Interview with Aaron Barlow, Author of Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes

Aaron Barlow earned his PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 1988 with a dissertation on the fiction of Philip K. Dick.  He returned from the Peace Corps (Togo, 1988-1990) to found (with another former PCV) and run Shakespeare's Sister, a café and store in Brooklyn, New York. In 2001, he returned to teaching. 

A specialist on the intersection of technology and culture, Barlow has written two books on New Media (with a focus on blogging) and two on film, including Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes. As a teacher, he is extremely interested in moving formal learning beyond classroom walls, integrating the university and the world, making the ivory tower a quaint, old-fashioned concept.

Trained as a printer and a reporter, Barlow edited a small monthly tabloid newspaper, Chinook Winds, for a number of years in the early eighties. He has written for a variety of venues, though he has concentrated on writing for the Internet since the mid-nineties, both as a blogger and as a contributor to online journals. Though he is a peer-reviewer for several academic journals, he advocates for a new, Web-based, open model of scholarly discussion.

Barlow is currently writing (with Robert Leston) Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children for Praeger.  This is the third and final book in a series that began with his book The Rise of the Blogosphere and that was followed by Blogging America: The New Public Sphere, which he also wrote.  He is also editing Star Power: Celebrity Rule in New Hollywood, a three-volume set of essays to be published by Praeger.

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two dogs and two cats, and will start his fifth year this fall teaching at New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York.  He teaches Composition, Literature, Journalism, and Technical Writing. He took a break from his obviously busy schedule to speak with me by phone last Saturday morning.  We talked about his latest book, Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes, Tarantino, violence in the movies and the current state of the ongoing debate over the influence of violence in movies.

Tell me about the evolution of this project and how you got involved.

My editor at Praeger (Dan Harmon)  had been assigned to edit the  modern filmmakers series. My first book with them was on the development of technology for home viewing of movies, the DVD revolution.  I wanted to get back to writing about film, and I talked to Dan about what directors he needed stories on and which ones I'd be interested in. The one I was most interested in turned out to be the one he was interested in and that's how it happened. 

Article Author: FCEtier

FCEtier is a husband, father, grandfather, pharmacist, photographer, blogger, and high school football official who was born in Louisiana. He spent most of his adult life in Baton Rouge, eventually splitting his time between Baton Rouge and Gulfport, Mississippi. …

Visit FCEtier's author page — FCEtier's Blog