JOHNCARMODY.COM ★ Full Stack Development + Interactive Design + Teaching ★ Sculpting Order From Chaos

BIO: Just The Facts

Me? Aptitude tests in high school reported I was best suited to be a farmer.

Expelled my senior year from Gonzaga College High School in the District of Columbia, I was a high school drop-out for awhile, living the life of a musician, playing shows and trying to get my bands signed to record contracts.

I was accepted by the Catholic University of America despite having neither a high school diploma nor GED or SAT scores. I made Dean’s List, interned in the United States House of Representatives, and graduated with a BA in American History.

My career afterwards has taken me from managing a software store to database systems management to network administration to network emergency tech to web master to web developer to web designer to university professor.

What’s common to all these aptitudes and roles? Data management and design – the constant in all the information revolutions since Gutenberg.

ONCE IN COLLEGE

Did I mention that I graduated from Gonzaga High School during my junior year at Catholic University?

After that I was an intern in the United States House of Representatives, made Dean's List, & graduated with a BA in American History and a minor in Philosophy.

After college I became a musician & songwriter, which I pursued as a living for a long time. Then I gave it up, utterly.

BACK IN COLLEGE

Currently I am an adjunct professor at Montgomery College, teaching such courses as Advanced Website Development; Fundamentals of Graphic Design; JavaScript, and other courses.

I've been an adjunct professor at George Washington University, teaching graduate, undergraduate and CE students in such courses as Professional Website Development; Interactive Web Design; Layout and Design of the Book, and Frame-By-Frame Animation.

Before that I taught courses in diverse departments & academic disciplines at the (original) Corcoran College of Art + Design.  I was full-time Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Media by the time I left the Corcoran, where I spent 7 years teaching in the BFA Design Department, the New Media Photojournalism graduate program, and the Art History program.

Before that I was a member of the faculty at the Catholic University of America in the Department of Art and the Department of Media Studies.

THESE DAYS

I own a web development / design business - now in its 3rd decade - and work with clients of all types and sizes.

For years I was on the board of the Gonzaga Carmody Open. Founded in 1985, the Carmody Open is a 501(c)3 organization designed to raise scholarship funds for fatherless boys to attend Gonzaga College High School in the District. In its 4th decade, the annual Carmody Open Golf Tournament has raised millions of dollars in scholarship funds.

For years I was a board member of Choices, Inc.  Choices, Inc. was a non-profit organization 501(c)3 for the development of resources for the sexuality education of persons with cognitive challenges and disabilities , as well as their parents, caregivers and staff.

Unplugged Since 1992


For nearly 30 years, I have been studying American heritage while living a pop culture hermitage:

  • no TV
  • no celebrities
  • no radio
  • no sports
  • no crummy music
  • no car
  • no logos
  • no credit cards
  • no debt
  • no cell
  • no smart phone
  • no eBooks
  • no texting
  • no blogging
  • no twitter
  • no blackberry
  • no facebook
  • no video games
  • no consumerist wastage
  • no trends

10 Books Read, 2023

47 Books Read, 2022

  • Relativity

    The Special and General Theory

    Albert Einstein

    1920 -

  • A Distant Mirror

    The Calamitous 14th Century

    Barbara W. Tuchman

    1978 -

  • The Struggle for a Free Europe

    Dean Acheson

    1969 -

  • The Passenger

    Cormac McCarthy

    2022 -

  • Oil

    Upton Sinclair

    1926 -

  • All The Little Live Things

    Wallace Stegner

    1967 -

  • Wired

    Bob Woodward

    1984 -

  • The Flaming Corsage

    William Kennedy

    1996 -

  • The Devil’s Stocking

    Nelson Algren

    1983 -

  • A Visit From The Goon Squad

    Jennifer Egan

    2010 -

  • Herblock At Large

    Herbert Block

    1987 -

  • Born Standing Up

    A Comic's Life

    Steve Martin

    2007 -

  • The Pioneers

    Or, The Sources of the Susquehanna

    James Fenimore Cooper

    1823 -

  • So Long, See You Tomorrow

    William Maxwell

    1980 -

  • The Demon

    Hubert Selby Jr.

