I always found it frustrating that self-help books are often lumped in with psychology books at the bookstore. Their mingling on the shelves seemed to do at least one of them a disservice. Even given my bias, I’ve always been mildly fascinated with self-help as a genre. In The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in… Continue reading Help Your Self

Privilege is a kind of blindness. Open doors are invisible. We only see them when they’re closed. Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown happens entirely in liminal spaces. It’s all in the edges and on the edge. It’s just as Manuel DeLanda writes in A New Philosophy of Society (2006): “In the case of ethnic communities, for… Continue reading Ethnic Recurring: Charles Yu

As an area of research, sound studies is ever playing the disciplinary underdog, and it shows in some of the scholarship. There is a lot of nominalizing and theoretic land-grabby flag-planting. Some of it is justified. Some of it is not. Swerving into its own theoretic lane, the AUDINT research unit invokes J.G. Ballard‘s description… Continue reading Sounds Abound

Jay David Bolter has been writing and theorizing about new media since it actually deserved to be called “new.” If his Writing Space (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991) isn’t on your shelf, you’re missing a big chunk of literary thought, internet history, and hypertext theory—a strong precursor to all of the below. As he told me in… Continue reading New Media Renewed

New cyclists in the city are easy to spot. They’re like insects that are able to fly but aren’t that good at it. “Eyes trained accurately to measure distances and muscles accustomed to prompt obedience are especially able to cope with the exigencies of our crowded thoroughfares,” wrote Isabel Marks in 1901. “When watching the… Continue reading Wheel to Reel: Bicycles and Big Screens