kadar koli no. 10: "Off the Books"
ethpress.com

Now in its tenth issue, kadar koli has featured essays, poems, art work, translations, and interviews from some of today's most adventurous writers and artists, including Joyelle McSweeney, Rob Halpern, Diane di Prima, Shin Yu Pai, Gerrit Lansing, Susan Briante, Pattie McCarthy, Ammiel Alcalay, and Megan Cook, among many others. The theme of this issue is "Off the Books," chosen to coincide with the 4th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group on October 9-11, 2015 at the University of Toronto. Quoting from BABEL's call for sessions:

We are calling upon individuals and groups interested in proposing sessions for our 2015 biennial meeting that would explore various histories of the book and bookmaking, as well as consider what it means to go "off the books": how ideas and various cultural and historical forms leap off from and out of books; how we ourselves are "off of" books and "over" books; what it means to go "off the books" or "off the record": to go astray, between and off the lines, underground, and illegal, and to be unaccounted for. Going off the books means examining books themselves—their place in our culture, social imaginary, sense of history, and expectations of academic labor and value—while simultaneously examining their edges, aporias, margins, lacunae, and Others. What might be potentialized, opened up, and made when we break books, or break with books? Can we ever really leave books, or are we always somehow interleaved—both in our solitary studies but also within our University-at-large—with the books that have formed our education(s)? Are there ways in which books themselves have provided spaces of subterfuge, for going "outward bound" and "off the record," for resisting the business-as-usual of the Academy and other institutions? Does going off the books, refusing to keep records, and shredding the evidence-as-usual, while disseminating our ideas in other (more supposedly radically "off-book" forms), allow us to escape surveillance, or does it simply bind us to a surfeit of labors that can never be properly compensated? Will we ever be able to pay the price of our departure(s) from the forms of cultural capital that have ensured so many programs of study, so many positions, so many jobs? And why would we desire this path? We propose the sub-title "making, breaking, binding, burning, leaving, gathering" as a set of keywords (that are, importantly, also verbings and actions) with which we challenge everyone to propose sessions that would investigate the multiple trajectories and valences and entanglements of the past and present of being both bound to and off the books.

(Please visit http://babel-meeting.org/2015-meeting/ for more information.)

This issue of kadar koli will feature a special section of essays, writings, and art that goes "off the books." In the spirit of the theme, we're going off the books from "Off the Books," hoping to include work from scholars, poets, and artists who cannot be at the BABEL conference or are otherwise interested in contributing to this topic, however broadly defined. As with previous issues (and in concert with BABEL), we are most interested in work that pushes at boundaries and challenges preconceived notions of what the book is, or that speculates on what the book was, where it comes from, what it could be. Acknowledging that we are gathering this material into the book form of a journal, we are excited – as editors and designers – to challenge from within our own sense of the limitations and potential of the format. In keeping with the ethos of eth press and its parent imprint, punctum books, this issue of kadar koli will be available as an open-access download via our web site, in addition to a print-on-demand book.

Please send inquiries to co-editors Lisa Ampleman (lisa.ampleman@gmail.com)
and David Hadbawnik (dhadbawnik@gmail.com).
DEADLINE FOR WORK: JULY 20, 2015.
The issue will go to press no later than September 1, 2015.
kadar koli = 'whenever' in Slovene; for information on past issues: habenichtpress.com