Literature – Page 2 – Roy Christopher

October 11, 2014

Conjuring Infinity: The Dark Reach of Black Metal

At barely thirty years old, black metal is a relatively young musical genre. Its roots running back to such thrash acts as Celtic Frost, Venom, Bathory, and Slayer, it finally found fertile ground in Scandinavia in the late 1980s/early 1990s. This second wave, including such bands as Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, and Emperor, is what most are referring to when they utter the words. As author Ulrike Serowy puts it, black metal is “music that touches the inmost depths, goes beyond words, music that conjures infinity” (p. 33). Dayal Patterson points out that black metal “will surely continue to innovate and evolve, and this should be celebrated” (p. 484). Serowy’s new novella and Myrkur’s new EP both show how far this style has spread since its spiked-leather beginnings.

Serowy’s Skogtatt (Hablizel, 2014), is the first piece of fiction to capture the spirit of black metal. It tells the story of a young man lost in a wintery forest, his car having left him stranded after band practice, a black metal black mass: “Together they create an invocation, ever and again, over and over they call on something for which they yearn, something they never the less fear.” His struggles in the dark reflect the struggles of black metal as a genre and of humans as a species: nature versus technology, humanism versus misanthropy, love versus hate, silence versus sound. The protagonist’s long, lonely walk in the woods gives way to the introspection so central to the appeal of black metal. The rhythm of the story is reminiscent of a song. It’s no surprise that Serowy also plays guitar.

With illustrations by Faith Coloccia and a logo by Aaron Turner, (both of Mamiffer) and an English translation by Samuel Willcocks, Skogtatt is a true metal artifact without ever directly mentioning metal. It’s the perfect bedtime read as winter approaches here in the West. It’s as scary as it is unsettling, as dark as it is daring, as mysterious as it is moving, an intoxicating visit to the cold land of death. Couple it with Cult of Luna’s Eviga Riket (2012), and you’ll have all-metal dreams.

Screaming is one of the rewarding parts about black metal, both to listen to and to do myself. It releases a fraction of the anger and hatred I have inside me. — Amalie Bruun, Myrkur

Myrkur’s self-titled debut EP (Relapse, 2014) alloys black metal’s core aesthetic (e.g., frenetic, tremelo strumming, blast beats, screaming vocals) with haunting female choral arrangements. Before becoming a model and a musician in other genres, Amalie Bruun grew up with this music. She told Wyatt Marshall, “I was born and raised on the northern coast of Denmark. I have written this music for years by myself in my house in Denmark. Black metal comes from my part of the world, Scandinavia, and has its roots in the Nordic nature that I hold so dear and also our ancient pagan religion of Norse Mythology and our folk music.” Patterson continues, “it should also be remembered that many of the most powerful efforts have come from bands utilizing conventional black metal frameworks and traditional ideologies…” (p. 484).

In the short film embedded below, Bruun explains, “I always dreamed about becoming a Huldra, an elf girl, a valkyrie, or the goddess Freja. There are these powerful women in Norse Mythology that have both an element of beauty and mystery, but they are also deadly.” That’s exactly how Myrkur sounds: beautiful, mysterious, deadly. My only complaint is that there isn’t more of it.

Here is a very short film about Myrkur featuring the song “Nattens Barn” [runtime: 2:44]:

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References:

Marshall, Wyatt. (2014, September 16). Shedding Light on the Darkness of Myrkur. Bandcamp Blog.

Patterson, Dayal. (2013). Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Serowy, Ulrike. (2013). Skogtatt: A Novella. Lohmar, Germany: Hablizel.

October 6, 2014

Peripheral-Vision Man: William Gibson

William Gibson’s first and most celebrated novel was published 30 years ago. I first read Neuromancer (Ace, 1984) in the fall of 1999, halfway between here and there. I had just dropped out of graduate studies at the University of Georgia’s Artificial Intelligence program and was trying to figure out what to do next. In the meantime, I was running the interview website that would eventually become my first book. Since those inauspicious beginnings, William Gibson has always been at or near the top of my most-wanted interviews.

William Gibson

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. — William Gibson

In lieu of a face-to-face sit-down with The Man, Patrick A. Smith has compiled interviews with Gibson from most of his career. Thanks to interviewers asking many of the same questions over the years, these Conversations with William Gibson (University Press of Mississippi, 2014) run over and over the same ground, and many are interesting in spite of—and some because of—that. Twenty-three interviews being conducted by different people intermittently over about as many years often gives what would be the same question a new answer. Moreover, there are a few absolutely essential reads included: Andy Diggle and Iain Ball’s previously unpublished talk with Gibson from 1993, Edo van Belkom’s obscure 1997 interview, and Alex Dueboen’s interrogation of Gibson’s writing process from 2007. Also, the 30-page David Wallace-Wells interview originally published in The Paris Review #197 in 2011 is probably the best interview with Gibson anywhere—Kodwo Eshun’s unpublished 1996 interview notwithstanding.

Regardless, Gibson’s insights abound. Like his last book, Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012), this one collects its pieces from across the web and print publications: websites, magazines, and zines, some out of print and a few never printed before. Both books are huge steps in revealing the many deep and relevant thoughts of a man mainly known for only a few big ones. Here are several from these conversations:

1997: “To me, ambivalence seems the only sane response [to technology]. Technophobia doesn’t work, and neither does technophilia. So you don’t want to be a nerd, and you don’t want to be a Luddite, you have to try to straddle the fence and just make constant decisions” (p. 133).
1999: “I think Brian Eno‘s right in defining culture as everything we do that we don’t absolutely need to do… I look at what people are doing—particularly if they’re doing it passionately—that they don’t need to do” (p. 149).
1999: “To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is important to me in some way that I don’t yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas” (p. 154).
1999: “Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we’re doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn’t see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it’s very apparent” (p. 158).
2007: “In those early days of broadcast television, you were a little kid walking around and holding these two realities at the same time in your head” (p. 185).
2011: “Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies” (p. 222).

My to-read stack also grew a book or several after reading these interviews. Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets (FSG, 1981) and Manny Farber’s Negative Space (Studio Vista, 1971) are mentioned several times, along with Thomas Pynchon, Dashiell Hammett, Bruce Sterling, and J. G. Ballard.

Speaking of Pynchon, Gibson has always cited him as an influence, rebutting claims of his following Philip K. Dick. Given Gibson’s recent flirtation with the recent past, Pynchon’s latest, Bleeding Edge (Penguin, 2013), reads more like it was influenced by Gibson’s last trilogy than the other way around. I loved the way Gibson was able to describe our present like it was/is science fictional (proving the point that he, Frederick Jameson, and others have made about “futuristic” science fiction actually being about the moment in which it was written), but it’s good to see him projecting again. I’ve read all of his books since taking the plunge 15 years ago, and I recently reread that first one. I am back in graduate school and glad to be able to read another.

The Peripheral (Putnam Adult, 2014) leaps ahead again, the 22nd century making up at least one of the worlds in its pages. So far it feels more light than dark, but that may just be his lulling me into it with his trademark descriptions with sparse details, gaping breadth with needle-focused minutiae. Without giving too much away, I will say that it reads more like Neuromancer than it does Spook Country (my favorite of all of his novels). It has the giddy unease of the former tempered by the veteran hand of the latter. It’s both energy and nuance. Parsing Gibson’s paragraphs is a challenge again—and that much more fun for it.

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William Gibson white-out portrait by Roy Christopher. [01072014]

August 19, 2014

Writing Women: Don’t Care If You Like It

Sometime in the year since reading Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, I noticed that I’d been reading a lot of books written by women. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but looking back, it struck me as notable. But just as there are two kinds of racism, there are two kinds of sexism: noting the difference when it doesn’t matter and not noting it when it does. I love the writing of Rebecca Solnit, Chris Kraus, and Lauren Beukes regardless of their gender. I aspire to write like them because they are great writers. Several of the books I’ve been reading though tackle and twist ideas about feminism and femininity into new shapes for consideration.

Megan Abbott already has another novel out, but 2012’s Dare Me (Reagan Arthur) is populated with the illest, fiercest, flyest cheerleaders you’ve ever seen. Chelsea Cain of The New York Times Book Review describes it as “Heathers meets Fight Club.” If that doesn’t sell it for you, then this might not be the book for you. These girls wield power that Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated (2005) calls “absolute” (p. 82). Describing the mise en scène of the halls of high school, he writes,

Girls, certain girls, dominate these settings because they are impresarios of an evolving social art. Propelled by incipient sexuality, yes, but across the whole range of its sublimations, they devote enormous energy to mastering an array of symbols and cues, an interplay of appearance, clothes, accessories, music, slang—a totality of customs that constitute their emerging world. And when they understand it well enough to play with it, improvise with it, innovate and disseminate, they take up their positions in that ruling clique and their authority will be recognized by all who know them. It will be their privilege to control the tones and terms that catch and shape the flow of days, and the long weekends. This clique of girls dominates because it presides over a Wittgensteinian language game—meaning, not just a language, not just the slang, but also the whole form of life that goes with it. Everybody who wants to be anybody must live by it, and they are the gatekeepers (p. 82-83).

Addy Hanlon, Beth Cassidy, Brinnie Cox, Emily, Mindy, Cori, Tacy, RiRi—the girls of Dare Me—are these certain girls. Untouchable, they run their school from a level above the workaday drama. To the common masses of lockers, duffel bags, and backpacks, their taut, tight existences carry nothing nonessential. No baggage to see or speak of—or so it seems from the outside. As Louis CK once puts it, speaking about his own daughters,

Boys fuck things up. Girls are fucked-up. That’s the difference. Boys just do damage to your house that you can measure in dollars, like a hurricane. Girls, like, leave scars in your psyche that you find later… That’s the difference between boys and girls. And it becomes the difference between men and women, really. A man will, like, steal your car or burn your house down or beat the shit out of you, but a woman will ruin your fuckin’ life. Do you see the difference? Like, a man will cut your arm off and throw it in a river, but he’ll leave you as a human being intact. He won’t fuck with who you are. Women are nonviolent, but they will shit inside of your heart (C. K., 2008).

All of the musings of men above smack predominantly of one thing: misogyny. Louis is joking, of course, but the inherent irony of a joke is often lost in the laughter. Some of the female revenge stories (e.g., Monster, Hard Candy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo née “Men Who Hate Women,” etc.) may feel like they go too far, but there is rarely a point at which the righteous anger of a woman is not completely justified.

Turning the profile of the predatory pedophile on its head, Alissa Nutting’s newest novel inverts our gender-based perceptions of the perverted. Tampa (Ecco, 2014) tells the story of Celeste, an attractive middle school teacher who preys exclusively on her underage male students. Clare Swanson of Publisher’s Weekly calls it “Lolita meets American Psycho.” Only metaphorically feminist, Tampa is erotica wrapped tightly in satire, or possibly vise versa. Its critique turns on flipping gender expectations but also social mores; Nutting mixes gender-roles with sociopathy. “We can all tell when people have crushes on us, sexual or platonic,” writes M.E. Thomas (2013), “and we enjoy wielding that small amount of power over them. If anything, sociopaths are just a little better at it and enjoy it in a particular way” (p. 218). Always on the inside edge of getting caught, Celeste’s sociopathic obsession with young, male suitors never relents. Thomas explains the intersection of sociopathy and sexuality further as follows:

One of the manifestations of sociopathy in me is an ambivalence in regards to sex and sexual orientation. Sociopaths are unusually impressionable, very flexible with their own sense of self. Because we don’t observe social norms, we don’t have a moral compass, and we have a fluid sense of right and wrong… This extends, at least in some degree, to our sexuality (p. 241).

M. E. Thomas, a pseudonym used by the author of Confessions of a Sociopath (Broadway, 2013), evokes the prominent Victorian novelist M. E. Braddon, about whom Bruce Sterling says, “no one knew whether she was a man or a woman; she was passing for human” (quoted in Smith, 2014, p. 89). “Passing for human” might seem a sad phrase to use for escaping the trappings of gender, but it’s never quite so easy. “The problem isn’t so simple as a man-versus-woman frame,” Rebecca Traister writes in a recent piece for the New Republic. Citing an anecdote from Tina Fey’s Bossypants (Reagan Arthur, 2011) in which Amy Pohler tells off her friend Jimmy Fallon (See “I Don’t Care If You Like It,” pp. 143-146), Traister concludes,

I wish it were different. I wish that every woman whose actions and worth are parsed and restricted, congratulated and condemned in this country might just once get to wheel around—on the committee that doesn’t believe their medically corroborated story of assault, or on the protesters who tell them that termination is a sin they will regret, or on the boss who tells them he doesn’t believe in their sexual choices, or on the mid-fifties man who congratulates them, or himself, on finding them appealing deep into their dotage—and go black in the eyes and say, “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”

References:

Abbott, Megan. (2012). Dare Me: A Novel. New York: Reagan Arthur.

C. K., Louis. (2008). Chewed Up. New York: Showtime.

Cain, Chelsea. (2012, August 10). Bring It On: Dare Me by Megan Abbott. The New York Times.

de Zengotita, Thomas. (2005). Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury.

Fey, Tina. (2011). Bossypants. New York: Reagan Arthur.

Nutting, Alissa. (2014). Tampa: A Novel. New York: Ecco.

Smith, Patrick, A. (2014). Conversations with William Gibson. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Swanson, Claire. (2013, August 22). Q&A with Tampa Author Alissa Nutting. Publisher’s Weekly.

Thomas, M. E. (2013). Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight. New York: Broadway Books.

Traister, Rebecca. (2014, July 16). I Don’t Care If You Like It: Women are tired of being judged by the Esquire metric. New Republic.

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P.S. In the meantime, Lauren Beukes has written another outstanding novel. More on that one soon.

July 15, 2014

The Short End of the Story

Before I became a certified, book-carrying reader, I dabbled in short stories. I had tried diving headlong, headstrong into novels, but I couldn’t keep up. I’d start one before bed, not read for a few nights, and end up lost when I returned. I wouldn’t be able to hold it all in my head. I’d lose the plot, the characters, and my momentum.

