Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press, 2006). His essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Utne Reader, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, and IMAGE, and on-line at Killing the Buddha and Bookslut. He is a staff blogger for IMAGE, and is founder and Director of BLUR: The Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists, a residential summer program for high school artists that focuses on the intersection of landscape and technology.

My scholarly and creative interests hover around cultures of violence, the art of bearing witness, and the connections between poverty and creativity. I am an active member of the Red Lemonade publishing community, a social publishing venture launched by former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash.

Previous to becoming a full-time writer and academic, I was a trombonist for the Johnsons Big Band, an eleven member Pittsburgh-based group whose album Love Taps (and Soft Punches) (2004) enjoyed nationwide radio play and attracted the attention of the legendary front man of The Mekons, Jon Langford, who used The Johnsons as a back-up band on several shows during a US solo tour.

Zizek's book on David Lynch is well worth reading, but I find his most recent The Monstrosity of Christ impenetrable. I'll give it a few years and come back to it.