The essays in this book were originally published or presented as follows:
“Meteomedia, or Why London’s Weather Is in the Middle of Everything” was published in London from Punk to Blair, edited by Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (London: Reaktion Press, 2003).
“Why Ulysses Matters” was delivered as a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2013 and published under the title “Ulysses and Its Wake” in the London Review of Books (June 19, 2014).
“Kool Thing, or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” was published in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, edited by Peter Wild (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2008), which was published in the United States as Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, edited by Peter Wild (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).
“Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Tell Us About Literature” was published under the title “Writing Machines” in the London Review of Books (December 18, 2014).
“Tristram Shandy: On Balls and Planes” was published as the introduction to Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (New York: Vintage, 2013).
“Recessional, or the Time of the Hammer” was delivered as a lecture at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, in 2015, then published as Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer (Chicago: Diaphanes Press, 2016).
“Blurring the Sublime: On Gerhard Richter” was published under the title “Blurred Visionary: Gerhard Richter’s Photo-Paintings” in The Guardian (September 22, 2011).
“The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch” was delivered as a lecture at Tate Modern, London, in 2009, and published in slightly different form as “His Dark Materials” in the New Statesman (January 8, 2010).
“From Feedback to Reflux: Kafka’s Cybernetics of Revolt” was published as the introduction to Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Vintage, 2015).
“The Geometry of the Pressant” was published as the introduction to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, translated by Richard Howard (Richmond, UK: Alma Books, 2008), and reprinted in Artforum (Summer 2008).
“Stabbing the Olive: Jean-Philippe Toussaint” was published in the London Review of Books (February 11, 2010).
“On Dodgem Jockeys” was first broadcast on the BBC radio program The Verb (September 23, 2011), then published in The Believer (May 2012).
“Nothing Will Have Taken Place Except the Place” was delivered as a lecture at the Royal College of Art, London, and at Notre Dame University, Indiana, in 2015.
“18 Semiconnected Thoughts on Michel de Certeau, On Kawara, Fly Fishing, and Various Other Things” was published in On Kawara—Silence, the catalogue accompanying the Guggenheim exhibit of the same name at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2015.
“Kathy Acker’s Infidel Heteroglossia” was delivered as a lecture at the Center for Fiction, New York, May 9, 2017.