I’m in New York next week starting Tuesday for the Armory Show. Please email if you’d like to meetup: joanneDOTmcneilGMAIL. I’m also moderating a panel Saturday, March 6, at the Winkleman Gallery with An Xiao, part of #class Here’s more on #class on WSJ Speakeasy.
Tonight! Open Book: the first Boston Bookfuturists Meetup is at Microsoft’s Cambridge office at 7pm. We’ve got Joshua Glenn co-creator of Significant Objects and Hilobrow. Matthew Battles, also of Hilo, author of Library: An Unquiet History. New media artist Peggy Nelson and filmmaker Sean Fizroy are also presenting. As well as author Stona Fitch, founder of the Concord Free Press (with gifts.) Oh, yeah, and I’m going to be hosting it. C’mon! It’s going to be amazing!
Ugh, exasperated. The other world, the one where I live more that 50 hours a week, is steadily tightening its tether. But I haven’t forgotten the tomorrow museum. Almost every night I get a paragraph or an outline of something I would like to be an essay but never have the time to complete. Some of the titles and subjects of these drafts: A Defense of self portraiture, the curious origin of corporate storytelling, whether the internet is killing serendipity, books as fetish objects, a review of James Franco on General Hospital, the post-RSS blogosphere, “The writing of the body” (not going to tell you what that is.) In the meantime, please enjoy some past hits: Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum, Survival Creativity: Return to Pencil and Paper, Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip, Handmade Looking Writing, The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns, Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter, Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men, Where Are the Renaissance Women?, Five Books I Recommend to Everyone, The Annotation Impulse: Graffiti and Social Media, Finders Keepers? When a Found Object is a Lost Object of Emotional Value, and Why Read at All?
Chaos Reigns! I was a guest on Steady Diet of Film podcast with Erin Donovan. We talked about Lars von Trier’s Antichrist… the greatest DeBeers commercial of all time.
Hi everyone. I’m having a small meetup this Thursday to discuss the future of the book. Please come to Noir at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square at 7. More info
Got a bunch of good (long!) posts in store next week, but in the meantime, check out my posterous. It is full of video clips and pics from my recent trip to London.
I’m in London 10/12 (or, I guess, 12/10) for a week and a half for the Frieze Art Fair. Please email if you’d like to meet up: joanne.mcneilATgmail.
My proposed SXSWi panel with Richard Nash: The Novel in 2050. Research shows reading a book for as little as six minutes may cut stress levels in half. But have Twitter-length attention spans decreased demand for novels? What is the future of the “non-networked” book? This panel will debate the relevance of novels in a networked world. (Blip.tv clip of Nash’s talk at 140 characters conference mentioning book groups — 12:25 — and — 14:00 — how painting didnt get killed by film. More here in his recent Publisher Weekly article on “the future of [some] publishing.”) Our friends at Snarkmarket want to take you to 2020, and have a cool sounding panel focusing more on the actual gadgetry of reading. Great discussion on their blog. I’m also super excited about Erin Donovan’s panel for SXSW film: “Animating Reality: The New Frontier for Documentary”. If you aren’t listening to her weekly podcast Steady Diet of Film, I don’t know what your ears are doing.
This month, I needed to get some distractions out of my system but now the blog should be back on schedule (albeit, a relaxed, summer schedule.) What are you doing reading blogs in July anyway? Here are some things I missed in the meantime: Simon Critchley’s American Apparel ad, Bradgelina love road trips and Taco Bell, Metacritique, RIP Phyllis Gotlieb, Brian Baker “Interactive Architecture” series on Ballardian, Andrew Zornoza very great summer reading list. His book “Where I Stay” is lovely. “Love, Virtually,” Virgina Heffernan at her best, Anna Kavan’s New Zealand (”Kavan’s writing is really an equal to Katherine Mansfield at her best. It shares a crystalline quality, a hypnotic otherness which may have come from her heroin addiction but translates, on the page, into prose completely unlike anything..”), Paddy Johnson on fan production in the art world, The Dark Side of Scrabble, The Art of Juliet Jacobson, Karen Archey’s favorite links, Zaha Hadid’s Bach performance space Manchester Art Gallery, where “Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism” is opening in a couple months (which I plan on checking out, when I’m in the UK for the Frieze Art Fair), Emily Gould on Millionaire Matchmaker, and this: “The idea behind this performance is simple: I install a bed in a gallery or other performance-friendly public space, and stay in it until somebody gives me $10,000 dollars (or I am struck by lightning, whichever comes first)” (via.)
Death of a Dystopian, my article on the life and work of J. G. Ballard is up on Reason. “His writing is obsessed with the territories where the organic meets the inorganic; it is absurdist, bleak, vivid, and awake to the psychological effects of media and manmade landscapes. In the words of the novelist Martin Amis, ‘Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different—a disused—part of the reader’s brain.’”
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