In the three weeks between January 6 and January 20, 2021, I followed the white rabbit, as early Q followers would say. I read QAnon blogs and watched Q-commentators (QTubers). I even signed up for a Parler account. Even in that brief span, I found an alternate reality where the pope was arrested amid blackouts in several countries, and the US presidential election was to be overturned at any moment. The Storm was supposedly upon us. Again.

Whether QAnon is a religion, a cult, a joke, a political movement, or just an online game gone awry, Robert Guffey's Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump (O/R Books, 2022) is his attempt to figure it all out. Guffey's pedigree in this area is unmatched. His first book, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (Trine Day, 2012), explores every conspiracy theory out there. Here's a prescient line from Cryptoscatology: "In the modern day digital environment truth is as malleable as viscous liquid. You can't make up anything that won't come true a few minutes later." Ever since Q emerged online in 2017, he's been trying to figure out the appeal, the movement, and its meaning. His efforts are all chronicled in Operation Mindfuck.

Where cognitive dissonance is the default state of mind, QAnons' frequent refrain of "Do your own research!" echoes that of Behold a Pale Horse author William Cooper. Cooper was viewed as a "P.T. Barnum-style huckster" in UFOlogy and conspiracy circles alike. Guffey quips, "Compared to QAnon, William Cooper was Buckminster Fuller." Tarpley Hitt writes in The Daily Beast, “There’s an aspect of QAnon obsession that resembles demented literary criticism: every current event encoded with hidden meanings, global criminals desperate to signal their crimes through symbols, millions of messages waiting for the right close reader to unpack them.”

After a break to move everything out of the house, we're back! And there's a lot to get into this week.

Starting with...

Summer Reading List, 2022

For 20 years I’ve been bugging my literary-minded friends and colleagues about their most anticipated or most loved summer reads and compiling those lists into our annual Summer Reading List. To celebrate two decades of The List, I asked more contributors than ever, and I asked them all to recommend just one book.

I live at one end of a two-block stretch of road in the middle of Savannah's Baldwin Park neighborhood. Since there are only two consecutive blocks, the traffic is minimal. The end I live on dead ends into the back of an abandoned shopping center. There were two extant businesses in there when I moved here three years ago, but they've since closed up like the rest of the place--one in step with the pandemic, the other much more recently. Across the vacant parking lot and the street, a nightclub and a carwash stand empty. The front of the nightclub insists "no drugs," and the carwash sign still advertises "the best hand job in town."

Living adjacent to the blight of these buildings seeps into your psyche. It makes it easy to feel left behind. The closing of another business can feel like the end of the world. The end of a street can feel like the edge of the earth.

“The problem with snapshots,” Kirby Mazrachi thinks, “is that they replace actual memories. You lock down the moment and it becomes all there is of it.” Kirby is one of the girls in The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books, 2013), a disturbingly beguiling novel that is now an Apple TV series in which Elisabeth Moss plays Kirby. Beukes' easily digestible prose and gleefully nagging narrative betray a convoluted timeline and staggering depth of research. Drifter Harper Curtis (played in the show by Jamie Bell) quantum leaps from time to time gutting the girls as he goes. The House he squats in his helper, enabling the temporal jaunts. He’s like an inverted Patrick Bateman: no money, all motive. Where Bateman’s stories are told from his point of view in the tones of torture-porn, Harper’s kills are described from the abject horror of the victims. And the victims, who are all strong-willed women with drive and purpose, are only victims at his hand. Otherwise they shine with potential and promise.

Harper’s havoc reaches roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s and the 1990s. It’s a tangled mess of totems, trauma, and one who got away. As Harper puts it, "There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can’t face the terror that it might all be random." Beukes had her own method, mess, and snapshots to deal with while writing. She had a murderous map, full of "crazy pictures, three different timelines, murder dates…" She told WIRED UK, "It’s been completely insane trying to keep track of all of this."

