Fifty years ago, Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand. The quintessentially American writer–and poster bear for burly masculinity–is undergoing one of his periodic revivals, spurred not only by the anniversary of his suicide but by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, much of which takes place in the 1920s Left Bank of Hemingway’s […]
Apropos of nothing, isn’t it time you contemplated another of Joanna Ebenstein‘s stunning images of morbid anatomy, this one of an anatomical head modeled in wax with almost unsettling accuracy? I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press) is now available for pre-order at everyone’s favorite […]
Apropos of nothing, isn’t it time you contemplated another of Joanna Ebenstein‘s stunning images of morbid anatomy, this one of an anatomical head modeled in wax with almost unsettling accuracy? (Copyright Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved.) I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press) is now […]
I’ll be lecturing on “Metaphor as Illness” at the School of Visual Arts this Sunday, at 1:30 P.M., in a double-header with media theorist McKenzie Wark. Executive Summary: A personal essay–live, from the cancer ward!–that is simultaneously a philosophical investigation into the ways in which disease widens the Cartesian chasm, untethering our thought balloons from […]
Live, at Thought Catalog, my epically epic interview with Brazilian cultural historian Gunter Axt, in which we range widely over Brazil’s storied history and foundational myths–mash-ups of sacred and secular, high and low culture, European and African and indigenous elements. As I note in my introduction, Axt, a university professor and public intellectual, is a […]
File under Advertisements for Myself: University of Minnesota Press just finalized the cover design for my anthology, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays On American Dread, American Dreams. It’s breathtaking. The stunning photograph is by Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy fame; the 19th-century mannequin with crow’s-foot cracks is from the collection of Evan […]
This Friday, at 9:30 P.M., at the Rubin Museum of Art, “a nonprofit cultural and educational institution dedicated to the art of the Himalayas” * located at 150 West 17th Street, between 6th and 7th, in Manhattan, I’ll be delivering a brief introduction to a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, as part of […]
This Saturday, April 16, at the Coney Island Museum, I’ll be lecturing on Dreamland and the Invention of the Postmodern, as part of the Congress of Curious Peoples: Details HERE. Saturday’s omnium gatherum of scholars, aficionados, and weirdo-rati begins at 10 A.M. with a keynote lecture by the noted cultural critic Norman Klein, author of […]
In “Ghost Babies,” an essay featured on Boing Boing, I ponder the eBay market for postmortem photographs, wondering what the brisk trade in daguerreotypes of the dead says about its fanbase. Do collectors find these images compelling because they’re poignant memento mori of another time? Or because all photos embalm life, which makes postmortem photos […]
Star Trek blooper. Found on the Web; all rights reserved. Live, now, at Las Vegas CityLife: my essay, nominally a review of Star Trek: The Original Series 365, on the Trek mythos and its fandom: How is it that, more than 40 years after its barely three-year run on network TV, a low-budget, Nielsen-challenged space […]