Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Published: 08/24/2023

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the[…]

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion

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Published: 07/08/2021

Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: An Actual Occasion is the third in a series of three novellas emerging from a writing practice that taps the cusp of consciousness between dreaming and waking. An Actual Occasion revisits the viral transitioning of the becoming rat-woman from Last Year at Betty and Bob’s: A Novelty (vol. 1 in[…]

Cinema’s Doppelgängers

Published: 06/17/2021

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema — or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the[…]

Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 2: The Contest between B-Genres

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Published: 11/24/2020

In The Contest between B-Genres, the “Space Trilogy” by J.R.R. Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis and the roster of American science fictions that Gotthard Günther selected and glossed for the German readership in 1952 demarcate the ring in which the contestants face off. In carrying out in fiction the joust that Tolkien proclaimed in[…]

’Pataphilology: An Irreader

Published: 11/19/2018

1883. Jean-Pierre Brisset realizes that a close phonological analysis of spoken words will demonstrate that the French language, and therefore the human species, was evolved from frogs. 1896. Consulted as an expert in linguistics and comparative philology, Ferdinand de Saussure reports that the passages of Martian Language transcribed during the “sonambulistic glossolalias” of one (pseudonymously[…]