Before it was the name of a Douglas Coupland book, and before it was the designation of people born from 1965 to 1980, Generation X was a band. Formed in 1976 during the first wave of UK punk by soon-to-be pop icon Billy Idol, Generation X also included bassist Tony James. When Idol went solo in the early 1980s, James went on to form Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

If you were looking to get Cliff's Notes for the 1980s in musical form, you'd be hard pressed to find a better exemplar than Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1986 debut, Flaunt It! Tony James described them as "hi-tech sex, designer violence and the fifth generation of rock and roll." A product of punk in the same way that Big Audio Dynamite and Devo were, their techno-pop sound was laced with samples from movies and media. Even after all of the work Trevor Horn had done defining a new sound for the decade, Sigue Sigue Sputnik was still exciting. At the time, for better or worse, they sounded like the future.

In a move of unfortunate prescience, the band sold brief advertisements that played between the songs on the record. Ones for i-D magazine and Studio Line from L’Oréal share space with fake ones for The Sputnik Corporation and a Sputnik video game that never materialized. James touted the spots as commercial honesty, adding, "our records sounded like adverts anyway." Where the punk that preceded them railed against the dominant culture, Sputnik was out to to mirror it, to consume it, to corrode it from the inside. To interpolate an old Pat Cadigan story, the former was trying to kill it, the latter to eat it alive.

In 1994, David Baker had just left Mercury Rev, the band he co-founded with Jonathan Donahue, and started a new thing called Shady. I was a big fan of the first two Mercury Rev records, 1991's Yerself is Steam and 1993's Boces, but I'd yet to hear the Shady record, World. Baker enlisted the help of members from some of my other favorite bands of the time: Bill Whitten (St. Johnny), Jimi Shields (Rollerskate Skinny), Adam Franklin (Swervedriver), Sooyoung Park (Seam), and Martin Carr (Boo Radleys), among others. In an interview that year, he talked about never having money for records growing up, and how his musical influences were all found in thrift stores and bargain bins. I remember being really excited by this. Not only because of the kaleidoscope of sound it conjured but also because I too scoured thrift stores and bargain bins for records and tapes during my formative years.

Our discretionary budgets back then were small, and cassettes cost around $10, while CDs were closer to $17. I remember the music industry titans at the time promising that the CD would soon cost the same as a tape, promising a cheaper CD. Instead, CDs stayed the same and the tape eventually edged upwards. LPs were all but gone with fewer and fewer new releases even appearing in the format.

Prohibitive pricing notwithstanding, buying music was always a risk. We might have heard a song or two from a friend or seen a late-night video, but most of what one might buy was unheard, a mystery that could turn out to be quite disappointing. I never knew when I was going to have enough money to buy another record, so in the event that I had money for a record in the first place, I had to hope whatever I was buying was good.

Michel Foucault once said that the twentieth century might eventually be considered Deleuzian, and he still may end up being right. Gilles Deleuze, and his frequent cowriter, Félix Guattari, wrote some unignorable books in the late decades of last century, the two volumes, 1983's Anti-Oedipus and 1987's A Thousand Plateaus being the two most prominent in either’s canon. Each has an extensive body of work in his own right, but Deleuze casts a large shadow over his friend and colleague. Such a shadow in fact, that it prompted Ian Bogost to Tweet a while back: "Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?"

Assemblages, rhizomes, bodies-without-organs, repetition, difference… I can’t claim to have an answer to Bogost’s question, as I can’t claim to understand much of the Deleuze that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of it, and a lot of it more than twice). I do know that a lot of it is difficult simply by dint of the contrarian angle on subjectivity: These books challenge the fundamental way(s) most of us tend to feel that being in the world works. Eugene Holland opens his 1999 book, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, with the obvious statement: “The Anti-Oedipus is not easy to read.” Regarding writing it with his coauthor, Deleuze said, “Between Félix and his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how.” And about A Thousand Plateaus, he mused, “Now we didn’t think for a minute of writing a madman’s book, but we did write a book in which you no longer know, or need to know, who is speaking…” On page 22 of the latter, they even write it out, in black and white: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is compose of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” How is one to make sense of bastard philosophy such as this?

I once asked my friend and mentor Steven Shaviro what path to take as I embarked upon the plateaus alone for the first time. He suggested using Claire Parnet’s Dialogues as a sort of crib notes to the two major volumes mentioned above. Dialogues was compiled between the writing of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze talked about the book’s in-betweenness. That is, its being between both the two books and the three authors, writing that what mattered was “the collection of bifurcating, divergent, and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without going from one to the other.” And so it goes.