    1976 -

  • The New Improved Bob & Ray Book

    Bob Elliott & Ray Goulding

    1986 -

  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem

    Joan Didion

    1968 -

  • The Pregnant Widow

    Martin Amis

    2010 -

  • One Writer’s Beginnings

    Eudora Welty

    1983 -

  • The Great Shark Hunt

    Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

    Hunter S. Thompson

    1979 -

  • Washington Journal

    Watergate: The Events of 1973-1974

    Elizabeth Drew

    1974 -

  • Canada

    Richard Ford

    2012 -

  • American Dreams

    Lost & Found

    Studs Terkel

    1980 -

  • Machiavelli

    Philosopher of Power

    Ross King

    2007 -

  • The Bias of Communication

    Harold A. Innis

    1951 -

  • Redskin Country

    From Baugh to the Super Bowl

    Ken Denlinger & Paul Attner

    1983 -

  • Wise Guy

    Life In A Mafia Family

    Nicholas Pileggi

    1985 -

  • Roughing It

    Mark Twain

    1872 -

  • The Roosevelt I Knew

    Frances Perkins

    1946 -

  • I Married A Communist

    Philip Roth

    1998 -

  • The Voyeur’s Motel

    Gay Talese

    2016 -

  • This Way to the Universe

    A Theoretical Physicist's Journey to the Edge of Reality

    Michael Dine

    2022 -

  • His Excellency George Washington

    Joseph J. Ellis

    2004 -

  • Arrowsmith

    Sinclair Lewis

    1924 -

  • Everything That Moves

    A Documentary Novel

    Budd Schulberg

    1980 -

  • Glitz

    Elmore Leonard

    1985 -

  • America Goes To War

    The Civil War and Its Meaning to Americans Today

    Bruce Catton

    1958 -

  • Hillbilly Elegy

    A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

    J. D. Vance

    2016 -

  • The Roberts Court

    The Struggle For The Constitution

    Marcia Coyle

    2013 -

  • Post Office

    Charles Bukowski

    1971 -

  • Guys and Dolls

    Stories, 1930 - 1944

    Damon Runyon

    1992 -

  • The Great Santini

    Pat Conroy

    1976 -

  • The Loser

    The Confessions of a Compulsive Gambler

    William Hoffman, Jr.

    1968 -

  • Licks of Love

    Short Stories

    John Updike

    2001 -

  • The Secret Man

    The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat

    Bob Woodward

    2006 -

  • Masters of Deceit

    How The Communists Plan To Take Over America

    J. Edgar Hoover

    1958 -

  • The Accidental President

    Harry S Truman And The Four Months That Changed The World

    A. J. Baime

    2017 -

52 Books Read, 2021

  • Marshall McLuhan: Pro & Con

    Raymond Rosenthal, Ed.

    1968 -

  • The Klan Unmasked

    Stetson Kennedy

    1954 -

  • The Art of Cross-Examination

    Francis L. Wellman

    1903 -

  • Coming Of Age

    The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It

    Studs Terkel

    1995 -

  • The Pythons

    Monty Python

    2003 -

  • In The Clap Shack

    William Styron

    1973 -

  • Focus

    Arthur Miller

    1945 -

  • Science Fiction Showcase

    1948-1958

    Mary Kornbluth, Ed.

    1959 -

  • Counter-Clock World

    Philip K. Dick

    1967 -

  • Spying On The South

    An Odyssey Across The American Divide

    Tony Horwitz

    2019 -

  • The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

    Jimmy Breslin

    1969 -

  • I Must Say

    My Life As A Humble Comedy Legend

    Martin Short

    2014 -

  • Watergate

    The Fall of Richard M. Nixon

    Stanley I. Kutler, ed.

