Roy Christopher's Blog, page 16
October 3, 2021
The Medium Picture Object Thing: A Photo Essay
September 16, 2021
O Bother, Why Art Thou? Follow for Now, Vol. 2
Quick note: My new interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is now available from punctum books! More details and table of contents below.
Read on!
O Bother, Why Art Thou?In the late aughts, I did a talk at several events and on several college campuses called “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy.” The title was a joke, but the advice was real. It was a bunch of things I’d learned in the pursuit of various interests, mostly writing and publishing. Someone asked me recently why I bother to do I do any of the things I do. What follows emerged from an attempt to answer that question.
[“How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” at Geekend 2010. Photo by Patrick Rodgers.]
I started making zines in my teens. My friend Matt Bailie and I saw the first zine-review article in Freestylin’ Magazine and decided we should make one ourselves. It was the spring of 1986. We were just about to start high school.
Ten years later I registered the domain name of the last long-running zine I’d been making, and frontwheeldrive.com became my first website. After a false start or two, I ran the site steadily from 1999 to 2008. Two other like-minded dudes, Tom Georgoulias and Brandon Pierce, and I did interviews and wrote reviews about media and science and culture and whatever. Somewhere in there, I self-published the best of those interviews as a book called Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear, 2007).
One wrongheaded move I made during my transition from skateboarding and music zines to heavy, heady websites was thinking that I needed to completely replace old interests with new ones. I had just become a reader of books and was wishing I’d been one all along, so it was out with the hip-hop and punk rock and skateboarding and in with the science and literature and media theory. Eventually I realized that if not for the one there wouldn’t be the other. Music taught me how to do research. Who was on what record label, who used to be in what band with whom, who produced what, who was down with whom—these were the footnotes. I was already digging for sources, for citations. Skateboarding introduced me to art and determination and all of the music I love. Everything is research, and there’s room for all of it.
For the decade after closing frontwheeldrive.com, I reluctantly moved everything over to a blog format under my own name, roychristopher.com. One of the things I had finally realized about strictly publishing interviews with other people is that the other people are the focus. That’s exactly how that should be, but if you’re trying to build your name as a writer, as I was, the interview format doesn’t showcase your writing. Blogging, for what it’s worth, does that. It’s you and your words, and that’s it.
I learned another minor lesson from simply the naming of a thing: As flimsy a front as it might be, if you run a publication, people will quote it—assuming you’re giving them words worth quoting. They will proudly print, “she told Roy Christopher of frontwheeldrive.com…” If you’re nobody like me, they won’t quote you if the website bears your name. They won’t proudly print, “she told Roy Christopher of roychristopher.com…”: a small lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.
Through two decades of doing these two websites, as well as all the zine and magazine work that preceded them, I suppose I have managed to establish myself enough to be able to pitch ideas, write books, and do freelance writing here and there. One thing that differentiates my writing from some of my colleagues and peers is that I don’t rely on it for my living. The truth is that, aside from a few years in the 1990s, I’ve just never been able to pay my bills as a writer. Hell, since then being a writer has cost me money! That’s not a complaint, nor is it important.
What’s important is that whether or not you rely on something to pay your bills changes the goals and the results of that something. For instance, I was interviewing a band last week. There is nothing unique about my interviewing a band. I’ve been doing it for a while. The difference is that if I’m interviewing a band, it’s because I like them. I’m interested beyond the story I’m writing. That makes the way I do interviews different from when I was doing them on assignment for money. It changes them so much that the bands I interview usually notice the difference.
I hope the same can be said for my writing in general. Dan Hancox at The Guardian (see?) described my recent book, Dead Precedents, as “written with the passion of a zine-publishing fan and the acuity of an academic.” That’s the kind of compliment you hope for, and it comes from pursuing a certain kind of goal. One of the things I have found when teaching writing to others is that students have the most difficulty coming up with something to write about. More than any other part of the writing process, topic selection stumps them—more than the challenge of the initial blank page, or coming up with titles, thesis statements, headlines, leads, or anything else. I tell them to find something they already like, that they want to know more about, and that they want to tell people about.
That impulse, that desire to tell others about something cool, is the core reason I do just about everything I do. It’s the reason I’m a writer. It’s the reason I’m a teacher. It’s the reason I made zines. It’s the reason I made websites. It’s the reason I’m writing this right now. No one can tell you “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy,” but when you find that thing, that impulse, that thing you’ll do anyway, you’ll be on your way.
Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes
The above essay serves as the preface to a my new interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2. This collection picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.
“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.” — Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Here’s the full Table of Contents:
MEDIA:
Carla Nappi: Historical Friction
Kristen Gallerneaux: Unattended Consequences
Dominic Pettman: Human Matters
Rita Raley: Tactical Humanities
Jodi Dean: Of Crowds and Collectives (by Alfie Bown)
Gareth Branwyn: Borg Like Me
Ian Bogost: Worthwhile Dilemmas
Mark Dery: Nothing’s Shocking
Brian Eno: Strange Overtones (by Steven Johnson)
Zizi Papacharissi: A Networked Self
Douglas Rushkoff: The User’s Dilemma
danah boyd: Privacy = Context + Control
Dave Allen: Every Force Evolves a Form
HIP-HOP:
Juice Aleem: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Labtekwon: Margin Walker
M. Sayyid: The Other Side
Shabazz Palaces: A New Refutation
dälek: Build and Destroy
Matthew Shipp: Heavy Meta
Tyler, The Creator: The Odd Future is Now (by Timothy Baker)
Tricia Rose: Warrior Soul
Sean Price: Bless the M.I.C.
Rammellzee: The Wrath of the Math (by Chuck Galli)
Cadence Weapon: Check the Technique
El-P: Wake Up. Time to Die.
Sadat X: My Protocol is Know-It-All
WRITING:
Ytasha L. Womack: Dance to the Future
Bob Stephenson: Bit by Bit
Pat Cadigan: Eyes on the Skies
Mish Barber-Way: Flour Power
Chris Kraus: Wildly Contradictory
Simon Critchley: The Skull Beneath the Skin (by Alfie Bown)
Clay Tarver: Gone Glimmering
Nick Harkaway: A Dynastic Succession of Trouble
Simon Reynolds: Erase and Start It Again (with Alex Burns)
Malcolm Gladwell: Epidemic Proportions
William Gibson: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (by Kodwo Eshun)
Thirty-seven interviews deep, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 is a hefty collection of ideas and inspiration from some of the most important writers, artists, and thinkers of our time. It includes the first interview with Tyler, The Creator and one of the last with Rammellzee. A lengthy discussion between William Gibson and Kodwo Eshun caps it all off.
