October 15: Eleni Stecopoulos and Rebekah Rutkoff in Conversation

Presented by 192 Books, Eleni Stecopoulos and Rebekah Rutkoff discuss their new books—respectively, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (Nightboat Books, 2024) and Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (MIT Press, 2024)

This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Tuesday, October 15th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited. RSVP for free here. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.

Books will be available for sale after the conversation.

Eleni Stecopoulos—Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing (Nightboat Books, 2024)

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

Rebekah Rutkoff—Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (MIT Press, 2024)

Double Vision is a beautifully written work of biography and criticism that tells the inside story of Robert Beavers (b. 1949), a major American avant-garde filmmaker. Until now, Beavers's dramatic life of itinerancy and resistance to commercial circulation has obscured his recognition as one of today's most significant living filmmakers. In Double Vision, Rebekah Rutkoff, the first scholar to have full access to Beavers's writing archive, sheds light on this deeply original underground figure and reveals the way Beavers's films explore nonoptical seeing—awareness itself—as an outcome of cinematic sight.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a poet, essayist, and critic. Her other books include Visceral Poetics (2016), a hybrid of criticism and memoir that Petra Kuppers called “a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves," and Armies of Compassion (2010), a collection of poems that Anne Waldman called “riveting ... rare beauties.” She taught at Bard College and the University of San Francisco and now works with writers as an independent editor, manuscript consultant, and mentor. From New York, she lives in Northern California.

Rebekah Rutkoff is the author of The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions (Semiotext(e)) and the editor of a collection of essays by and about Robert Beavers. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.