Housmans

Upcoming events at Housmans

Community

Book Launch: 'flamboyance' With Jack Parlett

JACK PARLETT IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER SCALPELLO Flamboyance is Jack Parlett’s follow up to his acclaimed Fire Island (A Housmans bestseller of 2022). This new book has all the qualities one has come to expect of Jack’s work; big hearted and erudite in equal measure. Flamboyance ignites every aspect of our lives, from art and entertainment to ritual and protest. The word conjures exuberance and unashamed passion; in thought, expression and dress. Yet historically the term ‘flamboyant’ has been reserved for the over-the-top and the outré, invoked at times as a pejorative innuendo or worse. In his fascinating new book, Jack Parlett argues for its value as an empowering and creative force, illuminating the ways in which flamboyance is a fundamental aspect of human conduct that both marks and transcends difference. Taking in an eclectic array of examples, from Gothic architecture to the orange flowers of Dungeness, and populated by figures such as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, this is a book about flamboyant art and the art of flamboyance. And having both aspired to it and rejected it, Jack recounts his personal relationship to flamboyance while also finding new meanings of the word, exploring its surprises and contradictions, and reconnecting with its radical power. As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale.

Fri 5 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Talks & Lectures

Book Launch: 'flamboyance' With Jack Parlett In Conversation With Peter Scalpello

JACK PARLETT IN CONVERSATION WITH PETER SCALPELLO Flamboyance is Jack Parlett’s follow up to his acclaimed Fire Island (A Housmans bestseller of 2022). This new book has all the qualities one has come to expect of Jack’s work; big hearted and erudite in equal measure. Flamboyance ignites every aspect of our lives, from art and entertainment to ritual and protest. The word conjures exuberance and unashamed passion; in thought, expression and dress. Yet historically the term ‘flamboyant’ has been reserved for the over-the-top and the outré, invoked at times as a pejorative innuendo or worse. In his fascinating new book, Jack Parlett argues for its value as an empowering and creative force, illuminating the ways in which flamboyance is a fundamental aspect of human conduct that both marks and transcends difference. Taking in an eclectic array of examples, from Gothic architecture to the orange flowers of Dungeness, and populated by figures such as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Elton John, Amy Winehouse, Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan, this is a book about flamboyant art and the art of flamboyance. And having both aspired to it and rejected it, Jack recounts his personal relationship to flamboyance while also finding new meanings of the word, exploring its surprises and contradictions, and reconnecting with its radical power.

Fri 5 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

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Community

BOOK LAUNCH: Privatising humanity by Kate Baylis

Kate Baylis in conversation with Adrienne Buller PRIVATISING HUMANITY is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets. We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit. Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors, including asset managers, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society. Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK – water, energy and housing – Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality. Kate will be joined in conversation by Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at , and a free ticket will be made available. If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening.

Wed 10 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Free! (worth double-checking)

Community

BOOK LAUNCH: Privatising humanity by Kate Bayliss

Kate Bayliss in conversation with Adrienne Buller PRIVATISING HUMANITY is a powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets. We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit. Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors, including asset managers, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society. Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK – water, energy and housing – Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality. Kate will be joined in conversation by Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at , and a free ticket will be made available. If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening.

Wed 10 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Talks & Lectures

BOOK TALK: Absolute Ethical Life: Michael Lazarus in conversation with Bruno Leipold

Aristotle, Hegel and Marx: Michael Lazarus In Conversation with Bruno Leipold Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today. Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the “form of value,” Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.

Mon 15 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Community

Book Launch: The Next Fix By Kojo Karam

The question is no longer if we should legalise drugs. It’s: what happens when we do? The future of drugs is here, and it’s dangerously unequal. Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen — and who stands to benefit? Join us as we welcome the brilliant Kojo Karam to Housmans to celebrate the launch of his essential, brilliant and harrowing new book. In The Next Fix, award-winning author Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier.

Tue 16 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Community

Book Launch: Turning Away By Benjamin A. Saltzman

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world. This is a work of breathtaking scholarship. We are delighted to welcome its author, Benjamin A Saltzman, to Housmans for its UK launch. He will be in conversation with Revd Dr Ayla Lepine. Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others.

Wed 17 Jun20:00Housmans

via Housmans

Community

Book Launch: Liquid Reflections with Liliane Lijn

We are profoundly honored to be hosting the paperback launch for a memoir by one the world’s greatest living artists, the sculptor Liliane Lijn, who will be joined in conversation by leading art writer Jennifer Higgie. Liliane Lijn is an artist who needs little introduction. Her stirring, often ostentatious and always poetic works are dotted throughout the British urban landscape, and overseas. Regular visitors to Housmans will have no doubt seen her recent piece Temenos just up the road from us, near Granary Square. We will host Liliane May 2nd to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroman Liquid Reflections. The book begins in 1958 with the talented and fearless Liliane Lijn leaving her family home and moving to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement.

Fri 4 Sept20:00Housmans

via Housmans

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