Roy Christopher's Blog, page 21
December 8, 2019
May 25, 2019
Sounds Abound
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. Carving its own theoretic lane, the AUDINT research unit invokes J.G. Ballard‘s description of […]
May 13, 2019
New Media Renewed
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 […]
May 6, 2019
Wheel to Reel: Bicycles and Big Screens
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 […]
Wheel to Reel
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 […]
May 5, 2019
Investigating Veronica: More on Mars
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 […]
May 3, 2019
Uncanny Cartographies: Finding J.G. Ballard
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 […]
May 2, 2019
All About the Benjamin
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), […]
February 16, 2019
Making Sense of the Future Tense
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 […]
February 12, 2019
If Books Could Kill
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 […]
