jamesjbrownjr.net English professor Teaches and studies rhetoric and digital studies Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center (DiSC): digitalstudies.camden.rutgers.edu
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48% complete! Jim Brown has read 34 of 70 books.
This is a detailed study of Mobile Image, an artist group that built innovative projects using telecommunications in the 1980s and 1990s. Super detailed account of their experiments with satellite technology, videoconferencing, BBSs.
Most importantly, if you've seen the hullabaloo about the "portal" in NYC, you should know that Mobile Image built that in 1980 - a live, synchronous video connection between LA and NYC. It was called A Hole in Space and there's footage on YouTube.
Leigh's upbringing in Rotterdam revolved around her fascination with the waterfront, which served as a sanctuary from her troubled family …
Kathy, a clone about to donate all her organs and die, reflects on her past about her school and the …
This is the second of Ishiguro's I've read (the other was Klara and the Sun), and I'm struck with how much his characters love to revel in tedium. In this book, it's done to comedic effect often (since the narrator is obsessed with the details of what makes a "good butler" or what counts as "dignity"). But it then surprisingly dips into a love story and Nazi sympathizers. The book is deep in the weeds of something that seems ridiculous while all of these other more important things are happening around the edges. In the end, it works.
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid …
No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed …
No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, his most famous novel …
The introduction to my edition says that the third part of this book was initially its own thing, and that makes a lot of sense. The first two parts of the book offer a kind of nest for the last part of the narrative.
An intergenerational story, which seems to be a trend in the 20th Century Japanese fiction I've read. Bleak also...kind of another trend. I have tended to link both of those things to WWII, but this one was published in 1914, so that theory doesn't hold up.
From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing …
From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a …
I bought this book because Jeff VanderMeer blurbed it. It was not what I expected. All the issues with tech (AI, privacy, virality, inequity and inequality, the difficulties of parenting in a world of devices) are right on the surface. The book reads like YA fiction, but it doesn't appear to be marketed that way. I skimmed through to the end to figure out the narrative payoff, but mostly this book just wasn't what I was expecting.
From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing …
