Read and learn and share together!
Join a Bathers Library reading group!
SCHEDULE
(Time • Title • Start Date)
(Time • Title • Start Date)
TUESDAYS
5-7pm • Funny Games • 5/20
7-9pm • Deletion • 5/13 (FULL/WAITLIST ONLY)
WEDNESDAYS
7-9pm • Witches Only • 5/28
THURSDAYS
6:00-7:30pm • What Are Meetings? • 5/15
SATURDAYS
10am-12pm • Tackling Jon Fosse’s Septology • 5/3
2pm-4pm • Evil Gays • 5/31
SUNDAYS
10am-12pm • The University: What Was, Is, and Can it Be Good For • 5/4
12pm-2pm • Uncharted Worlds • 6/8
4pm-6pm • Abolitionist Possibilities • 6/29
6pm-8pm • Summer of Changing Light (offsite) • 5/25
Sign up!
DESCRIPTIONS
Abolitionist Possibilities will dive into Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien and Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead. Together, we will time travel to the liberated future, where Black trans Indigiqueers live in harmony with the land. Weaving voices from various perspectives, we will think critically about what we can do in the present to shift timelines towards that vision:
“Am I what I love? Is this the glittering world I've been longing for?”
—Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem.
XTRA.DAE is a queer trans experimental performance artist residing in Ohlone Land in Oakland, California, and originally from South Korea. Daeun Hwang is also a Community Organizer and has worked to curate community-building workshops and events that inform their exploration of community in the Diaspora. Using documentation from their life, Xtra.dae uses the life of Daeun Hwang to push reflection and exploration of the nonbinary in gender, queerness, and Asianness.
Gaia WXYZ (pronounced “wise”) is a multimedia artist, multi-instrumentalist, and cartoonist living in Oakland, CA. They create autobiographical comics about being BlaQueer, chronically ill and radical. They hold an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts, and currently teach there. They also teach the first ever comic art classes at UC Berkeley. They appear in No Straight Lines, the groundbreaking LGBTQ+ comics documentary, and in 2022 their comic The Tale of Daisy and Gaia was featured along Market Street in San Francisco. Their eagerly anticipated sci-fi comic series, SupaClusta is slated to be released in the near future.
THIS READING GROUP IS FULL. Sign ups will be added to the waitlist, and we’ll contact you if a spot opens. This 6-week series will contextualize Dump Site, a submission-based repository of deleted media, our collective trash folder. Dump Site collects digital trash to examine the conditions of deletion, a mechanism that shapes cultural memory. Our group will explore the landscape of deleted files and the preservation of them—touching on archival mess, born-digital cultures, and tech sovereignty. The guest speakers and readings will draw from archival practice, digital piracy, queer studies, discard studies, and digital humanities. This syllabus is gathered by Dump Site co-founders, Ven Qiu and Dorothy Tang, with the help of their besties, mentors, and fellow high screen-time netizens.
Ven Qiu is a memory worker and creative technologist based in the Bay Area, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. They draw from their work as a tattooer, archivist, and researcher to explore the textures of memory and archival practice. Their work most often involves oral history, field recording, body-art, scent, and born-digital media. Qiu also moonlights as a meme admin.
Dorothy Tang is an archivist interested in translating memories and emotions through a variety of mediums, such as oral history, digital expression, and scent. Their work is informed by community archival practices, which center collective ownership, reflection and sense making. Their research interests include: information and power; sensory-based archival activation; and nontraditional repositories.
In this reading group we will read all five of Dennis Cooper’s “George Miles novels.” These five novels, written between the late 80s and the early 00s, make a unique experiment in the representation of “bad gays”—men who, for whatever reasons, can’t resist the draw of vices as various as drug abuse, murder, and pedophilia. Our central question will be why, at a time when so many gay men were being shielded by the ever growing normalization of homosexuality, would Cooper choose to drag his narrators, and even himself, through the blood and heroine of crafting this five novel cycle?
Jared Robinson got his PhD in English Literature and Critical Theory from UC Berkeley in August of 2024. Since then, he has worked in Berkeley’s Division of Undergraduate Education focusing on expanding research opportunities for students in the Arts and Humanities. He is also a sometimes poet, a one time dramaturg, and yes, something of an evil gay.
We’ll begin by reading shorter selections from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, and The Blue and Brown Notebooks, before determining which text we want to tackle together as a whole over the course of a number of weeks. That will be supplemented by selections of text from people who play interesting types of 'language games' in their work. I’ll provide some (along the lines of Renee Gladman, Anne Boyer, Anne Garréta, Harriette Mullen, Sarah Kane, Samuel Beckett, Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, the list could go on), but plan to add based on suggestions from others in the group. I’ll come in with some open-ended questions each week, with discussions that I hope will be less academic and more focused on how we see these concepts embedded in the day to day, and how we might be able to weave them into our own art practices and activism. I'll provide pdfs of things, and maybe we'd even do a screening of the Haneke film.
