Synopsis of the Novel, Tar Spackled Banner
A mockumental work of the imagination by J. A. Ellis, Tar Spackled Banner is a 21st-century time-traveler's autobiography. It follows the journey of another Billy Pilgrim lost in a time of fascist violence and succession, discovering the curious esoterics of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and recalling Fyodor Dostoevsky's anti-heroic protagonist's raves in Notes from Underground. Ellis takes the reader on a scripto-visual journey where the Goosestep is even more popular than the Soupyi Shuffle.
About the Author, James R. Hugunin
James Hugunin is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, teaching the History of Photography and Contemporary Theory. He is the author of four experimental novels, two books of art criticism/theory, and numerous artist books. He is the founder and editor of two art journals, The Dumb Ox and U-Turn. In 1983, he won the first Reva and David Logan Award for Distinguished New Writing in Photography from the N.E.A. and The Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA. His publications include Wreck & Ruin: Photography, Temporality, and World (Dis)order (2013), Writing Pictures: Case Studies in Photographic Criticism 1983- 2012 (2013), Elder Physics: The Wrong of Time: Stories from an Elder Home (2013), Something is Crook in Middlebrook (2012), Tar Spackled Banner (2014), Case X (2015), Afterimage: Critical Essays on Photography (2016), Q_A: An Auto-Interview (2017), Finding Mememo: A Book in Search of an Author (2019), and Picky Hunting: A Journal of the Plague Year (2021).