Amodern 1: The Future of the Scholarly Journal (2013)

Amodern is a new peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journal devoted to the study of media, culture, and poetics. Its first issue is devoted to a critical conversation about the future of the scholarly journal.

With contributions by Scott Pound, Michael Nardone and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Scott Pound and Jerome J. McGann, Johanna Drucker, Benjamin J. Robertson, Gary Genosko, and Nick Montfort.

Editors: Scott Pound, Darren Wershler
Managing Editor: Michael Nardone
Publisher Concordia University and Lakehead University, February 2013

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Thomas Pynchon: Bleeding Edge (2013)

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but theres no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of whats left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethicscarry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into peoples bank accountswithout having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working momtwo boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhoodtill Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitlers aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where weve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

Publisher Penguin, 2013
ISBN 0698142683, 9780698142688
496 pages
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Review (Evgeny Morozov, Frankfurter Allgemeine)
Review (Justin St. Clair, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Review (Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times)
Review (Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal)
Review (Tim Martin, The Telegraph)
Review (Gary Lippman, The Paris Review)

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Arndt Niebisch: Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication (2012)

“The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century inhabited the media discourses of their time like parasites, constantly irritating and taking from them. Dadaists ripped images of a mechanically reproduced world out of newspapers and magazines and reassembled them in their collages. Futurists instrumentalized the brevity of telegraph messages for their free word poetics. Artists such as F.T. Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo constantly abused existing media technologies and hijacked public communication. This study traces these subversive tactics from avant-garde poetry to media technological experiments with radio tubes.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Avant-Gardes in Performance series
ISBN 1137276851, 9781137276858
250 pages

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