The solution I found at the time was reading short stories. I came across a mention of Harlan Ellison‘s Angry Candy (Houghton Mifflin, 1988) in Scott Davidson’s GUS zine, and I went looking. I found a copy at a long-since-defunct used bookstore on 84 East in Wicksburg, Alabama. After falling asleep to speculative tales like “Escapegoat,” “On the Slab,” “Laugh Track,” and the post-print “The Region Between,” I gained an extreme admiration for the brevity with which Ellison was able to boil my brain.

After devouring more of Ellison and the science-fiction stories in OMNI, I eventually moved on to longer forms. My respect for the short story never wavered though. Now that Ellison writes more litigation than literature, I’ve come across several other adept authors of the shorter form worthy of mention. Summer might be the time for longer reads, but I still find myself pulling back to graze.

Most recently, Leaving the Sea: Stories (Knopf, 2014) by Ben Marcus, whose last novel, The Flame Alphabet (Knopf, 2012), is one of my favorite reads of any kind in the past few years. I’m only just diving into Leaving the Sea, but his previous story collection, The Age of Wire and String (Dalkey Archive, 1995), stays by my bedside. Though much more sparse than anything he’s written in the nearly twenty years since, its inspiration is endless.

In Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bagigalupi (Night Shade Books, 2010), author of the fabulous The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2010), is able to write in times and places that do not exist, yet exist all around us—including the odd ontology of The Windup Girl (see “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man” in this collection). These are eerily adjacent possibles, and like the best science-fiction authors (I’m thinking specifically of Sterling and Gibson—see their collections, and A Good Old-Fashioned Future and Burning Chrome, respectively—as well as the aforementioned Ellison), he seems to be reporting back from them.

If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2011) was Charles Yu’s arrival, then Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (Pantheon, 2012) is his journey. Much of the brilliance of that book is preluded here. “Troubleshooting,” written to mimic an actual troubleshooting guide, is especially sparse and poignant.

I’ve spent the last couple of years corresponding with Brian McFarland. Scarcely a day goes by that we don’t volley several email threads. McFarland runs the Cursor-powered, indie-book publisher Red Lemonade, which is more of a publishing platform than a traditional imprint. It’s a community effort. So far they’ve unleashed Happy Talk by Richard Melo, Zazen by Vanessa Veselka, Follow Me Down by Kio Stark, The Sovereignties of Invention by Matthew Battles, and Someday This Will Be Funny, as well as several others, by Lynne Tillman. I asked publishing gadfly and Cursor boss Richard Nash how he came to work with McFarland. “It was a combination of three things really,” he told me, “his curiosity about non-traditional writing, his passion for doing things differently, and his eagerness to connect. I think I also wanted someone from outside the existing world of publishing, someone who would approach it knowing almost nothing of the status-quo ante. Fresh fresh fresh!”

“Three times fresh” is exactly how I’d describe the stories in The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade, 2012) by Matthew Battles. With a stream-of-consciousness recording device, the books title tract, “The Sovereignties of Invention,” is sort of a “Funes, the Memorious” for the iPod set (iFunes?), a pocket-size external harddrive for the mind’s every moment. As that one, “The Dogs in the Trees,” “The Manuscript of Belz,” “Camera Lucida,” and “I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully” all illustrate, the nominal number of pages (the whole book barely breaks the 100-page mark) needed for Battles to rearrange my mind and the world it’s in is simply amazing and reminiscent of my initial experiences with Harlan Ellison and short fiction in general. It even spawned its own book of reader responses.

All of the above is to suggest that the short story can possess all the complexity or potential for impact as its longer counterparts. If you’re not currently a big reader, one of these collections may be just the door you’ve been looking for.

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Special thanks to Scott Davidson for championing Harlan Ellison way back when, to Ashley Crawford for the tip on Ben Marcus, and to Brian McFarland for so many emails, links, and laughs.

June 25, 2014

Summer Reading List, 2014

As school finally releases its grip on our attention and summer eases in around us, it’s time to peruse book pages for pleasure. If you’re like me, you’re still working through stuff from last year’s list. As my friend Kristin Ross tweeted recently, “Lately when I think about my mortality, the primary sadness I feel is in regards to all the books on my ‘to-read’ shelf.” We may never get to them all, but here are 2014’s summer recommendations.

Lily upstairs at Myopic Books in Chicago.

This year’s list boasts newcomers Christopher Schaberg, Brian McFarland, and Alice Marwick, as well as veteran Summer Reading Listers Ashley Crawford, Lance Strate, Mark Amerika, Brad Vivian, Lily Brewer, Peter Lunenfeld, Alex Burns, danah boyd, Steve Jones, Zizi Papacharissi, Dominic Pettman, Benjamin Bratton, and myself. As usual, unless otherwise noted, the book links will lead you to the book’s page on the Powell’s site, the greatest bookstore on the planet.

Lance Strate

At the top of my reading list for this summer is On Reflection: An Essay on Technology, Education, and the Status of Thought in the Twenty-First Century (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2013) by Ellen Rose, an outstanding scholar. And speaking of great scholars, I have Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s most recent work, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) high up on my stack as well.

I am also looking forward to reading B. W. Powe’s important study, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy (University of Toronto Press, 2014). This looks to be a summer for biographical and semibiographical works, as I also have lined up In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) by Gerald W. Haslam with Janice E. Haslam, and Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor University Press, 2013) by Brett T. Robinson, as well as The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Anchor, 2007) by Fritjof Capra.

I’ve picked up some second hand books that I intend to enjoy this summer, including two from Ralph Waldo Emerson. One is a stray volume of his collected works that combines two of his major publications, The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude (Macmillan, 1910). The other is Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals (Programmed Classics, 1968), selected and with an introduction by Lewis Mumford (which alone is worth the price of purchasing the book). And then there’s Understanding Understanding (Harper & Row, 1974), by Humphrey Osmond, with John A. Osmond and Jerome Agel, which I am understandably curious about.

For poetry, I can’t wait to delve into the long awaited volume from Dale Winslow, Tinderbox (NeoPoiesis, 2013). And in graphic novels, there’s Volume 21 of The Walking Dead, real brain food that I’ll no doubt gobble up in one sitting when it comes out in a few weeks.

Christopher Schaberg

The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell (Penguin, 2013) charts “a year’s watch in nature”—the author goes out to the same small plot of forest every day over the course of a year, and reflects on being (and non-being) at myriad scales. Haskell calls this place the “mandala”: seen in a certain way, it’s like a microcosm of the universe. The book reminded me of object-oriented ontology put into practice. In other words, it’s a work of praxis: an experiment in constraint and wonder, with the fruits (or more precisely, flora and fauna) of this endeavor recorded in sprightly prose.

But what if the mandala were not a spot in the woods, but a color? And what if the temporal frame were not a year but ongoing, indeterminate and blurry? Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) reflects on blue hues across literary, artistic, and philosophical registers, and as the color shoots through her own life in ways that are at turns visceral and vaporous, ambient and affective. The book unfolds as a sequence of playfully (il)logical propositions, at once echoing Wittgenstein while venturing into new poetic territory.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has taken the impulse to color in another direction. His searching edited collection Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) does exactly what it’s title says: It pushes way beyond traditional “green” readings of nature, environment, and ecology. The chapters find deep reservoirs of semiotic value and biotic interplay across the spectrum of colors, reaching into perceptual zones as seemingly unnatural and alien as x-ray and ultraviolet. Collectively, this book comprises a tour de force that could be the core of an entire seminar on cutting edge environmental theory. (I plan to adopt the book this way in an environmental humanities seminar at Loyola University New Orleans in the near future.)

Of course a more traditional way to go about ecological thinking is to ground it in place. Jim Harrison’s latest collection of novellas, The River Swimmer (Grove Press, 2014), revolves around my own home region of northern Michigan. The two novellas in this collection (“The Land of Unlikeness” and “The River Swimmer”) are paragons of the form; even as their plot lines unravel typical (for Harrison) male fantasies and nativist wish images, the stories are gently hilarious, disturbingly violent, softly sublime, and eerily haunting. Harrison has a way with the novella that exhibits incredible formal control and concision, even as the stories sprawl out to epic and even magical proportions. Throughout each story, the aura of Michigan seeps through details as striking and elusive as the spring marshy air, the texture of river currents, and rare bird calls.

Another geography I recently found myself reading about, somewhat unexpectedly, was New York City. Thomas Beller’s new biography of J.D. Salinger (subtitled The Escape Artist; New Harvest, 2014) suggests that the landscape and atmosphere of New York shaped Salinger’s writing and consciousness to a large degree. I don’t know the city terribly well, and I have not read a single work of fiction by Salinger (I know, I know!), but the fact that Beller manages to lure me into and guide me through these intertwined (and to me, unfamiliar) topographies speaks to a certain ecological acuity present in the book. But it’s an eccentric ecology, attuned to human culture and the patterns and quirks of things like publishing, personae, and literary production. To call this biography ‘ecological’ may sound strange, but it’s precise in the sense that Beller breaks from a simple, linear-narrative biography and develops something more networked, something more (to recover a theoretical term perhaps overused but still apt here) rhizomatic.

Alice Marwick

I read two kinds of books during the summer: academic books that get me jazzed about research, and anything page-turnery I can read on my Kindle while lying around in the sun.

I’m in an academic book club and by far our favorite title this year was Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press, 2014). It’s a mind-blowing ethnography of young black men in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, and how the constant intrusion of the police and penal system systematically undermines their familial and romantic relationships. Goffman is a really gifted writer, and her book not only hammers home the horrific social impact of American mass incarceration of African-American youth, but includes a methods chapter where she discusses how living in a primarily black, masculine environment for six years affected her own subjectivity and relationship to academia. It’s the rare academic book I can’t put down and I would recommend it to anyone.

Goffman’s book has inspired me to finally read legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012) which tackles the same issues from a legal perspective. Alexander examines how today’s legal system has perpetrated systemic African-American disenfranchisement and inequality, much like the Jim Crow laws of years past.

Next on the list after that is Fred Turner’s The Democratic Surround (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read yet considering what a huge influence Turner’s smart, literate histories of the 20th century have been on my own work.

In fiction, my favorite discovery of the year was the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. I’m a huge fan of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, but I get very irritated by writers who can imagine a world with cybernetic augmentation, mass terraforming, etc. etc. but can’t get beyond run-of-the-mill patriarchy. Kirstein’s Steerswomen are scholars who travel around their realm, making detailed maps and observations about the natural environment. This, of course, deeply appealed to me as a social scientist, and I loved seeing Rowan, the chief steerswoman, use her version of the scientific method to puzzle through the various trials and tribulations that come her way. While the setting seems at first to be your typical medieval fantasy world, Kirstein expertly reveals throughout the series that it may be more than it seems. A fantastic, engaging series that is simultaneously nerdy and feminist. I can’t recommend these books highly enough, especially now that the rights have reverted to Kirstein and she’s released them all as ebooks.

I’m also planning on reading the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which is also speculative fiction but from an almost Lovecraftian perspective. The first book, Annihilation (FSG Originals, 2014), described a team of scientists sent out to explore the abandoned Area X. Why it was abandoned, who commissioned the expedition, and what happened to the previous teams remains a mystery, but the sense of dread that sets in as you watch the biologist, the anthropologist, the psychologist, and the surveyor—all women—navigate the uncertainty of the landscape. Without putting too fine a point on it, this book creeped me the hell out. The second book, Authority (FSG Originals, 2014), focuses on the institutional apparatus that supports the expeditions, which doesn’t sound terrifying but I’m hoping doesn’t lose the momentum of the first.

Other than that, I’ll be finally trying to finish The Goldfinch (Little, Brown & Co., 2013), which is like half of a really good book interspersed with a lot of boring short stories, catching up on various mystery, sci-fi, and dystopian series that have new books out, and perhaps making a dent in my “to read” PDF folder. Preferably while out in the sun.

Brian McFarland

Krysztof Michalski’s The Flame of Eternity (Princeton University Press, 2013) provides a reexamination and new interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the central role that the concepts of eternity and time, as he understood them, played in it.

If you read this as a confused teenager seeking power amid your angst, this book will remind you of the joy and freedom that was embedded within all that poetry. While reading I had that rare joy (that only books can provide) of remembering a former self experiencing a book and transforming that experience by re-visiting the text again. That’s not so clear, but Krysztof Michalski had the same fascination with passages that confounded my younger self- and here I was years later remembering that confusion and achieving understanding of it many years later. A powerful read and the author does a nice job of making difficult concepts clear.

Bradford Vivian

This summer, I’m studying various books on the subject of witnessing. Last year, I researched treatises on time and politics and, presently, I’m seeking to analyze the rhetoric of witnessing in light of temporality and the politics of time. To that end, my summer reading list features works that approach witnessing from unconventional angles and, in so doing, attempt to understand it in novel ways.

Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) illustrates one of the best features of her writing in general: her ability to connect canonical philosophical concepts and lineages to the concrete realities of public and political affairs. Here, she relates the Hegelian politics of recognition to conventional humanitarian, moral, or political discourse that assumes one witnesses in order to identify the basis for some common humanity and historical experience. Oliver helpfully pushes our approach to witnessing beyond recognition, in whatever form, as its guiding telos.

In this context, I also plan to closely study Jacques Derrida’s Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (Fordham University Press, 2005). This text is reputed to feature many of Derrida’s customary deconstructive topoi-my interest resides, in particular, in the extent to which that his reflections throughout Sovereignties are said to echo his remarks on impossibility and possibility elsewhere regarding related topics-specifically, forgiveness and mourning. That is, I’m interested in his understanding of how the impossibility of something like witnessing, forgiveness, or mourning might nonetheless accomplish productive ethical and political work.

Finally, I’ll be preoccupied with Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012). In this text, Hirsch takes up a line of thought that others have begun to explore in their own scholarship (notably Celia Lury in Prosthetic Culture and Alison Landsberg in Prosthetic Memory): namely, the degree to which one can remember someone else’s memories. Many discourses of witnessing presuppose that memories may somehow be affectively transferred from survivors or participants in history to future generations who did not witness the original events. This kind of work necessarily involves reflections on the communication of memory via literature, art, and media while raising important questions about the ethics and politics of witnessing.

Lily Brewer

I graduated from my SAIC Art History graduate program last May, and within the first 25 days of said graduation, starved for novels, I had read 15 novels, textbooks, and other non-fictions: I feel I have read all the great books already, but will continue to pursue others. Here is a representative sample of both.

