Possible worlds

This book is about waste and its inevitability in human culture and society.

Waste could be said to be one of the universal conditions of human existence, albeit one most often kept at bay or on the fringes of awareness. Waste: On the Limits of Human Life looks at its subject within the long perspective necessary to come to terms with how it has existed as a shapeshifting presence that seems to attach itself to human life at every turn, in every age and epoch.

Reaktion Books (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

‘Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself excels in its understanding of how the music is characterized by its unique relationship to time, its seizing of the moment as an existential act.’ - Los Angeles Review of Books.

In the fifties, when rock ‘n’ roll first burst into life the shockwaves reverberated around the world, aided by the images of untamed youth brought to life on screen. But for rock's performers showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. That world was blown apart by the events of the sixties and the decades that followed …

Reaktion Books (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar probes the nature of a phenomenon we all too easily associate with inner, mental life, and reveals it to be both the source and consequence of the ways we are always remaking the external world as our home.

‘Scanlan argues that the digital revolution and . . . the surfeit of available past experience [it produces] threatens to overwhelm the present […] Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar poses a challenge to connect historical accounts of the reductive focus on individual memory as recall in the neurosciences to these broader sociocultural meanings of memory.’ — Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2015.

Reaktion Books (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

‘There is such a fine Montaignesque scope to On Garbage ... [a] little masterpiece ... Scanlan [is] an essayist of the first order […] for those who wonder how the species that rises to the horrendous occasions of September 11, 2001, or the recent tsunami, searching for body parts at Fresh Kills Landfill or sorting through corpses for signs of life; how the same human kind could look away from famine and holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur, Scanlan’s inquiries cast some light among the shadows in the dark. Like a wide-eyed miner up from the underworld, what he tenders in On Garbage looks like gold.' — Thomas Lynch, The Times

Reaktion Books (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

The Reverb series offers a new perspective on the significance of music through a wider cultural and historical understanding of particular times and places. By focusing on the relationship between artists, performers, music and place—rather than strictly biographical or chronological histories—the series allows writers with backgrounds in music writing, social and cultural history, ethnomusicology, literary studies, philosophy, and geography to write books that reveal the ways in which music has, in a variety of genres and traditions, expressed a strong sense of place.

Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine analyzes the events surrounding the emergence, the eventful career and the subsquent implosion of the Sex Pistols in a manner that could be said to provide an instance of what cultural historian Robert Darnton labelled 'incident analysis'. The book draws on accounts of events as understood by participants at the time, relating it as a story – as against much post-hoc rationalising or culture industry representations made decades after the fact about what the Pistols 'meant' – to reveal the growing conflict between the artistic ambitions of two principal actors, Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon, who held divergent ideas about who and what the Sex Pistols were.

Reaktion Books (UK, 2016)
University of Chicago Press (US, 2017)

‘John Scanlan delivers a beautifully rich and finely researched account of how Americas endless highway has influenced and manifested itself in key artists work . . . Scanlan draws from known documentation but displays an innate feel for his subject as he throws up insightful theories about the more direct times before social media, when artists could be covered at close range by chroniclers of the time . . . It’s rare to find a tome which makes you ponder then punch the air in agreement but this highly recommended work is as much an endangered species as its subjects.’ — Kris Needs, Record Collector

Reaktion Books (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock’n’roll follows one band’s pursuit of the art of artlessness, and explores how they came to characterise ‘Zen California’ ...

'Making unlikely connections between Van Halen and movements as seemingly remote as the Beats and Bebop, Scanlan convincingly makes the case that the relationship between Roth and Eddie Van Halen reveals something of the essence of California . . . it is a tale concerned with the "art of artlessness", and the importance that living in the now had always assumed in the culture of California.' — Dagens Næringsliv's D2 Magazine

Reaktion (UK)
University of Chicago Press (US)

George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time elaborates an idea of “aesthetic fatigue” that might serve to encapsulate much of what, in this volume, seems to be characteristic of waste — its relation to time, to energy, to modernity’s desire for evermore perfect designs and forms of living — and to why we discard the past and the stuff that once adorned our world.

Overfamiliarity, Kubler suggests, makes us tired of the way the world looks; it makes the world itself look tired. “Waste,” as this book aims to show, is a multifaceted phenomenon …