Miscellanea

essays etc. on this and that, for this and that

the (vapor)wave of the Future

The 2010's saw the birth of the first purely Internet-based music genre: Vaporwave. Though less than a decade old, the genre has already been declared dead -- but, with regard to the social critique innate to Vaporwave (occasionally referred to as 'chillwave for Marxists') I argue that the genre still lives on, precisely because it was never born in the first place.

music from nowhere

Modernism has been difficult to capture with words --  much less an object. However, I believe that the profound shift twentieth-century society felt can be best represented by the musical instrument, the Theremin. The invention, seemingly able to 'pull sound from the aether,' embodied the ethos of a cultural change; the fusion of man and machine, of art and technology.

Saxa Loquuntur 

A comparative analysis of Ha Jin's Ocean of Words and Ghassan Kanafani's Men in The Sun. Both are collections of short stories, respectively dealing with the author's culture's trauma (for Jin, China's Cultural Revolution; for Kanafani, the loss of Palestine) in fictional vignettes. I explore the events that inspired these texts and, with some psychoanalytic consideration, how they effect the authors' content and writing style.