The pocket series Groundworks is devoted to statements and propositions that elude categorization and seek to broaden the parameters of their subjects. Groundworks features unique volumes of essays, poetry, pedagogy, theory, conversations, lectures, and experiments in hybridization. The ideas developed in the series are foundational touchstones in the mutation and adaptation that are vital to the evolution of cultural discourse.

A text for teachers who want to reconsider hierarchy in their classrooms and for those curious about education as a context for creativity and collaboration. Drawn from Ball’s experiences teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Notes on my Dunce Cap includes advisory material regarding the role of the teacher, the creation of syllabi, and the manner in which groups may evaluate the work of an individual without harm. Alongside these notes that reflect on his teaching practice, sample SAIC syllabi create contexts in which students develop habits that become the basis for a writing practice. Reading lists cover topics such as child protagonists, the dérive, and fairytales, and classroom procedures encourage students to lucid dream, take long walks without cellphones, and participate in the Franz Kafka Fancier Society of Chicago. Ball describes dynamic ways to ask questions, facilitate discussion, organize exhibitions, and incorporate theatrical elements to draw the most out of students and teachers alike. Ball shakes up classroom habits and breathes new life into reading, questioning, teaching, and learning.

Notes on My Dunce Cap

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Jesse Ball: Notes on My Dunce Cap

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Sleep, Death’s Brother is an instruction manual on dreaming that is intended for children or incarcerated persons. It enables such individuals to learn to lucid dream and to use their dreams to somewhat escape their situations. Like death, sleep is a kind of boundary, dividing waking life from the realm of dreams. While it is often the case that dream life is passively experienced, acclaimed novelist Jesse Ball (born 1978) reminds that it can be otherwise; that dreaming life is also a place where a sense of agency can grow. Even in the midst of physical or emotional environments that do not support such development in waking life, dreams are a place where one can take control. Ball calls for bravery in the exploration of this practice, and provides the dreamer with useful habits and techniques. Full of affirmation and wisdom, Sleep, Death’s Brother is a guidebook “for all oneironauts young and old.”

Sleep, Death’s Brother

Jesse Ball: Sleep, Death’s Brother

A collaborative, hybrid composition: part essay, part poem, and part social media collage. The authors cannibalise traditional research methods, for a more personalized, technology based process. While meditating upon Kurt Schwitter’s notion that “the medium is as unimportant as I am myself,” they confront historical traumas through the body of real and virtual environments. Establishing online personas on Myspace, Yelp and Twitter, they explore the real feelings that attach themselves to these expressions of self, the real sense of desire, connection, affirmation and friendship, as well as possibilities of destruction and loss. The relationship to the mother, a candlepin bowling league and an online Korean roleplaying group are the social environs through which the authors are made to grapple with their own sense of isolation and otherness in the digital age, the blind energy of desire, and the strangeness of tears.

I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected

Amy Lawless & Chris Cheney: I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected

The Anhoek School is a nomadic pedagogical experiment that analyzes educational structures and investigates alternatives to traditional North American methods for learning. Under the auspices of the school, the Anhoek Record Examination–an obscene form of the Graduate Record Examination–aims to gum the data production and collection of standardized testing as well as question the ideological underpinnings behind it. Compiled by Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn, Quaestiones Perversas gathers together unruly record examinations (Beautiful Economy; The Reproductive; F|Slash|F), a traumatizing listening lab (Doggy… Doggy), and a physical fitness test that maims more than it measures. The answer keys are an intervention/irruption of poesis in the field of systematicity or the lust for order: the position of the father and the controlling language of the state. The book undoes the benign voice of the test, awakens the reader to the history of violence embedded in the form, and activates it as a site for aesthetic expression.

Quaestiones Perversas

Beatriz E. Balanta & Mary Walling Blackburn: Quaestiones Perversas

A text for teachers who want to reconsider hierarchy in their classrooms and for those curious about education as a context for creativity and collaboration. Drawn from Ball’s experiences teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Notes on my Dunce Cap includes advisory material regarding the role of the teacher, the creation of syllabi, and the manner in which groups may evaluate the work of an individual without harm. Alongside these notes that reflect on his teaching practice, sample SAIC syllabi create contexts in which students develop habits that become the basis for a writing practice. Reading lists cover topics such as child protagonists, the dérive, and fairytales, and classroom procedures encourage students to lucid dream, take long walks without cellphones, and participate in the Franz Kafka Fancier Society of Chicago. Ball describes dynamic ways to ask questions, facilitate discussion, organize exhibitions, and incorporate theatrical elements to draw the most out of students and teachers alike. Ball shakes up classroom habits and breathes new life into reading, questioning, teaching, and learning.

A collaborative, hybrid composition: part essay, part poem, and part social media collage. The authors cannibalise traditional research methods, for a more personalized, technology based process. While meditating upon Kurt Schwitter’s notion that “the medium is as unimportant as I am myself,” they confront historical traumas through the body of real and virtual environments. Establishing online personas on Myspace, Yelp and Twitter, they explore the real feelings that attach themselves to these expressions of self, the real sense of desire, connection, affirmation and friendship, as well as possibilities of destruction and loss. The relationship to the mother, a candlepin bowling league and an online Korean roleplaying group are the social environs through which the authors are made to grapple with their own sense of isolation and otherness in the digital age, the blind energy of desire, and the strangeness of tears.