July 8: Book party & reading at Brecht Forum

Sunday, July 8, 4:00 - 7:00 pm
BOOK PARTY & READING

Health Proxy

with Author Robert Roth & Readings by Martha Lincoln, Margaret Mercer, Ralph Nazareth, Myrna NIeves & Joy Walker

4:00 - Reception

5:00 - Readings

The BRECHT FORUM
451 West Street (Bt Bank & Bethune)
www.brechtforum.org

(Transportation:
1, 2, 3 A, C, E to 14th Street,
14A, 11, 20 buses to Abingdon Square (where 8th Avenue meets Hudson Street)
8 bus to 10th & West Streets
L to 8th Ave @14th Street.)

"Robert Roth's Health Proxy is a dynamic collage of consciousness—bits and pieces of perception, insight, observation, dialogue, interior monologue, commentary, tirade, always deeply personal, profoundly philosophical at times, wide-ranging in its concerns and themes, ever in touch with the particular, deep in its sympathy, resolutely free—or shall we say there's a mighty struggle here to be free—of imperialist assumptions, hierarchical judgments. All of this makes it radically counter-cultural in its politics, a palpable extension of what we were all shaped by in the late 60s and early 70s.

"Circles of gay men with AIDS would come together. Each man speaking with enormous glee about whom they had cut out of their lives that week. I myself just waiting for that time to come. Pete turning on me in a fury and cutting me out of his life. And to know that the final pleasure you are probably going to give someone is the giddy delight they will feel when they cut you out of their lives is pretty bizarre to say the least. And that knowledge is part of the peculiar numbness that set in that helped me deal with the tragedy we were inside of.

"Though the situations are not parallel this reminds me of the fate of many who from the outside fought to help liberate South Africa from apartheid, who have helped liberate East Timor from centuries of oppression only to see those places liberated into the hands of the IMF or the World Bank. At that point of viability we recede into irrelevance and possibly even become a danger to those states. We are easily discarded.

"But you do it anyway."

from Health Proxy

"Robert Roth is a writer and co-creator of the magazine And Then. He has been in and around political movements as long as he can remember."