    1996 -

  • Very Old Bones

    William Kennedy

    1992 -

  • Hail To The Redskins

    The Glory Days of D.C.'s Football Dynasty

    Adam Lazarus

    2015 -

  • The Naked Ape

    A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

    Desmond Morris

    1967 -

  • The Lost Weekend

    Charles Jackson

    1944 -

  • Brief Answers To The Big Questions

    Stephen Hawking

    2018 -

  • The Disenchanted

    Budd Schulberg

    1950 -

  • Inside Story

    How To Write

    Martin Amis

    2020 -

  • The Shadow-Line

    A Confession

    Joseph Conrad

    1917 -

  • A World Lit Only By Fire

    The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age

    William Manchester

    1992 -

  • Candy

    Terry Southern & Mason Hoffenberg

    1958 -

  • Landfall

    Thomas Mallon

    2019 -

  • Shadow Box

    An Amateur in the Ring

    George Plimpton

    1977 -

  • Reckless

    My Life As A Pretender

    Chrissie Hynde

    2015 -

  • The Long Valley

    John Steinbeck

    1938 -

  • Exit Ghost

    Philip Roth

    2007 -

  • Gone With The Wind

    Margaret Mitchell

    1936 -

  • SCTV

    Behind The Scenes At Second City Television

    Dave Thomas

    1996 -

  • The Korean War

    Dean Acheson

    1969 -

  • The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

    Tom Wolfe

    1968 -

  • Factotum

    Charles Bukowski

    1975 -

  • Life Of Franklin Pierce

    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    1852 -

  • The Silence

    Don DeLillo

    2020 -

  • Sorry For Your Trouble

    Stories

    Richard Ford

    2020 -

  • Poor White

    Sherwood Anderson

    1920 -

  • Recapitulation

    Wallace Stegner

    1979 -

  • Fanny Hill

    or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

    John Cleland

    1749 -

  • Giants

    What I Learned About Life From Vince Lombardi And Tom Landry

    Pat Summerall

    2010 -

  • Rum Punch

    Elmore Leonard

    1992 -

  • The Road

    Jack London

    1907 -

  • Accessory To War

    The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

    Neil DeGrasse Tyson & Avis Lang

    2018 -

  • Cogan’s Trade

    George V. Higgins

    1974 -

  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find

    & Other Stories

    Flannery O'Connor

    1955 -

  • The Long March

    William Styron

    1952 -

  • The Optimist’s Daughter

    Eudora Welty

    1972 -

  • Lolita

    Vladimir Nabokov

    1955 -

  • Around The World In Eighty Days

    Jules Verne

    1873 -

  • Citizen Tom Paine

    Howard Fast

    1943 -

  • Something Deeply Hidden

    Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

    Sean Carroll

    2019 -

  • A Confederacy Of Dunces

    John Kennedy Toole

    1980 -

48 Books Read, 2020

  • The Landscape Of History

    How Historians Map The Past

    John Lewis Gaddis

    2002 -

  • Second Chance

    Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

    Zbigniew Brzezinski

    2007 -

  • The Culture of Time and Space

    1880–1918

    Stephen Kern

    1983 -

  • Movies For The Millions

    An Account of Motion Pictures, Principally in America

    Gilbert Seldes

    1937 -

  • Portnoy’s Complaint

    Philip Roth

    1969 -

  • Walden Two

    B. F. Skinner

    1948 -

  • The Final Days

    Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein

    1976 -

  • Sister Carrie

    Theodore Dreiser

    1900 -

  • War And Peace In The Global Village

    Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore

    1968 -

  • Rabbit At Rest

    John Updike

    1990 -

  • Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

    The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

    Lisa Randall

    2015 -

  • Chicago: City On The Make

    Nelson Algren

    1951 -

  • Picasso

    Gertrude Stein

    1938 -

  • Ironweed

    William Kennedy

    1983 -

  • Some Faces In The Crowd

    Short Stories, 1938-1953

    Budd Schulberg

    1953 -

  • John Brown

    The Making of a Martyr

    Robert Penn Warren

    1928 -

  • Let Me Be Frank With You

    Richard Ford

    2014 -

  • The Mind Of God

    The Scientific Basis For A Rational World

    Paul Davies

    1992 -

  • The Man Who Knew Coolidge

    Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen

    Sinclair Lewis

    1928 -

  • The Conquerors

    Roosevelt, Truman & the Destruction of Hitler's Germany

    Michael Beschloss

    2002 -

  • Strategies For Winning

    A Top Football Coach's Game Plan for Victory

    George Allen

    1990 -

  • Notes From Underground

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    1864 -

  • Jack Benny

    An Intimate Biography

    Irving A. Fein

    1976 -

  • The Names

    Don DeLillo

    1982 -

  • World’s Fair

    E. L. Doctorow

    1985 -

  • A Michener Miscellany

    1950-1970

    James A. Michener

    1973 -

  • Street Without Joy

    The French Debacle In Indochina

    Bernard B. Fall

    1964 -

  • Judgment Day

    James T. Farrell

    1935 -

  • “The Good War”

    An Oral History Of World War II

    Studs Terkel

    1984 -

  • Angle of Repose

    Wallace Stegner

    1971 -

  • Until The End Of Time

    Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

    Brian Greene

    2020 -

  • Rabbit Is Rich

    John Updike

    1981 -

  • Goodbye, Columbus

    And Five Short Stories

    Philip Roth

    1959 -

  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

    An Inquiry Into Values

    Robert M. Pirsig

    1974 -

  • For Our Beloved Country

    American War Diaries from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf

    Ed., Speer Morgan & Greg Michalson

    1994 -

  • Titus Andronicus

    William Shakespeare

    1588 -

  • Civil Disobedience

    Henry David Thoreau

    1849 -

  • The Pit

    A Story of Chicago

    Frank Norris

    1903 -

  • A Reporter’s Life

    Walter Cronkite

    1996 -

  • Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

    And Selected Stories

    Steven Crane

    1893 -

  • The Irish Way

    Becoming American In The Multiethnic City

    James R. Barrett

    2012 -

  • The Fifth Column

    Stories of the Spanish Civil War

    Ernest Hemingway

    1938 -

  • Rabbit Redux

    John Updike

    1971 -

  • Women With Men

    Richard Ford

    1997 -

  • The Supreme Court

    William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court

    1987 -

  • An American Dream

    Norman Mailer

    1964 -

  • The Saddest Summer of Samuel S

    J. P. Donleavy

    1966 -

  • House Of Meetings

    Martin Amis

    2006 -

41 Books Read, 2019

  • Neuroplasticity

    How Our Brains Change In Response To Our Actions

    Moheb Costandi

    2016 -

  • The Wars of Watergate

    The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon

    Stanley I. Kutler

    1990 -

  • Counterblast

    Marshall McLuhan

    1969 -

  • Rome At War

    AD 293 - 696

    Michael Whitby

    2002 -

  • Tortilla Flat

    John Steinbeck

    1935 -

  • Blood Meridian

    Or the Evening Redness in the West

    Cormac McCarthy

    1985 -

  • Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game

    William Kennedy

    1978 -

  • All Those Mornings At The Post

    The 20th Century In Sports

    Shirley Povich

    2005 -

  • White Trash

    John King

    2001 -

  • Daddy’s Boy

    A Son's Shocking Account of Life with a Famous Father

    Chris Elliott with Rebuttals by Bob Elliott

    1989 -

  • Plan of Attack

    The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq

    Bob Woodward

    2004 -

  • Tried By War

    Abraham Lincoln As Commander In Chief

    James M. McPherson

    2008 -

  • Cruising Paradise

    Tales, 1989-1995

    Sam Shepard

    1996 -

  • Elmer Gantry

    Sinclair Lewis

    1927 -

  • A Lost Lady

    Willa Cather

    1923 -

  • Six Crises

    Richard M. Nixon

    1962 -

  • The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan

    James Farrell

    1934 -

  • The Python Years

    Diaries, 1969-1979

    Michael Palin

    2006 -

  • Call If You Need Me

    Uncollected Fiction & Other Prose

    Raymond Carver

    2001 -

  • Flight of the Eagle

    The Grand Strategies that Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

    Conrad Black

    2013 -

  • Who I Am

    Pete Townshend

    2012 -

  • No Country For Old Men

    Cormac McCarthy

    2005 -

  • The Essential Groucho

    Writings By, For, and About Groucho Marx

    ed., Stefan Kanfer

    2000 -

  • Rabbit, Run

    John Updike

    1960 -

  • Our Gang

    Philip Roth

    1971 -

  • O Albany!

    William Kennedy

    1983 -

  • Of Mice And Men

    John Steinbeck

    1937 -

  • The 42nd Parallel

    John Dos Passos

    1930 -

  • Sex, Time and Power

    How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

    Leonard Shlain

    2003 -

  • Billy Bathgate

    E. L. Doctorow

    1989 -

  • In Review

    Pictures I've Kept

    Dwight D. Eisenhower

    1969 -

  • The Red Badge of Courage

    And Other Stories

    Stephen Crane

    1895 -

  • Deliverance

    James Dickey

    1970 -

  • Main Street

    Sinclair Lewis

    1920 -

  • Thirteen Days

    A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

    Robert F. Kennedy

    1967 -

  • To Chain The Dog Of War

    The War Power of Congress in History and Law

    Francis D. Wormuth & Edwin B. Firmage

    1986 -

  • The Killer Angels

    Michael Shaara

    1974 -

  • Haircut & Other Stories

    Ring Lardner

    1922 -

  • Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy

    John McCabe

    1989 -

  • The Lay of the Land

    Richard Ford

    2006 -

  • The Journals of Lewis & Clark

    ed. Bernard DeVoto

    1807 -

41 Books Read, 2018

  • Narcissus and Goldmund

    Hermann Hesse

    1930 -

  • The Gospel In Brief

    Leo Tolstoy

    1893 -

  • A Journal of the Plague Year

    Daniel Defoe

    1722 -

  • The Enemy Had It Too

    A Play In Three Acts

    Upton Sinclair

    1950 -

  • Fahrenheit 451

    Ray Bradbury

    1953 -

  • Amerika

    Franz Kafka

    1927 -

  • On The Road

    Jack Kerouac

    1957 -

  • The Gangs of New York

    An Informal History of the Underworld

    Herbert Asbury

    1928 -

  • Once There Was A War

    Dispatches from Europe & Africa, 1943

    John Steinbeck

    1958 -

  • Lie Down In Darkness

    William Styron

    1951 -

  • Dean Acheson

    The Cold War Years, 1953-1971

    Douglas Brinkley

    1992 -

  • The Ginger Man

    J. P. Donleavy

    1955 -

  • The Great Gatsby

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    1925 -

  • The Man With The Golden Arm

    Nelson Algren

    1949 -

  • Looking Forward

    Franklin D. Roosevelt

    1933 -

  • The Proud Highway

    Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955-1967

    Hunter S. Thompson

    1997 -

  • The Naked City

    Malvin Wald & Albert Maltz

    1948 -

  • Mad As Hell

    The Making of "Network" and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies

    Dave Itzkoff

    2014 -

  • In Cold Blood

    A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences

    Truman Capote

    1965 -

  • The Information

    Martin Amis

    1995 -

  • A History of Knowledge

    The Pivotal Events, People and Achievements of World History

    Charles Van Doren

    1991 -

  • The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

    Charles Darwin

    1887 -

  • Beyond Category

    The Life & Genius of Duke Ellington

    John Edward Hasse

    1993 -

  • Walden

    Or, Life in the Woods

    Henry David Thoreau

    1854 -

  • Touching and Imagining – An Introduction to Tactile Art

    Poems & Essays, 1973-1984

    Jan Švankmajer

    2014 -

  • Washington Goes To War

    David Brinkley

    1988 -

  • Legs

    William Kennedy

    1975 -

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Mark Twain

    1884 -

  • President Nixon

    Alone In The White House

    Richard Reeves

    2001 -

  • The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit

    Sloane Wilson

    1955 -

  • Remembering Laughter

    Wallace Stegner

    1937 -

  • Hammer of the Gods

    The Led Zeppelin Saga

    Stephen Davis

    1985 -

  • In Retrospect

    The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam

    Robert S. McNamara

    1995 -

  • Catch-22

    Joseph Heller

    1961 -

  • The Ugly American

    William J. Lederer & Eugene Burdick

    1958 -

  • What Makes Sammy Run?

    Budd Schulberg

    1941 -

  • The Letters of the Rožmberk Sisters, 1449-1482

    Noblewomen in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia

    Ed., John M. Klassen

    2001 -

  • Young Lonigan

    James T. Farrell

    1932 -

  • Red Rat Race

    Morris A. Bealle

    1953 -

  • Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew

    The World's Most-Recorded Musician

    Hal Blaine

    1990 -

  • A Swell-Looking Girl

    Stories, 1929-1931

    Erskine Caldwell

    1959 -

39 Books Read, 2017

  • Man of the People

    A Life of Harry S. Truman

    Alonzo L. Hamby

    1995 -

  • The Commanders

    Bob Woodward

    1991 -

  • Three Films

    Battleship Potempkin | October | Alexander Nevsky

    Sergei Eisenstein

    1974 -

  • Band Of Angels

    Robert Penn Warren

    1955 -

  • Gilliamesque

    A Pre-Posthumous Memoir

    Terry Gilliam

    2015 -

  • Neutrino Hunters

    The Chase to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

    Ray Jayawardhana

    2013 -

  • The Tumult and the Shouting

    My Life In Sport

    Grantland Rice

    1954 -

  • What Hath God Wrought

    The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848

    Daniel Walker Howe

    2007 -

  • The Bad Seed

    William March

    1954 -

  • The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

    Carson McCullers

    1940 -

  • Short Cuts

    Robert Altman & Frank Barhydt

    1993 -

  • A Tour On The Prairies

    An Account of Thirty Days in Deep Indian Country

    Washington Irving

    1833 -

  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

    Neil deGrasse Tyson

    2017 -

  • The Public Arts

    Gilbert Seldes

    1956 -

  • The Jack Benny Show

    The Life & Times of America's Best-Loved Entertainer

    Milt Josefsberg

    1977 -

  • The Fables of Ivan Krylov

    1769-1844

    Translated by Stephen Pimenoff

    2017 -

  • The Scarlet Letter

    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    1850 -

  • Ragged Dick

    Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks

    Horatio Alger, Jr.

    1868 -

  • Hard Times

    An Oral History of the Great Depression

    Studs Terkel

    1970 -

  • The Day of the Locust

    Nathanael West

    1939 -

  • Life on the Mississippi

    Mark Twain

    1883 -

  • I Married A Communist

    Or, The Woman On Pier 13

    Robert Stevenson

    1949 -

  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

    A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

    Hunter S. Thompson

    1971 -

  • In Confidence

    Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986)

    Anatoly Dobrynin

    1995 -

  • Being There

    Jerzy Kosinski

    1970 -

  • Lincoln’s Constitution

    Daniel Farber

    2003 -

  • Manhattan Transfer

    John Dos Passos

    1925 -

  • The Prince

    Niccolò Machiavelli

    1513 -

  • Leonardo’s Brain

    Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

    Leonard Schlain

    2015 -

  • No More Vietnams

    Richard Nixon

    1985 -

  • 1066

    The Year of the Conquest

    David Howarth

    1977 -

  • Ragtime

    E. L. Doctorow

    1974 -

  • Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life

    Self-portrait and Views of Washington from Roosevelt to Clinton

    Herbert Block

    1993 -

  • Tobacco Road

    Erskine Caldwell

    1932 -

  • How The Other Half Lives

    Studies Among The Tenements Of New York

    Jacob A. Riis

    1890 -

  • All The Pretty Horses

    Cormac McCarthy

    1992 -

  • Darkness At Noon

    Arthur Koestler

    1941 -

  • Keith Moon

    The Life & Death of a Rock Legend

    Tony Fletcher

    1998 -

  • Animal Farm

    George Orwell

    1945 -

37 Books Read, 2016

  • The Gutenberg Galaxy

    The Making of Typographic Man

    Marshall McLuhan

    1962 -

  • Longitude

    Dava Sobel

    1995 -

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Philip K. Dick

    1968 -

  • Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

    Capt. Ted W. Lawson

    1943 -

  • On The Beach

    Neville Shute

    1957 -

  • Thinking With Type

    A Critical Guide

    Ellen Lupton

    2004 -

  • The Wayward Bus

    John Steinbeck

    1947 -

  • Crossing To Safety

    Wallace Stegner

    1987 -

  • Off The Record With FDR

    The War Years 1942-1945

    William D. Hassett

    1958 -

  • Specifications Grading

    Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students & Saving Faculty Time

    Linda B. Nilson

    2015 -

  • Finale

    The Reagan Years

    Thomas Mallon

    2015 -

  • The Bell Jar

    Sylvia Plath

    1963 -

  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin

    1793 -

  • The Big Picture

    On the Origins of Life, Meaning & the Universe Itself

    Sean Carroll

    2016 -

  • Six Amendments

    How and Why We Should Change the Constitution

    John Paul Stevens, US Supreme Court Justice (ret.)

    2014 -

  • Death of a Salesman

    Arthur Miller

    1949 -

  • Notes From A Dead House

    Fyodor Dostoevsky

    1862 -

  • Real Peace

    Richard Nixon

    1984 -

  • Stars In Their Courses

    The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863

    Shelby Foote

    1963 -

  • Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

    Hunter S. Thompson

    1973 -

  • Zero K

    Don DeLillo

    2016 -

  • The Johnstown Flood

    The Story Behind The 1889 Disaster

    David McCullough

    1968 -

  • A Walk on the Wild Side

    Nelson Algren

    1956 -

  • The Jungle

    Upton Sinclair

    1906 -

  • Working

    People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

    Studs Terkel

    1974 -

  • Hells Angels

    The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs

    Hunter S. Thompson

    1966 -

  • Babbit

    Sinclair Lewis

    1922 -

  • Don’t Wait for the Next War

    A Strategy for American Growth and Global Leadership

    General (ret.) Wesley K. Clark

    2014 -

  • Here, There and Everywhere

    My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles

    Geoff Emerick

    2006 -

  • Sound Man

    A Life Recording Hits with The Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin

    Glynn Johns

    2014 -

  • Waiting For Lefty

    And Other Plays

    Clifford Odets

    1937 -

  • The Big Rock Candy Mountain

    Wallace Stegner

    1943 -

  • Voices From Chernobyl

    The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

    Svetlana Alexievich

    1997 -

  • The Executioner’s Song

    Norman Mailer

    1979 -

  • Claudius The God

    And His Wife Messalina

    Robert Graves

    1935 -

  • The Imperial Presidency

    Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

    1973 -

  • Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey

    1840-1870

    Lillian Schlissel

    1992 -

34 Books Read, 2015

  • Harpo Speaks…About New York

    Adolph Marx

    1961 -

  • Not Too Old To Cut The Mustard

    Jumping Bill Carlisle & Friends Talk About His Life & the Country Music Business

    Anita Capps

    2000 -

  • The Prank

    The Best of Young Chekhov (1880-1882)

    Anton Chekhov

    2015 -

  • Polk

    The Man who Transformed the Presidency and America

    Walter K. Borneman

    2008 -

  • A Study In Scarlet

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    1878 -

  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey

    Thornton Wilder

    1928 -

  • In The Wake of the Plague

    The Black Death & the World it Made

    Norman Cantor

    2001 -

  • All Quiet on the Western Front

    Erich Maria Remarque

    1928 -

  • Libra

    Don DeLillo

    1988 -

  • Requiem For A Dream

    Hubert Selby, Jr.

