In the near future, Oakland is haunted by natural disaster and political collapse. When k realizes that she has infected her girlfriend, bea, with a disease, she loses herself in a masochistic quest for atonement, leaving bea to contend with her fears about an increasingly precarious world by herself. Literary and adventurous, lyrical yet anchored, Davey Davis' work explores the meanings of responsibility, romantic love, and queer resistance in a late-capitalist hellscape where futurity is always in question. 204 pages, perfect bound softcover.---------------------------------------------------"A haunting, spare story set in an Oakland besieged by natural disaster, Davis’s novel explores queer intimacy and resistance in a world where the future is always in question.... Often mentioned when trans mascs of a certain type discuss how they figured out they were trans."--Torrey Peters"Davis is an observant and meticulous writer [...] Their writing is both surgical and mystical"—Alana Mohamed, Village Voice"Davis’s ability to trace the reverberations of psychic damage through to the body, and into its encounters with other bodies, is especially remarkable."—Laura Thorne, The Rumpus"A beautiful, necessary book about queer love & disaster." —Lorelei Lee"Intimate, taut, shimmery, and unflinching, the earthquake room crosses two cities, one bay, and a kind of queer love that feels like it's about to be lost forever. This is the very physical story of a nearby disaster, an urgent reminder that the (almost) end of the world doesn't mean what we feel for one another gets squared up—but rather that wanting to feel at all is how we survive.— Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore"Davey Davis’ writing is so intimate it’s uncomfortable, so certain that it’s incredibly anxious. the earthquake room is chock-full of satisfying paradoxes and nuanced complexities." —Amber Dawn, author of How Poetry Saved My Life and Sub Rosa"the earthquake room is a beautifully written story about love, pain, fear, and friendship set against an apocalyptic moment that looks very much like our own. It's a romance at once dystopian and utopian, wrought with a miniaturist's skill and precision."—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State"Immutable dread permeates the novel, which tells the story of a disintegrating queer relationship against the backdrop of a very-near-future Oakland in which the threat of devastating natural disaster looms. Yet amidst the pre-apocalypse, life—aka dyke drama—must go on. The novel’s unfortunate prescience struck me this week, as I hid in my apartment from the Most Unhealthy Air Quality in the World, perusing an Instagram feed that alternated between respiratory mask selfies and personal ads (“NON-TOXIC MASC 4 RADICAL TENDERNESS”). I couldn’t help feeling as though Davis’s vision of the very-near-future had in fact already arrived."—Tara Marsden, The Millions---------------------------------------------------Davey Davis writes about culture, sexuality, technology, and genderqueer embodiment. ---------------------------------------------------INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING is painfully expensive! We know and we are sorry. We try to only charge you what it costs us. We are not able to ship to the UK or EU countries at this time due to changed VAT regulations.
Future Shock
Future Shock is a 1970 book by American futurist Alvin Toffler, written together with his wife Adelaide Farrell, in which the authors define the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies, and a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time". The book, which became an international bestseller, has been widely translated.
Oakland is a Vibe: Blackness, Cultural Framings and Emancipations of The Town
Author(s): Heitz, Kaily | Advisor(s): Scott Lewis, Jovan | Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine the ways that developers and Black community organizers in Oakland, California, utilize a situated concept of Black culture to produce value in the city. This value is constituted by a politics of Blackness rooted both in racial capitalism, shifting structures of community care, and their affective articulations. The affective qualities of Black Oakland – which includes a sense of relationality, creativity, and resistance – are understood colloquially as “vibe.” While representations of vibe are mobilized by both developers and community organizations to respectively advance and resist gentrification, I argue that the vibe of the city is constituted by a Black sense of place that cannot be reproduced through capitalist representations of cultural value alone. This study of vibe presents an opportunity to take seriously the invitation of Black geographic scholarship to work at the intersection of poetics and historical materialism by exploring relationality as a site that coproduces racialized space and experience. Where developers leverage notions of vibe to generate value through private investment, Black organizers utilize such representations in order to reclaim the physical space necessary to the very production of vibe. The latter strategy is, I suggest, an enactment of what I call “emancipatory framing,” in which hegemonic framing is mobilized in order to create alternative spaces for liberatory praxes. This dissertation explores vibe and emancipatory framing at three different scales: the Black body, the independent business, and the grassroots collective. I conclude that vibe as a material and metaphorical asset of Blackness, is at the root of contestations over place, and sometimes contradictory imaginaries of freedom.
