“Future Projects” is another appropriate title for this page. So many of these papers below are first drafts for what I hope will be completed and published works. Conference organizers do lots of unrewarded labor, so thanks to Nicholas Meriwether and Ken Brandt in particular.
Before the two groups of papers, I include drafts of prefaces for two different books. One is tentatively entitled “Wandering through the Sixties with the Grateful Dead.” The other is “Bohemia America: Richard Henry Dana to Ken Kesey.”
The first group of papers pertains to the study of the Grateful Dead. I hope that these papers will somehow unite and form a book. that is my COVID-19 project. The second group pertains to the study of Jack London. I reworked most of these these for Author under Sail.
Here are two conference papers I delivered at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture conference, one in 2007 and one in 2010. The first discusses three moments of intersection between Frank Zappa and the Grateful Dead and crucial distinctions and overlaps between the 1960s California avant-garde and its bohemia. The second is an attempt to define the group identity of the Grateful Dead. Not simply a question of who could leave the band without the band having to discontinue playing but also, What were their fundamental commitments, their core values without which they would cease to exist?
Here are two papers on Jack London. The first discusses the importance of ghosts in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and London’s “What Socialism Is.” The second establishes the unlikely historical connection between London’s participation in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and It includes a discussion of his essay, “The Intercollegiate Socialist Society,” which I had recently discovered.
Theory Driven 