PASSWORDMANAGEMENT
December 2019/January 2020
Dr. Francesco Levato
- What's your favorite book to read for fun?My reading tastes vary, and I don鈥檛 tend to have favorites. What I鈥檓 currently reading, and am quite into, is The Stormlight Archive, an epic fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson.
- What's your favorite book to teach?
Currently, I鈥檒l Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women
- Do you have a favorite film?Again, don鈥檛 have favorites but I recently saw Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho and the sociopolitical commentary really resonated with me.
- How do you spend your free time?
Play Dungeons & Dragons
- What's your biggest literary inspiration?
Adrienne Rich, Murial Rukyser, Carolyn Forche, C.D. Wright, Charles Reznikoff, Mark Nowak, and Julianna Spahr, to name a very few. Adrienne Rich鈥檚 reflections on the intersection of poetry and politics have been particularly influential on my work, so much so that I tattooed the epigraph of her book 鈥淲hat is Found There鈥 on my arm. The epigraph is a stanza from 鈥淎sphodel, That Greeny Flower鈥 by William Carlos Williams, that reads 鈥淚t is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.鈥
- What's your cure for writer's block?Working with found language, chance operations, and textual collage.
- What are you working on outside of class?
My current project is a documentary poetics informed, videogame/VR art installation that examines immigrant detention at the border. It鈥檚 still a work in progress, but the game mechanics I鈥檓 considering will involve users interacting with objects that are representative of the for-profit immigrant detention process. Each object interacted with will have a set of texts associated with its role in the detention process, and each user interaction will collect these texts and compile them as a textual form of witness.