Art Metropole

23 Apr. 2016

No Reading After The Internet

Time

4-6pm

Reading Alice Driver and Susan Buck-Morss as selected by Joni Murphy

Reflecting on themes emerging from her debut novel Double Teenage, which has just been published by BookThug, this salon will feature texts selected by Joni Murphy that have been instrumental in the development of her work.

Joni Murphy in attendance.

Exploring ongoing patterns of violence against women (especially Indigenous women and women of colour) in relation to NAFTA and neoliberalism, Murphy investigates the matrix of violence wrought by western philosophical, economic, and cultural traditions. Excerpts will be drawn from Alice Driver’s “Femicide in Juárez is Not a Myth” and Susan Buck-Morss’s “The Flaneur, The Sandwichman and the Whore.”

Double Teenage tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media’s obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Double Teenage is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now, offering a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

Participants are invited to attend a reading by Joni Murphy on Thursday, 21 April 21 2016 at BookThug’s Spring 2016 book launch featuring readings by Jacob Wren, Malcolm Sutton, Joni Murphy, Margaret Christakos, Adrienne Gruber, Jennifer Zilm, François Turcot, Stephen Thomas and Alessandro Porco. Details can be found here.

No Reading After The Internet wishes to thank Art Metropole for hosting this salon and to the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto for their ongoing support of this project.

Joni Murphy is a writer and artist working between critical theory and fiction, writing, performance and sound. The quotidian workings of state violence, literary misprision, and subtle forms of resistance to neoliberalism are consistent themes in her varied creative output. Visit her website here.

Images

1: Still from “Céline et Julie vont en bateau” (1974), directed by Jacques Rivette. Jacques Rivette.
2: "Double Teenage" by Joni Murphy, book cover, published by Book Thug, 2016. Book Thug.

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