Nostalgia, that longing for a place and time that no longer exists, was once considered a sickness, a curable homesickness akin to the common cold. Now it’s a market-tested tool of sales and merchandising. It’s just so much easier to sell something with a built-in audience than it is to build an audience around something… Continue reading Investigating Veronica: More on Mars
It’s been a decade. A decade without J.G. Ballard. It should be more noticeable. Like filling the empty pool with emptiness, to paraphrase China Miéville. Like losing Bowie or Prince. A void of perspective, crumbling and gaping at our heels. Everyone should feel it. His work has been translated to the screen by directors with… Continue reading Uncanny Cartographies: Finding J.G. Ballard
Walter Benjamin is best known as a cultural critic, but he wrote all sorts of other forms and formats. Poems, parables, fables, short fiction, rhymes, riddles, and jokes, as well as transcriptions of dreams, all found their way into his extensive notebooks. According to Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian Truskolaski’s introduction to The Storyteller (Verso, 2016),… Continue reading All About the Benjamin
If you think we’re terminally distracted by our devices now, just wait a few more years. Virtual Reality, a wholly immersive set of technologies ever-poised to change everything, may finally become not only readily available but prevalent. In Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life (HarperOne, 2018), Peter… Continue reading Making Sense of the Future Tense
Human culture has been deeply interested in murder and the macabre since our ancient ghost stories and monster tales. We’ve since made celebrities of our real-life serial killers. With the recent release of Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018), which can be seen as a much longer, artier version of Mary Harron… Continue reading If Books Could Kill