After reading Lydia Davis’ remarkable collection of short stories in Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), wherein one story she outlines a systematic, syntactical, and secretly heartbreaking analysis of 27 fourth graders’ get-well letters to a classmate Steven. I’ve dipped my toes in her The End of the Story from 1995, but so far have found it more depressing than my summer warrants. Especially when read alongside S. D. Chrostowska’s Permission (Dalkey Archive, 2013), written as multiple emails’ soliloquy with image attachments, I’ve found that contemporary fiction writing, for me, needs to be carefully vetted by the public before I set my eyes to it. However, learning from my mistake and in an ameliorative effort, Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies (Wesleyan, 2010) so far relieves me with strange, sparse, deadpan scans of the backs of books, discount cards, and “Wet Paint” signs, and the narrative is obscure, or rather clandestine, or maybe not even there, and refreshing. I’m tired of narratives.

With that said, despite his overwrought account of the failure of memory in the sleepy wake of post-WWII PTSD, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (New Directions, 1999) records scattered memories of scenes as they come to the narrator, with images anchored within two lines of its antecedent. I hope the image and text in his The Emigrants (New Directions, 1997) is just as meticulously and personally designed when I begin it soon.

Christian Bok’s Crystallography (Coach House Books, 1999) inspired me toward Jacques Roubaud’s Mathematics (Dalkey Archive, 2012), but unfortunately in name only: Bok’s stupifyingly researched, fractal, picture poem on crystals and their study has eaten Roubaud for breakfast. Giving the latter a shot anyway, I thought his memoir on his mathematical academic career would be as cynical toward the academy as Barbara Browning’s detective(?) novel I’m Trying to Reach You (complete with screenshots of YouTube videos of, likely, the author herself in interpretive dance performances inspired by the death of Michael Jackson; Two Dollar Radio, 2012) and maybe even Chris Kraus’ memoir/erotica/art-history-laced-in-latex Video Green (Semiotext(e), 2004), but both Mathematics and Kraus’ novel Summer of Hate (Semiotext(e), 2012) have fallen short so far. I have high hopes anyway while finishing those and Roubaud’s The Loop (Dalkey Archive, 2009).

Finally and always already on my list are Sylvia Plath’s journals, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Jacob Bronowski’s works on science and its critics, and textbooks on our solar system’s planetary landscapes. Like the tradition set by Marianne Moore and the second law of thermodynamics, this female, like her Amazon shopping cart, is a chaos.

Steve Jones

Summer reading this year will veer even further toward pleasure and away from work, and even more toward indulging my interests in popular music, I’m glad to say. In no particular order I’m looking forward to reading Romany and Tom: A Memoir, by Ben Watt, that promises to be a fascinating look at British music and life before the Beatles broke. For somewhat similar voyeuristic reasons, you might say, I’m planning to read Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home (Little, Brown & Co., 2014), for its chronicling of the home life of people at the center of 1980s literary London. Holly George-Warren’s biography of Alex Chilton, A Man Called Destruction (Viking Adult, 2014), is also on my list. I’ve only known the Chilton myths, so I’m looking forward to something a bit more journalistic about hiim. I’ve also got Lisa Robinson’s There Goes Gravity (Riverhead, 2014) on the list, for light reading and a laugh. To round out the music titles I’ve got Greg Kot’s, I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March up Freedom’s Highway (Scribner, 2014). The Staples family have a singular place in popular music that I hope Kot is able to contextualize. I also very much want to read Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Domain (Oxford University Press, 2014), that’s actually been an intention for a long time. As I look at it now, it’s quite an indulgent list, really, and that makes me quite happy to see.

Benjamin Bratton

My reading list for summer 2014 is made up of largely overlooked titles. In most cases, they are lesser-known works by well-known authors, both fiction and non-fiction. In a couple cases, it’s a chance for me re-visit some favorites that have strongly influenced my recent work. If any of you read any of these over the next few weeks and write something on it, send me a link.

J.G. Ballard Crepuscular Enclave (Picador, 2014): This posthumously-published novel takes place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, occupied by British forces who live and work behind what is supposed to be the most impenetrable fortress ever devised (obviously modeled on the USA’s Green Zone in Baghdad). After the mysterious disappearance of several soldiers, none of which are officially listed on the base’s manifest, the camp Psychiatrist begins to suspect that the real purpose of the compound is not what it seems. With with two of her patients, awaiting dishonorable discharge for desertion, she makes a furtive pact to investigate what is on the other side of the “barrier.” In time they come realize that “every outside is an inside”and that the architecture of the fortified enclave is the same as a concentration camp.

Hiromi Matsui and Ken Nomo, editors, She Gets Confused (Flying Over the Dateline): Tokyo-Los Angeles Art & Architectural Practices, 1990-99 (Rizzoli, 2013): The catalog for this show featuring art and architectural practices that were based in both Los Angeles and Tokyo during the 1990s and whose work expresses influences from both sides of the Pacific. Of particular interest are extremely inventive “mobile multimedia” projects, experimental manga titles that strongly influenced on the Osaka School of typography, and a series of UCLA student projects for the Japanese space program. I remember with fascination the essays debating the controversy over the design competition for a Yukio Mishima memorial in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district (officially won by Angry Pineapple Now! after Studio Unit 731b withdrew in protest.) Purchase of the proposed site and construction of a memorial to the controversial right-wing Japanese poet, actor, body-builder, and political activist was provided by a local construction magnate, but outcry from Korean-American and Chinese-American Angelinos resulted in withdrawal of permits by the city. Amazing lenticular book cover design by APPPA.

Dr. Joseph Wang Programming Nanorobotics (O’Reilly, 2014): This introduction to programming essentials from O’Reilly Media books continues their excellent series of software/hardware primers in emerging programming fields. Nanorobotics has become a really interesting platform for design and development, especially in conjunction with standard 3D biotechnology tools. Autodesk’s systems are still the most widely used, including their prosumer iPad apps (like 123Gene and AutoProtein, which even my little boy can use to design DNA and print-to-order “biobricks”). I am more interested in what the new logic and behavior protocols can do (namely OOGL and NovoGenXL) especially in conjunction with Google’s Android Robotics OS. My previous work toying with nanotech skin-based sensing systems is something I would like to develop further for other surfaces with other machine behavior profiles.

Slavoj Žižek That Which is Not What it is Not (Punctum Books, 2014): I had a chance to spend some time with the intrepid Slovenian Philosopher earlier this summer at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where we were both teaching. We had a memorable conversation about Jacques Lacan’s notion of “Lamella,” a kind of monstrous brainless undead asexually reproducing indestructible goop. Žižek has used the term in his reading of David Lynch films, as a substance that is horrific and uncanny. I pressed the point that as far as Astrobiology is concerned this kind of matter is pretty ordinary, and that the sorts of things that we take to be “normal” (having a face, inside the symbolic order, sexually reproducing, etc.) are really the bizarre and exceptional forms. He agreed with this (I think), and we discussed H.P. Lovecraft and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which somehow lead him to anecdotes about Stalin’s body double’s true height and why he liked the new Robocop more than the original. Apparently, he deals with the concept of Lamella at greater length in this short independently published book, and even manages to relate it to the Dave Eggers/Emily Gould collaboration, The Tweed and Tonic Diaries (a text so deeply horrible that neither of us could bear to read more than a few pages —on that we agreed).

Also: Nick Land Urbanatomy Guidebook: Shanghai Expo 2010 (Urbanatomy, 2010); H.D.A. Miralles Historias: Los Edificios son Demasiado Largos (BIS Publishers, 2012); Nigel Worth The Cartoon Guide to Contemporary British Sculpture (Ridinghouse, 2014).

danah boyd

Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press, 2014) blew me away. Through deeply embedded ethnographic work, Goffman illustrates how young black men must navigate the abusive nature of policing practices from their earliest years, forcing them to develop sophisticated strategies to achieve some sense of agency in an unfair world. This book is raw and brilliant, providing key insights into aspects of American inequality that aren’t fully understood by more privileged folks.

Another book that delighted me to no end is Robin Nagle’s Picking Up (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), where she joins the New York City Department of Sanitation to better understand the often invisible infrastructure of waste collection that keeps our city functional. Did you know, for example, that more sanitation workers die on the job each year than policemen or firemen? And do you know the history of how NYC went from a site of filth to an impressively functional sanitation machine? This book will tell you this and more.

Most histories of the internet start with big tech companies. But if you dig deeper, there’s a more complex story. In the 1930s, the US government brought together leading artists like John Cage and the New Bauhaus folks alongside artistic organizations like MoMA and anthropologists like Margaret Mead to imagine what “democratic media” might look like in response to the “fascist media” of film. As Fred Turner beautifully documents in The Democratic Surround (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the communities that emerged around this helped imagine interactive technologies as we know them.

It’s easy to bash security theater when spending another day trying to navigate the TSA, but the US’s obsession with security isn’t just annoying; it’s downright dangerous. In Against Security (Princeton University Press, 2014), Harvey Molotch offers a series of case studies that shed light on how we used security to implement practices, policies, and infrastructure that fundamentally disenfranchises and harms the very people it’s designed to protect.

My publisher would probably murder me if I didn’t list my own book, published in February, among the list of key summer reading. It’s Complicated (Yale University Press, 2014) is an attempt to synthesize a decade’s worth of work into young people’s engagement with social technologies by responding to various fears and anxieties that enshroud discussions of youth. Kids do care about privacy. Bullying is more complicated than you think. The internet is not the great equalizer. And our online safety discussions are often a distraction to real risks youth face. More importantly, what teens are doing today is trying to reclaim a space of their own because we adults have made it so darn difficult for teens to socialize with their friends.

Peter Lunenfeld

My bifurcated research into media art and media design trifurcated when I started looking at digital humanities as well, and with a long-standing project on the cultural history of Los Angeles, has now morphed, re-mixed, and metastasized into a weird beast that I no longer quite understand or recognize, but one that demands to be fed with bushels of books over summer breaks.

For the media philosophy side, I’ll start with Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (University of Chicago Press, 2013). I want to see to see how these three formidable figures link their contributions together in the book, as collective writing becomes a bigger part of contemporary humanities culture (three authors here, five authors in Digital_Humanities, ten for 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; MIT Press, 2013).

More than a decade ago I wrote an essay about speed-up called “25/8,” so I’m interested in Jonathan Crary’s take in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013). This book has been very present on my grad students’ bibliographies, and I want to catch up with them (an anxious mode of text-reception befitting precisely what I figure Crary will be discussing).

I read Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) on-line over time as he posted various versions, but I want to sit down and take it in as a totality now that it’s been published in book form. The chapter on motion graphics is the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject, and the final version is copiously illustrated.

In co-writing Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012), I had to come to grips with just how tenaciously literary scholars want to hold onto the field as “theirs,” even though it seems quite evident to me that DH is far more. That said, I want to look more deeply at two of the best from that side of the aisle, with a close reading of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (Verso, 2013) and a microanalysis of Matthew Jockers’ Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (University of Illinois Press, 2013).

I’ll beat a hasty retreat back to the realms of the visual, spatial, and tactile with Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013) by the London-based wonder duo Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and LA architect Greg Lynn, whose Archaeology of the Digital (Ram Publications, 2014) features a series of interviews and project analyses from a show he did at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

In a similar vein, I plan to dive into the catalogues from some major shows about LA architecture and design from the past year, with Wendy Kaplan’s California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way” from LACMA, the Getty’s Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990 curated by Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander, and Never Built Los Angeles, which Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin organized for the A+D Museum.

The buildings in Southern California, even the unbuilt ones, are amazing, but so too is the food that Angelenos eat in and around them. Roy Choi, chef, originator of the food truck phenomenon, and all around bad-ass, has written L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food (Ecco, 2013) which is a must read for anyone trying to figure out the future of the City of Angels. To look at its past, Gustavo Arellano’s sections on SoCal in Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (Scribner, 2013) are also required reading. For a window onto right now, I’m looking forward to Dana Goodyear’s Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters and the Making of a New American Food Culture (Riverhead, 2013) which promises to contend with L.A.’s particular mix of the high and the low, the spicy and the sublime.

Finally, I’ve decided that I want to read all of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels. There are only twelve of them, with two short story collections, written between 1951 and 1964. I probably should be reading them while drinking martinis (shaken but not stirred), but I’m an Angeleno, and it’s already hot outside, so I’ll be opting for cucumber-jalapeno margaritas instead.

Dominic Pettman

Most of my summer reading will consist of canonical texts concerning “Eros & Civilization,” which is a new course I’ll be teaching at the New School for Social Research in the Fall. But when I manage to steal away from such agonistic Grand Narratives, I’ll be hopefully getting a chance to read the following:

Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: Book 2 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014): Yes, obvious I know. But I found Book 1 as inexplicably compulsive as many others, and I’ve heard volume 2 is even more absorbing.

Eugene Thacker An Ideal for Living (Gobbet Press, 2014): I read this techno-remix mind-melt in ms. form over ten years ago, and am keen to revisit it again, now that it’s been given a new life by Gobbet Press. A nice appetizer for Thacker’s incredibly transporting book on pessimism, which will hopefully come out in a year or so.

Eduardo Kohn How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013): People I trust have been raving about this book for the past year, so I better catch up. Kohn seems to be doing something similar, yet different, from what Hugh Raffles did in his splendid book, In Amazonia (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Yuriko Furuhata Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013): This book won a SCMS prize a year or so ago, and having read some of Yuri’s subsequent work-in-progress, this has rocketed to the top of the to-read pile. She uses specific sites to do astonishing historical revisions of interest to any scholars of critical media theory. Plus, I envy her virtuoso use of English.

Mark Fisher Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zer0 Books, 2014): Another obvious one, but Fisher’s writing is always worth reading, at the level of the sentence, the aesthetic, the politics, and the idea.

Marguerite Yourcenar Two Lives and a Dream (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988): Part of my ongoing project to read every word Yourcenar ever wrote, and remind the world that this remarkable woman needs to be rediscovered in a big way (a lá, the new marketing machine for Clarice Lispector). Truly humbling to be in the presence of such a brilliant and creative mind.

