My holiday reading consisted of wading my way (almost!) through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s massive book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). I like the book and I like their argument and I’m hoping that it spurs a wide ranging discussion of how our views of the past shape how… Read More →
This weekend I read Rachael Graff’s Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (2020). This is obviously a book that I should have read about a year ago, but for some odd reason, did not. I really enjoyed the book and admired Graff’s ability to balance between intimate and… Read More →
This weekend, I read Warren Ellis’s Nina Simone’s Gum. My punk archaeology buddy Kostis Kourelis sent it to me as a holiday gift and for that I’m immeasurably grateful. It’s really a genius book and one full of such unguarded earnestness and emotion that I’ve decided to add it to my class on things next… Read More →
This weekend, I finished Scott W. Schwartz’s new book, The Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape (2022). It’s really good and offers as compelling a contemporary critique of number and “numeracy” as anything that I’ve read in recent years. In fact, it will help me bring together some of my illformed ideas about how “slow… Read More →
This weekend (literally 5 minutes ago!), I read Shannon Lee Dawdy’s latest book: American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton 2021). The book is good, as one might expect from one of the most well-known and respected archaeologists of the 21st century, but I will admit that the book was not quite what… Read More →
This weekend I read Nicole M. Flores’s book The Aesthetics of Solidarity: Our Lady of Guadalupe and American Democracy (Georgetown 2021) and was absolutely captivated. What drew me to the book was the question of what might happen to the empty pedestals standing in public spaces now that the various statues have been removed. The… Read More →
This past weekend, I read After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics edited by Bjørnar J. Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, and Þóra Pétursdóttir. The entire book is worth a perusal, if you’re familiar with the work of the editors and their typical host of collaborators and colleagues. I want to focus on two specific parts of the book… Read More →
I’m running a little mini-seminar (not even a normal-sized mini-seminar!) on Late Antique and Byzantine history and hagiography this fall for a single student in the English department (“o tempora! o mores!” as the kids say). As I fumble around trying to get up to speed with my own reading in this area, I figured Anthony Kaldellis’s recent book… Read More →
This weekend, I read Rosemary Joyce’s The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material (2020). It’s a pretty good book and I’ll almost certainly add it to my syllabus for the course I want to teach in the spring on “Things” (or something similar).… Read More →
Last week, I listened to my first audiobook: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. It was lavishly produced (I think) and featured numerous actors and accents to enliven a story with a genuinely global reach. It is worth reading (or listening to). The book tells the story of climate change the role of… Read More →
This week, I’m vacationing in Florida with my family and it seemed like a good time to read Jason Vuic’s new book, The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream (UNC 2021). Some readers of my blog might remember my long-standing fascination with the huge platted communities here in Florida. Places like Cape Coral,… Read More →
Over the weekend, I read Cal Flyn’s delightful Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (Viking 2021). I read it, in part, because about five people recommended it to me and, in part, because it felt like the kind of quality non-academic non-fiction that maybe could appear in a class that I might teach in the spring:… Read More →
Yesterday, I began to work on a little review essay that considers some of recent work on Sun Ra including last year’s Arkestra album Swirling, the re-release of Sun Ra’s 1979 classic Languidity, and the recordings from the Arkestra’s 1971 tour of Egypt. Today, I turn to William Sites’ book Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (Chicago 2020) as a… Read More →
I’ve reached the point of the summer when all my projects seem to melt together into chaotic ball of deadlines, half-met expectations, and long bikes rides. Needless to say, it has not been very productive. At the same time, I am having fun thinking about things to blog about and then stretching my morning blogging… Read More →
