Books Read In 2018

  1. The Conversations by Cesar Aira

  2. Culture & Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

  3. Transformers Volume 7: Combiner Wars by John Barber

  4. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett

  5. The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason by Chapo Trape House

  6. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  7. Break Out: How the Apple II Launched the PC Gaming Revolution by David L. Craddock

  8. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America by Cathy Davidson

  9. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

  10. The Oxford Companion To Shakespeare by Michael Dobson

  11. White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race by Stephen Duncombe

  12. Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse by Annette Fuentes

  13. The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs by Ray Ginger

  14. The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980–1984 by Ian Glasper

  15. Classic GI Joe Volume One by Steven Grant

  16. More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing by Jesse Hagopian

  17. Long Shot: The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter by Craig Hodges

  18. The Odyssey by Homer (Barry Powell translation)

  19. The Odyssey by Homer (Emily Wilson translation)

  20. Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1989 by George Hurchalla

  21. Pillars of Society by Henrik Ibsen

  22. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History Of Racial Inequality In Twentieth Century America by Ira Katznelson

  23. All Labor Has Dignity by Martin Luther King Jr.

  24. Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties by Amanda Littauer

  25. The People of the Abyss by Jack London

  26. Liberalism: A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo

  27. How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate by Wendy Moore

  28. The Mosaic of Islam by Suleiman Mourad

  29. The Law of the Father? Patriarchy in the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism by Mary Murray

  30. Crazy Like A Fox: The Definitive Chronicle of Brian Pillman 20 Years Later by Liam O'Rourke

  31. Good Nintentions: 30 Years of NES: An Unofficial Survey of the Nintendo Entertainment System by Jeremy Parish

  32. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England by Mary Poovey

  33. Black Panther: The Complete Collection Volume One by Christopher Priest

  34. The Death of WCW (10th Anniversary Edition) by RD Deynolds

  35. Cosmos by Carl Sagan

  36. Transformers: Combiner Wars by Mairghread Scott

  37. Shakespeare's Hamlet: Manga Edition by William Shakespeare

  38. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro

  39. Nabakov's Shakespeare by Samuel Schuman

  40. Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals by Jonathan Smucker

  41. Space Is The Place: The Lives & Times Of Sun Ra by John F. Szwed

  42. Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War by Alfred Thomas

  43. Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Fool's Gold by David Tipton

  44. English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (The Novel in History) by David Trotter

  45. The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

  46. Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England by Garthine Walker

  47. The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists by CJ Werleman

  48. Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer

  49. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Books Read In 2012

  1. Being A Green Mother by Piers Anthony
  2. The Tent by Margaret Atwood
  3. New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  4. Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort
  5. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
  6. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  7. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
  8. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
  9. The Mind of Italo Calvino by Dan Cavallaro
  10. The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin
  11. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
  12. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
  13. Crossed by Ally Condie
  14. Noir by Robert Coover
  15. Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
  16. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow by Cory Doctorow
  17. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue
  18. Football The First Hundred Years The Untold Story by Adrian Harvey
  19. My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles
  20. The Map & The Territory by Michel Houllebecq
  21. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard
  22. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
  23. Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James
  24. Fifty Shades Freed by E. L. James
  25. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
  26. The Life & Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson
  27. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
  28. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
  29. The Lost Books of The Odyssey by Zachary Mason
  30. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
  31. Batman The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
  32. Batman Year One by Frank Miller
  33. Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  34. Paradise Lost by John Milton
  35. Batman-The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
  36. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore
  37. The Watchmen by Alan Moore
  38. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabakov
  39. King Lear by William Shakespeare
  40. Authors In Context: Virginia Woolf by Michael Whitworth
  41. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
  42. The Quran (Sher Ali Holy translation)
  43. Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
  44. The Tel Quel Reader

My Digital Humanities Origin

In its original draft, this was part of the introduction to my MA thesis.  After some discussion, I ended up pulling this out to keep my thesis more focused on the matters at hand.  I really like what I wrote here so I decided to excerpt it on my domain for my readers.  I wrote this right around this time last year.

