A good week for picking up library holds and a book I preordered.
Recently I had the privilege of writing an introduction to Lori Emerson’s forthcoming book, Other Networks. I can’t recommend this book enough—for you to preorder the book enough. For years, both in her scholarship and work at the Media Archaeology Lab, Lori has produced thoughtful and engaging work exploring the history of networks and encouraging people to think expansively about what we even consider a communications network to be.
Her publisher, Anthology Editions, has put great care into this publication. Just look at the gorgeous cover by Robert Beatty:
For Filmmaker Magazine, I profiled Bill Shaner and his projects, Rewind Video Store and the newsletter, Worcester Sucks But I Love It. It might seem like video stores and alt-weeklies are things of the past, but Shaner and his collaborators are showing what’s possible when it comes to community media and cultural activity.
I also wrote a piece on the 40th anniversary of Neuromancer and the legacy of cyberpunk. For my research, I read and watched and listened to just about every early interview with William Gibson that I could find. One of the interviews—a radio broadcast—stood out. The host was R. P. Bird, a broadcaster in Wichita, Kansas in 1987 and you can listen to the incredibly transportive audio on the Internet Archive. I was listening while I was washing dishes in my apartment on a quiet Sunday night, in 2024, of course, but I kept thinking what it must have been like, to be driving around Wichita in 1987 and turning radio dial through static before landing on this mind-blowing conversation between two people who sound thoughtful and kind.
I was curious who R. P. Bird was—this lighthouse keeper, this beacon of books and the future for people within the range of a broadcast out in Wichita— and sadly, first thing I found online was his obituary. (“He taught History at Butler County Community College and wrote for many magazines and published some Science Fiction books. He returned to Greensburg to care for his parents until the 2007 tornado caused him to move his mother to Hutchinson, Kansas.”) A book he wrote about the tornado, you can also read on the Internet Archive.
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You owe it to yourself to see Megalopolis on as a grand a theater as possible. For me, it was the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. If ever there was a movie made to see at the Chinese Theatre, it’s that one. It has the heart and soul of a post you vaguely remember reading on Ribbonfarm on your lunch break in 2006, and style somewhere Streets of Fire and that painted landscape where Gene Kelly danced with Cyd Charisse and her billowing veil. Movies like this don’t come around all that often. People with conviction like this don’t usually have the money to make movies like this. It’s an event. Is it good? Is it bad? Who cares. Don’t miss it.
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Everywhere I look, I see cheat codes have stopped working. Maybe this will be my next-next nonfiction book: WHEN THE CHEAT CODES STOP WORKING. What I mean by this is organizations that have, for years, coasted on tricks and loopholes to work around bureaucracies, but the fundamentals get them in the end. New cheat codes are written, and those stop working too. Finally, it’s game over.
I’ve also been listening to a podcast by someone who worked as a buyer at a popular clothing chain. She talks about the logistics of retail from the warehouse and shipping of garments to the environmental consequences of overconsumption.
The episode on sweaters is especially great because it dives deep into supply chain issues: everything from how product orders and distribution work to how labels decide on what yarn to use. At 1:04ish into the episode (the episodes tend to be quite long), the host tells an incredible story about how, when she was working at the clothing chain, there was a blizzard in the Northeast and sales tanked. She knew the blizzard was the reason that no one was buying anything, the sales team knew why no one was buying anything, but the internal processes were so messed up that she had to make up a reason like they didn’t have enough turtlenecks in stock. It reminds me of a lot of stories I hear from publishing—cheat codes; it’s all cheat codes.
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Something that happens often when you publish a book is people start asking you how to do it. Lately, I’ve been directing people who come to me with that question to the podcast Publishing Rodeo, which is—like Clotheshorse—looking at market forces and the industrialized nature of what might on the surface look like trends and whims and chance. It is hosted by two authors who had debut novels published by Tor in the same year. The authors had vastly different publishing experiences and use the podcast to compare notes. One of the authors had a book provided with extraordinary resources in-house. It was set up for success and it was a success. The other author had very little support and probably will struggle to find a publisher for his next book. Traditional publishing tends to operate in ways opaque to authors, which means you might be in the dark both about enormous effort put toward your book, or if the book isn’t supported at all—up until the last minute. It’s helpful to know what you are up against.
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Finally read Moderan, which is as vivid and deliciously bizarre as I’d hoped. I also read The Notebook trilogy by Ágota Kristóf, which was even more bizarre—I’m at a loss to even describe it.
Much earlier this summer, I read Children of Men—which I thought I had already read— but when I picked it up, after listening to a wonderful episode of Backlisted on it, the opening took me by surprise (and I don’t think my memory is that terrible). It begins with questions about the legacy that humans will leave behind when the world is absent of them. (I scribbled some notes down while I was reading it but now I find what I’d written incomprehensible: “Whether the stones are too soft, what papers will serve as archives to possible outer space beings that could one day explore the ruins of humanity?” Anyway, right off the bat it tackles Big Questions).
Of course I love the movie, but the thing that got me about the novel was the generational dynamic. The youngest people are called the “omegas”. They are completely opaque to older generations—glamorous and baffling in the present, while also pitted in an alienated fashion, given their significance as humanity’s likely end of the line. The novel is haunted by the dark future that looms: an earth thinly populated by very elderly people with only themselves to care for each other. and then….the end.
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Anyway.
Thanks for reading.