Literature
Many of my current interests converge on the cover of this week's New Yorker:
Air travel, ecology, post-apocalyptic imagery, book reading versus the new media technologies...this illustration serves as a cipher for a host of anxieties and consolations around the contemporary moment. There is a wish for aliens; but also a wish for them to be like us. There is a desire to see ecological recovery at the expense of human civilization?and a desire to see this from a removed, as if neutral perspective. Nostalgia for the old, tattered book depends on a pile of rubble in the form of the new media technologies (screens, keyboards, cell phones, e-book readers).
The New Yorker cover presents a modern take on Shelley's "Ozymandias": a story of ruin rendered in bright colors, positing annihilation in order to preserve an old form of reading (this is, after all, the summer fiction issue). Instead of the mise-en-abyme of first-person speakers who we meet in Shelley's sonnet, in this illustration we get to see the lonely reader at work?and he looks happy, his spaceship hovering nearby. To rephrase Wallace Stevens: the reader became the book, and the post-apocalyptic day was like the conscious being of the book.
- D.t. Max Visit
It was a pleasure to have D.T. Max visit Loyola this past week. My current students had prepared questions about David Foster Wallace, long-form journalism, and writing in the age of digital media. I was so happy with how the conversation turned...
- Lady Gaga And Today's Modernism
Amid the numerous allusions and references to past musicians, actors, and styles in Gay Talese's recent New Yorker article about Lady Gaga recording with Tony Bennett ("High Notes," September 19), I was struck by a more subtle aesthetic echo: the...
- Strange Plane Events
My colleague Mark Yakich and I have posted several excerpts from our current book project on flight. The book is a collaborative travel memoir of sorts that moves between two narratives: Mark's fear of flying, and my experiences working at an airport...
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- A Canticle For Leibowitz By Walter M. Miller Jr.
It took me a lot longer to finish than novel than initially expected since Miller's prose tends to be a little bit clunky and objectively detached for my tastes although it does suit the context of the novel: A epic and bleak historical post-apocalyptic...
Literature
interests converge
Many of my current interests converge on the cover of this week's New Yorker:
Air travel, ecology, post-apocalyptic imagery, book reading versus the new media technologies...this illustration serves as a cipher for a host of anxieties and consolations around the contemporary moment. There is a wish for aliens; but also a wish for them to be like us. There is a desire to see ecological recovery at the expense of human civilization?and a desire to see this from a removed, as if neutral perspective. Nostalgia for the old, tattered book depends on a pile of rubble in the form of the new media technologies (screens, keyboards, cell phones, e-book readers).
The New Yorker cover presents a modern take on Shelley's "Ozymandias": a story of ruin rendered in bright colors, positing annihilation in order to preserve an old form of reading (this is, after all, the summer fiction issue). Instead of the mise-en-abyme of first-person speakers who we meet in Shelley's sonnet, in this illustration we get to see the lonely reader at work?and he looks happy, his spaceship hovering nearby. To rephrase Wallace Stevens: the reader became the book, and the post-apocalyptic day was like the conscious being of the book.
- D.t. Max Visit
It was a pleasure to have D.T. Max visit Loyola this past week. My current students had prepared questions about David Foster Wallace, long-form journalism, and writing in the age of digital media. I was so happy with how the conversation turned...
- Lady Gaga And Today's Modernism
Amid the numerous allusions and references to past musicians, actors, and styles in Gay Talese's recent New Yorker article about Lady Gaga recording with Tony Bennett ("High Notes," September 19), I was struck by a more subtle aesthetic echo: the...
- Strange Plane Events
My colleague Mark Yakich and I have posted several excerpts from our current book project on flight. The book is a collaborative travel memoir of sorts that moves between two narratives: Mark's fear of flying, and my experiences working at an airport...
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- A Canticle For Leibowitz By Walter M. Miller Jr.
It took me a lot longer to finish than novel than initially expected since Miller's prose tends to be a little bit clunky and objectively detached for my tastes although it does suit the context of the novel: A epic and bleak historical post-apocalyptic...