Lessons of Decal is a queer-feminist meditation on reading and learning, a bibliophilic memoir, in a series of lyrically spun experimental essays. A decal is a copy, a transfer of forms and knowledge, something that sticks. In this book, I ask how we or I make decals through our reading, writing, and teaching. So the book is also a meditation on transfers, on sluggishness, on slickness, on the stickiness of knowledge, on listening, on not planning, on vulnerability and fierceness. Other topics include alternative and embodied modes of learning and relating, my teachers of reading (which may be objects), poetry’s phantom limbs, lazy laboratories, a pedagogy of percolation, playlists as gifts, queer love poems, serious copying, and non-dull repetition. Formally, it’s a book of creative non-fiction that blends critical analysis, personal reflection, poetics, and performance writing. Deeply informed by attentive reading and research, these lyric essays are accessible yet playful and at times experimental. They might, for example, play with sound and imagery; employ narrative and poetic vignettes; use associative and speculative transitions, or simply follow different visual and argumentative lines of argument. Thematically, they’re about process and pedagogy: proposing that serious copying and repetition can be essential decals for learning, or, relatedly, that the thing that sticks and stays from or in our reading is unpredictable, entangled, and pleasurably non-programmatic. Lastly, all chapters are interested in the pull between autobiography and abstraction; between hospitality and formal difficulty. Most of these essays have their origin in some kind of live occasion, usually performative lectures which combine research with costume, projections, choreography, poetic language, and performative delivery. For Fans Of: Maggie Nelson, Lisa Robertson, Nuar Alsadir

Book Information
ISBN 9781739393908
Author Sophie Seita
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint The 87 Press
Publisher The 87 Press