Borrowed Places

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring visiting fellow, Josh Berson.

Berson works best in borrowed places, and by this he means in three senses. First, he has observed that the times when writing feels effortless, when the days slip by in a sustained waking dream, when he senses he is not the source but the channel, when he hears the text whispered in his ear as he writes and wakes in the night with passages fully formed in hi head, are those when he has but the most tenuous claim to the place where he’s living, where the bedding is borrowed and the garden view, the morning birdsong, the dusk chorus, the petrichor that follows rain, the kitchen utensils (save for his Kuhn-Rikon carbon steel y-peeler, which accompanies him everywhere, notwithstanding the overzealous efforts of Berlin airport security); when he’s been living out of a knapsack for six months. It is in borrowed places that the world recedes, and it is in borrowed places that Berson feels the sense of openness that encourages risk-taking.

Second, he has observed that his most gratifying work is that where the writing process itself acquires a quality of dislocation. Writing, for Berson, is like wandering out on a tidal flat at dusk only to find, as the light goes and the tide returns, that he’s lost his sense of direction and stepped on something stinging.

Third, when Berson appears ineluctably drawn to borrowed genres. He was trained as a historian, anthropologist, and philosopher; an earlier career in computer science continues to inform his habits of thought. He’s held appointments in brain imaging labs and design studios; his second and third books formulated a program of research you might call critical-interpretive evolutionary anthropology. But over time, his work grew increasingly experimental, and at length he turned to fiction. His first novel, Waking Paralysis, he wrote as a preparation for The Human Scaffold (2021); it will appear this year, and the delay in its publication speaks to the difficulty of working against genre.

For this colloquium Berson offers Very Rough, Unrevised early pages from his third novel, working title Procedure. Procedure is a study, on the one hand, in the phenomenology of social disorder, on the other in the phenomenology of aging. It grows out of his own experience of congenital monaurality and its unexpected sequelae as he enters his sixth decade, including normal-tension glaucoma and the possibility of losing his hearing and vision simultaneously. As in The Human Scaffold and Waking Paralysis, borrowed places figure in the text as well as in the making of the text.

Respondents include Michael Sawyer, Professor of African American Literature and Culture, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh + Zachary Horton, Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event.