1997 was the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was also the year after Elvis After Elvis was published. And so I found myself talking about Elvis a lot that year. In August, I gave one version of the talk below in Memphis, at the third (and also, I …
A few months back, I pointed out the outrageous price being charged on Amazon for a “gently used” copy of Stuart Hall’s book, The Hard Road to Renewal. Much as I wanted to (re)add this volume to my library, $3000+ was more than I was willing to pay. A lot …
As I write these words, there is precisely one copy — described as “gently used” — of The Hard Road to Renewal, Stuart Hall’s only solo-authored book, available on Amazon. I’ve noticed this mostly because my copy of Hard Road is among the books that the US Postal Service swallowed …
It’s been a long, Long, LONG time coming. How long? This is a book that Jayne Fargnoli first approached me about writing in 2001. At the time, I was still teaching at the University of South Florida, Blackwell was five years away from being acquired by John Wiley, and the …
New. Paul. Beatty. Novel. OMG. Okay. It looks like I’ll need to wait until March to actually get my hands on The Sellout. But I’ll be counting down the days till then. I’ve already gushed briefly here about Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy Shuffle, and I could do the …
You can find a brief explanation of “Rerun Sunday” here. The post below originally appeared on 26 Apr 2007. Ted Striphas is running a caption contest on his blog involving a photo of a baby holding a book by every toddler’s favorite French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. I’m still working on …
I’m on sabbatical for the 2014-15 academic year, and spending it in Seattle: i.e., 1900 miles away from Minneapolis. Relocating for ~15 months poses a number of logistical problems — most of which I won’t bore you with — but there’s one that I suspect will resonate with many of …
Last week, my friend Ted Striphas (so cool that he has two blogs) stumbled across an Amazon link for my really-really-long-time-coming-but-finally-almost-here book, Why Cultural Studies? and posted some nice words of congratulations about it to Facebook. My friend Kembrew McLeod called it “the cultural studies equivalent of waiting for GnR’s …
If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen some version of the “Ten Books” meme. A friend there tagged me, and I agreed to follow through … but I’d rather do so here. Partially because it’s a way for me to keep up my renewed commitment to blogging regularly, but also …