Zizi Papacharissi

I have been reading Listening Publics by Kate Lacey (Polity, 2013), and am deeply regretting not having read it before turning in my own latest to Oxford University Press, Affective Publics: Sentiment and the New Political. It is a beautifully written and engaging book that reviews what form practices of listening took on in the past, and thus, makes us all reconsider what practices of listening mean for contemporary political cultures. I could not recommend more highly, especially to those interested in how newer media platforms can help revive tired civic habits of the past.

I also recently read and thoroughly enjoyed How Voters Feel by Stephen Coleman (Cambridge University Press, 2014), on what it means to feel like, rather than act like or think like a democratic citizen. Coleman examines how narratives, dreams, and memories inform performances of voting or non-voting, and what sorts of feelings about democracy and civic engagement these generate for people. The book focuses on what living in a democracy might feel like, rather than require of its citizens, and in so doing, it refocuses attention on the meaning of feelings for political engagement, without divorcing them from the organizing logic of rationality.

The Hybrid Media System: Political and Power (Oxford university Press, 2013) by Andrew Chadwick is another volume I recently finished and highly recommend, especially to those looking for a book to assign in basic courses on mass media (whatever the term may refer to these days), media systems, mass communication and new media, and all those courses that represent the core of our field. Having read this, many textbooks feel dated to me now. This volume describes the organization, logic, and function of contemporary media in immediate and engaging terms. It is a must read for all students of media, and interested parties in general.

Finally, I am trying to muster the energy to read Thomas Piketty’s much discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014). I have gone through the first chapter and had to ask myself whether all those who bought and pushed it to the top of best seller lists actually finished reading it. It is a very smart book, and one that had to be written, I am just not sure yet that the same issues have not been presented, in a slightly different contexts, by other social scientists already. I look forward to reading more, and more on this when I am done doing so. Happy reading!

Mark Amerika

Who has time to read? My world is one of continuous partial attention. Complicating matters is that I can no longer read anything without simultaneously writing something. Let’s call it riff-reading.

The best writing does absolutely nothing for me in the way of story, plot, character, authenticity, voice, setting or conventional meaning-making i.e. the predictable middle-brow or preprogrammed academic literary and theoretical styles that easily meet expectations. Rather, it immediately stimulates my muscle memory in a way my neurons never saw coming. Once the neurons are triggered and I am starting to go out of control, I too find myself writing-while-reading in the margins of my mind, iPhone, notepad, etc. What this means is that the best writing, the writing I come back to, is writing that awakens the writer-in-me, even if that writer is really anybody but me.

Fortunately, I often spend my summers in Portland, living and writing in my loft a mere six blocks away from Powell’s, arguably the best bookstore in America. My nightly visits to Powell’s open me up to books I might never have heard of were I to depend solely on the Internet or, worse, academic culture, to tell me what’s hot and what’s not. Which is why my summer reading is always an eclectic mix of the unexpected. This year is no different. These are the first books I have unearthed from the endless shelves that I immerse myself in:

Anne Waldman Gossamurmur (Penguin, 2013)
Christine Weirtheim mUtter–bAbel (Counterpath Press, 2013)
Melissa Broder When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, 2010)
Kate Durbin E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014)
Dodie Bellamy The TV Sutras (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014)
Chelsea Martin The Really Funny Thing About Apathy (sunnyoutside, 2010)

and one old guy too (who, page for page, happens to be the most underappreciated living American fiction writer):

Steve Katz The Compleat Memoirrhoids (Starcherone Books, 2013)

For more on my literary (and other) thoughts, I have two Twitter accounts:
@markamerika
@remixthebook

Ashley Crawford

Blake Butler Three Hundred Million (Harper Perennial, 2014): Alongside Ben Marcus, Blake Butler has rapidly become one of my favorite authors of recent years. His last two forays, There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011) and Sky Saw (Tyrant Books, 2012) were terrifying in scope and ambition. They were essentially abstractions, vivid, nightmarish images sown together with bloody twine to form shimmering, apocalyptic narratives. Three Hundred Million sounds like something of a departure for Butler. For one thing, judging by pre-publication blurbs, it appears as though he has veered into a more straight-forward approach (if that can ever be said of Butler!) – for the first time in his oeuvre he names characters – a psychopath called Gretch Gravey and a burnt-out cop called E.N. Flood. That fact alone suggests a more accessible narrative. But knowing Butler that’s a bit like describing Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night as a straight forward detective novel. I expect the unexpected.

David Cronenberg Consumed (Scribner, 2014): What’s not to be intrigued? He is one of the world’s most literary contemporary filmmakers, consuming and then exhuming, as it were, the works of the likes of Burroughs, Ballard and DeLillo for source material. As this is a first novel it will be intriguing to see if Cronenberg’s visual panache can be matched in the written word, but the themes are certainly suitably Cronenbergian: disease, depravity and conspiracy. Evidently the story of two journalists who become involved in the complexities surrounding a French philosopher’s death – it may be Umberto Eco on acid?

William Gibson The Peripheral (Putnam, 2014): It’s rather impossible to know which direction Gibson is going to go in with this. Where Thomas Pynchon’s last outing, Bleeding Edge (Penguin, 2013), sounded like a precursor to some of Gibson’s recent speculations, this one is evidently back to the “far future” – which, with Gibson, probably means next year. The pre-pub blurb is certainly intriguing complete with veteran’s benefits for neural damage suffered from implants during time in an “elite Haptic Recon force,” Beta-testing a new game, where “Little bug-like things turn up,” but “it might also be murder.” Gibson, to date, has never failed to supply a decent narrative drive, although perhaps not as visionary as his first novel, he has an uncanny knack for picking themes that seem strangely relevant to our near-future(s).

Okwui Enwezor, Homi K. Bhabha, and Hilton Als Matthew Barney: River of Fundament (Skira Rizzoli, 2014): Whilst the other books listed here must go down as pleasure, this one is work-related as part of doctorial research where Harold Bloom’s American Religion meets Barney’s art, Ben Marcus’ novels and moments of David Lynch. Yeah, weird. But River of Fundament is an extraordinary film/artwork which I strongly recommend for those who do not have allergies to the extreme. Inspired in part by Norman Mailer’s Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings, his infamous classic that chronicled the passage of a narrator through the stations of death and reincarnation (here reinterpreted as Mailer’s own aspirations to be the Great American Novelist). Barney has outdone the Cremaster Cycle on many levels. If one likes the films of Lynch, Cronenberg, and the more extreme moments of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, River of Fundament is a must-see. Hopefully the main text by Okwui Enwezor will provide an insight into a baffling but brilliant project.

Alex Burns

Michael Findley, Daniel Nielson, and Jason Sharman Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2014): The authors use an innovative experimental research design to investigate over 3,800 corporate service providers in 181 countries that establish anonymous shell corporations. These untraceable corporations are used for money laundering, covert financing, and offshore tax havens. One of the major findings is that corporate service providers located in major Western countries including the United States are more likely to flout international regulations of the World Bank and the Financial Action Task Force. The authors propose Transnational Experimental Relations as a new sub-discipline of international relations to conduct further research using field experiments.

Gordon Clark, Adam Dixon, and Ashby Monk Sovereign Wealth Funds: Legitimacy, Governance, and Global Power (Princeton University Press, 2013): In 2010 as the global financial crisis unfolded a new type of funds management emerged as a dominant force in international markets and financial media coverage: sovereign wealth funds. This rigorous study examines what sovereign wealth funds are, how they function in transnational economies, and includes case studies from Australia, Norway, Singapore, China, and the Gulf States. A model of how good academic research can dispel media hype cycles.

Thomas Piketty Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press, 2014): Piketty’s multi-year research program is one of the sources for multi-country data on income inequality. This book became a bestseller in 2014; crossed into the financial and popular media; and ignited a backlash against Piketty’s data collection and policy suggestions. Rather than Karl Marx, Piketty’s research continues a tradition on social elites pioneered by Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and most recently, Jeffrey A. Winters. The backlash against Piketty in part reflects an elite strategy of ‘wealth defense’ and civil oligarchical trends in the United States (Winters).

David Weil The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done To Improve It (Harvard University Press, 2014): Boston University professor Weil is now the Obama Administration’s first Wage and Hour Administrator. This confronting book on labor economics contrasts the asset and private equity style of management with the lives of independent contractors and outsourcing firms. Many of the trends that Weil identifies already apply to universities, and will continue to unfold over the next decade.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014): Brynjolfsson and McAfee continue a debate on technology shaped by Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings) and Alvin Toffler (Future Shock). This book catalogues recent growth in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and related fields, and how these innovations might change workplaces in the next two decades. Brynjolfsson and McAfee contend that recent innovations will lead to societal transformations (Toffler), yet they may also create a new economic underclass (Wiener; Piketty; and Weil). A primer to critically interrogate the preferred futures of Bangalore and Silicon Valley.

Riccardo Rebonato and Alexander Denev Portfolio Management Under Stress: A Bayesian-Net Approach to Coherent Asset Allocation (Cambridge University Press, 2014): Modern Portfolio Theory faced critique after the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Nouriel Roubini emerged as superstar critics. This book develops a post-MPT approach to asset allocation and portfolio management that uses Bayesian nets: probabilistic models of belief networks. Rebonato and Denev’s insights and formal models articulate ways to deal with extreme events and risk management that has resonances with the therapeutic literature on post-traumatic growth and resilience.

Henrique Andrade, Bugra Gedik, and Deepak Turaga Fundamentals of Stream Processing: Application, Design, Systems and Analytics (Cambridge University Press, 2014): A decade ago business management literature hypothesized the emergence of real-time companies. SAP’s enterprise resource planning platform was one way. Tibco and Streambase’s complex event processing engines are another way. This book provides a conceptual and methodological overview of stream processing that deals with high-volume, real-time data streams – with sections on system architecture, development, analytics, and case studies. Stream processing is an example of Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s transformative technologies, and that benefit Piketty’s economic elites. For one application in financial services, see Yacine Ait-Sahalia and Jean Jacod’s High-Frequency Econometrics (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Jacob Shapiro The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (Princeton University Press, 2013): During the Bush Administration’s so-called Global War on Terror the study of terrorist organizations was a ‘hot topic’ in security studies. This book is one of the best post-GWoT studies to combine agency theory with a careful study of internal documents from terrorist organizations. Shapiro identifies a dilemma: leadership need for control versus the need to be clandestine. His findings can also be read as a specialized form of Clayton M. Christensen’s influential Disruptive Innovation Theory, as applied to terrorist organizations.

Don Webb Through Dark Angles (Hippocampus Press, 2014): H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) influenced contemporary horror and weird fiction, films, and subcultures. This book collects the Lovecraftian-influenced short stories of Austin, Texas writer Don Webb. The short stories hint at Webb’s on-going practice-based research into the anthropology, linguistics, and sociology of operative magic (the Egyptian heka) as a liminal methodology to achieve, embody, and to cultivate Desire.

James H. Austin Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen (MIT Press, 2011): Over the past decade Austin has published a series of books on Zen and contemporary neuroscience. This book summarizes Austin’s research program, and offers guidance for mindfulness meditation practice. Rather than beliefs or doctrines Austin advises: “what you may glimpse are some of your brain’s innate resources” (p. xxiii). Austin’s latest book Zen-Brain Horizons: Towards a Living Zen (MIT Press, 2014) continues his personal research journey.

Roy Christopher

David Grubbs Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press, 2014): The last time I saw the name David Grubbs, it was attached to a record by Grubbs’ band with Jim O’Rourke called Gastr Del Sol. I got this book for Lily because she loves John Cage more than she loves me. Given the Grubbs connection though, I’ll probably read it before she does.

Lance Strate Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited (Peter Lang, 2014): It’s high time that Neil Postman’s ideas were revisited, and, having studied under Postman himself, Lance Strate is the ideal scholar to do it. Media ecology as a perspective is more important now than ever. This is the source and the voice of its views in the 21st century. I’m looking forward to the upgrade.

Eugene Thacker An Ideal for Living (Gobbet Press, 2014) and In the Dust of This Planet [Horror of Philosophy, vol 1] (Zer0 Books, 2011): Eugene Thacker has been quietly building an impressively wide and weird body of work. An Ideal for Living is a deserved re-issue of the anti-novel he was working on during our 2006 interview. In the Dust of This Planet is Book One of his re-imagining of horror, philosophy, and their intersection. Both are worth a look. Or three.

Lisa Gitelman Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014) and N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013): James Macanufo once said that if paper didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. In one way or another these two books are about the widespread implications of that idea.

Jonathan Crary 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013): This has been on my list since Jussi Parikka mentioned it last year. Now that it’s out in paperback, I suspect it will get the wider attention it deserves.

Mark Fisher Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zer0 Books, 2014): Just the introduction, “The Slow Cancellation of the Future,” is worth the price of this book. Fisher glides effortlessly across the surfaces of Joy Division, Burial, Kanye West, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and many others, sometimes trying to see past his own reflection, others just describing how he looks. It’s enough for me to add him to the short list of writers I aspire to write like, along with Rebecca Solnit, David Toop, and Terry Eagleton (I’m not kidding myself, but one should dream large).

I tend to read more music biographies during the summer. I’ve already knocked out Lexicon Devil, Keven Dettman’s 33 1/3 book on Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and both of D. X. Ferris’s Slayer books. I’ve collected a pile of books on New York’s late-1970s no wave movement, including David Nobakht’s Suicide: No Compromise (SAF Publishing, 2004). In addition, I’m hoping to finally get to John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Da Capo, 1998).

December 21, 2013

Nagging Narratives: Stories of the Year

Some stories are like other worlds we visit for a little while. Some climb in our minds and manipulate our thoughts. “[O]ur brains are built to try to process everything we see as a story,” writes David Wong of Cracked.com, so it’s no wonder that some stories are so powerful. These are the ones that haunted my head this year.

Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is easily the best movie of the year. As I wrote elsewhere, the hollow, breathless feeling I always choke down at the climax of his previous movie, Primer, was evident throughout Upstream Color. If the grammar of Primer is mechanical, spurred on by engineers spending their off hours tinkering in the garage, then Upstream Color is organic, revealing itself through rote ritual, hypnotic motion, and passages from Walden. Where Primer was wordy, stacked with dialogue and guided by Aaron’s answering-machine voice-over, Upstream Color is primarily nonverbal, a collage of scenes, snatches of dialog, subtle sounds, and spacious music.

