Thomas Swiss

That's me in the spotlight: Rock autobiographies

Autobiographies: the contemporary catalogue is huge and bookstore shelves are heavy with the weight of life-stories. Ex-Presidents, actors, cooks, criminals, Nobel prize winners, preachers, poets and CEOs all write them. Rock stars write them, too – ‘marquee names’ like Tina Turner, Melissa Etheridge, Grace Slick, and Meatloaf, but also minor figures such as Dallas Taylor, the former drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And plenty of others, including – to name just a handful – Chuck Berry, Ronnie Spector, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, both Ray and Dave Davies, Dee Dee Ramone, Martha Reeves, Eric Burdon, and John Cale.

The Pleasures of Collaboration

New media literature — composed, disseminated, and read on computers— exists in various configurations. Many of these digital “events” (to borrow a term from Kathryn Hayles) are kinetic, visual, written, and sounded, published in online journals and stored eventually in archives. Unlike mainstream print literature, which typically assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media literature assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. In the case of new media poetry, the work sometimes remediates procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, while contributing to an emergent poetics.

Zombies. children of zombies

This piece about homelessness and homeless students experiments with the form of the essay. Unlike most academic writing, it does not proceed in traditionally linear fashion and does not make an explicit argument. Instead, it engages the contingent, the associative, and the intertextual by linking various items, including newspaper reports, school documents, television images, song lyrics, academic writing, and other materials I’ve collected in the last few years. It does so in part because I believe a fragmented approach to writing mirrors my topic: the fragmented lives of the homeless and of homeless students. Among my tutor texts for this approach to academic writing are John Law’s book, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research; Roland Barthes’ late work, in which he deploys fragments as a series of interruptions with cumulative intellectual and aesthetic surprises; and contemporary practices of remixing, in which digital media content is drawn from preexisting sources to create a new work. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33:3–27, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2011.550186