Everything I found in electronic literature upon discovery, the intellectual aesthetic and interplay with computers, which had been my cherished companion since childhood, I had been looking, searching, for in my literary studies.  As a child I had played some text adventures, known as interactive fiction, and certainly remember their printed cousins the Choose Your Own Adventure book. I loved how interactive those books were and the agency which readers were given to decide their own fate and reading path.  Growing up, I had a lot of problems with motor development and coordination.  This led to many other problems including very poor penmanship. A wise teacher, when I was in elementary school, suggested my parents buy me a computer. She claimed that I would end up ahead of the curve because personal computers were going to takeover classrooms before I left for college. Wisely, my parents took her advice and purchased an Apple II for me to do my school work on and, because I did not play well with other children, to have an outlet for play and creativity.

Long before I became an avid reader in my teens, my creativity came almost exclusively from computers. Game designer Jane McGonigal’s recent weblog post about her experience creating detailed narratives out of Apple II games that did not already have them like Summer Games brought back memories from my own childhood. I had a similar experience at almost the same time by creating forms in a word processing program with different countries and names. I created brief backgrounds for each character and had them compete against each other on screen. Scandal, same gender romance, athletic achievement, and other intrigues played out in this interpretation of my gaming experience. I would not call that literature, obviously, but I tell this story to show how my creativity was electronically nourished before I embraced print culture later in my teens.

I have been on the Internet since sometime in early 1995. Immediately I became involved with participatory online culture by writing fan fiction, posting to newsgroups and listservs, chatting on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and, on and off, creating journals which nowadays would be called a weblog. At the same time, I published print based punk rock fanzines periodically until 2005 when I began Signifying Nothing, a webzine, archive of my earlier fanzines, and podcast devoted to my endeavors in hardcore punk which continue to this day.

My interest in electronic literature came to fruition while taking a senior seminar on postmodernism with Scott Rettberg in the spring of 2004. While being turned onto writers like Italo Calvino, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and theorists like George Landow, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva I realized that not only were these fiction writers exactly what I had longed for all of my life from literature, but the bridge between literary theory I fell in love with from Kristeva and Barthes, which I had struggled with until this time, and computers which Landow and others like Rettberg himself bridged via their theories was a dream come true. The beginning years of my college career were filled with frustration, failure, and difficulty. The first step of my recovery came when I embraced electronic literature.

Reading hypertext fiction and the theories of Barthes and Kristeva in Rettberg’s seminar improved my readings of previously read authors like Faulkner, Woolf, and Wallace. I began researching electronic literature and exploring the links on Rettberg’s weblog. Through these links I was able to explore the work of other hypertext and New Media theorists like Nick Montfort, Angela Thomas, and Jill Walker. I experimented with and clicked through Rettberg’s hypertext novel, The Unknown, and began actively participating in the sticker novel he authored with Montfort. As the semester wound down, two classmates and myself began our own weblogs, inspired with Rettberg and Walker especially, and I moved mine to its own domain later that summer.

Since the rise of the novel the past few centuries have had some hypertextesque works of literature. Novels like Tristram Shandy, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses can seem to those familiar with the workings of electronic literature to have qualities which “stand out for the first time.” (Landow 1982) When I read Sterne’s novel in an undergraduate course on the history of the novel, I came in one morning and remarked to my professor that the novel had a lot of the qualities of hypertext fiction which I was learning about in Rettberg’s seminar on postmodernism the same semester. Without knowledge of electronic literature I would have never made the connection, which made my reading of Sterne’s novel much more pleasurable. Experimental works of literature like Pavic’s Dictinary Of The Khazars and Nabakov’s Pale Fire also exude qualities which are emphasized by an understanding and familiarity with hypertext and electronic literature.

As Janet Murray argues in Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future Of Narrative In Cyberspace, “the impending dissolution of Yugoslavia,” in Dictinary Of The Khazars, “is preconfigured by the fragmentary account of a mythical lost tribe” of three separate, conflicting, dictionaries (Murray 37). The “multicursally” seen in Pale Fire has been seen as a branch between not only modernism and postmodernism but as a text that has hypertextesque qualities (Aarseth 8). Writers like Robert Coover, a longtime advocate of electronic literature, Borges, and other postmodernists from France and South America also write literature which embodies many aspects of hypertext fiction.

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