It’s now available from punctum books! Get yourself a pretty paperback or an open-access .pdf!
Thank you all for reading,
-royc.
September 10, 2021
August & September
With two new books out there (see below) and a few more in various stages of the publishing process, I've been feeling buried, writing and editing different things every day. In the meantime, I found a few fun things I wanted to share.
First, my friend and collaborator Tim Saccenti sent me these pictures the other night. The first is Dead Precedents with the hands from the cover of Run the Jewels' third album, RTJ3, which Tim shot.
The second is Follow for Now with the hands from the cover of RTJ4.
Tim and them made these! They are physical objects. Here's the story behind the hands straight from Tim and El-P on The Verge. I am honored to have my work even tangentially related to theirs.
Tim is a visionary photographer, videographer, and designer, and I've been fortunate enough to use some of his work in Dead Precedents and the forthcoming collection, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism. More on the latter soon.
I did a fairly lengthy interview with Fifteen Questions this week. Here’s an excerpt:
There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?
It probably sounds corny but feeling positive, like the work is worthwhile. There’s also that spark of inspiration that’s usually an exciting mix of both confidence and fear: the feeling that you’re fully capable of doing something mixed with the possibility that you might fail. It has to feel possible while also feeling risky.
Distractions abound. I suffer the same ones as anyone: social media, hunger, laundry. Turn off the ones you can, and deal with the rest as needed.
Doing the work every day is imperative. Sure, inspiration hits at odd and inopportune times, but working every day is the only way to get things done.
I also did a Fevers of the Mind “Quick 9” interview recently. Here’s an excerpt:
ICYMI:I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. I made C’s in both English 101 and 102 in college, but in my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for the first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art. I give the credit for my newfound confidence to my Abnormal Psychology teacher.
Many thanks to everyone who’s copped a copy of either of my new books. Both of these are steps in new directions in publishing for me, one into poetry and the other into fiction. Both have been scary and exciting. Your support means everything.
In case you missed them, here’s a bit about each:
Professor Steve Jones of the University of Illinois-Chicago with his copy of Fender the Fall.
The poet Scott Cumming writes in his Goodreads review, “Short choppy chapters and sections coupled with an innovative design make for an original reading experience in what could be dubbed Back to the Future meets Primer, but funnier and less confusing than the latter.”
I put together a soundtrack for the book as I was writing it. There’s more about the book here and a look at the pages inside.
If you’re already sold, the paperback is here, but it’s also now available in a less-cool Kindle version.
My friend Rachel Carter reading Abandoned Accounts.
My friend and fellow First Cut poet HLR wrote this nice review of Abandoned Accounts on her Treacle Heart website. Here’s an excerpt:
Roy Christopher is clearly comfortable with traditional forms and he bends these ‘rules’ to tell his story in the best way possible; the poems are terse and impactful in their simplicity, and Christopher has evidently mastered the art of rhyme. In some poems, the rhymes are watertight, building pace and maintaining rhythm, punching exactly where they ought to, and other poems have looser rhyme schemes, where Christopher plays freely with language and meter while still maintaining an utterly convincing voice. None of these verses are careless: every poem says exactly what it needs to, without relying on flowery language or incomprehensible metaphor or frivolous formatting or random risk-taking. Christopher is a true wordsmith, and as a reader, I was totally absorbed by his voice.
Many thanks to HLR for the kind words.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop:Coming up next are the interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2 from punctum books and the edited collection Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism from Strange Attractor Press.
More on those soon!
Hope you’re well,
-royc.
September 6, 2021
The Roots We Share
One of my major struggles as a professor was always getting students to read. It's difficult to relate to the attitude since I became a reader myself, but I remember the resistance as an undergraduate. There were too many other things I wanted to be doing, and I didn't even have TikTok or Instagram to suck up the rare gaps in my days.
(A collaborative drawing from HEADTUBE zine by me and Sean Walling.)
When talking about our interactions with media, my friend Doug Rushkoff uses the remote control as a metaphor. The remote was the first invention that allowed interactive television viewing, and in the process, it changed the way we consumed the medium. Instead of wanting to see what's on, we want to see what else is on. The habit has carried over into every medium since. We scroll through our feeds not looking for something to read, but to make sure we don't need to read anything. This is how students approach reading for class. They don't set out a time to do the reading. They skim the material to make sure they don't need to read it. The only way to get them to read is to test them on the material. If I ask them to read something so we can discuss it in the next class meeting, a small fraction of them will. If I tell them to read something because I'm going to give them a quiz on it in the next class meeting, all of them but a small fraction will. The problem is that students don't like taking tests, and I never liked grading them. How do we get to the good stuff without all of these contrived assessments? We have to work together.
Another example: While legitimizing the downloading of music was one of the hurdles that Apple faced with record labels when introducing iTunes, another was the breaking up of the CD into individual songs. Record labels had long been making billions off of record, tape, and CD sales. Individual hit songs were mere marketing, advertisements for the CD. What Apple wanted to do legitimized downloading but broke down the price structure of the millennial record industry. Instead of buying 15-18 songs for $17.99, now listeners could buy just the song they wanted for $.99. It streamlined the process for listeners but cut out massive profits for the labels. Full-length records didn't go away completely, but now there are other options for music fans.
I remember reading some years ago that a successful direct-mail campaign, that is a physical mailing of postcards advertising some good or service, had a 2% response rate. That means that 98% of the materials and effort of a successful campaign were wasted. These mailings still exist, but email has revolutionized such campaigns. With such a reduced overhead, the response rate of a successful spam campaign must be infinitesimal.
Anyway, I've been thinking about these shifts in media consumption and the subsequent waste in the context of writing. Unlike records or CDs, which are clunky and inconvenient at best, books are an unimprovable technology, but now there are other options. There are blogs and tweets and newsletters and other media altogether. As readers and writers, we have so many more options. Reading and writing are collaborative. As readers, how do we cut out the crap and get to the good stuff? As writers, how do we streamline the process of reaching readers?
I have noticed more and more our unwillingness to meet each other halfway, to see things from another's point of view. Not just as readers and writers, but as humans sharing a ball of dirt in space. It’s an inability that borders on abject refusal. The example I always use is the one time I went to a personal trainer. I had a free consultation with my climbing-gym membership in Chicago, so I went. As the guy asked me questions and ran me through exercises, he slowly stopped listening to what I was saying and put me into one of his pre-planned regimens. He already knew what he thought I needed before he even weighed me in.
