Hi everybody,

We are so lucky that of all of the times in history we could have existed in, we get to exist this week and go to three great literary events. Come to all three readings and get a free t-shirt.

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IN THIS ISSUE
1. Idiolexicon THURSDAY with Kaya Oakes, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Cynthia Weyuker
2. Studio One FRIDAY with Martha Ronk, Brian Teare, and Campos-Quinn
3. Small Press Traffic SATURDAY with Nathalie Stephens
4. Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize - deadline TUESDAY
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1. Idiolexicon THURSDAY with Kaya Oakes, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Cynthia Weyuker
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Most of you probably know Kaya and already know how much fun it is to hear her read. Many of you know how Cynthia and how much she can make you question what you thought you knew about musical saw players. But fewer of us have had the chance to hear Lee Ann Roripugh read. She's making the trek all the way from South Dakota to share from her new book, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (SIU Press 2009). Come out for a great evening of poetry, music, prose, and stuff.

Idiolexicon Poetry Series with Kaya Oakes, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Cynthia Weyuker
Rancho Parnassus, 132 Sixth Street, San Francisco
Thursday, September 23, 7 PM, Free
http://www.idiolexicon.com/ips/09.html
Facebook invite: http://bit.ly/9-23

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2. Studio One FRIDAY with Martha Ronk, Brian Teare, and Campos-Quinn
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If you still haven't made it to a Studio One reading, then what is your problem dude. Come for an awesome night of innovative poetry and experimental film.

Studio One Reading Series
Studio One Art Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland
Friday, September 24, 7:30 PM, Donation
http://studioonereadingseries.blogspot.com/2010/09/studio-one-reading-series-is-on.html

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3. Small Press Traffic SATURDAY with Nathalie Stephens
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Come hear a talk by multigenre, multilingual artist Nathalie Stephens.

Saturday September 25, 2010, 7:30 PM
CCA Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro Street, San Francisco
http://smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com/2010/09/spt-presents-nathalie-stephens-vigilous.html

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4. Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize - deadline TUESDAY
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Yeah, I know this is short warning, but this contest sounds fun. Winning poets will read at the Davis Jazz Festival.

http://culturalactioncommittee.com/2010/07/the-jack-kerouac-poetry-prize/

That's it. I hope to see you on Thursday. I hope you've had a good weekend. I hope that when you tell anecdotes at parties, they get the big laugh they deserve.

Yours,
Elliot

THE FUTURE ATTACKS YOU FROME BEHIND is Elliot Harmon's personal fanzine of the Bay Area and national literary and music scenes. No claims are made of completeness or veracity. If you'd like to see something covered in the next issue, then send it to me. If you've received this email in error, please follow the instructions below to have your email address removed from the list.

Hi everyone,

Well, it's been too long since I've done one of these updates. I've been hiding away, shrugging off my duty to spam my friends once a month with advertisements for poetry readings that they probably already know about. But no more.

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IN THIS ISSUE
1. Idiolexicon TOMORROW
2. Mike McGee's In Search of Midnight - August 22 and 29
3. Bay Area Poetry Marathon - August 28
4. Studio One with Joseph Lease and Steffi Drewes - September 3
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1. Idiolexicon TOMORROW
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The Idiolexicon Poetry Series in back with a vengeance at Rancho Parnassus, a new number-theory-themed restaurant on 6th street. Come out and see three innovative poets, Carrie Hunter, Della Watson and Jessica Wickens. Della and Jessica will be performing excerpts from their new project, The Crow and Benjamin Letters. From what I hear, there will be a projector involved. And I know there's nothing you people like more than multimedia components.

Idiolexicon Poetry Series with Carrie Hunter, Della Watson, Jessica Wickens
Rancho Parnassus, 132 Sixth Street, San Francisco
Tuesday, August 17, 7 PM, Free
http://www.idiolexicon.com/ips/08.html
Facebook invite: http://bit.ly/august17

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2. Mike McGee's In Search of Midnight - August 22 and 29
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Mike McGee has been a part of the Bay Area performance poetry scene for years. I don't know where he lives now (I think he might actually live on HBO somehow?) but we have a rare chance to see him in an evening of poetry and storytelling at the SF Playhouse. Come see one of the most entertaining performers in America.

