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Inscribing what Levinas might call 'espace vital' (the space we can survive), 'Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings', (written/composed by Adeena Karasick and visualized/designed by Warren Lehrer), is an ecstatically wrought, never quite post-COVID-19 celebration/exploration of openings. It tracks the pain of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Employing fragmentation, layered language and sonic wordplay, these excerpts explore a range of intralingual etymologies of the word 'opening', laced with post-consumerist ironic and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms, 'Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings' foregrounds language as a material, physical organism of hope – highlighting the concept of opening as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transporting us through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light. The full volume is forthcoming from Lavender Ink Press, Spring 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the rebirth of irony during the post-COVID-19 era. Topics discussed include the meaning of irony from Ancient Greek, ways irony operates through language and transgression, and the author's view that irony can teach people about communicative models that in general semanticist terms offer structural and semantic changes in one's character and mental capacities.

With shout outs to Edward Sapir, Benjamin Whorf, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Wex and Ludwig Wittgenstein, this paper will explore both the structures of Yiddish and Kabbalistic hermeneutics. Focusing on the aphoristic nature of Yiddish as a series of media ecological probes, and how thirteenth-century Kabbalah offers multiperspectival strategies for negotiating truth, it will expose how both through its form and presentation, speaking 'Jewish' reshapes culture and provides a model for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to H´elene Cixous,"woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently from their bodies... Woman must put herself into the text -- into the world and into history -- by her own movement."1 Read through French Feminist theorists, H´elene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Kabbalistic hermeneutics, this essay posits some semantically playful and interventive strategies into what has historically been seen as a somewhat male dominated discourse. Offering gendered models of language use, it points toward more inclusive economies of exchange. If Gregory Bateson's 1972 axiom,"a difference that makes a difference,"2 then, it's crucial that we not only listen differently but speak / write in new ways. As Lance Strate points out,"if media ecology is concerned with the way that we do things and the differences among the means, methods and modes that we employ; the situations, context and relationships that we act within, the forms, substances, codes, technologies and techniques that we utilize,"3 then mediating language in new ways, can and will inevitably lead to powerfully transformative ways of thinking, and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem "Checking In" by Adeena Karasick is presented. First Line: Warner Bros. Records want to make AMERICA great again; Last Line: American English is missing u.