Another collage-like experience, Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is as beautiful as it is bewildering. Its heist scene might be the best few minutes of cinema I’ve seen in years. Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) rob the Chicken Shack restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun while Cotty (Rachel Korine) circles the building in the getaway car with the camera (and us) riding shotgun. Our limited vantage point gives the scene an added tension because though we are at a distance, it feels far from safe. Much like the security camera footage of Columbine and Chronicle, and the camera-as-character of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we receive a crippled information flow while experiencing total exposure. Their mantra: “Just pretend it’s a fucking video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.”

The book of the year is The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books). Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.

Also worthy of mention are Year Zero by Rob Reid (Del Rey/Ballantine), Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin), The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (Scribner), the nonfiction The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit (Viking) and Present Shock by Doug Rushkoff (Current), and the reissued, 20th anniversary edition of Vurt by Jeff Noon (Pan Macmillan).

July 25, 2013

Lauren Beukes’ Tangled Timeline of Transgression

“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it” (p. 319). Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), the disturbingly beguiling novel of the summer. Beukes’ easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.

Harper’s havoc reaches roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s and the 1990s. It’s a tangled mess of totems, trauma, and one who got away. As Harper puts it, “There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random” (p. 324). Beukes had her own method, mess, and snapshots to deal with while writing. She has a murderous map, full of “crazy pictures, three different timelines, murder dates…” She told WIRED UK, “It’s been completely insane trying to keep track of all of this.”

The Shining Girls is set in my current home of Chicago, which gave me both a history lesson and a feeling of familiarity. The differences among the decades in the story are as interesting as the use of usual local terms like “Red Line,” “Wacker Drive,” “Merchandise Mart,” and “Naked Raygun,” the latter thanks to the one that got away, the spunky, punky Kirby Mazrachi. It’s one part murder mystery, one part detective story, one part science fiction, and another part love story, but it’s all subtle, supple, and masterfully handled.

1993 is the latest year Harper’s House will go. That’s also the year that Michael Silverblatt of the Los Angeles Times coined the term “transgressive fiction,” a term that aptly describes Beukes’ novel. Silverblatt used the term to describe fiction that includes “unpleasant” content such as sex, drugs, and violence, and coined it in response to the censor-baiting controversy of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage, 1991), Patrick Bateman’s nearly choked conduit into the world.

In Transgressive Fiction: The New Satiric Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Robin Mookerjee discusses Ellis, as well as many other literary forebears of Beukes and The Shining Girls. From mock epics like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the perversions of J. G. Ballard and Nabokov to the cut-ups and borrowing of William Burroughs and Kathy Acker, on up to contemporary deviants like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, and Ellis, of course.

Mookerjee discusses these writers’ novels through the Menippean mode of satire, in which the transgression is total rather than individual, a literary style that “opposes everything and proposes nothing,” as Mookerjee puts it. For instance, in American Psycho, whether Bateman is brushing his teeth or slicing up some hired young thing, his tone never changes. The effect is indirect, general not specific, and pervades the book’s ontology as a whole.

It’s also notable that Transgressive Fiction seriously considers many works of fiction that have often only been vilified in the past, and Mookerjee does it with both conviction and an even hand.

————

Here’s the trailer for Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls [runtime: 1:01]:

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June 20, 2013

Summer Reading List, 2013

You know the drill by now: Every year I ask my readerly and writerly friends for their reading recommendations for the summer. New contributors to the list this year include Janet Murray, danah boyd, Rick Moody, Steve Jones, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Kadrey, Benjamin Bratton, Brad Vivian, and Lily Brewer. Usual suspects holding down the tradition include Lance Strate, Alex Burns, Howard Rheingold, David Silver, Mark Amerika, Jussi Parikka, Dominic Pettman, Gareth Branwyn, Peter Lunenfeld, Patrick David Barber, and myself. Read on.

Lily at Powell's

As always, the book links will lead you to the book’s page on the Powell’s site unless otherwise noted.

danah boyd

One of my favorite unexpected delights this year was Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design (Princeton University Press). This book provides an eloquent analysis of Las Vegas’ gambling machines, revealing how data and design are used to manipulate people for profit and pleasure. Addiction by Design offers a necessary critique of the economics-driven rhetoric that implies that technology use is simply about individual choice.

This was also a year where many friends of mine produced amazing books covering topics that are deeply important to me. In particular, three recent books provide complementary perspective on the intersection of technology and society:

Biella Coleman’s Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press) is an ethnographic account of the free and open source movement that untangles the values and practices of hacking.

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York University Press) examines how information flows through social media.

Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton & Company) highlights the importance of understanding not just how information flows but also how people connect, laying the foundation for rethinking what global citizenship can and should be.

Rick Moody

I am all about the backlist these days, partly because I just finished teaching a course on narrative art before Cervantes at NYU, but also because that is sort of where my attention goes, so you might try a few of these if you haven’t already:

Aupuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by Sarah Ruden (Yale University Press), which is the most profane, irreverent, and fascinatingly digressive text of antiquity, it seems to me, and which has lots to say about mystery cults, too. No reading experience of the last year has touched me as much.

The Sagas of Icelanders, various translators (Penguin Classics): These are the crime fictions of pre-Renaissance literature. Grim, violent, only fleetingly magical, and so hard to put down. The sagas about visiting North America are particularly fascinating. They did not have such a good time in Greenland.

The Ramayana, adapted by R. K. Narayan (Penguin Classics): Narayan’s edition is a mere portion of this 20,000 line Indian epic, and reflects a modern, twentieth century impulse, but it’s also a delight. Spare, funny, wry. The gods are virtuous, but inexplicable, and love is always a disaster, even, it seems, for the good guys.

Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by M. A. Screech (Penguin Classics): An elegy to scatology, early modern ideas of the body, and alcoholism, funnier than almost any other book ever written, and a sly indicator of what was to come from the Marquis de Sade. Almost no one, it seems, read Rabelais anymore. Not one writing student in my class had read it, few had even heard of it, but this text sure turned some heads.

Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper Perennial): The greatest, mostly lovely, tender, and knowing book about the folly of humans, in an engaging, accessible, and literary translation. Everything comes from this book, despite what the Richardson scholars would tell you, except that everything in this book comes from some earlier origin (grailing literature, etc.). Whatever it is, this epic, it is imperative to the novel and how the novel would develop from here on out. And did you know that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day? What a bad day that was art made out of language.

Lance Strate

It’s summertime, and the readin’ comes easy, and time itself is a topic of great interest for me. I was thrilled to learn of the recent publication of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by physicist Lee Smolin, where he argues for a position I’ve long held to be true, that time is more fundamental than space. On a similar theme, but coming from a very different angle, I also plan to read Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (ACLS Humanities) by our greatest living world historian, William McNeil.

On the subject of media and culture, I have lined up Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (University of Illinois Press) by the late John Miles Foley; I saw him give a talk on this topic a few years ago at an annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, and know that he makes an important contribution to our understanding of media environments. I am very interested in how the electronic media undermine print-based concepts of identity, which is why The Digital Evolution of an American Identity by C. Waite (Routledge) is a must read as far as I’m concerned. Returning to the theme of time, Douglas Rushkoff‘s latest, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current) is high up on my list of priorities. And looking back to an earlier time, the origin of monotheism, related as it is to the introduction of the Semitic alphabet, is another subject of significance for me, which is why my list includes From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends (Jewish Publication Society) by Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch.

Having been absolutely blown away by the new Hannah Arendt film by Margarethe von Trotta, which I highly recommend as an excellent audiovisual supplement to any summer reading list, I want to return to her final work, The Life of the Mind (Mariner Books), which was edited by her best friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (who plays a significant role in the film). I’m also planning on digging into The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Harvard University Press).

Last year, at the Players Club in New York, I heard the late M. Z. Ribalow do a reading from his outstanding novel, Redheaded Blues (NeoPoiesis Press), and I have been looking forward to sitting down with the book for a long time now. Back on the subject of time, I know I’ll be enjoying Paul Levinson’s latest time travel novel, Unburning Alexandria, (JoSara MeDia). And when it comes to graphic novels, there is no question that I am going to devour Vol. 18 of The Walking Dead (Image Comics). I have grown increasingly more fascinated at the way the plot of the television series diverges from the story told in the comics.

One of the great summertime pleasures is picking up a book of good poetry, and This Poem by Adeena Karasick (Talonbooks) promises to be a literary, aesthetic, and intellectual delight, judging by all of the rave reviews that it’s received. And finally, I’m not making any promises, but I have this copy of John Milton’s The Complete English Poems (Knopf) waiting to be read…

Janet Murray

I am giving a talk in the UK in July so perhaps that is why two novels written by English women were at the top of my iPad queue: Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (Reagan Arthur Books) which I read as soon as our semester ended, which at Georgia Tech means early May. It turned out to be quite a revelation for how far what I call the “Replay Story” has made it into mainstream serious fiction.Atkinson is as inventive as Borges or Eco or as Ursula Le Guin was in Lathe of Heaven, but this is not a self-conscious literary experiment or a sci-fi fable; she is working much closer to lived experience, with realized characters in recognizable historical circumstances, yet offering multiple possible lives for the same character. It was odd to read this multisequential story on my iPad with a hyperlinked Table of Contents that was incidental to the structure, not designed for it but suggestive of an evolving digital form. I wound up blogging about the lessons it offers us about narrative structure in interactive formats.

Next up is Jane Gardam, Last Friends (Europa Editions) — the third novel in a trilogy told from each of three members of an unlikely love triangle but I may have to go back and review the other two which came out years ago. I absent-mindedly ordered this in both paper and electronic form, but I am keeping both because I want it on the shelf next to the other two but I also want to read it anywhere.

I also hope to make a dent in that perennial pile of books I have been meaning to read including several at the intersection of cognition and culture — notably, Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (University of Chicago Press) and Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language (Harvard University Press). I never miss Emily Nussbaum’s weekly TV criticism in the New Yorker, and I’ve just found Kathryn’s Shulz’s equally smart and well-written book review column in New York Magazine and found myself ordering Americanah by C. N. Adiche (Knopf), a Nigerian born novelist whom I had not heard of before, on the basis of Schulz’s review. Of course the summer will be shorter than I anticipated and will be very busy with administrative work and travel and family visits so I will probably be cutting and pasting this when you ask me again next year.

Steve Jones

I’m about to begin reading Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House). Summer reading, for me, generally involves reading for pleasure, though it always somehow circles back to my intellectual interests, and in this case the idea that time, literally, physically, slows, strikes a chord. Speaking of chords, I’m finishing up Ken Scott’s Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust (Alfred Music), which, as a huge Beatles fan I’d love anyway, but as a history of the recording of popular music it’s unparalleled. There is plenty of technical detail, and the narrative is well written. Rather than try to tell his story chronologically, Scott largely goes artist by artist, to great effect. Somehow I keep coming back around to my earliest scholarly fascination with how musicians, engineers and producers talk about music and recording, and how that discourse is influenced by, and influences, recording technology.

The next books on the table are George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Michael Burlingame’s two volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press). I have noticed lately that quite a few pundits seem intent on noting that the present political era in the U.S. is neither different from, nor worse than, many in the past. While I think such comparisons are interesting and potentially useful, the more interesting thing to me is that the country continues to muddle along. Whether this is from inertia, from lack of alternatives (a civil war seems somehow unimaginable, even though the last civil war veterans died in the 1950s, not so long ago in historical terms), or from the rapidity with which election cycles seem to come and go and provide illusions of alternatives, I don’t know, but I’m particularly interested in juxtaposing these books.

I’d like to get to Charles Emmerson’s 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (Public Affairs), but it seems unlikely given that it is already June. I still don’t feel as if I have a good grasp of World War I and its consequences for modernism, and from reviews I’ve read Emmerson may provide some illumination.

Richard Kadrey

I’ll be writing my new Sandman Slim this summer, so reading will have to fit around my writing schedule. There are four books I know I’ll get to.

I’m really looking forward to Charlie Huston’s Skinner (Mulholland Books). I’ve read all of Huston’s work, starting with the Henry Thompson crime books and his Joe Pitt vampire series. I’m looking forward to Huston’s take on the intelligence business and terrorism.

The Ocean at the end of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow) is a bit of a cheat. I read an early copy and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a book about childhood and terrifying magic, but it’s also about the horror of being young, the casual cruelty of adults, and the terror of remembering or worse, not remembering. I want to go through the book again, slower this time. It’s fun watching Gaiman crank the gears.

Another book I’m looking forward to is Edge of Dark Water by Joe Lansdale (Mulholland Books). Some of the chatter around it seems to pitch it as a young adult title, probably because of its young protagonists. However, like Gaiman’s book, young characters don’t necessarily add up to a kid’s book. I’m a sucker for all things Lansdale and a dark and murderous road story sounds just right for the summer.

Mark Dery has a new ebook called All the Young Dudes: Why Glam Rock Matters. Dery is a cultural critic with a keen eye for the secret meanings and influences of pop culture. All the Young Dudes is the first book from bOING-bOING, the culture, politics, and tech site. If Dery is their first author, I think we can look forward to more interesting work coming from them.

Benjamin H. Bratton

With an eye toward what I will be writing about in the Fall, Summer is usually a time when I inhale a lot of books, starting more than I finish. Two books at the top of my pile concern architecture’s relationship to computational materialism. Luciana Parisi’s Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (The MIT Press), draws on Alfred North Whitehead to develop an open-ended theory of algorithms as a “mode of thought,” more than just a mode of drawing or fabrication. Her take is a welcome alternative to the simplistic reductionism on offer by some of the perspectives closely associated with Parametricism. Architecture Xenoculture is a special issue of eVolo, guest edited by my friend, Juan Azulay, along with Benjamin Rice. It is a wild collection of works, ideas, and provocations from Reza Negarestani, J. G. Thirwell, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Perry Hall, Terry Riley, and many others. It’s a good approximation of what a posthuman, postdisciplinary architecture would look like today.