In our most tranquil dreams, peace is almost always accompanied by quiet. Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they did so, like tea leaves before the addition of hot water.” Reading silently was subversive.

We often speak of noise referring to the opposite of information. In the canonical model of communication conceived in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, noise is anything in the system that disrupts the signal or the message being sent.

If you’ve ever tried to talk on a cellphone in a parking garage, find a decent sounding radio station while driving through a fly-over state, or follow up on a trending topic on Twitter, then you know what this kind of noise looks like. Thanks to Shannon and Weaver and their followers, it’s remained a mainstay of communication theory ever since, privileging machines over humans. Well before it was a theoretical metonymy, noise was characterized as “destruction, distortion, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages.” More pointedly, in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali conceives noise as pain, power, error, murder, trauma, and youth—among other things—untempered by language. Noise is wild beyond words.

Each time we move to a new city, we make memories as the city slowly takes shape in our minds. Every new place we locate — the closest grocery store, the post office, rendezvous points with friends — is a new point on the map. Wayfinding a new city is an experience you can never get back. Once you’re familiar with the space or place, it’s gone.

Since moving out on my own, I’ve gravitated toward cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago. Externalized memories built in brick and concrete. It reminds me of a passage from Steve Erickson’s novel Days Between Stations:

“What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?”

This week marks the three-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release, the Preface from the text, and some information on a related forthcoming project. Enjoy!

We launched Dead Precedents properly at Volumes Bookcafé in Chicago with readings by me, Krista Franklin, and Ytasha L. Womack.

In late May of 1980, Joy Division had planned their first tour of the United States. Planned, that is, until just a few days before they were board the plane, Ian Curtis committed suicide. Life had been a few notches higher than hectic for Curtis for the months before the planned tour. He was juggling a family (Debbie and their one-year-old daughter Natalie), a girlfriend (Annick Honoré), and a band on the verge (they’d just recorded their second record, Closer, and were all set to tour the world), not to mention his epilepsy getting the better of him both on and off stage. They’d had to cancel several shows in England, and he’d already made an attempt on his life on April 6. All of the above would have been heavy load even without the disorder. Something had to break.

In Jon Savage's recent This Searing Light, the Sun, and Everything Else (faber & faber, 2019), Liz Naylor says, "My thing about Joy Division is they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's just the noise around where you are." Even with his life’s story on film with the Anton Corbijn-directed Control (2007) and many books written, there remains so much mystery around Ian Curtis. “He seemed able to surrender control of his life as if it was nothing to do with him at all,” his widow Debbie wrote of him at the time of his overdose. Indeed, he wasn’t much in control as the band went straight back to doing shows. “Ian went straight from his suicide attempt to a gig at Derby Hall, Bury, on 8 April 1980,” Debbie writes in Touching from a Distance (faber & faber, 1995). He only sang two songs at that fabled show, which ended in an outright riot. Something, nay, many things had to break.

Just four years earlier on June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played another much-fabled show in Manchester to a few dozen people and even more empty chairs (the scene in the movie 24-Hour Party People supposedly has it about right). Supposedly everyone there left that show dead-set on starting a band. There’s even a book about it: I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World by Dave Nolan (Blake Publishing, 2006). In attendance were Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto (of the nascent Buzzcocks, who organized the gig but weren’t ready to play), Kevin Cummins (photographer who took many great pictures of the British punk and post-punk scene, including the one above), Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Mick Hucknall (Simply Red), Tony Wilson (TV personality and future Factory Records owner), Paul Morley (writer; chronicler of the Factory scene for NME; future co-counder of The Art of Noise), Rob Gretton (future manager), Martin Hannett (future producer), Morrissey (duh), and Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook (who of course went on to immediately start the band that would become Joy Division). Peter Hook gets all of this down in his Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (!t Books, 2013), and like Debbie Curtis, he was right there when it all went down, albeit facing different facets of there and a different facets of Curtis.

