Mikita Brottman is an author, psychoanalyst, and chair of the humanities program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. Her book, The Solitary Vice, was published as a PopMatters imprint in 2008 (see 1 of 3 excerpts here). She lives in Ojai, California. Her website is available here.
Features
Friday, June 20 2008
The Solitary Vice: Has Reading Really Made You a Better Person?
In this third excerpt of PopMatters' first book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, by Mikita Brottman, Brottman tells us about the dark, pathological side of reading.
Wednesday, May 14 2008
The Solitary Vice: You Can Always Watch the Movie, Instead
In this second excerpt of PopMatters' first book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Mikita Brottman suggests an easy out when you don’t want to read the book.
Monday, April 7 2008
The Solitary Vice: Remove the 'Guilt' from 'Guilty Pleasures'
PopMatters unveils its first book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, by Mikita Brottman, in this first excerpt and author interview. Brottman wonders, Just what's so great about reading, anyway?
Friday, March 21 2008
In Print and In Conversation: Rocco Versaci
Surprising though it may be to PopMatters readers, there are those who still feel that a taste for comic books is a sign of arrested development, or wasted youth.
Columns
Wednesday, July 8 2009
The Curse of Monkey-Eared People
Nothing like a new iPhone to make one feel self-conscious about one’s ears.
Tuesday, April 21 2009
The Special Bus
Esotouric offers the connoisseur of crime a selection of tours round the infamous hot-spots of L.A’s darkest neighborhoods.
Wednesday, May 28 2008
Surton Girls
The girls collected in Surton's photographs evoke butterflies pinned to a board in the dusty attic of a lonely lepidopterist.
Tuesday, May 6 2008
E-mails from the Dead
Like a cyber séance, of sorts, these Internet services have become a means for the dead to speak to the living.
Wednesday, March 26 2008
Customer Feedback
Some Amazon buyers serve as "culture jammers", expressing their contempt for advertisers through simple acts of creative customer feedback.
Reviews
Wednesday, March 19 2008
Sway by Zachary Lazar
Reading this book is like taking a ride a dark, scary ghost train. Only in retrospect can you look back and see where you’ve been.
Thursday, January 31 2008
The Executioners Bible by Steve Fielding
Hanging people is a messy business, and most of those in the trade, however eager they may have been to take the job at first, before long would be traumatized by the scenes they were forced to witness and take part in.
Thursday, January 3 2008
Sleaze Artists by Jeffrey Sconce
It must surely be daunting for any young film scholar with an interest in trash to come face to face with the volume of academic work that’s been done on once-disreputable movies.
Wednesday, December 12 2007
The Gothic by Gilda Williams
As this volume makes clear, there's nothing new about the Gothic culture, which goes back, well, to the Goths.
Thursday, September 20 2007
Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum
An exhaustive, exhausting exploration, evisceration, analysis and autopsy of the author’s obsession with the phenomenon of the hotel, both edifice and state of mind.