The same thing happens with coworkers, teachers, students, editors, employers, friends, everyone. We need to be more able to break out of our own views and see things from others. If not, we are doomed. It’s not just empathy. It's being able to completely drop your own agenda and understand someone else's views and goals. Communication is a collaboration. We have to work together.
(RESET Mercantile logo sticker, as designed by me and Justin April.)
Collaboration is not compromise, it's a chance to make a connection. Cooperation is not a problem to solve, it's an opportunity to understand. Together we can make everything better, or as I plan to cross-stitch on a throw pillow:
The fruits we bear are made sweeter by the roots we share.Happy Labor Day! More news soon.
Hope you’re well,
-royc.
August 15, 2021
Fender the Fall
During a particularly dark period in my adult life, I decided I wanted to learn how to write screenplays. I’d gone through a horrible breakup, moved back home, and was working part-time at a chain record store. I was floundering around, unsure of what to do next.
One night I watched Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) for the second time, but I saw it for the first. It struck something in me, in that time, and I wanted to figure out how to write a movie. I got the script and started studying what you put on the page to make things happen on the screen.
As a result, the screenplay I started writing was heavily influenced by Donnie Darko. I’ve worked on it off and on in the fifteen years since, and even took an introductory screenwriting class at Second City. Last year I finally novelized the whole thing into a loooong short story.
Fender the Fall is about Chris Bridges, a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save his marriage and her life. The plan doesn’t go as planned.
Tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back.
It’s now available from Alien Buddha Press! It’s 5”x8” and 136-pages long, like a good paperback should be. It’s the perfect fall read.
I was fortunate enough to get Matthew Revert to design the cover and Mike Corrao to do the typesetting. As a result, it’s a sharp-looking little book. Check it out:
Here’s what other people are saying about it:
“A fun, classic roller-coaster of a time-travel story that could have been published in the 1950s, except that it’s furnished with all manner of savvy insights into current 2020s life.” — Paul Levinson, author of The Plot to Save Socrates
“Fender the Fall is a nostalgia-infused journey through time about second chances and the causality of love. It’s a formative song from your youth revisited, a favorite VHS tape found in the back of your closet.” – Joshua Chaplinsky, author of The Paradox Twins
“Hard-boiled strange loops in a froth of weird.” – Will Wiles, author of Plume
Many thanks to Matt Revert and Mike Corrao for making this thing look so good; Red Focks for putting it out there; Paul Levinson, Josh Chaplinsky, Will Wiles, Jaqi Furback, Gabriel Hart, C.W. Blackwell, Ira Rat, J. Matthew Youngmark, and Jeph Porter for their time, feedback, and kind words; and Claire Putney, from whom I stole the title.
Here’s a soundtrack I put together while writing Fender the Fall. It has songs mostly from and around the years in the story (2002 and 1991).
Order your copy of this lovely, little paperback from Alien Buddha Press now! You won’t regret it.
And don’t forget about my recent collection of poems, Abandoned Accounts, about which Bristol Noir says, “Perfectly balanced prose. With the subtext, gravitas, and confidence of a master wordsmith. A joy to read.”
One last thing: My next book for Repeater Books, Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, comes out next March during SXSW. I’m hoping to go down there and talk about it. Voting is now open, so if you could go drop a quick vote for my talk, I would appreciate it.
Thank you!
Hope you’re well,
-royc.
July 30, 2021
Abandoned Accounts
I’ve been writing poetry since before I could write. I would shout them out in alliterative, repetitive, rhyming couplets, and my mom would take dictation. Once I started writing, I wrote poems, short stories, comic books, fake newspapers.
In high school, I took to making zines publicly and writing poems privately. Everyone I looked up to was a poet of some fashion. From the smart sense of Danny Elfman and David Byrne to the gothic verse of Robert Smith and Andrew Eldritch, from the street knowledge of Ice-T and KRS-One to the hardcore chants of Kevin Seconds and Ian MacKaye, poetry was the process, the worded frame for the world. So, I started writing my own again, stilted little stanzas of teen longing and angst, mostly designed to make me seem deep to my friends and interesting to girls.
Last spring, when the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects I had in progress. In the months before, I’d started writing silly little poems about odd memories I had, tiny stories that didn’t fit anywhere else. I went back to those when I couldn’t think any larger. I eventually moved on to short stories and finally back to book-length writing, but not before I amassed a small collection of fitful misfit verse.
All of this is to say I have a poetry collection coming out today. Abandoned Accounts: Poems, 2020-2021 has those silly memories I started writing down, including reflections of walks in the woods at my parents’ house in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama, encounters with favorite bands and somewhat famous people, tales of travel and intrigue, and a few stray poems from as far back as 1990. It’s available in paperback and on the Kindle today!
Here’s a taste: the great Scott Cumming reading “Virga” from Abandoned Accounts:
It’s a fun little book of verse. Get a pretty blue paperback for $7.99 or the Kindle version for only $3.99!
Thank you!
More soon,
-royc.
July 4, 2021
BIG MESS: How Gene Simmons and Danny Elfman Made Me a Music Nerd
Gene Simmons might be one of the most polarizing personalities on the planet. He co-founded one of the most controversial bands of the 1970s, has allegedly had his way with thousands of women, has run magazines, written books, hosted talk and reality shows, and has revolutionized music marketing and merchandising. I’ve always had a soft spot for The God of Thunder, but I’m never surprised when I find someone who hates him. For better or worse, he’s one of the reasons I’m a music nerd.
In Edgar Wright’s 2017 movie Baby Driver, the main character, Baby (played by Ansel Elgort), is a music nerd himself. He has tinnitus from a car accident he suffered as a child. The accident also killed his parents, more importantly, his mother. She was a singer and instilled in the young Baby a love of music. Since acquiring the “hum in the drum,” he listens to music constantly. With various components of stereo equipment, he also makes his own: glitchy, analog collages made from recordings of conversations, various samples, and beats banged out on keyboards and other music machines. Never without his earbuds, Baby sings and plays along, mimicking the instruments on tables or steering wheels.