Michel de Certeau wrote in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, "Books are only metaphors of the body." The move to digital texts, which is gaining more and more zeal by the day, has put the not only the fetishization of books as objects in jeopardy but also seemingly the want or need for them at all. As Jonathan Safran Foer (see below) puts it, “When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.”

Erasure poetry both deconstructs and demonstrates the idea that books are bodies, playing operation with structure, doing surgery on syntax. My dear friend Danika Stegeman LeMay has a full book-length erasure of the text from God is in the Small Stuff for the Graduate by Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz (Barbour Publications, 2004). It's called called GOD IS IN THE MALL, and an excerpt is available in Vol. 30 of Word for/ Word. This page gets right to it:

Danika's is the latest example of this practice I've seen done well, but the first was a while ago. Maybe it’s apt that I don’t remember exactly how or where, but I came across Tom Phillips‘ “treated Victorian novel,” A Humument (Tetrad Press, 1970), two decades ago at San Diego State University. Phillips took William Mallock’s A Human Document (Cassell Publishing, 1892) and obscured words on every page, leaving a few here and there to tell a new story. It’s part painting, part drawing, part collage, part poetic cut-up, and all weirdly, intriguingly unique.

What follows is a brief round-up of various writing and drawing I have out this month and some news about forthcoming books and such.

But first, it's the...

15th ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLOW FOR NOW:

The designer James Macanufo once said that if paper didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Paper, inscribed with writing and then with printing, enabled recorded history. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler once wrote that print held a “monopoly on the storage of serial data.” Even as writing represents a locking down of knowledge, one of “sequestration, interposition, diaeresis or division, alienation, and closed fields or systems,” Walter Ong pointed out that it also represents liberation, a system of access where none existed before. After all, we only write things down in order to enable the possibility of referring to them later.

Herbert Bayer, Diagram of the Field of Vision (1930).

People would make fun of you if you were working on software for communicating with the dead even though that’s half the purpose of writing. -- @mathpunk, November 1, 2014

Today is David Lynch's 76th birthday, and in his honor, I'm sending you this brief bit about one of his several masterpieces, Twin Peaks. Happy birthday, Mr. Lynch!

[Portrait by Chris Mars.]

This being the first full year that I've done a newsletter, I'm doing a quick recap of 2021 in links and images. Between writing and drawing and publishing, I did a lot of stuff this year! You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it. Check it out!

Here we go:

• I had two poems in the April issue of Anti-Heroin Chic.

• My MF DOOM security-envelope collage (above) was featured in Shadows of Tomorrow: DRO CUP’s DARK SIDE OF THE DOOM Pink Floyd/DOOM Mash-up & Visual Album (MF DOOM Tribute) on The Witzard.

• I had a poem called "San Diego" in the inaugural issue of Sledghammer Lit.

• And an excerpt from my next book for punctum books, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (see below), is available on the Malarkey Books site.

• I have a short story called “Hayseed, Inc.” in Cinnabar Moth’s anthology, A Cold Christmas and the Darkest of Winters.

• I did a fairly lengthy interview with Fifteen Questions.

• I also did a “Quick 9” interview with Fevers of the Mind.

• Todd L. Burns did an interview with me for his Music Journalism Insider newsletter.

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct," opens Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction epic Dune. Herbert says of the novel’s beginnings, "It began with a concept: to do a long novel about the messianic convulsions which periodically inflict themselves on human societies. I had this idea that superheroes were disastrous for humans." The concept and its subsequent story, which took Herbert eight years to execute, won the Hugo Award, the first Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the minds of millions. In his 2001 book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, chronicler of cinematic science-fiction follies David Hughes writes, "While literary fads have come and gone, Herbert’s legacy endures, placing him as the Tolkien of his genre and architect of the greatest science fiction saga ever written." Kyle MacLachlan, who played Paul Atreides in David Lynch's film adaptation, told OMNI Magazine in 1984, "This kind of story will survive forever."

Writers of all kinds are motivated by the search and pursuit of story. A newspaper reporter from the mid-to-late-1950s until 1969, Herbert employed his newspaper research methods to the anti-superhero idea. He gathered notes on scenes and characters and spent years researching the origins of religions and mythologies. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist with his finger closest to the pulse of the Universe, wrote in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986), "The life of mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance… Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being." Dune is undeniably infused with the underlying assumptions of a powerful mythology, as are its film adaptations.

