Books Read 2017

  1. The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson
  2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Unknown, Simon Armitage (Translator)
  3. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 1 by John Barber
  4. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 2 by John Barber
  5. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 3 by John Barber
  6. Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Volume 4 by John Barber
  7. Transformers: Robots In Disguise Volume 5 by John Barber
  8. Transformers: Robots in Disguise Volume 6 by John Barber
  9. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman by Harold Bloom
  10. The Black Elfstone (The Fall of Shannara, #1) by Terry Brooks
  11. Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That... by Joe Carducci
  12. The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino
  13. The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin
  14. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary
  15. Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto by Jessa Crispin
  16. Captain Marvel (Marvel NOW!) #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick
  17. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  18. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
  19. Star Trek: Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay by Harlan Ellison
  20. The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Friedrich Engels
  21. Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings by Manny Farber
  22. Essays, Speeches & Public Letters by William Faulkner
  23. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Tim Ferriss
  24. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World by Leon Festinger
  25. Clinton in Haiti: The 1994 US Invasion of Haiti by Philippe Girard
  26. Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984 by Ian Glasper
  27. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  28. A Philosophy of Tragedy by Christopher Hamilton
  29. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris
  30. A People's History of the French Revolution by Eric Hazan
  31. Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) by J. Hoberman
  32. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael K. Honey
  33. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies by bell hooks
  34. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
  35. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  36. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays by Immanuel Kant
  37. The Future is Queer: A Science Fiction Anthology by Richard Labonté
  38. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge by Alison Landsberg
  39. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories by Nella Larsen
  40. Wellsprings by Mario Vargas Llosa
  41. Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer
  42. My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor by Keith Morris
  43. Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore by Albert Mudrian
  44. A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy
  45. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle
  46. Employee of the Month and Other Big Deals by Mary Jo Pehl
  47. Visual Storytellling: An Illustrated Reader by Todd James Pierce
  48. Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 by Tony Rettman
  49. Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
  50. Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution by Heather Rogers
  51. Get In The Van: On The Road With Black Flag (Second Edition) by Henry Rollins
  52. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson
  53. Lazarus, Vol. 1: Family by Greg Rucka
  54. Der Mond: The Art of Neon Genesis Evangelion by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
  55. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai
  56. A New Companion to Digital Humanities by Susan Schreibman
  57. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet
  58. Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
  59. Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings by Mark Twain
  60. Saga, Vol. 1 (Saga, #1) by Brian K. Vaughan
  61. Saga, Vol. 2 (Saga, #2) by Brian K. Vaughan
  62. A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas
  63. Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas
  64. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal by G. Willow Wilson
  65. Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson
  66. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople by Susan Wise Bauer
  67. How Fiction Works by James Wood
  68. No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens by Amy Yates Wuelfing
  69. What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States by Dave Zirin

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.