This is somewhat shorter than my normal book round-ups. Normally, I would let this sit until it was a bit more full, but it’s finals week and I don’t have the brain power to really dive into something else.
Read More
This is explicitly a function of nostalgia, but it is nostalgia had second-hand, where the original object is eerily absent, decontextualized and beginning to run down like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where the original recordings were physically destroyed in the process of transferring them over.
Read More
What I'm getting at here isn't just the juxtaposition of a classic mystery genre with the weird but something that emerges from that juxtaposition, and what it says about us and the world that we live in.
Read More
Much has been written about toxic masculinity, much of it by much better scholars than me. What I would like to do in this piece, and subsequent pieces under similar headings, is analyze non-toxic manifestations of masculinity, discuss their functioning, and – as much as possible, without oversimplifying – present guidelines so that we can follow them in the future. There are, of course, pitfalls here and I want to acknowledge them at the beginning: just about everything we do has unintended consequences, and the suggestions that I make here will no doubt be liable to have them, too. Moreover, any behavior can be twisted into a toxic manifestation: you have to have the self-awareness to try to recognize that when it happens, and to accept the criticism when it comes up.
Read More
I believe that the way that we tell stories has a major influence on the way that we conceive of selfhood and acceptable behaviors, and I think that there are some easy ways we can adjust how we construct our narratives that would be helpful and possibly lead to new and interesting story shapes.
Read More