True West Presents: The Mountain Goats. An intimate evening with John Darnielle, to benefit The Oregon Institute for Creative Research.

Following the success of the first OICR “Readings for Now” Series, we will hold a second event on Tuesday, October 3, at 7:00 p.m. in the Kitchen at Yale Union, where we will devote ourselves to a close reading and discussion of Adorno's aptly-named "Opinion Delusion Society." 

In this talk, we locate (in)distinguishability as a singularly important criterion and 21st-century challenge, examining what seems to be a deep resemblance and mutual implicature of electro-optical media, synthetic biology, quandaries of verification, socio-political madness, and the inability to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, “life” and “Life itself,” the living and the dead.

Join us for a roundtable discussion on a range of critical topics, from the growing indistinction of the real and the fake to the threatened disappearance of politics as a system of challenge, contest, and negotiation.

Washington State University Department of Fine Arts will have scholar Anne-Marie Oliver present on the following topic of Utopia/Dystopia. 

A critical conversation on method and madness, knowledge and respect, theory and nascent wonder, ignorance and arrogance, authority and tradition, judgment and distinction, learning and the pleasing of another, sober realism and the rage for justice.

A series of 12-15 mini-presentations and performances, 1-5 minutes apiece, whether funny, sad, tragic, or silly, but never indifferent, led by members of the Critical Theory and Creative Research Collective under the title of its esteemed guest-lecturer series “Come If You Dare.”