Mike McGee's In Search of Midnight
SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Sundays, August 22, 29, 7 PM, $20
http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season0910/solo.php

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3. Bay Area Poetry Marathon - August 28
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If you don't know about the Bay Area Poetry Marathon, then you're the worst. Every summer, Joseph Lease and Donna de la Perriere curate a monthly reading featuring some of the most interesting poetry happening today. These readings always have a great mix of people you've heard of and people you need to hear of. August 28's reading features Garrett Caples, Maxine Chernoff, Junior Clemens, Steffi Drewes, Edward Foster, Lorelei Lee, Erika Staiti, and Brian Strang.

Bay Area Poetry Marathon
The Lab, 2948 16th Street (@ Capp), San Francisco
Saturday, August 28, 7 PM, $3-15
http://www.thelab.org/events/450-2010-poetry-marathon.html

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4. Studio One with Joseph Lease and Steffi Drewes - September 3
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If you haven't yet been to the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland, this is a great time to start. Joseph and Steffi are two of my favorite local poets and two of my favorite local people.

Studio One Reading Series
Studio One Art Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland
Friday, September 3, 7:30 PM, Donation
http://www.studioonereadingseries.blogspot.com/

That's all I've got. It would be great to see at any or all of these. I hope you're having an okay Monday and that you found something good to eat for lunch.

Sincerely,
Elliot

THE FUTURE ATTACKS YOU FROME BEHIND is Elliot Harmon's personal fanzine of the Bay Area and national literary and music scenes. No claims are made of completeness or veracity. If you'd like to see something covered in the next issue, then send it to me. If you've received this email in error, please follow the instructions below to have your email address removed from the list.

In the past two days or so, there's been a bunch of discussion in some parts of the Internet about something called 1 Million Shirts. You're supposed to send in your T-shirts and they'll give them to people in Africa who don't have T-shirts. The guy who started it apparently makes a living with his T-shirt-oriented website, and this project was a way to serve the world with his skills at making websites about T-shirts.

There's been a lot of response on the Internet (great wrap-up here), almost entirely from people who have spent a lot of time working on development in Africa, which makes his response seem all the more... odd.

It all kind of reinforces my belief that there's something really dangerous about putting all your eggs in the "social media discussion makes everything better!" basket. What was a nice, if misguided, idea is now something that people are putting a lot of emotional energy into, and maybe it's all kind of going in the wrong direction.

Would he be just as interested in using his ability to game social media to work on something less T-shirt-oriented? Is it better than nothing? Should we punish people for being self-promoters or should we find ways to help them self-promote in more mutually beneficial ways?

Apparently there will be a conference call tomorrow. I'd love to attend, but I don't want to.

Is the "big limousine" in this song a hearse? Is it?

Let me know if you're interested, and I'll make the introduction.

Thanks, Arthur.

(12:19:55 PM) elliotharmon: I'm thinking of making polenta. Do we have butter?
(2:53:16 PM) Kat: Should I get butter on the way home, or do you want to?
(2:53:33 PM) elliotharmon: I can do it
(2:53:50 PM) Kat: OK. Do you we need anything else?
(2:54:04 PM) elliotharmon: Some kind of veggies to have with the polenta maybe?
(2:54:10 PM) elliotharmon: Like asbarapus maybe?
(2:54:21 PM) Kat: I love asbarapus!

I just found out that Ai is dead. I vividly remember picking up one of her books in my second year of college. Her writing was utterly unlike anything I'd read before. Actually her writing is still unlike anything I've ever read, even now that I'm aware of many writers in the same constellation as her.

She wrote - exclusively, almost - about shocking things, but did her poetry ever feel like it was trying to shock you? It was just walking along with you. You knew and it knew that it was taking you somewhere dangerous, but neither you nor it quite wanted to make it stop. Maybe because it seemed just as unsure what was going on as you were?

Now you should read this.

Originally published at AshokaTech.

Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It's a great place to share ideas. This month's chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka's Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.

