Monday, April 12, 2004
(9:24 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Quick Questions
Looking through my library, I realized that I have books in series whose titles I can't quite decipher:
- Cultural Memory in the Present
- Meridian Crossing Aesthetics
- Post-Contemporary Interventions
- Thinking in Action
Most of these titles seem to be adequately translatable by the phrase: "an excuse to charge you $20 for a 100-page book."
Sometimes, series actually make sense, like the Wo es war series that published a lot of Zizek's earlier stuff, or maybe IU's religion and postmodernism series -- but those series just end up drifting off into nowhere, with books promised and never delivered. (And I really wanted to read Mladen Dolar's Lacanian reading of Phenomenology of Spirit, damn it!) Those series of "books that cost way too fucking much and don't even have a name index," however, just keep churning them out month after month.
Just for the sake of claiming the name: after the semester is over, I fully intend to do a series of blogposts on "Cultural Amnesia in the Future." Unlike Stanford University Press, I also fully intend to have some kind of theme uniting those posts, aside from the fact that they are written by a Big Name such as myself.