Peach Kander is a queer poet and dioramist who holds an MFA from NYU, and is currently in the ensemble of Opera Lab Berlin as a writer/collaborator. They were the poetry editor at Pigeon Pages and Washington Square Review, and were a recipient of a City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts and a residency from Art Farm Nebraska. Their chapbook MAGIC BOX is out now from Ursus Americanus Press and their writing has appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), as well as various online and print journals.
Formalist poetics meet something like science fiction in James Merrill’s epic occult poetic trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover, composed in collaboration with otherworld voices via the ouija board. We’ll start by parsing through the more dense formal layers of The Book of Ephraim, where Merrill sets the stage for the wild pedagogies in atomic science, celestial hierarchy, and soul density transmitted via more raw dictation in Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant. Meeting Merrill’s collaborative writing approach with a collaborative reading approach, we’ll consider the possibility that humanity as we know it is the most recent in a series of experiments in world-building, while exploring the formal shifts and breakdowns that characterize the poet as medium. We’ll meet outdoors in the hour of changing light.
Kelly Egan is a poet, amateur diviner, and student of various occult arts. She received an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has authored two poetry chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. She studies astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and the paranormal in both official and unofficial settings.
Reading a difficult text is always easier in a group. So together we will take on the Septology series of books by the 2023 Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse. The series asks the questions: What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Septology has been praised for its breakthrough form—the entire series is one 600-page long sentence devoid of a single period—and mystical message, heavy on Catholic symbolism and liturgical cadence, reflecting Fosse’s conversion to Catholicism in 2012. If we have time, we'll also read his slim volume, A Shining.
Joanne Furio is a writer of personal essays and an award-winning journalist at Berkeleyside, where she writes about books and culture. She received an MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2016 and has been teaching in its Jan Term program ever since—including, most recently, a class on banned books.
Let’s read about how we can change our future! Inspired by world building, phenomenology and merging of spaces this book group would be exploring speculative, social, and political themes of the bay area and beyond. The discussions of how to create community, buildings, and support for the future from the proposed readings. Authors will include science fiction novelist Ursula K. Leguin, Alexis Madrigal, Setha Low, and Lee Smith.
Kate Kuaimoku has found their way back to the Bay Area after pursuing a Fine Arts degree while living on a houseboat on the River Lea. As a sculptor, maker, and thinker I’m looking to continue my research into the politics of space as I continue my research into consumer waste and depository systems, supply chains, and the global effects of bauxite mining in the global south.
Classroom, library, archive, laboratory, curator, ivory tower, landlord, weapons manufacturer, and snitch. The university—as physical location and ideal—has long been a site of contention. This reading group will explore the myriad faces of the university, and the possibilities for radical change that it both promises and thwarts through readings by June Jordan, Fred Moten and Stefan Harney, and Davarian Baldwin among others.
Stephanie Reist is a writer, educator, and translator from outside of Chicago. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and got her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies at Duke University. Her multidisciplinary and multimedia dissertation includes a co-directed and edited documentary on race, class, urban mobility, and access to higher education in Rio de Janeiro. She also runs, cooks, and background sings with Neblinas del Pacífico, a local San Francisco band playing music from the Afro-Colombian Pacific.
Freedom is an Endless Meeting by Francesca Poletta argues that meetings are the fundamental unit of democracy, and the book cover gestures at that ideal. Meanwhile, ancient television enjoyers remember Alec Baldwin as a cliche corporate executive on 30 Rock quoting from Meetings Magazine. What do we want from meetings? What do they want from us? How do we want to be together? Suggested readings and light snacks provided.
Danny Spitzberg is a sociologist interested in cooperatives, personal narratives, resisting cultural assimilation, and community research methods. He currently works at UC Berkeley on a state-funded study about how worker ownership can improve job quality and firm performance in historically low-wage sectors.
The focus of this reading group is to discuss how horror plays an important role in examining and subverting societal norms and expectations. For years, the world of horror has excluded the voices of queer, feminist and/or BIPOC authors from telling their stories. This has left lovers of this genre with tired tropes and plots that reinforce heteronormative, Christian values. From the neo-gothic horror of Caitlin R Kiernan, body horror of Lesley Nneka Arimah to the world of slashers with Stephen Graham Jones, we will read to exorcise years of exclusionary horror from our systems.
Elena Noyes has been bothering friends and family about the cultural and societal significance of horror for too long. Through this group, she is excited to discuss important works with others who share her passion. When not actively curating her goth bathroom or finding more skulls to put around her apartment, she is in grad school for a degree in sustainable solutions (which is a horror all its own)