When discussing a song with her name, Debora (Lily James), Baby says the song is by “Trex.” Here is where Baby’s nerdom and mine diverge. As everyone knows, the band’s name is “T. Rex,” not “Trex,” but Baby’s mispronouncing of the name illustrates that he’s more interested in the music itself and not the bands or information surrounding them. The kind of nerd I am couldn’t tell you the key a song is in or how to play the first note, but we know the name of the band. Not only that, but we also know that the song “Debora” was recorded back before Marc Bolan had shortened his band’s name from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T. Rex and helped spread the glam through rock on a global scale.
The first record I ever bought with my own money was Gene Simmons’ KISS solo record. In 1978, the four masked men each released solo records. Gene’s wasn’t the best corner of the square (Ace Frehley’s can easily claim to that spot), but it was probably a solid second, even if a distant one. Because of things like those solo records, KISS fans knew all the members, their roles, their alter egos. The Wu-Tang Clan notwithstanding, most bands aren’t promoted as collectives, and most of their members aren’t promoted as individuals. KISS was my first favorite band and Gene was my first favorite member.
This is back when a Journey album cover or a Rob Roskopp skateboard graphic would inspire a story that could occupy your mind for months. The wayward spacebug, once captured and then escaped. The monster breaking through the target just a little more on every board. I never own either a Journey record or a Rob Roskopp deck, but you’d see the images in the magazines or at the record store or skate shop, and your mind would wander. KISS is a band that invited investigation from its young fans. From their comic-book personae, superpowers, and devilish face paint to their catchy, cheesy songs, they had a lock on the imagination of preteen boys for over a decade. We had to dig deeper, and, thanks to a massive merchandising arm, there was always more to find: comic books, pinball machines, action figures, and the movie, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978), among other things.
In the second grade, I saw KISS live in Biloxi, Mississippi on what was to be their last tour in the makeup until the inevitable reunion tours. KISS remained my favorite band for the next few formative years. In middle school, my friend Keith Vanderberg introduced me to Oingo Boingo. Oingo Boingo was the first band whose lyrics actually made me think about things. Danny Elfman’s songwriting elevated my expectations. Bands like KISS were soon on their way out of my shoebox of cassettes, and bands like Talking Heads, The Police, and The Clash were in, eventually giving way to the hardcore of 7Seconds and Minor Threat, the hip-hop of Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy, and the indie rock of Superchunk and the Grifters.
At my first staff meeting for Tacoma, Washington’s Pandemonium! Magazine in 1994, the guy next to me pitched a story on the new Oingo Boingo record. I leaned over and whispered to him that I didn’t realize they had a new record. He said he’d just gotten back from Elfman’s house: “Give me a ride home, and I’ll give you a copy.” That record ended up being Boingo, their last as a group. Once I’d moved on from Oingo Boingo, Elfman had as well. He has scored many movies you’ve seen. He’s worked with directors like Tim Burton and Gus Van Sant, an on movies from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) to The Woman in the Window (2021), as well as many in between like Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Good Will Hunting (1997), and The Circle (2017). He even composed the theme song for The Simpsons.
Gene reemerged sometime later, impressing me with his indie-rock knowledge. In some music magazine in the early 1990s, Gene talked at some length about the lineage of Teenage Fanclub, including BMX Bandits and his love of Eugenius. This seemed not only out-of-character for him, but also oddly too well researched not to be genuine. It was impressive.
Fast-forward a few more years, and I had moved up to editor of Pandemonium!. KISS had reunited for what would be the first of several top-grossing tours in the old makeup. In a fit of nostalgia, we were planning to put them on the cover of our Halloween issue. Our staffer Dave Liljengren was handling the interview, but when Gene called him to chat, Dave was on his way out the door to something he apparently could not miss.
Dave: “Sorry, Gene. I’m walking out the door. Can you call me back at the same time tomorrow?”
Gene: “Not a problem.”
Now, you’d think that this on-and-off freelance writer for this little regional rag in Tacoma, Washington had just blown his one chance for calling Dr. Love (that’s certainly what I thought), but I’ll be damned if Gene didn’t call Dave back the next day and do the interview as planned. We didn’t end up using it (Finding out before we went to press that the October 1996 issue was going to be our last, I put another of my all-time favorite bands on the cover: the mighty Godflesh), but the point is that Gene Simmons could be bothered to call back the next day.
So, say what you will about Gene Simmons. He is all of those things: a slimy, brilliant, shameless, hokey, flamboyant, cheesy, innovative, and a giant still casting his long shadow from my distant past.
Danny Elfman, on the other hand, just released a new record of punky prog-pop. Big Mess is as dark and weird as anything he ever did with Oingo Boingo, but tinged and tainted with the times. Imagine the rambunctious new wave of that band of misfits, combined with Elfman’s orchestral knowledge of decades of film scores, then compressed by recent politics and a year-long lockdown, and you’re almost there. He even redid the Oingo Boingo song, “Insects.”
Again, Elfman was the guy who taught me that music could be about something and introduced me to the music that would shape my mind as a teen. Now, music “about something” is typically the last thing I want to hear, but Big Mess has been on repeat in my house and in my head since it came out last month. The anger, the angst, the energy: decades on, he’s still got it.
June 30, 2021
How Bo Burnham Cured My FOMO
Millennials be like, Bo Burnham did a thing.
Once a bright, shiny reflection of the zeitgeist, in Inside (Netflix, 2021) he’s the mirrorball in his darkened, one-room studio, reflecting only the dim light from his laptop screen.
Mirror Ball Kit: street photo by Adalena Kavanagh.
Inside operates on the level of what Seanbaby at Cracked calls “the Ready Player One of philosophy”: “You create this elaborate world of fantastic bullshit around yourself where your ordinary whiteness suddenly becomes the most important trait a hero can have.” Burnham does that, and then admits that he’s doing it, and then admits that he’s doing that, and then admits that he’s doing that, and so on. It’s like starving in a feedback loop. It’s like taking a shower when you’re thirsty.
I hate to put Burnham on blast because I know that to create something—to truly create something—is to open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable. To deliberately open yourself up as an act of creation, as he has done here, is several steps further out, making him several steps more vulnerable. I also know that paratexts like this review are just part of the show. I started writing this to excise the feeling Inside gave me, and if that isn’t a testament to its importance, then never mind the rest.
If Inside is about anything, it is about depression. It is also in itself depressing, but there’s no denying Burnham’s talent. Even with the curtain pulled back, the technical aspects of the special and Burnham’s command of them are simply staggering. In lesser hands, this would be like… Well, it would be like the internet.
