Explores Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” as if it were experienced by many viewers of a particular type — SCM’s: suburban, collegiate young men — as a feeling out of how they might contrive themselves so that their future development would not place them as identifiable as losers by he-men pulp figures they’d learned early represent…[Read more]

Compares how “Treasure Island” and “Charlotte’s Web” demonstrate how protagonist avatars for ourselves establish they truly matter to “parents” who pretend to value them but whose true lack of interest in them as individuals can’t be mistaken. Argues for seeing stories as recognizing the problem of “not being seen” by parents, and as them as…[Read more]

Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

A.M. Klein’s “Political Meeting” as problematic as a poem highlighting and delineating a dangerous orator’s power; as really more on which suggests he’s ensnared, enslaved, by the crowd’s expectations and demands of him to “lead” them into particular fervour.

Explores Elizabeth Daryush’s “Children of wealth in your warm nursery” as of a narrator visiting us to warn us about our possible ill-fate, if we don’t “escape..” The game for the reader is to decide if she’s to be trusted, or not.

Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing” as a poem about re-cooperating from the infliction of a triggering, caustic word upon one’s mental composition, using efficacy, experience in knowing composure and competency, as a rebutting counter.

Explores how Phyllis Webb’s “To Those Who Have Also Considered Suicide” is a poem which mischievously induces the reader to become one of the “friends” who undergo the “initiation” of suicide. The reader is encouraged to let go any grievance, however, in consideration of the poet’s successful demonstration of the initiation as involving genuine…[Read more]

Explores a clip of “Blade Runner” as if it were an artifice for suggesting means by which we might find meaning, purpose, in our own world. Decker as extension of ourselves, experimenting, failing… but ultimately succeeding, to discover purpose that is palpable to many of us, in a world we find actively seeking to degrade the possibility of it.

A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

In this article, I examine the nonfunctional harmony of three tunes from the mid-1960s by Wayne Shorter from the perspective of transformational theory. While some transformational approaches to jazz have taken the seventh or ninth chord as the basic unit, I use the more inclusive and abstract concept of a “chord scale” to encompass more of the…[Read more]

This article discuss the ways rhythm changes can be used in music theory instruction.

This chapter proposes an application of topic theory to jazz improvisation. It introduces the concept of a “groove topic” and defines the expressive correlations of a variety of common jazz grooves. The chapter then traces the unfolding groove topics in Miles Davis’s celebrated 1964 solo on “My Funny Valentine.”

This bibliography presents selected sources (mostly in English) at the intersection of music and architecture. Many of the sources approach the relationship between the practices through multiple case studies. Several books focused on particular artists in both disciplines have been included not because those artists are central to the study of…[Read more]