A Gala Benefit for The Morbid Anatomy Library with me, Evan Michelson of the TLC reality-TV series Oddities, & Other Curious People, June 30 8 P.M. DETAILS HERE. DO NOT MISS THIS. It’s going to be stupendous: bearded women, glabrous men, a linguist who lost his tongue to savages in Ultima Thule, the world’s avowed […]
The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link)—one of (if not the) oldest online communities, Â testbed for my theories about disembodied sociology in the Digital Age when I was editing Flame Wars in the early ’90s, Â invaluable source of crowd-sourced wisdom and subcultural ethnography when I was writing Escape Velocity in the mid-90s—is hosting a conversation about […]
The LA Review of Books has published “Mail Bonding,” my lengthy essay on Floating Worlds, the impossibly erudite, puckishly witty, and nakedly revealing correspondence of Edward Gorey and Peter Neumeyer, the children’s book author (and professor) whose Donald books Gorey illustrated. Nut graf: Theirs was a friendship of almost telepathic rapport and, atypically for men […]
Live, on the Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC, NPR affiliate, NYC). If I look a little tipsy, it’s because I’m drunk on the power of the elite liberal media, subliminally fondling the American unconscious with the long, sticky tendrils of my socialist thought. My latest, the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays […]
Time starvation forces me to cut and paste this one:* *(Thanks to hosts Ted Enik and Wythe Marschall for writing the site copy!) Mark Dery at the Cornelia Street Observatory When Apr 29, 2012 from 06:00 PM to 08:00 PM Where The Cornelia Street Observatory, Cornelia St. Cafe, 29 Cornelia St., New York, NY 10014. […]
Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 28, at 7 P.M. at Housing Works bookstore cafe: A few blink-and-you’ll-miss-it micro-lectures on a medical movie called Plastic Reconstruction of the Face (1918), malaria pinup calendars (!), and—by your friend and humble narrator—dentists’ hand silhouettes, all in celebration of the publication of Hidden Treasure. Directions, details HERE. (Blast Books.) An incomparably […]
HIVE MIND: City Lights bookstore, in San Francisco, has expressed interest in an in-store appearance-cum-lecture, on the occasion of my new book, in late May, perhaps on Memorial weekend, May 25-27. Thus, the question: if I book a date, will you come? If enough of you sound off, I’ll book it. Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, […]
My forthcoming essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (University of Minnesota Press), won’t be out until April 1, but the critical verdicts of readers who’ve received review copies are starting to come over the transom. Happily, they’re uniformly applausive (so far!). Blogger Kate Walker led the parade with a ruminative review on her […]
Srsly. At long last, my new essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press, April 2012), is available for pre-order from: Amazon U.S. Barnes & Noble. Amazon.CA. Amazon U.K. Amazon.FR. Amazon.DE. Bruce Sterling wrote the introduction; Boing Boing‘s advance praise calls it “…an intellectual […]
WHAT: LECTURE, “The Politics of Style” WHEN: TOMORROW, Tuesday, December 13, 6 – 8:30 P.M. WHERE: The School of Visual Arts, 136 West 21 Street, 2nd floor. Presented by the MFA Design Criticism Department, a.k.a D-CRIT. COST: Free and open to the public. RSVP at http://dcrit.eventbrite.com SHORT VERSION: From Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay “Ornament and […]