Handmade Books

In my spare time, I am an amateur book designer and maker.  My books are vehicles for digressive thinking and wanderings provoked by my research; crafting them gives me space to think through the management and coordination of form and content in academic worlds. What follows is a curated selection. 

Poetics of Noncontradiction

How do you create a world without contradiction?  What spaces are not programmed in advance by an ambivalent attachment and a self-defeating structure?  Metabolizing Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Paris is Burning (here made into a flip-book gif), Deleuze on Bartleby and Agamben on gesture (here presented as Pale Fire-like footnotes in search of a polemic), and a Steinian reproduction of the “official world,” complete with a text-based computer game coded in Python and inviting you to try and break free from it, this immersive “theory book” practices conceptual architecture and invites wanderings through post-biopolitical landscapes.

A Field Guide to the Affects: A Nonce Taxonomy

Plagiarizing the form (and sometimes the content) of A Field Guide to Mushrooms, this “nonce taxonomy” organizes, visualizes, and discusses each of the affects Spinoza itemized in his Ethics.  I treat affects as topological surfaces: smooth but morphable landscapes on which we wander.  Let this book be your guide to the field.

Logics for Phobics: A Chelsea Manning Handbook

This book merges the content of public discussions by Wikipedia editors on how to identify Chelsea Manning’s gender in articles with the form of the shapes in Euclid’s 6th book of the Elements, on similar figures.  Packaged with a detachable ruler and protractor, students can transform one block of text into another.  Let transphobic text be the materials of your learning figural transformation!  All 33 axioms included!