    1978 -

  • Notes on the Death of Culture

    Essays on Spectacle and Society

    Mario Vargas Llosa

    2012 -

  • A Detailed Analysis of the Constitution

    Edward F. Cooke

    1958 -

  • Paterson

    Volumes I - V

    William Carlos Williams

    1946 -

  • Art & Physics

    Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light

    Leonard Schlain

    1991 -

  • The Story of a Bad Boy

    Thomas Bailey Aldrich

    1870 -

  • Independence Day

    Richard Ford

    1995 -

  • The Spectator Bird

    Wallace Stegner

    1976 -

  • O Pioneers!

    Willa Cather

    1913 -

  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

    Harriet Jacobs

    1861 -

  • White Mule

    William Carlos Williams

    1937 -

  • The Time Machine

    H.G. Wells

    1895 -

  • The Haldeman Diaries

    Inside The Nixon White House

    H.R. Haldeman

    1993 -

  • Travels With Charley

    John Steinbeck

    1962 -

  • John Barleycorn

    Or, Alcoholic Memoirs

    Jack London

    1913 -

  • Law and the Nation

    1865 - 1912

    Jonathan Lurie

    1983 -

  • Days of Wine and Roses

    David Westheimer

    1962 -

  • One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn

    1963 -

  • That Man

    An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt

    Robert H. Jackson

    1954 -

  • Harlot’s Ghost

    Norman Mailer

    1991 -

  • Looking Backward

    Edward Bellamy

    1888 -

  • Equus

    Peter Shaffer

    1973 -

  • Seven Plays

    Sam Shephard

    1981 -

  • A People’s History of the United States

    Howard Zinn

    1992 -

  • The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin

    Richard Lourie

    1999 -

34 Books Read, 2014

  • The Unvanquished

    William Faulkner

    1938 -

  • Blockade Diary

    Under Siege In Leningrad, 1941-1942

    Elena Kochina

    1990 -

  • The Luck of Roaring Camp

    And Other Stories

    Bret Harte

    1869 -

  • Groucho And Me

    The Autobiography

    Julius H. Marx

    1959 -

  • The Glass Cage

    Automation and Us

    Nicholas Carr

    2014 -

  • From Here To Eternity

    James Jones

    1951 -

  • The Zone of Interest

    Martin Amis

    2014 -

  • The Autobiography of Mark Twain

    1877-1910

    ed., Charles Neider

    1959 -

  • The Communist Manifesto

    Karl Marx + Frederick Engels

    1848 -

  • The Iron Heel

    Jack London

    1908 -

  • Slaughterhouse-Five

    Or, The Children's Crusade

    Kurt Vonnegut

    1966 -

  • It Can’t Happen Here

    Sinclair Lewis

    1935 -

  • Homer & Langley

    E. L. Doctorow

    2009 -

  • Plain Speaking

    An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman

    Merle Miller

    1974 -

  • From Eternity to Here

    The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

    Sean Carroll

    2010 -

  • The Plot Against America

    Philip Roth

    2004 -

  • Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven

    ed., McSweeney's 45

    2013 -

  • Good Hunting

    An American Spymaster's Story

    Jack Devine

    2014 -

  • Bad Monkey

    Carl Hiaasen

    2013 -

  • All The King’s Men

    Robert Penn Warren

    1946 -

  • Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940

    How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

    David E. Kyvig

    2002 -

  • Morning And Noon

    A Memoir

    Dean Acheson

    1965 -

  • Killer Of Crying Deer

    William Orem

    2010 -

  • Barabbas

    Par Lagerkvist

    1950 -

  • The 480

    Eugene Burdick

    1964 -

  • Big Bets & Black Swans

    Policy Recommendations for President Obama in 2014

    ed., Brookings Institution

    2014 -

  • Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

    Philip K. Dick

    1974 -

  • The Friends of Eddie Coyle

    George V. Higgins

    1970 -

  • Nixonland

    The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

    Rick Perlstein

    2008 -

  • The Human Comedy

    William Saroyan

    1943 -

  • The Sportswriter

    Richard Ford

    1986 -

  • My Silent War

    The Autobiography of a Spy

    Kim Philby

    1968 -

  • Winesburg, Ohio

    A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life

    Sherwood Anderson

    1919 -

  • Frankenstein

    Or, The Modern Prometheus

    Mary Shelley

    1831 -

36 Books Read, 2013

  • The Crucible

    Arthur Miller

    1952 -

  • Last Exit To Brooklyn

    Hubert Selby, Jr.

