With the Public School New York, the Hollow Earth Society produces series of free workshops at Observatory. The ongoing series Para-Academia & Theory Fiction has featured:
- Philosopher Nicola Masciandaro on Commentary
- Writer Wythe Marschall on Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft
- Writer Stephen Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness
- Philosopher Ben Woodard on Complicitous Continuums: The Horrors of the Cosmicist Earth (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, Lovecraft, and C. A. Smith)
We are currently in talks to produce more workshops. Feel free to comment here with your suggestions.
Course description:
The para is the “alongside,” that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic approaches.
Blogs, speculative medievalisms, Cyclonopedia, Charles Fort, teratology, print-on-demand—these and other tentacles of a polycephalic (many-headed) para-academia have entwined to produce an addendum and, finally, an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.
The Public School New York and the Hollow Earth Society will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops, with audio available after each session.