Collapse — Oakland Public Library
Collapse — Dallett, Cassandra, — <p>COLLAPSE is a doomed love, temporary, free on bond, haunted by rage and regret, fueled by Hip-Hop beats, and clinging like the remains of the Ghost Ship fire--with the world burning around us, it is time and place, politics and anarchy, connection for the broken.</p><p>Poetry. California Interest.</p>
Deep Oakland: How Geology Shaped a City [Hardcover] by Andrew Alden
A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller! Beneath Oakland’s streets and underfoot of every scurrying creature atop them, rocks roil, shift, crash, and collide Read the rocks as only a geologist can, with this deep drill-down into Oakland’s geological history and its impacts on the city’s urban present.
Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity
In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, a subject’s history splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person - an unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past and whose future harbors nothing to come; an existential improvisation, a form born of the accident and by accident. Out of a deep cut opened in a biography, a new being comes into the world for a second time. <br /> <br /> What is this form? A face? A psychological profile? What ontology can it account for, if ontology has always been attached to the essential, forever blind to the <i>aléa</i> of transformations? What history of being can the plastic power of destruction explain? What can it tell us about the explosive tendency of existence that secretly threatens each one of us?<br /> <br /> Continuing her reflections on destructive plasticity, split identities and the psychic consequences experienced by those who have suffered brain injury or have been traumatized by war and other catastrophes, Catherine Malabou invites us to join her in a philosophic and literary adventure in which Spinoza, Deleuze and Freud cross paths with Proust and Duras.
Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity
In the usual order of things, lives run their course and eventually one becomes who one is. Bodily and psychic transformations do nothing but reinforce the permanence of identity. But as a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, a subject’s history splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person - an unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past and whose future harbors nothing to come; an existential improvisation, a form born of the accident and by accident. Out of a deep cut opened in a biography, a new being comes into the world for a second time. <br /> <br /> What is this form? A face? A psychological profile? What ontology can it account for, if ontology has always been attached to the essential, forever blind to the <i>aléa</i> of transformations? What history of being can the plastic power of destruction explain? What can it tell us about the explosive tendency of existence that secretly threatens each one of us?<br /> <br /> Continuing her reflections on destructive plasticity, split identities and the psychic consequences experienced by those who have suffered brain injury or have been traumatized by war and other catastrophes, Catherine Malabou invites us to join her in a philosophic and literary adventure in which Spinoza, Deleuze and Freud cross paths with Proust and Duras.
That Winter the Wolf Came — Oakland Public Library
That Winter the Wolf Came — Spahr, Juliana — <p>That Winter the Wolf Came is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.</p><br /><p>"In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it." —<i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i></p><p>"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems." —<i>The Nation</i></p><p>"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority." —<i>Publisher’s Weekly</i></p><br /><br />Excerpt:<br /><br /> It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.<br /><br/>Renewed poetry of struggle at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe—feminist, ferocious, and finally celebratory.<br />
Somebody Blew up Oakland: Dispossession as a Praxis of Racial Ordering
Author(s): Jones, Stephanie Delise | Advisor(s): Hironaka, Ann; Sojoyner, Damien | Abstract: In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between underdevelopment and Black geographies. I then explore the consequences of this relationship on the city of Oakland. From 2019 to 2021, I conducted 68 in-depth field interviews of Black Oakland residents who detailed the processes and mechanisms by which California housing policy contributed to the displacement of Black subjects. Building on the work of scholars of Black geographies, I have interrogated the myth of development and the relationship to the dispossession of Black geographies. I theorize how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing in urban areas. The empirical contribution of my research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being displaced. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.I argue that the relationship between dispossession and refusal creates a distinct politic. In chapter two, I theorize the work of Moms for Housing to further understand Black knowledges of resistance to dispossession. Moms for Housing is used as a case study to highlight the many theoretical implications of dispossession occurring in Oakland. In chapter 3, I use two interviews from developers to demonstrate the contradictions in what I call the mythology of development. In chapter 4, I walk through the geographic stories of 2nd and 3rd generation Oakland residents and demonstrate each of the ways they feel locked out of the city as a result of the urban changes. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how communities resist dispossession and disposability. The city of Oakland lacks proactive implementation of equitable housing policy. The lack of action by the city of Oakland puts the onus on everyday residents to organize against their landlords, employers and the state.
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
A book that redefines both family and narrative for the…
Libra Season: iPhone Modernism by Travis Diehl
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley | East Bay Booksellers
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK • A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system.
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.
The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
"Tearing down myths and distortions on virtually every page, The Revolution Has Come is the first substantive account of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland chapter—the iconic gathering that birthed the party and held on to its very last breath. Robyn C. Spencer’s incisive attention to gender, state repression, black radical alliances, philosophical and ideological debates, and the organization’s long decline makes this one of the most original studies of the Panthers to appear in years." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The Complete Works of Pat Parker by Pat Parker | East Bay Booksellers
The Complete Works of Pat Parker includes Parker’ s poetic masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as the poetry collection Jonestown & other madness, in addition to her published essays and other prose, along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems.
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simon…
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Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism
I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.