As for the “content,” as he insists on calling it here, missing is that definitively Bo moment where the whole thing leaps to a level no one else can touch, up where it becomes so meta you get a nosebleed, out where French theorists fear to tread. He’s not Charlie Kaufman. He’s not even Andy Kaufman. The most relevant Kaufman here is William Kaufman. In his book The Comedian as Confidence Man (1997), Kaufman coined the condition “irony fatigue.” It’s the juxtaposition of earnest critique with the escape hatch of the joke. Kaufman argues that one cannot be a Crusader for Truth and be just kidding about it at the same time. As for Burnham, you can’t be this sincere about detached irony for very long before that context collapses too.
Maybe I just grew out of it.*
Bo Burnham still might be the voice of the millennial generation, but on Inside, he’s dangerously close to being the internet version of Weird Al Yankovic. That’s fine, but he’s so much better than that.
-royc.
P.S. Subscribe to Adalena’s newsletter. It’s a welcome inbox interruption of brains and beauty.
My wife, a millennial herself, did suggest that I was too old for this special.June 22, 2021
Summer Reading List, 2021
After a two-year absence, it's the return of the Summer Reading List! This year we have reading recommendations from newcomers Carla Nappi, Maria Abrams, John Morrison, and Drew Burk, and from SRL veterans Lance Strate, Steven Shaviro, Lily Brewer, Ashley Crawford, Alex Burns, Joseph Nechvatal, Peter Lunenfeld, Paul Levinson, Howard Rheingold, and myself. We picked out a big pile of great books to take with you back out into the world.
Read on!
[Note: All book titles link to the book on IndieBound where you can order it online or find it at your local bookstore.]
Wu Ming [trans. by Shaun Whiteside] Manituana (Verso, 2009): A collective of unknown communal Italian writers, writing a detailed and graphic re-depiction of the struggle for American Independence? Yeah. That’s a solid work. Bloodshed and peace treaties. Native Americans speaking three languages at once and others counting coup. Nothing delves into the meat of history better at times than a profound work of historical fiction. These folks are the crème de la crème. Or rather, la panna.. della panna.
Diana Walsh Pasulka American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology (Oxford University Press, 2019): I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet. But to have an American philosopher write a work that references Immanuel Kant and the French scientist Jacques Vallée (played by Francois Truffaut in Close in Encounters of the Third Kind) in the same work seems like Summer Reading material to me. Now whether these materials are of terrestrial origin…. That’s a whole other question.
Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, reprint Edition 2007): An Afro-American Lesbian Feminist who sought to undue structures of self-hate and to restore a liberation politics of self-love and self-care seems as prescient and important today as when she first penned the work in 1984.
Rickey Gates Cross-Country: A 3,700 Mile Run to Explore Unseen America (Chronicle Books, 2020): American Quixotes don’t come around that often. Rickey Gates is a well-known trail-runner and as Quixotic as they come. In this beautiful work and struggle— wandering across the American landscape from the South Carolina coast to San Francisco Bay— he sought to commune with common people and ordinary life to wander and dream and confront his own delirium as he overcame heartache and dehydration in the Nevada desert.
Sylvain Tesson [trans. by Frank Wynne] The Art of Patience: Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet (Penguin Press, July 2021): Many have written about Tibet, only a true philosopher-poets knows how to turn the art of waiting into a lesson on stillness and wonder sitting in a frozen-desert landscape at 15,000 feet elevation, hallucinating mystical creatures at -20 celsius and partaking in the splendors of the void. Having thoroughly enjoyed reading this Prix Renaudot-winning work in French several years ago, this translation by Frank Wynne will be a generous poetic offering in sharing the work of a travel-writer and adventurer to a larger reading public.
Paul Fournel [trans. by Allan Stoekel] Need for the Bike (University of Nebraska Press, 2003): Fournel heralds from the poetic Oulipo group including the likes of Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud. And while the Oulip group might need no introduction, Fournel is lesser known, however, and his wielding of words to express the art of taking up a quasi-mystical practice of cycling will serve any reader well both in the arts of poetry but also in how to truly live and experience the joys and suffering on what the French only refer to as “le vélo.”
First and foremost, I would recommend the posthumously published first volume of writing by Christine Nystrom, entitled The Genes of Culture: Towards a Theory of Symbols, Meaning, and Media, edited by Carolyn Wiebe and Susan Maushart (Peter Lang, 2021). Nystrom was a colleague and collaborator of Neil Postman, and one of the foundational media ecology scholars of the late 20th century, her work focusing on language and symbolic communication, culture, and human relationships. Her work is absolutely brilliant, and at the same time highly accessible.
Second on my list is a very significant addition to philosophical thought regarding the human condition by Corey Anton, entitled How Non-Being Haunts Being: On Possibilities, Morality, and Death Acceptance (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2020). This insightful and wide ranging work incorporates rhetorical theory, psychology, systems theory, and phenomenology in a multidisciplinary tour de force.
A bit more down to earth, and relevant for educators and parents as well as scholars, is The Arts and Play as Educational Media in the Digital Age by Robert Albrecht and Carmine Tabone (Peter Lang, 2020). The need to step outside of our digital and electronically media environments, at least temporarily, has never been greater, and this book offers a practical guide and theoretical rationale for doing so.
Given the current state of things, we all could use a little help when it comes to financial investments, even for those of us whose funds do not extend beyond TIAA/CREF retirement accounts. For this reason, I am pleased to recommend Christopher Mayer’s How Do You Know? A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, and Life (Institute of General Semantics, 2021). Mayer not only provides sound and knowledgeable financial advice, but also a popular introduction to general semantics that can be applied to any human activity or concern.
Finally, what is life without a little poetry? Dale Winslow’s second collection of poems, Seeing the Experiment Changes It All (Neopoiesis Press, 2021) is an exciting and deeply meaningful volume that is perfect for those sunny summer days, and equally so for those cold winter nights.
In past years, I could imagine the summer as some kind of a coherent thing. It was when I didn't have to prep courses and grade papers all week. It was a time for being outside, for planning trips, maybe. Bit of a rest, bit of freedom. I understood what June was meant to feel like, and July, and August. I knew what kind of thing the summer was, because I felt like I understood what it wasn't. There was a rhythm, and then a release, and a new rhythm to take its place. If you had asked me what I planned to read over the summer, in past years, I would have been able to tell you a story that I believed at the time.