After labored but failed attempts by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Haskell Wexler, and Ridley Scott (the latter of whom offered the writing job to no less than Harlan Ellison) to adapt Dune to film, David Lynch signed on to do it in 1981. With The Elephant Man (1980) co-writers Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, Lynch started over from page one, ditching previous scripts by Jodorowsky, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Frank Herbert himself, as well as conceptual art by H.R. Giger (who had designed the many elements of planet Giedi Prime, home of House Harkonnen), Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and Chris Foss. Originally 200 pages long, Lynch’s script went through five revisions before it was given the green light, which took another full year of rewriting. “There’s a lot of the book that’s isn’t in the film,” Lynch said at the time. “When people read the book, they remember certain things, and those things are definitely in the film. It’s tight, but it’s there.”

Todd L. Burns interviewed me about my writing for his excellent Music Journalism Insider newsletter, about which he writes,

The newsletter collects some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; highlights news about the industry; and features interviews with writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens.

I first pursued music journalism as a career path in the early 1990s, and though I've strayed, I still feel related to it at least tangentially. What follows are Todd's questions and my answers.

Music Journalism Insider Interview:

I don’t know any casual skateboarders. Everyone I know who’s ever done it has either an era of their lives or their entire essence defined by it—the rebellion, the aggression, the expression—inextricably bound up with their being. It’s the way you wear your hair and the way you wear your hat. It’s the kind of shoes you wear and which foot you put forward. It’s the crew you run with and the direction you go. There is something about rolling through the world on a skateboard that changes people forever.

The author at age 11 and the beginning of a very long road.

Ever since I first saw Wes Humpston’s Dogtown cross on the bottom of a friend’s skateboard in the sixth grade, I knew it was going to be a part of my world. I first stepped on a skateboard at the age of 11. There are scant few physical acts and objects that have had a larger impact on who I am and how I am. Through the wood, the wheels, and the graphics, skateboarding culture introduced me to music, art, and attitude. Riding a skateboard fundamentally changed the way I see the world. "Skateboarding is not a hobby,” says Ian MacKaye, “and it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.”

As much as I clearly see the problems with year-end lists, they're one of the things I look forward to in the waning days of the year. Whatever negative feelings you have about them, mine is meant as a celebration: These are the sounds that kept me going this year.

To be honest, I listened to Elder's Omens (Armageddon Label), which I missed last year, more than anything else this year, but the ten records below came close. There are a lot of favorites, old and new. And, as they have been for the past several years, all of the links below lead to the album's Bandcamp page where available. Today is also the last Bandcamp Friday of the year, during which the site waves all of its fees, so these artists will get all of the funds you send their way. No one has been able to tour properly for quite some time, so... Please spend recklessly.

I journal like a lovelorn kid in middle school. And I've been keeping one almost since I was a lovelorn kid in middle school. My senior year of high school, I met a girl. I started writing poems about her on receipts, handbills, and other various scraps of paper. My writing about her was so prolific, I decided to start keeping it all in a notebook. I've been keeping such a notebook ever since. Around the same time, I started keeping a day-to-day journal as an extension of the poems. I've kept some form of both off and on ever since.

For me, journals are like asides that begin and never end, parentheticals or paratexts, running on in the margins of other projects. Though the writing and thinking there ends up in other pieces that are crafted for consumption, the content of the journals themselves is for me only. Mine are full of drawings, diagrams, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books.

In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Walter Benjamin, discovering Paul Virilio, and the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started a research journal. I've kept three different analog journals ever since.

One of the many methods used in futures studies is what is called environmental scanning. "All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques (e.g., expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, conference monitoring, etc.), helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, President of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

A little further afield, science fiction is another place we look to "see" the future. Citing Karl Marx’s reification and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, Adam Roberts writes, “Science as simulation is the reason why fictional science, or ‘SF’, is so much more fun to watch than real science…” Spaceships, robots, cyberspace, the metaverse: These all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances come from science-fiction books and movies. "In the context of SF,” Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction to show us the potential directions in which the technology of the future is going.

