Books by Matthew Goulish
The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure
Goulish, Matthew
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The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Introduction by Jane Blocker. 2nd Edition. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion. Layout and design by Sonnenzimmer.
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Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island
by Matthew Goulish, Stephen Bottoms
Goat Island are one of the world’s leading contemporary performance ensembles. Their intimate, low-tech, intensely physical performances represent a unique hybrid of strategies and techniques drawn from live art, experimental theatre and postmodern dance. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, is the first book to document and critique the company’s performances, processes, politics, aesthetics, and philosophies. It reflects on the company’s work through the critical lens of ecology – an emerging and urgent concern in performance studies and elsewhere.
This collage text combines and juxtaposes writing by company members and arts commentators, to look in detail at Goat Island’s distinctive collaborative processes and the reception of their work in performance. The book includes a section of practical workshop exercises and thoughts on teaching drawn from the company’s extensive experience, providing an invaluable classroom resource.
By documenting the creative processes of this extraordinary company, this book will make an important contribution to the critical debates surrounding contemporary performance practices. In so doing, it pays compelling tribute to committed art-making, creativity, collaboration, and the nature of the possible.
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Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
by Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthew Goulish
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish set up a room in Marcel Proust's house of memory in which poetry and prose could enact a dialogue, structured as a parallel weave, on several subjects from Proust's novel, as a way of extending their experience of reading. They selected three aspects or elements from Proust's work and wrote in response to them, on alternating pages that also responded to what the other had written. These were the first book, Swann's Way; the in/famous "long sentence" in Sodom and Gomorrah; and the idea/concept of captivity as marked in the moment in The Captive when the narrator watches Albertine as she sleeps. The result, on face-to-face pages, asks the reader to figure out what to privilege in the reading, a work that requires both memory and audacity (how return, how move forward, to read everything, or to privilege one form over another).
"I will recall passages from this book like the stanzas of songs I heard on the radio during my childhood, word for word at the most unexpected times. Or, I will forget the words of this book entirely only to experience what the book describes—all of my faculties working together simultaneously unaware that they are each part of a cosmos. Let us navigate this multi-verse by appending the names of favorite authors to newly discovered constellations. Let us imagine that each book we've read is the same book, one read to us long ago by a beloved caretaker who satisfied our every need before we could recite the alphabet. This book."—Gregg Bordowitz
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