This year, as I sit to write this, I can't tell that story. It seems that these 1.25 years (and counting) of pandemic time have decomposed my sense of rhythm and normalcy such that I have no sense of what the summer is meant not to be, and thus I have no sense of summer. (My days, work, and internal weather are consistently inconsistent, are reliably unpredictable and irregular.) I'm in my house, still. I'm masking up even when it's optional, still. I'm not sure where the summer is, as a time-space I'm reaching to inhabit. And still, I'm reading, and what I can tell you is what I'm swimming around with right now.
Always, the comic books. This is what I tend to read before bed, and right now that looks like all things Loki-related, anything by Jeff Lemire, the second part of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology series (Dark Horse, 2021), Jupiter's Legacy (Image, 2020) and Karmen, (Image, 2021), but that will explode out into a big colorful cloud as issues of other series that I follow are released over the summer. I just finished James Albon's The Delicacy (Top Shelf, 2021), which I highly recommend for any comic lovers who enjoy reading and thinking about food.
And speaking of food, the pandemic has brought a change in where I get my groceries: more farm share home delivery is available where I live, now, and as the summer produce rolls in I'm spending more time working in my kitchen. The pandemic has also changed how I cook and read about food: I tend to read recipes not as guides to make particular dishes but as collections of lessons in how to process the materials I have at hand. I'm often in my kitchen these days, processing garlic scapes or turnips or rhubarb, dehydrating tomatoes or ramps, without a clear idea of what I'm ultimately going to do with them. Glass jars and bottles of powders and things are scattered across my counter and fridge shelves, and they'll eventually find their way into various experiments. It's a mad science lab in there. For inspiration, I'm currently reading in Magnus Nilsson's Faviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End (Phaidon, 2020), Nik Sharma's The Flavor Equation (Chronicle, 2020) and Season (Chronicle, 2018), and Nick Balla and Cortney Burns' Bar Tartine (Chronicle, 2014) for inspiration on magicking with the dehydrator, Niki Segnit's books, and anything Melissa Clark or Ottolenghi for help with basics. I may wind up writing about this, as part of a kind of freaky wild hybrid housekeeping manual and collection of very short fictions. We'll see.
Soon, I'll be reading Linda Rui Feng's new novel Swimming Back to Trout River (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and Carrie Jenkins' Victoria Sees It (Strange Light, 2021), and finishing Josh Berson's The Human Scaffold (University of California Press, 2021) and Dominic Pettman's Peak Libido (Polity, 2020): four recent books by brilliant scholar-friends whom I find endlessly inspiring. And I'll be looking for new scifi, after recently enjoying Nino Cipri's Finna (Tor.com, 2020) and Defekt (Tor.com, 2021), Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland (MCD, 2021), and Tamsyn Muir's first two books in The Locked Tomb Trilogy (Tor.com, 2020). I'll be rereading George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House, 2021), Robert Hass's A Little Book on Form (Ecco, 2018), and getting back into ghazals.
As a teacher I've fully embraced ungrading as part of my pedagogy for a couple of years, now, and I'm currently reading Susan Blum's Ungrading (West Virginia University Press, 2020) with a collective of other women as we think together about how to refine an ungrading methodology in our classes.
And for a project I'm working on, I'm continuing to swim around in two ponds that are shaping my work at the moment: books on Tarot, Lenormand cards, and other forms of cartomancy; and books on paleobotany, invertebrate paleontology, and bog bodies. Rot and goddesses. Goddesses and rot. That's my current jam.
Rivers Solomon Sorrowland (MCD, 2021): This could be described as a gothic or magic realist novel, but it has the alienating feel of the best science fiction. Vern is a young albino Black woman, living alone with her twin babies in the woods, caught between the repressive Black nationalist commune from which she fled, and the racist terror that characterizes the larger American society. The novel is overwhelmingly harsh and distressing, but it also ultimately about resistance and overcoming. It is continually, astonishingly inventive, continually surprising the reader as it reaches from the tiniest details of sheer survival in the wilderness, through a cold look at American political and economic realities, and all the way through them to a hard-won cosmic perspective. Sorrowland is by far the most powerful work of speculative fiction that I have come across in a good while.
K. Allado-McDowell Pharmako-AI (Ignota Books, 2021): This book is a collaboration between its listed human author, and the software program GPT-3, the most advanced computer system yet devised for generating meaningful prose. The human author provides prompts, and the computer takes off from there, elaborating on the prompts, and occasionally changing its tack as the author gently intervenes. The focus, provided by the human author, is more or less New Age-y, with lots of talk about how we have to understand our position in the universe, about how we need to listen to the plants and other life forms surrounding us, about transcending self and language and creating "hyperspatial art," and so on. I personally don't find the subject matter all that interesting (though I would not necessarily want to argue against it, either). But the book is powerfully disturbing nonetheless, because it almost makes sense. Sentence by sentence, it is fairly lucid and rational in its own terms. At times, it veers in directions I can't quite follow -- but when this happens, it doesn't feel like an aberration that I know how to characterize. It is not delirious or raving, nor is it dogmatic or overly closed off, nor is it avant-garde, nor is it nonsensical in a dadaist manner. Instead, it hovers just beyond meaning, suggesting a kind of alien sensibility that we cannot quite make contact with, or a sort of intelligence that somehow subsists even though we know that GPT-3 is not conscious or intentional, and that a different human interlocutor would lead it off in quite different directions.
Carl Neville Eminent Domain (Repeater, 2020): This is a near-future, alternative-reality novel. It takes place in a Great Britain where a successful revolution in the 1970s and 1980s not only defeated Margaret Thatcher, but eliminated capitalism altogether and sent the royal family and all its upper-class minions and enablers into permanent exile. The result is the People's Republic of Britain (PRB), a semi-utopia where work is minimized and shared equally, ecologically sensitive policies are a matter of course, drug- and music-fueled hedonism is widespread, and most political decisions are managed through decentralized cybernetic networks. There is also a shady bureaucracy that hasn't quite given up secret control, and a certain degree of menace from foreign enemies (especially the United States, whose President seems like an odd combination of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a GPT-3 style language processor). The novel manages the feat of showing off all the society's hidden imperfections and problems, while at the same time convincing us that it is nonetheless far better than actually-existing conditions in the UK or anywhere else. You can neither scoff at this utopia as being impossibly perfect, nor cynically dismiss it as being as bad as what it replaced -- and this is in itself an astonishing triumph of utopian writing. At the same time, it has a compelling plot, and it is narrated through a blend of voices and styles in a way that really conveys a sense of altered-for-the-better consciousness, without being overly arty or incomprehensible. (This novel is actually part of a diptych, alongside the parallel dystopian-UK vision of Resolution Way [Repeater, 2016]).
