CFP: &Now 2008--A Festival of Innovative Literature and Art

CALL FOR PROPOSALS (<----click there!>)

&NOW gathers together two things in their constant motion: writers inventing form, and the forms that are already “the past” as soon as those writers move on to their next invention. To gather the moving requires the grace of contingency.

We are a conference that calls itself a festival because we festivate the confrereity of our common difference. &NOW comes together to give meaning to words or ask words to give meaning to us, both of which always fail!

In that failure, resides the richness of our ignorance.
Even its radiance.The product of radiant ignorance is art. This is not new. How we do it is &NOW.
The product of ignorant radiance is the unpronounceable word: human.

&NOW is the not then that never passes.

&NOW is the letters of the names of all its conferees scrambled into a zetabet.

&NOW is not an anti-conference because transgression defers recognition.

&NOW stands in the danger zone between popular culture & the elitism of native intuition.

&NOW has fun at no expense; for free, like words are, no charge.

&NOW is the ampersand that signs a sign for a sign signaturing the presence of the present in the past.

&NOW is a message to narrativity signifying that all is well

&NOW is a message from narrativity simplifying that nothing ends, well or ill.

&NOW: a sentence that contradicts itself/ /&/, so contradicting, sets a standard for comprehending love /&/ religion /&/ nature /&/ politics as portrayed by the fictionalists beginning this year two thousand seven anno domini.

&NOW is a literary movement without authors that comes into view for 3 days biennially -0041067% of time- so that those authors without whom this literary movement does exist gather to keep literature in motion.

&NOW is theater that has moved off the stage but continues in search of the seven props it needs to make the emotion of the action live to make live action mind

&NOW redefines the halls of academe that they be no longer safe from the fear of the ampersand and/or the chaos of a now.

&NOW arrives 200 years after Ivahoe, 100 years after Freud, 50 years after Picasso, Elvis & Faulkner, and fourteen years after www., it arrives kicking its limbs screaming its lungs in voice & gesture that articulate arrival.

&NOW includes all those art•lit•ists from New York to Los Angeles for whom the medium is the muscle but traveling eastward from New York eastward with a sweep spread from 0° North to 180° South to catch every language in its net woven of the pre-linguistic thought of the world’s current 250,000 child-soldiers as they sleep.

&NOW exists that the gag of terror not create silence.

&NOW recalls commerce as a form of interaction outside the monetary systems while it rings the bell.

&NOW rings the bell to open trading on each day’s aesthetic market then listens all day to the bellringing echo /&/ then goes home after the dayclosing bell reinaugurates the sound•syllable that begins the invocation at the outset of each fiction-act.

&NOW, recognizing that its murderer’s lurk in the shadows turn on the darkness to expose them to a fright.

&NOW is ’04(NotreDame)•’06(Lake Forest)’08 (Chapman) toward infinitum: a quantum equation designed to utter irresolution.

Rebecca Goodman
Martin Nakell
Vahid Norouzalibeik
Davis Schneiderman
Sophocles
Steve Tomasula