I would put something here but all the relevant info is on the main page, and I like to be concise! My linkdump has most of my internet presences, also.
Mostly on McSweeney’s!
A blog for my academic ideas, more or less.
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Theme: Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan
I am an architect, currently living between Milwaukee, WI and Kolkata, India and own a firm called Research Design Office.
I am a long time McSweeney’s reader – receiving a postcard from David Eggers asking if I’d like to buy the first issue. Which I did and have never looked back.
Today I stumbled across your blog and started wondering, if McSweeney’s was an architectural firm, what would it look like. I started thinking about what made McSweeney’s possible – why does it exist. As an incubator for bright young writers and an “end around” on the normal (expensive and long schedules) publishing process. Trying to map some ways in which architecture is “broken” and see what analogies can be drawn.
Interested to hear what you think makes McSweeney’s… well, McSweeney’s.
Regards,
Brook Louis Meier
Hi Brook, thanks for your comment. My research is trying to understand basically that, what makes McSweeney’s McSweeney’s. And more generally how social/cultural/artistic movements work, and thinking about what we’re seeing in the 21st century with the involvement of the internet and the changing role of ‘real-world’ institutions makes our cultural moment unique. Some strange interactions.
The kind of model I like to think about just now is McSweeney’s as a locus, a site to organise certain tendencies of literary/artistic communities. But then there’s lots of other stuff associated with brand/identity that I’m wrestling with. In a lot of ways it resists being pinned down, but in other ways it has a very fixed and stereotyped existence, that it can be a shorthand for a kind of cultural experience. The literary and design worlds meet in such interesting ways in McSweeney’s, and this is I think where the meat of my research is.
Dear Kevin,
I think you would find the interests and work of a writer named Matthew Stadler in Portland OR of interest. He has written about the subjects covered in your blog, and of similar interest to your work. He was the founding editor for Clear Cut Press, and is currently working on a project called suddenly.org. I enjoy your blog by the way. Thanks, Matt
Hi Matt, thanks for the tip! I’ll look into him, yet another (welcome) expansion of my research…
Dear Kevin, have to say I really like your blog.. it even looks a bit like mine!
Glad to see a fellow literary design fan here in London – are you aware of Five Dials, something conceptually similar(ish) to McScweeney’s?