Nino Cipri Finna (Tor.com, 2020) and Defekt (Tor.com, 2021): These are two short narratives (novellas) set in the same science-fictional environment, one in which an Ikea-like chain of furniture stores has colonized the multiverse, and it is up to a small band of plucky employees not only to fight inter-dimensional monsters, but also to resist the humiliations and deprivations imposed upon them by management. Fast-paced, hilarious, and unapologetically queer. In short, these books are irresistible fun.
During the summer months, I am drawn to any work that involves the sea, beaches, or large bodies of water. Especially now that I live in land-locked Colorado.
Michael McDowell's The Elementals (Valancourt Books, reprinted in 2014) includes some of my favorite elements: Victorian houses wasting away on the shore, a family mystery, and evil spirits. What more could you want?
Alma Katsu's The Deep (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) is a historical fiction novel about the Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic. Katsu blends a paranormal element into the book that makes it appeal to horror and history fans alike.
Shea Ernshaw's The Wicked Deep (Simon & Schuster, 2018) tells the story of a coastal town haunted by three witches. Once a year, the witches try to lure teenage boys into the sea in order to exact their revenge. The book is technically a young adult read; however, I found it to be the perfect, light read for a summer day. Plus, witches!
Andrey Mir Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers (independently published, 2020): Easily the best media theory book I've read in 40 years. I'm not as pessimistic as Mir, but his capacity to tie together the birth of newspapers and their reliance on advertising to the pummeling both are taking now by the screens of social media, and everything media in between, is brilliant, crucial, fascinating, and peerless.
Rob Sheffield Dreaming the Beatles (Dey Street, 2017): Just the best book on the Beatles ever written, teeming with insights that will surprise you, delight you, and confirm what you already knew in your heart of hearts.
Sergio Pistoi DNA Nation: How the Internet of Genes is Changing Your Life (Crux, 2019): Everything you need to know about how the marriage of DNA and social media is something to be prized and feared.
John Stith Pushback (Reanimus, 2018): A crackling, punch-in-the-face, vivid mystery by an underrated master of science fiction.
Elizabeth Hirst Distant Early Warning (Renaissance, 2021): This zombie novel has life, pizzazz, and soul. Somewhere between The Call of the Wild and The Walking Dead, and by no means either, but well worth your read.
Isabel Wilkerson The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010): Between 1916 and 1970, nearly six million African Americans migrated to the North, West, and Midwestern states, many seeking industrialized work and the promise of a better life. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of this monumental event and the complex social and political dynamics that surrounded it.
Frank Kofsky Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (Pathfinder Press, 1970): A classic study of Jazz in the 60s and its interrelationship with the Black freedom movement. Written from a Marxist perspective, Kofsky explores the ways in which music and culture intersect with race and capitalism.
Nathaniel Mackey Atet A.D. (City Lights, 2001): A beautiful, bizarre, and compelling novel about a working Jazz band. Atet A.D. not only captures the Blues-rooted emotional tone of the Black musical tradition its use of surrealistic imagery makes it a truly unique work of fiction.
Claude “Paradise” Gray and Giuseppe “u.net” Piptone No Half Steppin’: An Oral and Pictorial History of New York City Club the Latin Quarter and the Birth of Hip-Hop (WaxPoetics, 2017): As the booker for luminary Hip-Hop club, the Latin Quarter, and cofounder of X-Clan/The Blackwatch Movement, Paradise Grey is a key figure in our culture’s development. No Half Steppin’ tells a thrilling and informative history of the Latin Quarter and Hip-Hop’s golden era from the people who were there.
With City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined (Viking, 2020) coming out in paper back in a few weeks, I’ve been trying to keep up with recent books on Southern California. Three that I’m looking forward to are: novelist Sesshu Foster and artist Arturo Ernesto Romo's ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines (City Lights, 2021), a speculative tech rewriting of the Eastside; moving on to DTLA (as real estate types rebranded downtown) and the Westside, there’s Susanna Phillips Newbury's The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2021); and lastly, Ronald Brownstein’s revisiting of the city’s cultural imaginary across media in Rock Me on the Water: 1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics (Harper, 2021).
Next year, I’m co-teaching a seminar and studio on environmentalism and social justice in Southern California, and one book that everyone has recommended to me as a way to get deeper into contemporary ecological thinking is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2015).
Finally, because it sounds like a fundamental book to not just understand the present but to move into a better future, I’ve got a copy of Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021).
Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Cost of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021) is the result of 10 years of research into AI and its extractive political economy: a more cautionary and critical perspective on the utopian visions of AI and data industries in the early 21st century. Donald MacKenzie's sociology of finance research has influenced me: his latest book Trading At The Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets (Princeton University Press, 2021) is the best history yet of how high-frequency algorithms and firms have shaped online trading brokerages and indexes: a necessary counter to the 2021 frenzy in meme stocks, Reddit forums, and Robinhood trading apps. Hartmut Rosa's Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity Press, 2021) is one of the most detailed analyses of how we cope (or not) with a world defined by increased social acceleration and disconnection. Yuval Elmelech's Wealth (Polity Press, 2020) details the microfoundations, macrofoundations, and the causal processes of wealth, financialization and intergenerational cumulative advantage, explaining how the 1% have benefited from economic inequality. Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa's edited collection Assetization: Turning Things Into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press, 2020) explains how assets can be capitalized and traded as a revenue stream: the intellectual property portfolio goal of today's neoliberal universities.
Joe Henrich The Secret of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2017): This is the interdisciplinary study of human cooperation that I called for in my 2005 TED talk.
Antonin Artaud (Trans. by Peter Valente and Cole Heinowitz) Succubations & Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947) (Infinity Land Press, 2020): This selection of letters from Artaud’s consummate work, Suppôts et Suppliciations [Henchmen and Torturings] translated into English for the first time, provides a vivid, uniquely intimate view of Artaud’s final years. Translated by Peter Valente & Cole Heinowitz with an introduction by Jay Murphy and wonderfully illustrated by Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band (Thames & Hudson, 2020): The history of the Plastic Ono Band Ono-Lennon conceptual art project that ended up as two ‘solo’ music albums in 1970: one by Yoko Ono and and one by John Lennon. My review is up on Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
Blake Gopnik Warhol: A Life As Art (Ecco, 2020): An amazingly in-depth new biography of the life and work of Andy Warhol. My review has been published at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
Julia Frey Venus Betrayed: The Private World of Édouard Vuillard (Reaktion Books, 2021): Fascinating detailed biography of French painter Édouard Vuillard. My full review has been published at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
Blake Butler Alice Knott (Riverhead, 2020)
Jeff VanderMeer Hummingbird Salamander (MCD, 2021)
On September 29, 2020, reviewing Blake Butler’s stunning Alice Knott for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, critic Jeff Calder made a somewhat startling correlation between Butler’s book and author Jeff VanderMeer. “What we do have is Butler’s ‘gnarl,’ so to speak, a location of puzzling quantum glitch where he and his contemporaries, like Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer, allow themselves to flourish.”
