Politics and Protest Reading Event at Bushel Sept 28

DELHI — Bushel is thrilled to host a reading by Delaware County writer Jennifer Kabat, followed by her conversation with political organizer L.A. Kauffman, and a performance by sound artist G Lucas Crane, on Saturday, September 28, 3–5 pm. Bushel is located at 106 Main Street, in Delhi. This event is open to the public, with a suggested donation of $10–$15. 

Jennifer Kabat will read from her new book The Eighth Moon—a remarkable combination of a memoir detailing her move to the Catskills in the 2000s, and an essay on the mid-nineteenth-century Anti-Rent War. “The book opens with a shootout in a corral in dresses and builds to a polytemporality where the past and present run together,” states Kabat. “Collapsing the two times together has been my way to understand the rise of political violence.” 

Kabat’s reading will be the basis of her conversation with L.A. Kauffman, a political organizer who wrote a definitive history on protest movements, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. They will discuss protest and politics in these uncertain, politically charged times. To round out the program, G Lucas Crane will perform a sound piece, incorporating audio recordings of present-day relatives of Anti-Rent protesters, reading their forebears’ letters and testimony along with songs from the uprising. Crane’s sonic work is “beautiful, time traveling, transcendent,” describes Kabat.

Doors at 2:40 pm; program begins at 3 pm. Masks optional but recommended.

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are being published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. Her essays and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. She lives in Margaretville, serves in her local fire department, and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA. 

L.A. Kauffman is a writer and progressive organizer who has been a seasonal resident of the Catskills for more than 20 years. She has published two books on the history and impact of protest movements in the United States. 

G Lucas Crane is a sound artist, designer, performer, and musician whose work focuses on slow media, media/memory confusion, sonic mind control, and time skullduggery. His cassette-tape based archival sound practice explores the wild liminal spaces of hybrid analog aesthetics and new performance techniques for allegedly obsolete technology. Crane has performed at the Museum of Art and Design, Pioneer Works, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many other places; co-founded the collective art/performance space Silent Barn in Bushwick; and now lives in Margaretville. 

BUSHEL is a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, volunteer-led, mixed-use space dedicated to art, agriculture, ecology, and action. It is located at 106 Main Street in Delhi. For more information, go to www.bushelcollective.org.