Derek Woodgate, founder of The Futures Lab, calls this method the “wide-angled lens” approach. Analyzing the work of William Gibson, Woodgate writes, “Here, in the various levels of connectivity, we need to study the patterns and signals suggested by the ‘lens’ and models. More important, we must be able to recognize the patterns and make connections between seemingly unrelated data in a way that will provide us with powerful and effective future leverage points." As much as Gibson denies being a predictor of any stripe, his work is invariably consulted as a map to the future of technology.

The first time I heard a compact disc was in middle school. My best friend’s dad had just replaced his entire collection of LPs with CDs. They sat in stacks beside the apparatus that played them. They were like extra-terrestrial objects, something from the science fiction we were into at the time. They were also off limits. We were not allowed to touch them.

One day my friend’s dad sat me down on the couch in the middle of their den. The angled sunlight of autumn streaked through the limbs and leaves of the trees in their small front yard. Four large brown cabinet speakers, sitting one each in the corners of the room, were all pointing directly at me. He put on “Owner of a Lonely Heart” from Yes’s then-new record, , loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. The opening samples stumbled around the room before the lead guitar took hold. That first horn stab, a sample from "Kool is Back" by Funk, Inc. (which is a cover of “Kool’s Back Again” by Kool and The Gang) leftover from Trevor Horn’s sessions with Malcolm McLaren, sounded like a laser shot from space. I remember being able to feel Chris Squire’s bass thumping through the floor as Trevor Rabin’s guitar swirled and the samples bounced around the room and my skull to dizzying effect. That day the CD earned and maintained its otherworldly reputation in the history of recording formats, supplanting the raggedy cassette and the woefully outmoded vinyl record.

Due to global supply-chain issues, our edited essay collection, Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism, has been pushed back until early next year, but it’s already available for pre-order! If you're interested in owning a copy, you can help the book immensely by preordering it. If you're unsure, here's a bit about how it came together, a look at the cover, the blurbs, the table of contents, and an early review from The Wire magazine. Read on!

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

Over the past few years, I gathered up some friends, and we’ve been working on an edited collection, sort of a companion to my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Now, the mighty Strange Attractor Press is putting it out. Check out the cover by Edwin Pouncey a.k.a. Savage Pencil!

Why does the world now look more like a William Gibson novel than one by Arthur C. Clarke? Gibson’s friend and cyberpunk peer Bruce Sterling explains:

Because he was looking at things that Clarke wasn’t looking at. Clarke was spending all his time with Wernher von Braun, and Gibson was spending all his time listening to Velvet Underground albums and haunting junk stores in Vancouver. And, you know, it’s just a question of you are what you eat. And the guy had a different diet than science fiction writers that preceded him.

In Doug Pray’s 2001 DJ documentary , which featuresinterviews with many prominent turntablists, one of the questions was, “What made you want to be a DJ?” A large majority of the interviewees named Herbie Hancock’s 1983 hit “Rockit” as the defining impetus for their becoming DJs. This struck me as odd since the main thing that people remember about that song is the video’s disturbing robotic mannequins.

We’ve all been at a dinner party where the dynamic seemed to sour as the night progressed. One person is being uncooperative, the conversation turns to uncomfortable subjects, or the personalities assembled just don't quite sync up. What if the dynamic not only went bad but also splintered into multiple realities? James Ward Byrkit’s 2013 film, Coherence, chronicles just such a gathering.

Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. The film is . After working on big-budget movies (e.g., , the  series, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of  written by Erwin Schrödinger,  works because of its limited initial conditions, not in spite of them.

Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter's first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It's about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It's well worth checking out.

Quick note: My new interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is More details and table of contents below.

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 with the hands from the cover of ' third album, , which Tim shot.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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, 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 where you can order it online or find it at your local bookstore.]

I’ve been busy writing, and I’ve been thinking a lot about paraphrasing and its ugly sibling, plagiarism. While endemic to hip-hop, the practice of interpolation also hotly debated. In writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted but can be quite helpful.

