Reading at Assemble March 27

I am quite pleased to announce that, for the first time in quite a while, I will be reading some of my poems at Assemble in Pittsburgh, PA on Thursday, 27 March 2014. The reading has been put on by the Hour After Happy Hour Writing Workshop & Journal. Weenta Girmay, Tyson Himes, Jessica McNally, Jason Peck, and one of my former students, Amy Hayes, will also be reading. I am quite looking forward to sharing some of my recent writing with an audience. It has been far too long.

Spring Semester 2014

In two days I start a new semester teaching three classes I am very much looking forward to at the University of Pittsburgh: Reading Poetry (ENGLIT 0315), Narrative and Technology (ENGLIT 0399), and Introduction to Critical Reading (ENGLIT 0500). The links on the last two classes take you to the class blogs. I am especially excited for Introduction to Critical Reading, as I will be teaching Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) for the first time. “A screaming comes across the sky.” I cannot wait.

The Hyperarchival Parallax Turns Five

Today marks the fifth anniversary of The Hyperarchival Parallax: Making Eschatological Anxiety Fun for 4000 Years. Somehow I have been at this for five years! I started from a relatively modest place, where I really didn’t have a coherent idea of what I was doing, why I was doing it, or how I would proceed. Since that first strange post, this blog has become, over these five long years, years in which much has happened to me as a scholar and writer, something much, much more (or at least I would like to think). I thank you for continuing to read and frequent my site. This year I have gotten more “followers” than in the previous four combined. I hope this is an indication that people like what I do here. I’m going to continue. And for at least another five years I hope to continue to map the intersections between disaster and archives. And as I will (hopefully) complete my current project on such things in the next year or so, I look forward to being able to also take this blog in other directions, perhaps even one day inviting others to contribute, turning it into something maybe a bit more ambitious.

But for now, this is also to acknowledge that I have been shirking my duties. I have been quite busy with professional matters, working on essays, writing conference papers, and most of all teaching 3 enjoyable, if time-consuming classes. (Here’s the blog to one that is just wrapping up.) So I haven’t had much time to post new content recently, and have not even posted many links. I will hope to rectify this in the coming weeks, as a major amount of work is now in my rear-view mirror. I will empty out my backlog of links (that is sitting dormant in a folder on my browser). In the coming weeks I will post a recent conference paper that I’ve been threatening to put up but haven’t yet (my discussion of The Manhattan Projects [2012- ]). And I hope to be putting up considerably more original content in the coming year.

So thank you again for reading. And here’s to five more years of The Hyperarchival Parallax.

Fall 2013

Here are .pdfs of syllabi for classes I will be teaching this fall at the University of Pittsburgh:

Reading Poetry (ENGLIT 0315)–“American Poeisis: Imagining the Twentieth Century”

Introduction to Critical Reading (ENGLIT 0500)–“Light and Darkness in the Twentieth Century”

Narrative and Technology (ENGLIT 0399)–“Narrating Nuclear, Information, and Biological Technology”

And my Narrative and Technology students will be keeping a class blog. Check it out here.