Book Club
Midway has a book club, which meets every month to discuss fiction, art books, or anything else they choose. The book club is free and open to the public. Snacks are welcome.

About the current selection:

As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Esssay on Melancholy and Cannibalism by Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2008).

This mind-altering meditation on hunger, the true nature of food and melancholy was first published in Sweden in 1992. It is no less relevant today, as the authors examine the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, using readings from Kafka, Beckett, Freud, and Hegel, among others, to illustrate their points. Touching on such themes as primitive sacrificial rites and contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and linguistic theory, the text asks if it is possible to transfer this idea of a different kind of food to other art forms, such as painting and sculpture. "The saturnine mind is gloomy and depressed, yet inspired and radiant," write the authors. "It is the state of mind of inspiration." -- Amazon.com

For the next meeting please read chapters 1-5 (pages 7-82) as it is a fairly dense book. There are a few copies of the book available at amazon.com and there is also a copy available in the Midway library. You can also download a PDF of the reading (4MB) here.

Past Book Club Selections
Georges Perec, A Void
Pierre Klossowski, The Baphomet
Gagarin vol.9 #1, March 2008
Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
Beryl Markham, West With the Night
Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games
Essay from History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, Dominick Lacapra
And "An Elephant Crackup?" by Charles Siebert, NY Times
Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad, Silvia Kolbowski / Walid Raad: Between Artists
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth
Arthur Kopit, Wings
John Rajchman, "Deleuze Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art" published in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, edited by Tanya Leighton