    1957 -

  • Six Months In 1945

    FDR, Stalin, Churchill & Truman - from World War to Cold War

    Michael Dobbs

    2012 -

  • The Circle

    Dave Eggers

    2013 -

  • The Millennium

    A Comedy of the Year 2000

    Upton Sinclair

    1907 -

  • God’s Little Acre

    Erskine Caldwell

    1933 -

  • Return of the Thin Man

    Dashiell Hammett

    1935 -

  • NW

    Zadie Smith

    2012 -

  • Confederates in the Attic

    Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

    Tony Horwitz

    1998 -

  • I, Claudius

    From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius

    Robert Graves

    1934 -

  • Go East Young Man

    Short Stories on Class in America 1917-1931

    Sinclair Lewis

    2005 -

  • Dewey Defeats Truman

    Thomas Mallon

    1997 -

  • The Art of Intelligence

    Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service

    Henry A. Crumpton

    2012 -

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin

    Or, Life Among The Lowly

    Harriet Beecher Stowe

    1852 -

  • Visual Explanations

    Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative

    Edward R. Tufte

    1997 -

  • A Democrat Looks At His Party

    Dean Acheson

    1955 -

  • The Wanting Seed

    Anthony Burgess

    1962 -

  • Flatland

    Edwin A. Abbott

    1884 -

  • Cosmopolis

    Don DeLillo

    2003 -

  • Sabbath’s Theater

    Philip Roth

    1995 -

  • London Fields

    Martin Amis

    1989 -

  • The Hunt For KSM

    Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind

    Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer

    2012 -

  • The Luck of Barry Lyndon

    William Makepeace Thackeray

    1844 -

  • Amity & Sorrow

    Peggy Riley

    2013 -

  • Affection and Trust

    Personal Correspondence, 1953-1971

    Harry S Truman and Dean Acheson

    2010 -

  • Fellow Travelers

    Thomas Mallon

    2006 -

  • Pakistan On The Brink

    The Future of America, Pakistan & Afghanistan

    Ahmed Rashid

    2012 -

  • The Good House

    Ann Leary

    2013 -

  • Freedom

    Jonathan Franzen

    2010 -

  • The Thin Red Line

    James Jones

    1962 -

  • Give Me Everything You Have

    On Being Stalked

    James Lasdun

    2013 -

  • Marjorie Morningstar

    Herman Wouk

    1955 -

  • Time’s Arrow

    Martin Amis

    1991 -

  • Junky

    William S. Burroughs

    1953 -

  • Hedy’s Folly

    The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr

    Richard Rhodes

    2011 -

  • Sunday Nights at Seven

    The Jack Benny Story

    Jack Benny

    1990 -

38 Books Read, 2012

  • American Nations

    A History of the 11 Rival Regional Cultures of North America

    Colin Woodard

    2011 -

  • Narcopolis

    Jeet Thayil

    2012 -

  • Escape From Camp 14

    One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

    Blaine Harden

    2012 -

  • Citizen Soldier

    A LIfe of Harry S Truman

    Aida D. Donald

    2012 -

  • Visual Strategies

    For Scientists & Engineers

    Felice C. Frankel & Angela H. DePace

    2012 -

  • A Farewell To Arms

    Ernest Hemingway

    1929 -

  • Cities of the Plain

    Cormac McCarthy

    1998 -

  • Swamplandia

    Karen Russell

    2011 -

  • Midnight Rising

    John Brown & the Raid that Sparked the Civil War

    Tony Horwitz

    2011 -

  • Envisioning Information

    Edward R. Tufte

    1990 -

  • Washington, D.C.