Throwing the current Czar of the ‘Weird,’ or ‘New Weird’ – VanderMeer, in alongside the Heir Apparent of the ‘Experimental’ – Butler, was a risky gambit indeed. But it was also a remarkably astute observation.
Calder went on to note that: “In 1971, the critic George Steiner wrote, ‘We stand less on that shore of the unbounded which awed Newton, than amid tidal movements for which there is not even a theoretical model.’ In tomorrow’s fiction today, the uncertainty of such a model may, in fact, be the model. We don’t yet have a Theory of Everything to resolve discrepancies between the subatomic world and sidereal motion – you know, the bigger picture.”
Calder suggested that the realm where Butler and VanderMeer could meet was a form of literary Interzone: “This place is the forbidden mine of American letters, where our hands run along the phosphor seams of H.P. Lovecraft and… Thomas Pynchon; we guide ourselves to the surface, where, as Butler puts it, even the wind seems different.”
Both VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and Alice Knott are essentially ‘crime’ novels, but that’s where their similarities end. Hummingbird is an out-and-out riff on the detective genre, and it is also Vandermeer’s most mainstream novel to date. There is nary a hint of the ‘weird’ that Vandermeer has built his career on to date, and that lack strips the novel of the odd frisson that he has become renowned for. In that regard Hummingbird sits in sharp contrast with Vandermeer’s other ‘detective’ novel, the truly bizarre Finch from 2009 with its noir-ish talking mushrooms. Indeed, Hummingbird by contrast borders on the banal – it’s an out-an-out eco-thriller, a great beach read with only the briefest of hints of the imposing environmental Armageddon that Vandermeer usually wields with such force.
Alice Knott is also a great read, but in a very different way. Butler wants his readers to consume language like a drug, a psychedelic, hallucinatory drug that is not always palatable. It begins with an art theft of immense scale and then charts the increasing derangement of the arts patron whose work has been stolen. Alice is definitely for the brave of heart, a not always-easy narrative that rewards in multiples.
But Calder got something right when he suggested a literature of the ‘gnarl,’ and “a location of puzzling quantum glitch.” Although this doesn’t apply to Hummingbird, it did with Vandermeer’s Annihilation and it most certainly does with Butler’s Alice Knott. Whether they be ‘gnarl’ or ‘glitch,’ these are welcome literary mutations indeed.
Roisin Kiberd The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet (Serpent's Tail, 2021): "What if I'm addicted to the medium, and not the message?" Roisin Kiberd asks in the last chapter of The Disconnect. She makes the point, accurate by all estimates, that the internet and all of its attendant technologies of wares both hard and soft were built by men, for men. Her book further proves that men are not the best critics of that technology. Ellen Ullman, Zizi Papacharissi, danah boyd, Alice Marwick, Annallee Newitz, Patricia Lockwood, Anna Weiner, and Kiberd herself, just to name a few, are our real guides. In addition, Kiberd's writing is as personal as it is critical. You're not likely to read about Jaron Lanier's online-dating activities or Cal Newport's energy-drink experiments in their books, but those internet-adjacent experiences---as well as many others---are all here in stark detail.
B.R. Yeager Negative Space (Apocalypse Party, 2020): This is fiction from some scary area that feels all too real. This is conjuring something from somewhere else and then having to confront it without proper weaponry Yeager's storytelling style puts you right in the heads of most of the characters but keeps you out of some very important ones, thereby making some things intimately known while simultaneously increasing your exposure to the unknown. It's all liminal, interstitial, awakening the latent evil in the cracks of the everyday.
Joshua Chaplinsky The Paradox Twins (Clash Books, 2020): Three books in one, The Paradox Twins tells the story of a family fraught like any other, paralyzed by paradox, and weighed down by legacy. Chaplinsky's allusions to the many films of Stanley Kubrick, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), are subtle at times, over-the-top at others, yet always perfectly suited for the scene and story.
Lauren Beukes Afterland (Mulholland Books, 2020): In Afterland's post-apocalyptic world, the men are all but gone. Before you decide that Lauren Beukes has found the key to utopia, there are plenty of problems. For one, virus-induced, post-apocalyptic tribalism leads to an overnight state of complete anomie. It's as if Children of Men were Children of Women, but with Beukes' unique style and ample abilities, it's so much more than that.
Terry Miles Rabbits (Del Rey, 2021): A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to Midway in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson's Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole's Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998). At the exact moment that I read the phrase "all dressed in white" on page 57 of Rosewater, Courtney Love sang the same phrase in my ears on the song "Use Once & Destroy." A few months later, I was clearing some records off my iPod to add a few new things, including the newly released Jay-Z record, 4:44 (Roc Nation, 2017). When I finally stopped deleting files and checked the available space, it was 444 MB. A few minutes later, while reading the latest Thrasher Magazine (July, 2017), I happened to notice the issue number: 444. Welcome to Rabbits, a book about a game of synchronicities and discrepancies. Jumping tracks on the train of meanings behind things, it's a wild ride to the end of the world. You might already be playing the next iteration.
The Return of The Summer Reading List!
After a two-year absence, it’s the return of THE SUMMER READING LIST! For those unfamiliar, I’ve been asking my friends and mentors for summer book tips since 2003, and then I compile them for your convenience. It’s kind of a big deal.
This year we have reading recommendations from newcomers Carla Nappi, Maria Abrams, John Morrison, and Drew Burk, and from SRL veterans Lance Strate, Steven Shaviro, Lily Brewer, Ashley Crawford, Alex Burns, Joseph Nechvatal, Peter Lunenfeld, Paul Levinson, Howard Rheingold, and myself. We picked out a big pile of great books to take with you back out into the world.
(Your to-be-read stack will thank you.)
In other news, I have a brief excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Hope for Boats up on Malarkey Books site.
And I have a book of poems called Abandoned Accounts coming out next month! More on those – and several other things – soon.
Hope you’re well,
-royc.