Tom's first question was, "What breakthrough invention do you think will reshape the lives of the poor?" There were a lot of good answers - mobile phones, solar power, clean water - but I wondered if perhaps the question was too broad for there to be any one good answer. In a Tech4Society panel on mobile phones, for example, Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Madan Mohan Rao said that the increase in mobile phone use in rural India has the unintended consequence of limiting women's ability to communicate, as over 90% of family mobiles are carried by men. According to Rao, social equity still requires landline phones. In this way, what's more important than a specific technological solution is a willingness to pay attention to the needs you're meeting. The high-tech solution isn't always the better one, even if the low-tech one is more difficult.

Some of us got to wondering if maybe the most important innovations aren't in the inventions themselves, but in new ways that inventions can spread and reproduce and inventors can collaborate across continents and centuries. One of my favorite thoughts to come out of Tech4Society was this inspiring sentiment from John Wilbanks:

There's a big world of entrepreneurs out there just hacking in the real world. First life, if you will. High touch, not high tech.

Being enveloped in their world for a few days gave me a lot of new perspectives on the open access and open educational resources movements. … I now get at a deep level the way that obsessive cultures of information control in the scholarly and educational literature represent a high tax, inbound and outbound, on the entrepreneur, whether social or regular. If you don't know the canon, you're doomed to repeat it. And we don't have the time, the money, or the carbon to repeat experiments we know won't work. We can't afford to let good ideas go un-amplified, because we need tens of thousands of good ideas.

So how do good ideas get amplified? Wilbanks' Science Commons is one way; so is Cambia. And, for that matter, even more pedestrian Internet tools. As Wilbanks said in a panel discussion, "Technologies that were invented to share pictures of cats can also share lifesaving ideas."

Question two was, "How can young people be inspired to become inventors or inventor-entrepreneurs?" Christine Turner had a great reply: "Find ways to minimize the fear of failure. I think that is what gets in the way of a lot of inventors/entrepreneurs."

Fear certainly gets in the way, but sometimes teachers get in the way too. As a rather dour footnote to the inspiring Youth Venture session at Tech4Society, Charles Tsai told me that a few of the young inventors who'd been invited to Hyderabad couldn't come because their schools wouldn't allow them to take time away from class. Allowing young people to pursue the things they excel at is hugely important, both for their education and for our future.

The question makes me think again of Javier Fernandez-Han and his story of how Ashok Gadgil inspired him to become an inventor. Javier's simple challenge, spend one hour inspiring someone, could be the secret to starting the careers of the next generation of inventors. As I had dinner with Javier and Gadgil and saw them interact as colleagues in the scientific community, I wondered how we could create more opportunities for the Ashok Gadgils of the world and the Javier Fernandez-Hans to meet. It seems essential.

As an interesting side discussion, some of us started talking about the idea of play and how play contributed to the life of the inventor-entrepreneur. I suggested that in working with young people, we shouldn't have to choose between instilling values and playing in the sandbox: the sandbox is where you learn values. Joe Brown agreed that the sandbox is important, but said it's not the only place where values get instilled. "What motivates the playing in the first place?" he asked.

At Tech4Society's closing panel, Phil Auerswald posed a similar question to Lemelson Foundation executive director Julia Novy-Hildesley. Should we teach children science for its own sake, or should we teach kids science for the sake of social and environmental change? She replied, "Make those things the grains of sand you play with."

Tom's final question was, "If tomorrow you were granted $1 mlllion for investment in the social invention/innovation space, where would you put it?" I'll let people's great answers to this one speak for themselves:

Kendall Thiessen: I'd build an open innovation forum to connect social entrepreneurs, universities and inventors.

Elliot Harmon: A legal fund for negotiating patent issues on behalf of social entrepreneurs.

Nidhi Chaudhary: I would create more effective collaborations between research, implementation, and existing institutions. Let's build, not reinvent!

David Ewaku: Invest in improving the communication density in marginalised places.

Rosa Wang: I would sprinkle money on several very early stage "wild card" social invention/innovation ideas.

Photo: epugachev, CC license