This Saturday, at the extraordinary New York Academy of Medicine Library, I’ll be speaking from 12:30-1 PM on “Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries,” at a conference brilliantly curated by Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy and featuring, among others, Oliver Sacks, Lawrence Weschler, Michael Sappol, Amy Herzog, and Salvador Olguin.
WHAT: Festival of Medical History & The Arts.
WHERE: New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street.
“Medical libraries such as the New York Academy of Medicine’s offer ready access to a mother lode of ‘invisible literature,’ the SF novelist J. G. Ballard’s term for medical textbooks, scientific journals, technical manuals, and other gray matter. Although it comprises a veritable galaxy in the universe of print media, invisible literature is nowhere to be found in general-interest bookstores and is never reviewed in mainstream book pages for the simple fact that no one, not even the specialists who are its intended audience, thinks of this stuff as literature in the literary sense of the word. But what if we did?”
Live, now, at Thought Catalog: “Memory Palace: Fay Ballard’s ‘House Clearance,” a review-cum-essay-cum-interview inspired by J.G. Ballard’s daughter’s exhibition of drawings.
Live, now, at Boing Boing, “The Rat King: On the Fascinations (and Repulsions) of Rattus.” Click here to read. Teaser: In what he calls “an Experiment in Controlled Digression,” Mark Dery touches on xenogastronomy, ortolan, Edible Dormouse, Victor Hugo’s fondness for rat pâté, rat-baiting as a betting sport in Victorian times, the rat as New […]
This just in: the revised, final cover for the paperback edition of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, due out from the University of Minnesota Press, February 2014. “An absolute treasure trove of the disturbing and enlightening.” – Warren Ellis. – Warren Ellis “Brilliant.” – William Gibson Sign up to receive blog posts and news […]
