In this episode of The Neo Historian we are joined by Dr Guy Mankowski to talk about a history of Kristen Pfaff.

Kristen Pfaff was an American musician best known as the bassist for the alternative rock band Hole and the noise rock band Janitor Joe. She was also a backing vocalist for Janitor Joe and contributed to Hole's critically acclaimed 1994 album, Live Through This. Pfaff died in 1994 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose, just two months after her close friend Kurt Cobain's suicide.

Guy speaks with us in this episode about Kristen Pfaff's family life, her feminist activism, life in Hole, how she reacted to the death of her friend Kurt Cobain, just six weeks before her own death and how she is remembered today.

I know How to Live: The Life of Kristen Pfaff by Dr Guy Mankowski

With access to her audio diaries, personal notebooks and other archives Guy Mankowski has written a biography of Kristen Pfaff, with the close co-operation of her brother Jason Pfaff and other people who knew Pfaff well. The resulting project title 'I Know How To Live Well' is now a very popular Substack where subscribers can access the biography of the iconic bassist through various mediums.

Dr. Guy Mankowski is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Lincoln School of Creative Arts. His research interests include music writing, particularly depictions of post-punk and subculture. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority.

Read the book on Substack: 'I Know How To Live': The Life of Kristen Pfaff

Dr Guy Mankowski: Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Lincoln

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Guy's Ted Talk: YouTube

Guy's First Appearance on the Podcast: A History of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders

Episode #5: A History of Grunge with Mark Yarm

No Treble: Wonder Women: “I Know How To Live:” The Life of Kristen Pfaff

Hit So Hard: A Memoir by Patty Schemel

Heavier Than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross

Everybody Loves Our Town: A History of Grunge by Mark Yarm

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

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In this episode of The Neo Historian we are joined by Dr Matt Lodder to talk about the history of tattooing as an art form and profession. Matt tells us how tattoos existed in England long before Captain Cook was said to have brought the art form to London, the influence of Yakuza gangs on Japan's Onsen rules and on how a butcher from Wapping tempted 19th century aristocrats to tattoo their own children!

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art by Dr Matt Lodder

The true history of tattoo as both art and profession in the West.

There is a pervasive stereotype of tattoo culture as relating to an underworld of scoundrels, sailors, and ne’er-do-wells, yet it has existed in the West as a professionalized art practice for centuries. Drawing on extensive new research and unprecedented access to largely unpublished private archives of photographs, art, and ephemera, Matt Lodder offers a new perspective on the history of commercial tattooing in Europe and the United States, beginning even before it emerged as a recognizable profession in the mid-nineteenth century. In the process, he shows that the art of tattoo has long been both practiced and commissioned by individuals across economic, gender, and class divides; he also examines the stylistic trends that have shaped tattoo’s development as an art form over its history.

Lodder introduces the many artists and professionals who shaped tattoo history, including early figures like Martin Hildebrandt, the first-known professional tattoo artist in the West; prominent woman artists like Grace Bell and Jessie Knight; mid-twentieth-century icons like Sailor Jerry and Les Skuse and the Bristol Tattoo Club; and contemporary industry stars including Ed Hardy, Davy Jones, and the Leu family. Richly illustrated with rarely published images, this important book is the first to examine the history of tattoo in the west as both a serious profession and an art form.

Dr Matt Lodder is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art History at the University of Essex, and one of the University of Essex' Public Voice Scholars. He teaches European, American and Japanese art, architecture, visual culture and theory from the late 19th century to the present, including modern and contemporary art post-1945, digital and "new media" art, and the intersections between art & politics.

Buy the book: Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art

Dr Matt Lodder: University of Essex Senior Lecturer

Matt Lodder: Instagram

Matt Lodder's Podcast: Beneath the Skin

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Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith

Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn.

All books are, as Stephen King put it, 'a uniquely portable magic'. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form - their 'bookhood' - that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper's Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a 'classic'-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal - and more turbulent - than we tend to imagine.

Emma Smith was born and brought up in Leeds, went unexpectedly to university in Oxford, and never really left. She is now Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller This is Shakespeare. She enjoys silent films, birdwatching, and fast cars.

Buy the book: Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith

Emma Smith: Author profile

Emma Smith: Academic Profile: Hertford College, University of Oxford

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