The Charles Bernheimer symposium
September 25, 2008: Food Writing
This year's Bernheimer symposium featured three events:
- Blogging/Food: a lunch talk with Dynise Balcavage of Urban Vegan.
- KWH Reception Bootcamp with Erin Gautsche: ideas, menu planning, cooking and presentation — while helping to prepare the reception for the evening program, featuring recipes from Ellen Yin's Forklife.
- Discussion with Ellen Yin ('87, '93), co-owner of Fork, a nationally acclaimed New American bistro, and author of Forklore (Temple, 2007), which tells the story of Fork — the people, the food, the ideas and the influence that create the perfect dining experience.
February 13, 2008: Johanna Drucker
Johanna Drucker is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and Professor in the Department of English. In 2000, she helped establish the Speculative Computing Laboratory, a research group dedicated to exploring experimental projects in Humanities Computing. Her recent work focuses on aesthetics and digital media, particularly graphical communication and the expressive character of visual form. She is well known for her publications on the history of written forms, typography, design, and visual poetics. Her critical study, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005 and was followed by a major exhibition of contemporary art at the University of Virginia Art Museum in 2006 titled Complicit! that explored the issues of dialogue between mass media and contemporary art central to Sweet Dreams.
In addition to her scholarly work, Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental visual poet. Her work has been exhibited and collected in special collections in libraries and museums including the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, the New York Public Library, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and many others. Her most recent letterpress book, Testament of Women, was produced at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center in 2006. One of her other projects is the development of a networked resource for the study of artists' books, ABsOnline.
"Writing Books: what writers learn from making their work into books" (Listen)
A lunchtime program and discussion co-sponsored by the Common Press and the Fine Arts Program.
"Exquisite Printwork"
A collaborative writing and printing workshop at the Common Press, Morgan building.
January 25, 2007: Marathon reading of Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Cosponsored by the Penn Humanities Forum
Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a rollicking, stream-of-consciousness novel, burst onto the literary scene in 1957, rocketing Kerouac to fame and inspiring a multi-generational obsession with "the road." On the Road, a rapid-fire adventure tale of crossing the country (and back again) solo and with friends, discovering drugs, jazz, and the "bug" of travel, became a benchmark for the Beat Generation. Kerouac wrote the novel in a three-week marathon burst on twelve reams of paper he taped together and referred to as "the scroll." In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the book, and the spirit of the book, the Writers House hosted a marathon reading of our own scroll, featuring local luminary guest readers and accompanied by improvisational jazz musicians.