While some still consider the interpolation of rap lyrics an act of biting, others see such a move as metaphorical and central to the art form and indeed historical African oral traditions. In the use of allusive appropriation in hip-hop, a practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. The tension between biting and innovating has been around since the beginning of recorded rap. The lyrics to the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” were lifted straight from the streets. The fact that those verses belonged originally to Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers is the oldest bit of rap lore. David Drake writes, “Hip-hop, an art poised in the balance between repetition and novelty, is really an oral tradition. The purpose of rhymes are to freeze that which is temporal and ephemeral, creating patterns and imprinting them in the cultural memory.” One person’s clever quip is another’s cliché. Novelty is as cognitive as it is cultural.

As we head back out into the world on and in various vehicles, I thought I’d bring this little list back out. It’s about staying safe on the streets, but each rule is an allegory that applies to many things.

I was walking to the UT campus in Austin one day, and I was almost mowed down by a guy on a bicycle. I was crossing a street, in the crosswalk, where I clearly had the right of way, but he rang his bell and blew by right in front of me, running the stop sign on the corner. I’d already been conceiving this post in my head and that was the last close call. Being a frequent rider of bikes on the streets of many cities, as well as a frequent pedestrian, I have come to realize that people aren’t just inconsiderate, a vast majority of us — whether on foot, behind the wheel, or in the saddle — simply do not know what to do when confronted with each other on the road. So, I hereby give you The Rules of the Road.

I was digging through an old notebook today, looking for some notes on my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. Instead I found this Year-End Top-Ten List of ideas from 2003. I’d been thinking about a few core concepts that I always seem to return to, and I thought more of them were on here. I felt like I had a second imprinting between the end of my 20s and my mid-30s, but perhaps it wasn’t as tenacious as I thought.

Substack is wack, so we’re trying a new platform.

For our test run of this new newsletter, I thought I’d round up all of the stuff I’ve published on various websites the last month or so. I’ve managed to get a few poems, short stories, a book excerpt, and even a collage published recently. You may have seen some of this, but chances are you haven’t seen all of it.

Sixteen years ago today, we lost one of the funniest voices and best visionaries humanity has ever given us. The odd-angled comedy of Mitch Hedberg remains unparalleled.

There’s no way to do him justice, but years ago I attempted to pay tribute to the man. This piece originally appeared on Vulture (née ) in 2013.

First up, a new online literature journal called Sledgehammer Lit launched today, and I have a poem up there! It’s called “San Diego,” and it will also be in my collection of poems coming out in July in Close to the Bone’s . .

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the publication of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books! In celebration, here are some pictures from the book’s release, the Preface from the text, and some information on a related forthcoming project. Enjoy!

This time around I’m offering a short story.

Maybe you can relate to this: When the lockdown started a year ago, I found it difficult to focus on anything very big. All of my writing projects seemed both intractable and pointless. My attention was reduced to writing poems, flash fiction, and book reviews. Slowly, the pieces I was able to concentrate on grew to something almost normal.

The following is one of the pieces I’ve written in the past year. It’s several short articles about and interviews with a fictional band, compiled to accompany a boxset of their discography. While Bad Flag doesn’t exist, they are very real. Maybe you’ll recognize them.

This story is dedicated to the memory of Sam Jayne.

On December 18, 1996, I started my first online job. I remember the date because one year and one day later, the company closed its doors.

We sold software online. It sounds quaint now, but we were the first company to do it. This was back when the attitude was apocalyptic about using your credit card online. The internet was a dark, dismal place. No one out here was to be trusted. It was also when people expected software to come in a box with shiny discs and glossy instruction manuals. Customers routinely asked when they would receive these. The idea that you could download a program over the phone-lines, then install and run it on your computer without a disc was still foreign to most.

Sometime in 1997 we were purchased by another software retailer. They made their money through mail-order catalog sales and were curious about potential sales online. They bought us as a placeholder just in case this internet thing took off. When we didn’t show the returns they expected in the time they expected, they shut us down.

It sounds as weird now as downloading software did then, but this kind of turnover was normal in the dot-com era. My coworkers seemed to be split between the glib, who’d seen it all before, and the crushed, who’d harbored dreams of online fortune. We were so far ahead of other companies, many of their jobs didn’t exist anywhere else yet. As one of my friends there said, despondent after being unable to find similar work elsewhere, “I love what I do.”