My favorite novel I’ve read in the last few months is Red Plenty (Graywolf Press) by Francis Spufford. Through a series of interwoven vignettes, it recounts the dreams and failures of Soviet cybernetics and its plans to realize the State as a universal platform-of-platforms. It’s clear (at least to me) that there is no way to imagine a genealogy of Google’s informational cosmopolitan ambitions without including this era as a key antecedent (I suppose, for better or worse, it would be impossible then to think about the contemporary fate of ‘communism’ without including Google’s own Gosplan.) Beyond States and markets, what ties this novel’s protagonists to Google’s is a belief in the power of the platform to organize the world in its image. Ideally it should be read in conjunction with Alexander Bogdonav’s Red Star (Indiana University Press), a 1908 Sci-Fi novel about a communist utopia on Mars, and Steven Levy’s (equally utopian) history of Google, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Lives (Simon & Schuster).

Every summer I try to more or less systematically re-read something of significance to me. Sometimes it is a major work, several works by one author, or some group of books that form some kind of cluster. Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Kim Stanley Robinson and Jonathan Lethem geek out with one another for an hour or so about their favorite Philip K. Dick works. Inspired, I am making my way back through 6 or 8 key PKD novels in more or less chronological order, starting with The Man in the High Castle (Mariner), then Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Mariner), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Del Rey), UBIK (Mariner), Flow My Tears the Policeman Said (Mariner), A Scanner Darkly (Mariner), and VALIS (as well its little brother and a personal favorite, Radio Free Albemuth, the first PKD novel that I happened to read). There are certainly so many other great ones, but for a refresher, these will suffice to scratch the surface. As a companion I will read Laurence A. Rickels book of commentary on Dick’s work, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (University of Minnesota Press). Rickels is an extraordinarily interesting writer, and a former professor of mine. His other books, dealing with California, vampires, and Nazi psychoanalysis, etc. are also recommended. The Case of California (University of Minnesota Press) in particular makes for excellent beach reading, actually. No joke.

Lastly, I have become interested in issues in and around the philosophy of biology (in a open, non-disciplinary sense) especially as it pertains to fuzzy boundaries between living and non-living matter, strange systems, inhuman time and so forth. Recently I’ve read, or have it planned to read, a handful of titles that may be of interest. Hypersea: Life on Land (Columbia University Press) is a mad book by Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin that starts with the question, why is a greater diversity of life on land than in the sea? Their answer is nested parasitism: animals living inside of animals living inside of animals. Life Explained (Yale University Press) by the French Biologist, Michel Morange, is a nice overview of contemporary issues ranging from molecular genetics to astrobiology, and beginning with the fundamental question of what is and is not “life” exactly? I’ve been looking forward to reading Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance (Zone Books) by Hanna Rose Shell, for some time. As the title suggests, it develops a theory of camouflage from evolutionary biology to aerial warfare. Lastly, I picked up a well-loved copy of the 1987 book by Steven Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harvard University Press). It discusses how, through geological science in the 17th through 19th centuries, it became possible to think the “Deep Time” of the Earth: billions of years, not thousands.

(P.S.- for those with a strong constitution and an oblique sense of humor, you may want to grind through Agenda 21 (Threshold Editions), the novelization of America’s eco-totalitarian future, ghost-written for Glenn Beck. I often find that that the paranoid Right imagines a political Left that is much more interesting that the Left that actually exits. In Beck’s world the Left is programmatically coherent, stealthy, and dominant. FEMA camps for climate criminals? If only!).

Lily Brewer

During school months I build monuments of books to the Summer Break gods, do a frustrated rain dance of tears around them for spring semester’s end, then begin my reading tribute to myself after a year of finished school work. Thus commences the happy dismantling of the towers three or more at a time. I’ve grabbed a few and put them here.

China Mieville is always begrudgingly on my summer list, even though Un Lun Dun, The City & the City, and Perdido Street Station (Del Rey), as grunge-ily elaborate and adventurous as they may be, fall flat at the critical moment. Despite our tenuous relationship I can’t get away from China and will be finishing Embassytown, (an absolutely brilliant, linguistically twisted story, but I hate the protagonist so badly and don’t care what happens to her). Railsea is also on my list, and I’m optimistic with my bout with these newer additions to his fantastical and other-worldly repertoire. Another SF pick, Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel (Wakefield Press), by Paul Scheerbart is the first German Expressionist utopian Science Fiction novel from 1913, (perhaps the only one?). An oblong and elastic inhabitant of a planet in a binary star system, Lesabéndio is a happy relationship between technology and nature. And the characters move around like bouncy balls. Walter Benjamin recommends it. My last fictive pick is Cloud Atlas (Random House) because David Mitchell was in desperate need of vindication. Without going into detail of how miserable the movie made me for three hours, and even though I picked this one up out of frustration and pity, so far I’m impressed (and relieved) with Mitchell’s inspired, paradoxically parallel and interwoven threads through space and time. (This opus deserves another post entirely.)

I always forget I’m a student of history, so I’ll also be spending much of my time in Howard Zinn’s captivating and, alas, so far depressing A People’s History of the United States (Harper Perennial), for which my 11th grade American History teacher John Irish would be ecstatic, along with I Bernard Cohen’s Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams & James Madison (W. W. Norton & Company). Both books detail the pushed-under-the-rug histories of the U. S. that allow my roguish self think of my studies in art and design history under a darker, scandalous light. Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster) I hope, will complement like colors my interest in the history and philosophy of science along with these, as well as Linda Henderson’s newly republished The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (The MIT Press), the latter for which I’m particularly stoked.

I’ve almost finished The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh (Anchor). According to Singh, “Codebreakers are linguistic alchemists,” from Mary Queen of Scots to the Navajo code talkers to quantum computers. With this summer’s special edition of Scientific American, “Extreme Physics: Probing the Mysteries of the Cosmos” (with heroes such as Steven Hawking, David Deutch, and the baddest boy on black holes and String Theory, Leonard Susskind) and Deutsch’s article on Constructor Theory, I’m pretty optimistic I’ll have a great historical and quantum-ly foundation for when I return to art school in the fall. I’m comfortable in the contrast.

Howard Rheingold

Victor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Tansform How We Live, Work, and Think (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Yes, the title sounds like a concatenation of buzzwords, but both the subject matter and style of writing are compelling: The ability to collect ALL the data about phenomena, made possible by sensors and extensive computation power, rather than sampling data the way scientists have done thus far, is making it possible to know things that we couldn’t know before, and to approach the idea of knowing the world in new ways. When Google crunched billions of searches against 450 MILLION algorithms, they came up with Flu Trends, which can predict influenza outbreaks weeks before the Center for Disease Control. It’s not just about selling things, dataveillance (don’t forget that the NSA is building a million square foot server farm to look for patterns in trillions of phone calls, text messages, emails), or predicting epidemics. It’s a new way of studying the world.

Mark Amerika

More than ever, this summer my reading will be endlessly contaminated by my writing and vice versa. What I mean is that I am finishing two books, or not books per se, although they will end up looking like books, but two long performance art works that disguise themselves as books, even though they are really durational achievements.

The first book constructs a fictional narrative around Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box featuring imaginary characters who go by the names Walter Whitman Benjamin and Virginia Wolff. It’s hard to explain, but you can be sure that I have to read a lot of material about Duchamp’s Large Glass a.k.a. The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Honestly, it’s my pleasure.

The second book is my remix of an auto-translation of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (Alma Books). This means I will read-write the French-to-English auto-translation of Roussel’s novel that I conduct myself by employing mediocre online tools. The end result is already looking like a very mangled version of Roussel’s original book since I will not be reading any sanctioned (verifiable, legit, published) English translation and do not read, write, or otherwise comprehend any texts written in the French language. Having said that, I will be reading, rereading, writing and rewriting Roussel through Duchamp’s Green Box. This ongoing read-write process is what I mean by the term remixology (the subject of my last book, remixthebook).

Will there be time for any other reading? Last year, my friends published so many wonderful books that I could not get to those books written by relative strangers. This year I’ll try to get to take hold of those that I let go last year because I did not have the time as well as a few others that have since popped into view: possible contenders include Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (Picador), Claire Donato’s Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Scribner), Vanessa Place’s Boycott (Ugly Duckling Presse), and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books).

I’ll also finish two excellent art history books: Branden Joseph’s Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books) and Judith Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes: Allen Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (The MIT Press). These latter two titles are meant to trigger new thoughts about what it would be like to develop a new Graduate arts program in collaborative / experimental / experiential / emerging / inter / media art practices. I would like to find a way to integrate expanded and electronic forms of writing into this program as well and imagine it will even include a PhD component.

As you can imagine, my reading list changes, daily. For instance, ten minutes ago another book just came to my attention and may have to wait but I really hope to get to it by September 21st: Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (University of Chicago Press), by Cary Levine. And three minutes ago, I received an email from Ulises Mejias inviting me to read his just-released Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press). Quickly scrolling through the online version, I can see that I will take him up on his offer.

Will I also have enough time to start dipping my nose into Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Harvard University Press)?

And I haven’t even touched upon on all of the other pdfs I have loaded on my iPad.

Bradford Vivian

I will be using the summer to gain momentum on a new research project about time and politics, so I’m reading David Ewing Duncan’s The Calendar: The 5000-year Struggle to Align the Clock and Heavens—and What Happened to the Missing Ten Days (Fourth Estate) as a broad background text. Duncan chronicles the profound difficulty to establish a reliable clock throughout the (mainly) Western tradition, from the dawn of so-called civilization forward. His account shows the repeated ways that forms of authority (kings, religions, early democratic or republican governments) invested themselves in the use of time as a means of ordering human society and consolidating power in the process.

Sanford Kwinter’s Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (The MIT Press) focuses on questions of time as a central formative component of modernity. Kwinter draws heavily from Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari (who are likely the prime lens through which he accesses the former two figures) to argue that all the various, and at times contradictory versions of Western modernity, find common roots in efforts to radically rethink time not as a stable backdrop against which events occur but, rather, as the productive force through which phenomena come into being and exist in their continual becoming.

In addition to these and other books on time and its many manifestations, I will attempt to tackle Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree (Vintage). After first encountering his work in The Road, I have gradually been working my way through his corpus from first to last. I find McCarthy’s prose stunning for its highly disciplined economy of pacing, precise but still haunting descriptive powers, uncannily vivid dialogue, and distinctive capacity to suggest the contours of an intimate psychological world through external, worldly details.

Dominic Pettman

Summer means novels. Lots and lots of novels.

Once more unto the beach!

Ross MacDonald, The Blue Hammer (Vintage): I really enjoy MacDonald’s mid-century California-noir atmospherics, and try to read at least one title of his a year.

Charles McCarry, The Miernik Dossier (Gerald Duckworth & Co.): I’ve only just discovered McCarry, but apparently this is considered by many to be the best Cold War era thriller by an American.

Charles Willeford, The Shark-Infested Custard (Vintage): Pure pulp, apparently in the most flagrant and unironic way possible.

Gerald Murnane, Barley Patch (Dalkey Archive): A recent and well-received title by one of Australia’s most interesting and elusive writers.

Anna Kavan, Ice (Peter Owen): I don’t know much about this, except the author is an under-appreciated modernist, and the minimal title beckons me.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner): Clearly the buzz-book of the Summer, highly recommended by several people I trust.

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus (Penguin): I’m ashamed to have snoozed on this one for so long.

Kawamata Chiaki, Death Sentences (University of Minnesota Press): Translated by the brilliant Renaissance man, Thomas LaMarre, by a schoolchum of the guy who made the Ringu series, and working off a similar premise.

In terms of theory and/or non-fiction:

Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned (Faber & Faber): An award-winning portrait of modern India by one of my colleagues.

Margret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford University Press): Well, don’t you want to know? Margret will no doubt bring a far more nuanced and critical eye to all those pink pixels flowing through the modemsphere.

Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot (Harvard University Press): I saw Carla present a creative piece inspired by her research at the New Museum a few months ago, and now her book on “natural history and its transformations in modern China” is high on my list.

Roland Barthes, How to Live Together (Columbia University Press): If anyone can respond to such a self-imposed title, it’s RB.

Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from WWII to Hip Hop (Stop Smiling): I read a short piece by Tompkins which was so good that I instantly bought his book.

I will also be catching up with recent issues of Cabinet magazine (subscribe, if you don’t already!).

Plus pretty much everything put out by Univocal Publishing.

My project for the whole year, extending beyond Summer, is Giacomo Leopardi’s epic Zibaldone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), finally being published in English in its entirety mid-July.

Jussi Parikka

My summer reading is going to be sporadic, but hopefully I get to attend to some texts that have been on my radar.

One certain is Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (Polity). She is just fantastic in her affective energy as well as a pioneer of new materialism. Compared to her, the more recent discussions of the nonhuman are really latecomers. The new book promises some good chapters on death as well as on the future (and non-future?) of humanities.

Besides Braidotti, I will definitely check out another one of my idols, Jonathan Crary’s, new book, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso). Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (MIT Press) was my go-to book for a long time, and finally there is some new writing out from him. For me, someone who has had sleeping problems the past year, the topic is perfect. And he ties it with the increasing colonialization of our most private spheres by capitalism, so even more perfect.

If and when time, there is a bunch of German media theory waiting to be read. It includes two new hefty volumes from Wolfgang Ernst on time-criticality (Chronopoetik and Gleichursprünglichkeit, both from Kulturverlag Kadmos).

As well as Till Heilmann’s book on computers as text machines, a sort of a media archaeology: Textverarbeitung. Eine Mediengeschichte des Computers als Schreibmaschine (2012) . I have been slowly reading novels again and should one day finish Paolo Bacigalupi’s fantastic The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books) and pick up some Richard Powers I think (at least I was recommended to).

Matthew Kirschenbaum

My summer reading plans are as ambitious as anyone’s and cluster around media archaeology, military affairs, and game history. While there are a whole lot more university press titles in the stack now I suppose the basic mix hasn’t changed all that much since I was fourteen, making bad interactive fiction on my Apple II and listening to Rush albums while reading Tom Clancy and the Monster Manual. (Yes, I was that kid.)

Right now I’m finishing Robert Bolaño’s Third Reich (Picador), his posthumously published first novel recently serialized in The Paris Review. The title comes from the Avalon Hill tabletop simulation game, Decline and Fall of the Third Reich; the novel’s protagonist, Udo, sets this game up obsessively as he vacations at a beach resort on the Costa Brava (is the whole setting a sand table?), playing out his relationship with his girlfriend and brooding on history (his own, Europe’s), spinning scenarios (both ludic and life-altering), and baking his reptilian brainstem in the heat-soaked setting. It is an oppressive strong novel and will not be to everyone’s taste, though it offers a rare extended fictional portrayal of an old school hex and counter game (Bolaño himself was an improbable aficionado of the genre).

