Have you noticed toady’s Google search image paying homage to the techno-counter-cultural icon Nikola Tesla? Today is his birthday (thanks canuck for the reminder). Timothy Ely‘s inspired work above beautifully narrates Tesla’s haunting legend and continued mystique electrically interwoven into techno lore. Airtight Games homage to Tesla (and insertion of his character into the gameplay’s [...]
Last night during the Danish version of the X Factor (I’ll understand if you don’t respect me in the morning) one of the contestants sang Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner, without instrumentation similar to Vega’s original. I was surprised to hear it selected within the context of such a commercialized pop setting. The Danish program is [...]
Tagged Suzanne Vega, VirtualityConstitution, 2008 8 x 25 feet in five panels Depicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration’s war on terror.
If you found Bent’s recent post on American Post-9/11 fiction interesting you may want to check out the Cafe discussion on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.
I just received a pre-notification on a cfp for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The organisers are Burroughs and Beat Gen. scholar Oliver Harris, in partnership with fellow-Burroughsian – see for instance Reality Studio – Ian MacFadyen (they are also co-editing the book, Naked Lunch@50), and [...]
Tagged BurroughsEvery year the International Literature and Psychology Conference offers scholars an opportunity to discuss literature and the other arts, using insights from psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches. We have psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freudians, Lacanians, a few Jungians and myth theorists, Zizek’ers, post-Zizek’ers, plus an assortment of literature and culture scholars who like to dabble in the [...]
Tagged 9/11, DeLillo, Safran Foer, trauma, Yves KleinSince the early 60s, Raymond Federman has been one of the most important American writers. In his highly experimental fictions – works that bear such titles as Take It or Leave It, Double or Nothing, and The Twofold Vibrations – he has explored cultural and personal memory, invented intricate narrative strategies, and above all has [...]
Noam Cohen has an interesting piece, The Wiki-Way to the Nomination, at the NY Times on the online activism behind the Obama campaign. It’s a bit simplistic but it provides some good background if you haven’t been following all the online activity. Doesn’t everything happen online today? It’s also interesting how techno jargon is becoming [...]
My paper for the EAAS conference in Oslo last week dealt with icons and icon work, continuing a line of research I began about 5 years ago when I participated in a conference in Austria with the theme of US Icons. The convener of both the AAAS event in 2003 and of the Oslo workshop [...]
Tagged Journals and Publications, Photography, Popular Culture, Postmodern Culture, The 70sThis week’s blog version of The Beat Generation Revisited lecture takes us on a journey into a dark continent of drug abuse, pretty boys who orgasm as their necks snap in the hangman’s noose, and marks and narcs melting into one another – in the flesh – turning into ectoplasm. You’ve guessed it: we are [...]