In the first chapter of his 1992 book, Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley), Donald Norman describes going to see a sixth-grade play in a relatively small auditorium. “If there had been only fifty parents present, it would have been crowded,” he writes. “But in addition to the parents, we had the video cameras.” Written some thirty years ago, this anecdote is well before the camera shrunk and merged with the mobile phone. Video cameras were cumbersome, and many didn’t yet run on batteries, hence his long-since gone concerns about space. He continues,

Ah yes, once upon a time there was an age in which people went to enjoy themselves, unencumbered by technology, with the memory of the event retained within their own heads. Today [1992] we use our artifacts to record the event, and the act of recording becomes the event.

I distinctly remember the only issue of Blender Magazine that I ever read had Dave Chappelle on the cover (August 2004). The mid-00s were the magazine format’s last peak, and there were so many of them, newsstands stretching down grocery-store aisles, colorful covers like cereal boxes. I don’t remember what prompted my purchase of this particular issue, but I read the Chappelle piece with intense interest. I’d seen some of Chappelle’s stand-up and seen him in movies here and there. I’d never seen Chappelle’s Show proper, though I’d watched clips from it online. I had friends who were huge fans though, the kind who couldn’t describe a sketch without devolving into uncontrollable laughter.

At the height of my fandom of Richard Kelly’s first movie, Donnie Darko (2001), I attended a midnight screening of the director’s cut at The Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. During the trivia contest that preceded the movie, I was asked to sit out due to my long string of correct answers. The movie struck something in me at a time when I needed to be struck. As Kelly himself put it, “I think you are challenged by things that are slightly beyond your grasp.” It is those things obscured that make a movie like this so engaging, endearing, and enduring.

A few years ago, I was having lunch at a bar in Chicago when an Archers of Loaf song came on over the speakers. Excited, I told my partner what a big fan I am, about the first time I saw them at the Crocodile Café in Seattle, and that I saw them a dozen or so times during their first run in the 1990s, once even traveling up to Vancouver to see them play with Treepeople and Spoon. I told her how, fancying myself an indie-rock mogul, I had plans to put together a compilation of Chapel Hill bands, and they were the first to agree to contribute a song. And how I’d gotten to be pretty good friends with their bass player, Matt Gentling, how he’s also a rock climber, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years.

When I was in the sixth grade, I was in a Vic-20 user’s group. I had a revved-up Commodore Vic-20 with an 8k-expansion cartridge and an external tape drive. Though floppy discs were available, we traded games and software via cassette tapes. There was this device at every meeting called “The Octopus.” It was a port replicator, and when we all plugged in our tape drives for copying multiple programs at once, it looked like a giant, electronic octopus.

On his spoken-word album Bomb the Womb (Gang of Seven) from 30 years ago, Hugh Brown Shü does a great bit about it being 1992, and everything seeming familiar. “What has been will be again,” reads Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That old familiar feeling has been around longer than we’d like to admit, but how do make sense of things that seem familiar but really aren’t?

The first time I heard “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kid Cudi (2009), I felt like something was a bit off about it. I felt like it had originally be sung by a woman, and he’d just jacked the chorus for the hook. I distinctly remembered the vocals being sung by a woman but also that they were mechanically looped, sampled, or manipulated in some way.

Upon further investigation I found that the song was indeed originally Kid Cudi’s, but that Lissie had done a cover version of it. Her version is featured in the Girl/Chocolate skateboard video Pretty Sweet (2012), which I have watched many times. Even further digging found the true cause of my confusion: A sample of the Lissie version forms the hook of ScHoolboy Q’s song with A$AP Rocky, “Hands on the Wheel.” This last was the version I had in my head and the source of my confusion.

After a successful run of movies in the 1980s, Spike Lee used to say “Make Black Film” like a mantra. We saw it in the 1990s with Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Lee himself. It looks as though it’s back in effect with boundary-bombing work by Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Arthur Jafa, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, Terence Nance, Daveed Diggs, and Boots Riley. The latter’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) is not just one of the best movies of the past few years, it’s a statement, a stance, and a hopeful catalyst for change.