I will also be making time for Speculate This!, the enigmatic new e-book from Duke University Press attributed to the otherwise anonymous collective who call themselves “uncertain commons.” (A note in the text glosses the membership as “a group of scholars, mediaphiles, and activists who explore the possibilities of collaborative intellectual labor.”) “The future has been sold,” the first screen reads. “Parceled, bundled, and securitized.” This! becomes a site of affect and resistance. It may in fact find some odd if inverse kinship with the Bolaño, focused as it is on futurity rather than historicity and forms of scenario-making less about prediction and perfection than the creative calculus of difference.

Media archaeology encompasses a loose constellation of scholars and theorists, many of them non-American, that grounds its excavations of media history in strange loops, weird machines, and code forks not followed, with a heavy dose of techno-fetishism and Foucauldian obsession for the archive. Texts I would place in this category from my pile include Finn Brunton’s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press), Cornelia Vismann’s Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford University Press), Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paper Work (Zone Books; notice a trend here?), and Goto80’s Computer Rooms, (lulu) which is a print-on-demand photo documentary of “what computer culture really looks like.” Media archaeologists like it gritty, and so one final item is a David A. Mindell’s older monograph Between Human and Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press), which examines the history of pre-cybernetic feedback mechanisms and analog computing through the lens of naval gun control and automated fire direction, a nexus of topics newly relevant in the face of drone technology once again raising questions about human actors, non-human systems, and the protocols of war.

Speaking of which, I am about halfway through Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife (Penguin), a well-sourced look at the 21st century’s most significant development in American war-fighting strategy, the tactical conjoining of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in the wake of 9/11. This is the deep military (and defense policy) history behind the drone wars, as well as the now-routine global deployments of “black” units like the much mythologized SEAL Team Six.

Other reading may include Matt Jockers’ Macroanalysis (University of Illinois Press) and Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know (Yale University Press), The latter is the deep historical study James Gleick’s much-hyped The Information (Vintage) could never be, and although it’s now been out for several years I am overdue for some time with it. I am also looking forward to Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker’s Blake and the Digital Humanities, a Routledge hardcover with a price-point set by Urizen.

I have both of Ken Wark’s volumes on the Situationists on deck, The Beach Underneath the Street and the latest, The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso). Guy Debord, by the way, was himself a player of games, and designed a “war game”—Kriegsspiel—that would have done Bolaño’s protagonist proud. Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures From Chess to Role Playing Games (Unreason Press) is a self-published 700-page tome that very much treats its subject, tabletop gaming, as media—by which I mean material instruments for focalizing and amplifying abstractions—offering up the most carefully researched, loving, and impeccably documented history of Dungeons of Dragons we are surely ever going to see. It’s a book that publishers presumably wouldn’t touch, a simultaneously indulgent and authoritative book our world would be a dimmer place without.

Finally, my ongoing research on the literary history of word processing has introduced me to Len Deighton, whose 1970 novel Bomber (Sterling) is likely the first novel ever written on a machine that qualifies as such. Deighton was famous for his brutal yet urbane Cold War espionage thrillers—neither Ian Fleming nor John le Carré —and I’d like to get to some of them. Spy Story (HarperCollins) features a clandestine computer center dedicated to simulating the next world war, one move at a time. After Mazzetti’s contemporary spy stories, this reads now as pure nostalgia for an obsolete end-game.

David Silver

Most of my summertime reading will come straight from whatever’s on the coffee table — a New Yorker article, some section of the Sunday Times, a cookbook or two from the public library.

Few, if any, of the books I will read this summer will contain footnotes.

Most of the books I will read this summer will be gardening and cookbooks which I don’t really read but rather strategically strike: grab, look up, consult, skim, and scan.

The book I hope to read, start to finish and from every which way, is Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy (Ten Speed Press).

Most likely, the only books I will begin and actually finish this summer will be children’s books — read to and with Siena. I will find these books browsing the kids section of my local public library (Berkeley Public – Claremont Branch), reading the children’s column of the Sunday Times‘ book review section, and searching through the database of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards.

During summer, as well as fall, winter, and spring, these books are always read socially.

David and Siena

Gareth Branwyn

Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, John Law, Tales of the SF Cacophony Society (Last Gasp): A group of San Francisco artists, creatives, and lovable malcontents in search of “experiences beyond the pale” – that was the M.O. of the SF Cacophony Society, begun in 1986 and active ’til the turn of the century. Tales… chronicles their many adventures in urban exploration, elaborate costume events, the birth of Burning Man, and more. May this book spawn new generations of urban absurdists and culture jammers.

Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls: A Novel (Mulholland Books): I met Lauren at last year’s Comic-Con and was mortified to admit that I hadn’t read any of her well-regarded novels. I’ve since become something of a fanboy and am looking forward to reading her latest, The Shining Girls, this summer. This genre-bender is about… you’ll never guess… a time-traveling serial killer. Lauren seems to be one of those authors who exfoliates more creativity than most of us have to begin with.

Richard Kadrey, Kill City Blues/The Sandman Slim novels (Harper Voyager): In Kadrey’s Sandman Slim series, he repeatedly sends us and the main character, James Stark (aka Sandman Slim), to hell and back again. Back being LA. Four books in and it’s hard to decide which locale is worse. In fact, by book four, Kill City Blues, they basically overlap. And it’s this psychogeography of the series, its mash-up of the familiar and the occult, and it’s relentlessly violent, always clever and cocky narrative, that make it stand far above other darlings of the genre like Jim Butcher.

Lucian Perkins, Alec MacKaye, Hard Art, DC 1979 (Akashic Books): The pictures in this lovely book, by well-known DC photographer Lucian Perkins, perfectly evoke the unique magic of its time and place – the DC punk scene of 1979. Bands like Trenchmouth, Teen Idles, Slickee Boys, and the incomparable Bad Brains, played shows in sketchy galleries, squat-clubs, and even inner city housing projects, where punks (frequently in all-white bands) played for all-black audiences unsure of what they were standing in front of. An urgent narrative by Alec MacKaye (Untouchables) and an essay by Henry Rollins provide a backstory to these potent images.

R. U. Sirius Timothy Leary’s Trip Thru Time (Futique Trust): In this timeline-formatted book and free ebook, 90s countercultural iconoclast R. U. Sirius paints probably the most accurate picture to date of 60s counterculture iconoclast Tim Leary. People seem quick to love him or hate him, but best of luck just trying to find Timothy Leary, the actual man entangled in the myth. Like the mercurial Aleister Crowley before him (the early 20th century occultist whom he greatly admired and emulated), Leary seems to be all of the great and terrible things said about him, and none of them. Trip Thru Time is a fine attempt at teasing out the truth behind this (anti)hero of the 20th century.

Peter Lunenfeld

Now that I’ve passed the half-century mark, I was thinking that this summer I might revisit my high school English syllabus, including The Great Gatsby (Scribner), 1984 (Plume), Brave New World (Harper Perennial), and Victory (Double Day) to see how and if they and I have held up. Continuing on with fiction, I’ve already read James Salter’s All That Is (Vintage) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia (Penguin; which are oddly similar in their attention to men making it, albeit in different eras and places), so for the summer I’ll move on to fiction of and by Angelenos. These include native son and Industry scion Matthew Spektor’s epic about Hollywood, American Dream Machine (Little Brown); East German Christa Wolf’s (that’s how she identifies herself) dyspeptic City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (Scribner), which though about the New York and Italian art worlds of the 1970s is written by an Angelina; and Summer of Hate, partially set in Southern California, by Chris Kraus. n.b. Kraus’s seminal LA intellectual tell-(not)-all-(but some) I Love Dick (Semiotext(e)) has been invoked a lot lately in relation to internet alt-lit demi-celebrity Marie Calloway’s blog-post-a-clef/short story “Adrien Brody.”

Veering away from fiction, this summer I’m hoping to engage more fully with the amazing publishing program of Geert Lovink’s Institute of Network Cultures (all of which are available as print-on-demand books and pamphlets or as free .pdfs from the site). I’m particularly interested in going through the Un-Like Us Reader, and the two Video Vortex readers. The first is on social media, the others on YouTube and online video. I read Andreas Treske’s pamphlet, The Inner Life of Video Spheres, an expansion of his Video Vortex work, and it’s prompted me to finally sit down and tackle Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology (Semiotext(e); pithy titles are obviously not big in German media philosophy at the moment). Pithier to be sure, and reissued and updated after more than two decades, is the second edition of Brenda Laurel’s groundbreaking Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley; with the added bonus of an awesome new cover designed by Martin Venezky).

Speaking of design, I’ll be re-reading The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels (Princeton Architectural Press). Jeffrey sent me a pre-release .pdf of the book when he and I were working on Digital_Humanities (The MIT Press), but I want to revisit it in print. I won’t be reading so much as browsing Artur Beifuss and Francesco Trivini Bellini’s Branding Terror: The Logotypes and Iconography of Insurgent Groups and Terrorist Organizations (Merrell Publishers). I hope the mere possession of this book doesn’t put me on NSA and TSA watch lists, but if I do get stopped by airport security this summer, I’ll make sure to have a copy of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (Back Bay) with me, because I read DFW so slowly and with such pleasure.

Patrick David Barber

About a year ago I read Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (Vintage) start to finish on one lovely day at a campsite in Tillamook National Forest. The book is quintessentially Eggers and also a great summer read: engaging and fast-moving but with enough dark undertones to keep it interesting and relevant.

Last weekend we camped for Solstice and I brought along Edward Lee’s new cookbook Smoke & Pickles (Artisan). I don’t usually think to bring a cookbook for campsite reading, but this was a perfect choice. Lee writes appealingly of his interest in food and of the intersecting influences that brought him to where he is today: a Korean-American New Yorker, running a restaurant in Kentucky that manages to bring all of that together. I’ve yet to try any of these recipes, but, hey, you had me at “Korean-Southern fusion.” Of particular note are the four seasonal kimchi recipes, the variety of rice bowls, and the bourbon-pickled jalapeños.

Edward Lee book in action. (photo by Patrick David Barber)

Alex Burns

Jeff Madrick Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (Vintage): Madrick is editor of Challenge magazine, a contributor to The New York Review of Books, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His detailed reportage examines how corporate and regulatory battles created new economic and political elites. Age of Greed spans Walter Wriston’s revolt as CEO of First National City bank to Angelo Mozilo’s demise as CEO of Countrywide Financial. There are new, devastating details about the AOL Time Warner merger negotiations; the Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken cases; Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve; and fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations. I liked Age of Greed so much that I bought hardback, paperback, and Kindle copies to study Madrick’s writing style more closely.

Mary S. Morgan The World In The Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge University Press): Morgan is Professor of history and the philosophy of economics at the London School of Economics and the University of Amsterdam. She provides a detailed conceptual history of key theoretical economists, including David Ricardo, John Maynard Keynes, John Nash, and Max Weber. This is a book about how to think about model-building and simulation; what models do and don’t do; how models are used; and under what conditions models can fail. Gillian Tett’s reportage in Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown) provides an example of how J.P. Morgan became a market-maker for credit default swaps and other financial engineering which contributed to the 2007-09 global financial crisis.

Peter Flach Machine Learning: The Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press): Flach is editor-in-chief of the Machine Learning journal and is a Professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. This is an accessible introduction to machine learning: “the systematic study of algorithms and systems that improve their knowledge or performance with experience” (p. 3) such as email spam filters. Topics include binary classification; concept learning; tree, rule, and probabilistic models; and model ensembles. Flach uses equations and illustrations to explain the major concepts involved. For more advanced research, I recommend David Barber’s Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (Cambridge University Press) and Kevin P. Murphy’s Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (The MIT Press).

Barry Johnson Algorithmic Trading & DMA: An Introduction to Direct Access Trading Strategies (4Myeloma Press): Charles Duhigg broke the news about high-frequency trading (HFT) systems in a New York Times article on 24th July 2009. Then the Flash Crash happened at 2:45pm on 6th May 2010. Since then, there is a mini-industry of HFT-oriented topical books (both pro and con); and publisher updates to pre-HFT titles on algorithmic trading. Johnson’s self-published book is a detailed introduction (for institutional investors and HFT system developers) that requires a working knowledge of market microstructure (orders and price structure) and quantitative finance. He alludes to trading strategies yet discusses the equally important transaction and execution costs. For a HFT and algo history, see Scott Patterson’s Dark Pools (Crown Business). For a basic, accessible overview of alpha, risk, portfolio, transaction and execution systems see the revised edition of Rishi K. Narang’s Inside The Black Box (John Wiley & Sons). Publishers have a slate of new HFT and algo books out later this year, starting with Robert Kissell’s The Science of Algorithmic Trading and Portfolio Management (Academic Press). You will have to do further work to understand the major asset classes and trading strategies like mean reversion, momentum, trend-following, volatility, distressed debt, and event arbitrage.

Alan N. Fish Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes (John Wiley & Sons): James Altucher, Sal Arnuk, Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, Joseph Saluzzi, Charles Hugh Smith, Kanye West, and others agree: The internet is hollowing out the middle class. Norbert Wiener foresaw this outcome with The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) on cybernetics and robotics. Fish combines three areas—decision management (predictive analytics and business rules); business process management systems (activity sequences); and service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled, reusable software services)—to explain how to automate many business functions, or to alter organizational decision structures. It should give you some tools to self-disrupt your current job if you need to—and stay ahead of the reengineering curve. The savings and scalability involved often flow to Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin).

Belinda Barnet Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem Press): Barnett is a colleague and lecturer at Swinburne University, Australia. Memory Machines will probably be the definitive conceptual history of hypertext, and the influence of Vannevar Bush’s Memex, Doug Engelbart’s NLS, Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, and Andries Van Dam’s File Retrieval and Editing System on the internet’s evolution. Barnett combines a rich, scholarly understanding of the historical literature and interviews. She provides background on Nelson’s philosophy that will interest readers of Jaron Lanier’s recent Who Owns The Future? (Penguin), which also explores Nelson’s insights.

