February 17, 2009

- Read review of Will Straw's Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America in Journal of Visual Culture 7(3). Straw's essay for this book may be interesting, though it focuses on tracing style through production/industry histories. Reviewer notes two books that may be interesting: Tom Cohen's Hitchcock's Cryptonomies (about secret agents?) and True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity -- the latter may be specifically about true crime literature though.

-Started  "Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties" in Shades of Noir. Very interesting connections made btw. American variation of the city mystery genre (Lippard's Quaker City is the prime example) and the romans noirs of the forties. Details about the abandonment of cities and good references for making a case about the specificity of urban modernity to America. 

-Leafing through Routledge's four volume Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies -- nothing too interesting so far. 

- Picked up new-ish architecture anthology The Unknown City. May be interesting.