Shopping Bag
My AccountToday’s Featured Book Event:
Charting Our Course: A Show About Education, Literacy, and Books (Reading Frenzy, @6:00pm): Tonight is the opening night for an exhibit featuring work from the Just Seeds Artists’s Cooperative. Justseeds is an artists’ collective that runs a webstore, a blog, and produces individual and collective work about political issues and for social movements. The prints in this show are all based on the written word, from portraits of authors to images inspired by poems and songs. The title of the show is taken from Malcolm X’s famous quote about education and culture: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future.” This event is free and all ages. Exhibit runs through November. Prints will be available for purchase. Free beer at the reception from Ninkasi!
Other Book Events Today:
NEGATIVE BULGE: Art & Zines by Islands Fold (Floating World Comics, @6:00pm): Luke Ramsey came down for the Zine Symposium this past July to represent the Islands Fold art collective that he started in Pender Island, British Columbia. One day after the fest he was hanging out and participated in a drawing session with local artists: Blaise Larmee, Kinoko (from Seattle), Sean Christensen & Theo Ellsworth. Little did they know, the collaborative jam session would result in a zine of ultimate greatness, Negative Bulge! We are very pleased to present original art from the legendary jam session as well as the new zines from Islands fold.
Dolltopia Book Launch Party (Floating World Comics, @6:00pm): Lulu Award-winning cartoonist Abby Denson is a rock n’ roll ‘Jane of all trades’ and creator of the queer comic Tough Love: High School Confidential, and now she’s bringing the punked-up Barbies and stripped-down Kens of her new book Dolltopia on the road! Dolltopia is the story of Kitty, a ballerina doll forced into a not-so-happily-ever-after living arrangement with a male jock toy. Filled with discontent, Kitty takes it upon herself to escape her human-imposed domesticity and create a new life and a new image for herself away from the persecution of the human world. On this mission, she finds not only a host of like-minded individuals, but a veritable heaven for the alternative doll: Dolltopia.
Bring along your own punked-up doll for a chance to win a free signed copy of the book! Free cupcakes!
Visiting Writers Series: Gail Tsukiyama (Reed College, Psychology 105, @6:30pm): Gail Tsukiyama is the first author to receive the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center for the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. She is the author of six novels published by St. Martin’s Press, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai’s Garden, Night of Many Dreams, The Language of Threads, Dreaming Water, and her latest novel, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms. For more information, visit the Visiting Writers website.
First Thursday: Leon Kagarise (Powells City of Books, @6:30pm): In the ’50s and ’60s, in outdoor parks throughout Maryland and Pennsylvania, rural families paid a dollar a carload and picnicked under the trees as recording stars such as Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and George Jones performed. With an artful eye and the passion of an avid fan, Leon Kagarise amassed an archive of hundreds of candid photographs of these musicians and their fans. Upon their discovery 30 years later, the Library of Congress placed the collection among the most important documents in the history of American music.Pure Country (Daniel 13/Process) is the first book to publish this outstanding collection. The book’s text presents a fascinating and lively history of the golden age of country and bluegrass as celebrated by one of its biggest fans.
Vanished Birds and Shooting Stars: Death and Life from the Skies (PSU, Smith Memorial SU, Room 333, @6:30pm): In his two nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, Christopher Cokinos has grappled with the tragedy and inevitability of extinctions. From the cautionary tale of the last known wild passenger pigeon (and how the extinction of that species was human-caused) to the effects of meteorite impacts in the past (and the future), Cokinos frames a discussion of extinction within the contexts of personal responsibility and deep time. Surprisingly, out of literal devastation–such as an impact event 500 million years ago– life can emerge. So our time in the Holocene is, in part, a gift of past extinctions. But how do we live now?
Ron Slate presents The Great Wave, with Floyd Skloot (Looking Glass Bookstore, @7:00pm): Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He earned his Masters degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973 and did his doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He started a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review, in 1973 which was published through 1988. In 1978, he left academia and was hired as a corporate speechwriter, beginning his business career in communications and marketing.
Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and novelist whose work has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and many more. His fifteen books include memoirs, poetry, collections, and novels.
Driving to Vernonia (Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, @7:00pm): Edmund Kirby-Smith’s life is in ruins, and he thinks that the way back from his rage and despair is to find Richard Vickerman, a man who used to have answers. Set in the Northwest, George Byron Wright’s Driving to Vernonia (C3 Publications) is a penetrating story of deprivation, laced with love and anger, violence and self-discovery.
Mike Dooley (Bagdad Theater, @7:00pm, $25-includes copy of book): As the next step beyond Notes from the Universe, Mike Dooley’s newest tour de force, Infinite Possibilities (Beyond Words), is a guide to overcoming the hardships of our age by believing and harnessing the power to shape the future. Tickets, $25, include admission and a copy of Infinite Possibilities, and are available at the Bagdad Theater box office, the Crystal Ballroom box office, Ticketmaster.com, and all Ticketmaster outlets.
Conversations That Matter: Well-Being and the Economy, with Mark Anielski and David Korten (The Governor Hotel, Grand Ballroom, @7:00, $20): A new series, Conversations That Matter: Well-Being and the Economy promises to raise critical questions, incite new thinking and offer participants a forum for exploring how best to serve the well-being of all. Each event will feature two internationally recognized guests who will share their own perspectives and then engage one another and the audience in an open discussion that moves beyond our sound-bite culture to a more provocative, in-depth discussion of the pressing questions of our time. The second and third Conversations will be held in February 2010 and May 2010.
The series launches with a conversation between Mark Anielski, author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth, and David Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. Tom Potiowsky, Oregon state economist and professor of economics at Portland State University, will moderate.
Daniel Arnold Reading (Lewis & Clark College, Templeton Campus Center, Council Chamber, @7:00pm): Daniel Arnold will offer a reading from his book “Early Days in the Range of Light,” an artful blend of history, biography, nature, and adventure writing, in which Arnold chronicles three years spent retracing the steps of his climbing forefathers in the Sierra Nevadas.
Arnold began climbing the Pacific Rim volcanoes and basalt crags of his native Portland as a teenager and went on to climb throughout North and South America. He lives and climbs in Southern California. He has a BA in Philosophy from Stanford and MFA in Creative Writing from San Jose State University. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and The Mountain Gazette.
Rilassi Reading Series presents David Oates (Rilassi Coffee House & Tea, @7:00pm): David Oates’ What We Love Will Save Us offers moments of transcendence and hope, told in personal essays that are tender and funny, searching and human. This book is about keeping faith and experiencing darkness. David Oates writes nonfiction and poetry about urban life and the natural world. Most recently he explored the urban experience in City Limits: Walking Portland’s Boundary. In his ground-breaking book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature he challenged environmental sacred cows.
Chase Twitchell Poetry Reading (University of Portland, Buckley Center 163, @7:30pm): Nationally-respected poet Chase Twichell’s books include Dog Language (Copper Canyon Press and, in England, Bloodaxe Books, 2005), The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, 1998), The Ghost of Eden (1995), Perdido (1991), The Odds (1986) and Northern Spy (1981), plus a translation (with Tony K. Stewart) of Rabindranath Tagore’s Lover of God (2003), and, with Robin Behn, The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach (1992). In addition to her work as a poet, Chase Twichell is widely admired as the founder and editor of Ausable Press (recently merged with Copper Canyon Press), a publishing house that for ten years published some of the best new poetry in America in beautifully designed editions.
You can find other events on your community Libraries schedule using these links: Washington County, Multnomah County, Clackamas County.