Don Webb Overthrowing the Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and the Book of the Law (Inner Traditions). There have been a flurry of new and thoughtful books about the English magus Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and his aeonic word Thelema (Will). Webb provides a trans-aeonic interpretation of Crowley’s Liber Al vel Legis (1904) and its influence on contemporary occulture. Readers will learn from Webb’s Egyptological and Classical research, and the self-change insights from his extensive magical/initiatory work. For a contemporary, psychological view of Thelema see Roy F. Baumeister’s research program on self-regulation and ego-depletion, summarized in Baumeister and John Tierney’s Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin).

Michael A. Aquino MindWar (CreateSpace): The Aquino/Vallely concept paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory” (1980) had a much-debated reputation amongst far right New World Order conspiracy theorists, before Vallely became a CNN commentator during the 2003 Iraq War. Aquino provides a corrective in this self-published book to conspiracy-driven disinformation. He articulates a ParaPolitics meta-ethical philosophy influenced by Plato’s noesis and Club of Rome philosopher Raghavan Iyer’s Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press). He goes beyond the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act and Military Information Support Operations to articulate a different approach to military force structure and joint coordination: PhysWar (Combat), MindWar (Psychological Operations), MetaForce (Special Operations), and ParaPolitics (Civil Affairs). He provides a glimpse of a personal research program involving experimental psychology. For the appropriate context to understand Aquino’s MindWar and what it responds to, see Martin van Creveld’s The Culture of War (Ballantine Books); the revised edition of William C. Martel’s Victory In War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press); and, as one comparative view to Iyer/Aquino’s ParaPolitics, Johan Galtung’s TRANSCEND method in peace studies. On the potential “ethics of use,” I also suggest you consider the relevant ethical and research program guidelines from the American Psychological Association (particularly Divisions 3, 6, 19, and 56); the Experimental Psychology Society; the Society of Experimental Social Psychology; and the International Society of Political Psychology.

John Kekes The Roots of Evil (Cornell University Press): Kekes is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the University of Albany. He considers moral, political and theological dimensions of evil, and then evaluates possible causal factors (internal and external conditions). Case studies include the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars; the French Terror of 1793-94; Franz Stangl the Kommandant of the Treblinka concentration camp in Nazi Germany; Charles Manson; Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976-83; and the psychopath John Allen. Kekes then evaluates four different explanations: external-passive, external-active, internal-passive, and internal-active. This is a subtle, nuanced book on moral philosophy that deserves re-reading and mindful reflection.

Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam A Theory of Fields (Oxford University Press): Fligstein is a Professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley. McAdam is a Professor of sociology at Stanford University. This book develops a conceptual model of Strategic Action Fields as a mesolevel construct in which different actors collectively shape and change societies. Fligstein and McAdam contrast microfoundation and macrofoundation insights; consider methodological aspects; and provide two case studies: United States debates about race (1932-1980) and the mortgage securitization industry (1969-2011). This book exemplifies how to present new conceptual frameworks and theory-building for an academic audience.

Roy Christopher

Steve Aylett recently sent me a pile of new stuff I’ve been itching to get into: Smithereens, Novahead, and Rebel at the End of Time (Scar Garden Press). Reading Aylett is like reading a videogame in a blender, so I’m anxious to see how these three play, but there are a few ahead of them:

Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Dutton): I’ve had this book for ages and read it years ago. I’m revisiting it this summer because I found a clean copy of it recently, and it’s just so weirdly prescient. Published in 1970 (now available online), Expanded Cinema discusses the extensions of humans through the evolution of cinematic language. Youngblood writes of the “global intermedia network” and image-riddled “post-mass audience age.” Bucky Fuller wrote the Introduction, but it could just as easily have been written by Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, or Paul Virilio. Youngblood is somewhere among them, even if a bit more sober. Couple this book with Anthony Wilden’s widely overlooked 1972 book, System and Structure (which I mentioned on last year’s list), and you’ve got a whole new set of ways to see the possible present(s).

Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press): Reevaluating the work of old theorists in light of new developments (much like I suggest with Youngblood and Wilden above) is often fertile ground for new seeds of thought. Sampson does this in Virality with the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and Gilles Deleuze‘s interpretation thereof. The tack can have its limitations though, and I’m anxious to see which way Sampson’s book leans.

I finally read Bruce Sterling‘s The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam), as well as his storm-hacking novel from the same era, Heavy Weather (Bantam), as a part of a short reading list of hacker-themed books I’m either finally reading or re-reading. Something about Sterling’s recent talk on fantasy prototypes and “real” disruption crossed with a mild interest in criminology (from sporadic classes during my undergraduate studies and watching glorified cop shows like Veronica Mars and Lie to Me) spurred a renewed interest in hacking. I’m reading Steven Levy’s Hackers (O’Reilly) right now alongside Katie Hafner and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk (Simon & Schuster) and Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous (Back Bay). Then I’m rereading Ken Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press) to reestablish the larger, philosophical context.

Speaking of Ken Wark, I have two new ones by him that I’ve barely started. Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (Polity) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (Verso) continue his adept analysis of the media milieu and what Guy Debord and the Situationists can still teach us about it. I’m hoping to cover these soon.

I also just finished Daniel Suarez’s latest novel, Kill Decision (Signet), which Paul Saffo mentioned on last year’s list. Its autonomous-drone tale is germane and terrifying. Oh, and if you haven’t read his previous two novels (Daemon and its sequel, Freedom), you should add them to your list. Theirs is an amazing, scary story with lots of crazy already-existing technology.

What are you reading this summer?

May 24, 2013

Keep Your Distance Close: Maps and Monographs

I grew up moving around. From my birth to my high school years, my family moved at least once every two years. There’s no way to gauge how much that forced mobility shaped me as a person, but it certainly made me unafraid to pick up and go somewhere else.

The day after my last final of my undergraduate studies, I moved out of my parents house, from the bucolic plains of southeast Alabama to the Cascadian coast of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve moved more times than there have been years since then and even more than I did growing up. Seventeen of those twenty-odd treks have been state-to-state moves.

Map Bookshelf by Ron Arad

There are certain things you learn from a life on the road. You learn to keep your life lean (except perhaps for the literary indulgences; books tend to be the bulk of any of my many moves), you learn to pack what you keep efficiently, you learn to make new friends and keep in touch with old ones, and you learn how to read a map.

In The Faraway Nearby (Viking, 2013), Rebecca Solnit addresses all of the above with the intricacy and intimacy for which she is known. Even the books, about which she writes, “Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone” (p. 61). And in another passage that deserves quoting at length, she writes,

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping unknown territory that arrises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet (p. 54).

There are several intertwining allegories threading through The Faraway Nearby. One is about a windfall of apricots rotting slowly on the floor of Solnit’s bedroom, and that story is connected to the very dire story of the diminishing mind of her mom. Overall though, the book is about moving, about going, coming, and becoming, the crisis of living where cartographers have yet to tread, losing your way and finding it again. Every time it feels like the story of her troubled relationship with her mother is getting more alienating than engaging, Solnit drops a paragraph like this one:

My survival depended on mapping her landscape and finding my routes out of it. We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them (p. 29).

Her ability to connect the mundane to the monolithic is time and again why she’s one of the more reliable voices in cultural history and criticism and remains one of my very favorite writers.

“What size is representation?” Solnit asks, “No size at all, for we get used to seeing satellite photographs of continents the same size as snapshots of babies” (p. 92). If Solnit’s book is about the territory of living itself, then Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance (Zone Books, 2013) is about the representation, the technologies, the map itself. And it’s beautiful in a completely different way. Kurgan, who runs the Spatial Information Design Lab, directs the Visual Studies program, and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, is not only close with mapping technologies but also quite critical of their shaping how we see the world. “The consumers of generally available satellite imagery,” she writes, “or even the ones who download images for a price from a commercial satellite database, will never know who has tasked a satellite to take a picture (unless they did it themselves) in order to see something close up, but from far away” (p. 20).

The problems of perspective that Solnit mentions above are evident in Kurgan’s critiques. As much as they reveal, remote sensing and imaging technologies remove us from the grit and grind of the realities on the ground. Kurgan investigates these processes through nine case studies, from the images of earth shot from space (i.e., Earthshine and Blue Marble) to satellites over Manhattan on 9/11. Kurgan writes, “The ease with which we can conduct these experiments often hides the reasons for the existence of the images in the first place,” (p. 20), military purposes often being the most nefarious. As Braun (2005) puts it, “…media should never be understood only through their superficial characteristics or merely as interfaces: Certain ideas of reality, society, and subject are always encoded in them” (p. 73). The assumed objectivity of these images is suspect, as they mediate (i.e., insert themselves into) our view, obscuring our ability to accurately interpret what we see.

What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. — Michel de Certeau

However tempting it might be to call Solnit’s book the micro-view and Kurgan’s the macro-, or one about life lived up close and the other at a distance, both are intimate narratives of their subject matter. New books, new stories, new places, new cities can all be a challenge, but dealing with them is manageable and fun. You learn the characters, learn the tropes, learn the plot, learn the map, learn the landmarks, learn the major thoroughfares and cross-streets, and learn when it’s okay to get a little lost.

References:

Braun, Reinhard. (2005). From Representation to Networks: Interplays of Visualities, Apparatuses, Discourses, Territories, and Bodies. In Annmarie Chandler & Norie Neumark (Eds.), At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 72-87.

de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 129.

Kurgan, Laura. (2013). Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books.

Solnit, Rebecca. (2013). The Faraway Nearby. New York: Viking.

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Many thanks to Ken Wark for suggesting I review these two titles in tandem.

April 30, 2013

Tales Rabbits Tell: Dominic Pettman’s New Book

Welsh naturalist Ronald M. Lockley spent a large chunk of his life on the rabbit-riddled island of Skokholm just southwest of Wales. When he found he could do better writing about rabbits than catching and breeding them, he wrote The Private Life of the Rabbit (Macmillan, 1964). The book, which is a detailed account of all rabbit activities and proclivities, has become the manual on rabbit life. It informed Richard Adams’ novel, Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972), which is the rabbit adventure tale, about the ways and mores of leporid life. Fiver, the runt-rabbit guide embodies the spirit animal that bunnies have become in many mythologies, pop cultural contexts, and other great stories.
Rabbit
Rabbits extend far outside of the hillsides, downs, and Easter baskets in which we we typically envision them. Examples I can think of without too much effort include Bugs Bunny, Greg the Bunny, the Playboy Bunny, the Ray Johnson documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, 8 Mile‘s B. Rabbit (played by Eminem), the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll, Bambi’s pal Thumper, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Watership-Down mythology of Fall of Efrafa’s Warren of Snares, and the out-moded rabbit ears of broadcast television. As Susan E. Davis and Margo Demello (2003) write in their definitive Stories Rabbits Tell (Lantern, 2003),

…besides inhabiting forests, fields, backyards, and homes, they inhabit the realm of representation–in folklore and photos, on television and film, in gift stores and in literature. These fabricated rabbits may not tell us much about the lives of real rabbits, but they do tell us a great deal about how we think about rabbits and their place in society (p. 129).

Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology by Dominic Pettman (Zer0 Books, 2013) uses the rabbit as totem as a trope through which to interrogate our relationship with technology. Pettman explores the Heideggerian being-toward-death of the pooka in Harvey (1950) and Donnie Darko (2001), the overwrought sexuality of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and the spectral haunting of the rabbits in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). Like Frank the bunny in Donnie Darko, Pettman reads the rabbits both Of Mice and Men and Watership Down as guides: Looking at the bunny is looking into the future.

Skipping ahead, however, is not always a promising prospect. The Cassandra conundrum of seeing imminent catastrophe and having no one in the present believe you follows the prophet–rabbit or otherwise. The vagabond rabbits of Watership Down led by the frequently hysterical Fiver, Lennie, George, and Candy in Of Mice and Men led by a rabbit-ridden future vision, Donnie Darko led by his daylight hallucinations of Frank, and Elwood led by his imaginary Harvey are all held suspect by their peers. “The list of lapine totems, no doubt, could go on and on–which is partly my point,” Pettman writes (p. 63). Moreover, two more rabbit holes he mentions early in the book include “the bunny plot” and “the Easter egg.” The former is a nagging idea that won’t leave you alone until you write it out of there, and the latter, of course, refers to the hidden treats of media: DVD menus, websites, etc. Pettman writes,

Indeed, the notion of the Easter egg can be employed to reflect on the nature or possibility of significant surprises in a claustrophically overcoded – thus predictable – world. A world seemingly bereft of alternatives. Perhaps we need to enact rituals designed to encourage the magic bunny to break the tedious cultural algorithms that restrict every day – in the West at least – to a smooth series of anticipated rhythms. (After all, a predictable consumer is a docile and productive citizen.) Perhaps we should be finding inspiration from the temporal tricks of this particular totem to get access not to the material Easter eggs of fetishized commodities, but the hidden, virtual gift of the “something else”: an unprecedented experience, a unimagined possibility, an unanticipated alliance, and so on (p. 63).

A future seen eliminates the element of surprise. For the living being, it’s an ontological issue, one that Pettman explores from virtual rabbits to software, citing everyone from Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and N. Katherine Hayles, to Slavoj Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari, Vilém Flusser, and Giorgio Agamben. Make no mistake, this rabbit hole is deep.

Concluding, Pettman sums it up, writing,

The rabbit, Orc, penguin, avatar, angel, pixelated lover – even Paradise itself – all make appearances in the idiosyncratic virtual montage fashioned by this book. They are neototems for an era in which the monolithic notion of Nature is finally giving way to an understanding of ecology that includes computers as much as whales, and in which humans are just as likely to be sheep as shepherds (p. 164).

Far from the private life of the rabbit, its many public representations can show you the way. Totems can help us see the world with fresh eyes. So, next time you’re lost in the media matrix, wake up and follow the rabbit.

References:

Adams, Richard. (1972). Watership Down. London: Rex Collings.

Davis, Susan E., & Demello, Margo. (2003). Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. New York: Lantern Books.

Lockley, R. M. (1964). The Private Life of the Rabbit. New York: Macmillan Publishing.

Pettman, Dominic. (2013). Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology. Ropley Hants, UK: Zer0 Books.

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Rabbit drawings by Roy Christopher.