Phone Booth

by Ariana Kelly, Christopher Schaberg (Editor), Ian Bogost (Editor)

Overview

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

The phone booth exists as a fond but distant memory for some people, and as a strange and dysfunctional waste of space for many more. Ariana Kelly approaches the phone booth as an entity that embodies diverse attitudes about privacy, freedom, power, sanctuary, and communication in its various forms all around the world. Through portrayals of phone booths in literature, film, personal narrative, philosophy, and religion, Phone Booth offers a definitive account of an object on the cusp of obsolescence.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628924091
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/24/2015
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ariana Kelly is a freelance writer and educator. She teaches English literature and comparative religion at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, California, USA, and has written for, among other publications, The L.A. Review of Books and Salon.

Table of Contents

1. Disconnected
2. Hermit's Hut
3. Our Speed
4. The Phantom Phone Booth
5. Say Anything
6. Fortress of Solitude
7. Significant Portals
8. A Fine and Private Place
9. Glass Case of Emotion
10. The God Booth
11. Only Connect

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

An entertaining and enlightening exploration of the cultural history of the phone booth and a lament for the loss of these spaces.” - WPR: BETA

"In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation-hanging wires and scratched glass-to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout." —Johanna Drucker, Professor of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

"Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way." —Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USA, and author of The Telephone Book

"The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you've read a few of these, you'll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: 'I wonder what the story is behind this thing?'"—Steven Johnson, best-selling author of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

"The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a collection of "mini object-lessons", brief essays that take a deeper look at things we generally only glance upon ('Is bread toast only insofar as a human toaster perceives it to be "done?" Is bread toast when it reaches some specific level of nonenzymatic browning?'). More substantive is Bloomsbury's collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth." —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

From the Publisher

Fascinated and attuned, I was cabled into Phone Booth. Ariana Kelly replenishes the work on speculative telephony in an altogether compelling way.

Avital Ronell

In this delightful set of mini-essays, Ariana Kelly has created a paen, rather than an elegy, in celebration of the many dimensions of the vanishing phone booth. Her text gleans images and sensations from our collective memory of the once (if briefly) ubiquitous structure. Site of superhero transformations, crimes, communications, quick changes, and other coins of the social realm, the phone booth and the kiosk served as small theaters of intimate activity in full view of the public eye, a curious combination of enclosed and exposed space. She shifts scale from the minutiae of physical observation-hanging wires and scratched glass-to the larger cultural issues of communication and longing, mixing personal experience with historical, literary, and film references throughout.

Johanna Drucker