What if Coffee is Responsible for Fascism? Lol Jk …Unless? Part I
Any old hipster will tell you that the best coffee—as per the directions of the barista at their favorite third wave coffee shop—is made with a Chemex Pour Over. You could, however, opt for the French press, (the modern design actually comes from Italy, an important note), if you prefer the thicker, oily consistency that
Poetic Politics in Watchmen and “Desolation Row”
It’s no secret that Bob Dylan’s lyricism was a crucial point of inspiration for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal ‘86–‘87 comic, Watchmen, in which the superhero narrative comes under a gritty and subversive lens intended for mature readers. The comic depicts an alternate 20th century history where a number of masked vigilantes (costumed, but
THE POETICS OF SEA SHANTIES, PART II
This week’s post is a continuation of last week where we examined the current sea shanty trend and began to situate it in relation to popular poetry as defined in Dana Gioia’s 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture? Gioia identifies four ways that popular poetry differs from literary poetry: it
The Poetics of Sea Shanties, Part I
Unless you’ve been lost at sea, you’re likely familiar with the tidal wave of popularity that sea shanties have garnered since the beginning of the year. Shanty performances sailed to the top of the charts in the UK, netting three billion views on TikTok alongside a 7000% increase in Spotify listens by the end of
Grounded and Ungrounded: Technology of Space in Dracula
This week, I’ll be working through the beginnings of a new reading of the gothic horror novel Dracula (1897) to both argue something about the novel and connect its work to broader themes in horror media. In this post, I’ll explore how the book’s villain-vampire Count Dracula is recurrently characterized as having a kind of
Utopia and Mapping the Imaginary
In something of a loose association with my previous post, I’ll be writing and thinking this week about another interesting intersection between images and text. In particular, I’ll be exploring both old and new attempts to map Thomas More’s seminal text Utopia. Written in 1516, More’s Utopia is a text which provides the first major
MAZE: Playing Between Image and Text
Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle reads the subtitle of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book MAZE. Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000
Hell’s Black Intelligencers: Shakespeare and Our Current Fears of Surveillance
In July 2018, the United States government formally pressed charges against Maria Valeryevna Butina for operating as an unregistered foreign agent operating in the service of the Russian state, a term that the news media quickly collapsed into the more provocative and instantly recognizable designation of “Russian spy.” Coupled with the revelation that the Russian
“Millions of false eyes”: Responding to Surveillance
Surveillance culture doesn’t crop up overnight. It is the result of social and political processes, which humans creatively adapt to and undermine. Last week, I looked at the ways in which early modern audiences and playwrights reacted to the increasing sense that their government was using spies to monitor their actions in and around the
They Come Not Single Spies: What Surveillance Meant to Shakespeare’s Audiences
After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572,[1] the English government, particularly Principle Secretary Francis Walsingham (often credited as the father of English espionage), greatly increased the scope of their intelligence networks. This resulted in the foiling of a number of plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, most notably the Babington Plot, which led