Talk /
“Eating the Book,” with Simon Morris

Date: Tuesday, 5 February 2013, 7–9pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Please join us for a talk by English artist Simon Morris on “experimental literature.” One of the leading proponents of conceptual writing, which fuses art and literature, Morris will present a number of his experimental bookworks, including The Royal Road to the Unconscious, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, and his latest book, Pigeon Reader.

Inspired by Georges Perec’s musings on reading, which he likens to “a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs,” Pigeon Reader sets these birds to work on the very surface of Perec’s celebrated text “Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline.” In the process, Morris puts pressure on the terms in Perec’s title and asks what it means to engage a text physically—looking at print, flipping pages, processing language, vocalizing, responding—in the absence of the social practices and semantics we usually associate with “reading.”

About the Participant
Simon Morris is an artist based in York, England. In 2002, he founded the publishing house Information as Material, which has subsequently become one of the largest publishers of “uncreative writing” in the world. In 2011–2012, he was writer-in-residence at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Beer for this event has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.