The 2nd Annual Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics: Jalal Toufic

This event is going to be huge! Jalal is flying in from Istanbul to deliver the lecture, and I'm basically memorizing Leslie's fascinating essay on his work "Fiction and the Present Without Basis" (first delivered in a class I attended in Buffalo back in 2003 and later published in symploke, vol. 12, no. 1/2 (2004)) in order to write an introduction; I hope to post Leslie's essay in sections here leading up to the event, which takes place Sunday, June 10th at 5:00 pm (Timken Hall, 1111 8th Street, SF).

I'm also currently rereading most of Jalal's work in anticipation (today Undying Love or Love Dies between grading essays), totally in awe of his conceptual power! Perhaps you'd also like to spend the coming month reading Jalal's entire body of work in anticipation of this event?! If so, you might be interested to learn that almost everything he's written is now available in PDF form here. The new material (The Portrait of the Pubescent Girl: A Rite of Non-Passage (rhymes with Tiqqun, no?) and What is the Sum of Recurrently?) certainly promises to keep me busy until the 10th! Hope to see you there...