Laurie Taylor Column

According to a new website, booksofcourse.com, one in ten books recommended to students by academic tutors is impossible to find - The Times Higher, April 21

University of Poppleton

Department of Media and Cultural Studies Summer term reading list for Understanding Cultural Studies

*** Absolutely essential

** Pretty essential

* Quite essential

** Petula Clark. I Couldn't Live without Your Love: My Own Story . About 1969.

*** G. Lapping. Put Your Glad Rags On? A distinguished academic analyses the recent outbreak of cinema violence prompted by the film Rock around the Clock . "Should Catholics be worried?" Catholic Herald . Late summer 1956.

*** Ted Odgers and Gordon Lapping. Seize Control of the Principal Organs of Mass Communication - NOW . Big Red Torch . Volume One. Number One. May 1968.

* Benjamin Walter. The Art of Work in an Age of Thingy . Very old. 1930s-ish.

** George Melly. Someone borrowed this from me last term and hasn't returned it, but this is the one in which one of Melly's band gets very drunk and urinates down the stairs. (I think the first word of the title may begin with an "O".)

* Marshall McLuhan. The Medium is the Message or The Medium is the Massage (this is confusing because he says one thing in the book and then says the other thing in the title). Anyway, it's round about the 1960s.

** Fred Inglis. Media Theory: An Introduction . I can't really remember the year of this one, but it's got a sort of Pop Art picture on the front, with a Mr Atlas figure holding a tennis racket in the middle of a normal sitting-room. Don't bother with chapter two.

*** Gordon Lapping. "My favourite film of all time: A local man explains why he never gets tired of watching Barbarella ". Poppleton Evening Press .

July 21, 1974. (On the page next to the big advert for Cyril Lord carpets.)