    A Novel

    Gore Vidal

    1967 -

  • Lionel Asbo

    State of England

    Martin Amis

    2012 -

  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette

    Maria Semple

    2012 -

  • The Counterlife

    Philip Roth

    1986 -

  • Complete Stories

    1943 - 1982

    Truman Capote

    2004 -

  • American Diplomacy

    George F. Kennan

    1952 -

  • Logavina Street

    Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood

    Barbara Demick

    1996 -

  • The Dictator’s Learning Curve

    Inside the Global Battle for Democracy

    William J. Dobson

    2012 -

  • Canada

    Richard Ford

    2012 -

  • The Education of a Typographer

    ed. Steven Heller

    2004 -

  • The Corrections

    Jonathan Franzen

    2001 -

  • Page One

    Inside the New York Times & the Future of Journalism

    ed. David Folkenflik

    2011 -

  • Mao II

    Don DeLillo

    1991 -

  • A Visit from the Goon Squad

    Jennifer Egan

    2010 -

  • The Years of Lyndon Johnson

    The Passage of Power

    Robert A. Caro

    2012 -

  • Grouped

    How Groups of Friends Influence the Social Web

    Paul Adams

    2012 -

  • The Angel Esmeralda

    Nine Stories

    Don DeLillo

    2011 -

  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

    Ken Kesey

    1962 -

  • The Best American Science Writing

    ed. Jesse Cohen

    2010 -

  • Watergate

    A Novel

    Thomas Mallon

    2011 -

  • The Design of Everyday Things

    Donald A. Norman

    1988 -

  • Satan Is Real

    The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers

    Charlie Louvin

    2011 -

  • The Cleanest Race

    How North Koreans See Themselves

    B.R. Myers

    2011 -

  • The Long Goodbye

    Raymond Chandler

    1953 -

  • The Orphan Master’s Son

    A Novel

    Adam Johnson

    2012 -

  • Sound Reporting

    The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production

    Jonathan Kern

    2008 -

  • The Hidden Reality

    Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

    Brian Greene

    2011 -

  • Reclaiming Fair Use

    How To Put Balance Back In Copyright

    Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi

    2011 -

38 Books Read, 2011

  • Night of Camp David

    Fletcher Knebel

    1966 -

  • Collected Works, The Screenplays Vol 2

    1971-1978

    Paddy Chayefsky

    1995 -

  • The Visual Miscellaneum

    David McCandless

    2009 -

  • Eisenhower

    The White House Years

    Jim Newton

    2011 -

  • I Married A Communist

    Philip Roth

    1998 -

  • Stasiland

    Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

    Anna Funder

    2002 -

  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

    Edward R. Tufte

    1981 -

  • The Art Of Creative Advertising

    Michael Antebi

    1968 -

  • Life In Year One

    What The World Was Like In First-Century Palestine

    Scott Korb

    2010 -

  • The Great American Novel

    Philip Roth

    1973 -

  • The Song of the Lark

    Willa Cather

    1915 -

  • You Are Not A Gadget

    A Manifesto

    Jaron Lanier

    2010 -

  • The Stranger

    Albert Camus

    1946 -

  • Famine Ship Diary

    The Journey of an Irish Coffin Ship

    Robert Whyte

    1847 -

  • White Noise

    Don Delillo

    1985 -

  • Nothing To Envy

    Ordinary Lives In North Korea

    Barbara Demick

    2010 -

  • Mr. Citizen

    Harry S Truman

    1960 -

  • The American Civil War

    A Military History

    John Keegan

    2009 -

  • The Boys of Summer

    Growing Up Within Shouting Distance of Ebbets Field

    Roger Kahn

    1971 -

  • The Big Sleep

    Raymond Chandler

    1939 -

  • Augustus

    A Novel

    John Williams

    1972 -

  • Making Movies

    Sidney Lumet

    1995 -

  • The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories: 2011

    The Best Stories of the Year

    ed. Laura Furman

    2011 -

  • Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure

    Matthew Algeo

    2009 -

  • My Antonia

    Willa Cather

    1918 -

  • Bomb Power

    The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

    Garry Wills

    2010 -

  • Underworld

    Don Delillo

    1997 -

  • The Moviegoer

    Walker Percy

    1960 -

  • Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

    Robert Penn Warren

    1980 -

  • The Next Decade

    Where We've Been..and Where We're Going

    George Friedman

    2011 -

  • Cognitive Surplus

    Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

    Clay Shirky

    2010 -

  • Change By Design

    How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations & Inspires Innovation

    Tim Brown

    2009 -

  • The Humbling

    Philip Roth

    2010 -

  • The Art of Immersion

    How the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories.

    Frank Rose

    2011 -

  • Chuck Amuck

    The Autobiography of Chuck Jones

    Chuck Jones

    1992 -

  • The Lost Peace

    Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953

    Robert Dallek

    2010 -

  • Cyber War

    The Next Threat to National Security

    Richard A. Clarke

    2010 -

  • Marshall McLuhan:

    You Know Nothing of My Work

    Douglas Coupland

    2010 -

36 Books Read, 2010

Books Read:
January 2010 — March 2023.

That's 1 book every 9.11 days or 3.34 books a month for 13.25 years.

Every title on this list is a 100% genuine book, of course.

That is to say, not one was consumed on a device.

Average year of publication? 1970.

Click Here for the big list of books.

I READ ALOT, LIKE TO ARGUE, RESEARCH & CODE

  • early 19th- to mid 20th-century American literature
  • American history
  • cold war foreign policy
  • physics
  • chess
  • philosophy
  • genealogy
  • debate
  • photography
  • graphic design & typography
  • popular music from the 1920s to the 1970s
  • 40+ years in musical composition & performance
john-carmody-design-studio

Photos of My Studio

Click here to see more photos from the Washington Post Magazine shoot, as well as other photos taken over the last 18 years as this space has evolved.

Custom-Designed Clothing For Sale!

Mostly, I focus on recreations of ephemeral relics from the better days of the USA.

Original Custom Face Mask Designs

Stay Healthy (Or Stay Beautiful) With An Original Design

Recent Site Highlights

Aircheck Collection

I used to be a hoarder of found moments on the AM & FM radio airwaves

The Big Broadcast

Ed Walker, one of the Joy Boys, brought back the golden days of radio every Sunday night for 30 years.

Gunsmoke. Jack Benny. Dragnet. Lum 'n Abner. The Shadow. News of the day, much more.

The Big Broadcast played on WAMU FM on Sunday nights, mostly from 7 to 11.

The Eddie Stubbs Show

Eddie Stubbs's Sunday show on WAMU FM played a variety of classic honkytonk, traditional country and vintage bluegrass + deep catalog favorites.

This was a show for listening to while drinking beer in the sun in the afternoon, great music delivered with unique insight.

The Dick Spottswood Show

The "Obsolete Music Hour" played rare classic recordings of bluegrass, country, string bands, honky tonk, western swing, blues, gospel & old world music.

Great Music & Sports

Off-the-air live recordings of a now-defunct station playing all sorts of great American popular music from the mid-20th century, back when music was good.

You'll also find some Baltimore Orioles post-game highlights from the mid-1980s.

News & Music on WAMU

From elections to 9/11 to the war on terror, these off-the-air live recordings of events of the day are from NPR on WAMU FM.

Highlights

Contact

I Do It All. Contact me and I'll solve your problems.

information (at) johncarmody (dot) net

Copyright

All content on this website is © 2023 John Carmody, Washington, D.C. including but not limited to:

  • photography
  • design
  • music
  • lyrics
  • songs
  • string arrangements
  • video
  • audio
  • animation

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