Skateboard (Object Lessons) Paperback – September 8, 2022 by Jonathan Russell Clark (Author), Christopher Schaberg (Series Editor), Ian Bogost (Series Editor)
$14.95

Skateboard

Brand: Bloomsbury Academic
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic (September 8, 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 150136748X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1501367489

 

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Review

“Skateboard is zippy, poetic, and playful, yet grounded in history. And what a fascinating history it is! Clark moves with great and joyful agility between his profiles of pro-skaters and his meditations on the technologies that transformed skateboarding from a hobby into an artform.” ―Merve Emre, Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK, and contributing writer at The New Yorker

About the Author

Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and critic living in the United States. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (2018), a study of
Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, The Atlantic, Vulture, Rolling Stone, Literary Hub, New Republic, The Columbus Dispatch, LA Review of Books, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and numerous others. He has an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA. He has been a theater critic in Boston, a co-founder of a shadow puppet theater company, and a guitarist in a gypsy jazz band. He has skateboarded for 25 years.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013) and The End of Airports (2015) and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.

Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. Bogost is author or co-author of seven books: Unit Operations (2006), Persuasive Games (2007), Racing the Beam ( 2009), Newsgames (2010), How To Do Things with Videogames (2011), Alien Phenomenology (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and 10 PRINT CHR (205.5+RND(1)); : Goto 10 (2012). Bogost also creates videogames that cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally. His game A Slow Year, a collection of game poems for Atari, won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 Indiecade Festival.