A few of my colleagues at UIC and a few of their colleagues from institutions around the world are all working on social media privacy. They put together a group called the Social Media Privacy Research Collective and wanted to solidify their efforts with a logo. Being the resident artist of our department, I was tapped to do the design. I immediately started playing with the initials.
At first I messed around with the P and the R. I knew there was something I could manipulate there. I thought it was goign to be flipping the P, then I thought it was going to be integrating their similarities. Flipping the R ended up being the way to go.
Then I started to see the similarities between the P-R combination and the M.
Once I got that, which took a few more iterations, the S and the C fell into place, and I had it. Then I moved to the computer to render it cleanly.
I ran this design by my colleagues, and they wanted it done up with some color.
Though it may go no further than this, I am thankful to Kelly Quinn and Dima Epstein for the opportunity to stretch a bit on this one.
UPDATE: This is another version I did later, and the one I think they ultimately ran with. I know they liked it better regardless.
As it always does, my to-read stack has already doubled just from compiling and editing this year’s Summer Reading List. Get ready to add to yours, because there’s plenty below that you’re going to have to check out. There are so many books to read and so many ways to read them, you have no excuse not to read every chance you get.
— Lily perusing the classics at Red House Books in Dothan, Alabama.
This year we have recommendations from newcomers Paul Edwards, Paul Tremblay, Mark Bould, and Matthew Gold, along with past Summer Reading List contributors Dominic Pettman, Dave Allen, Lance Strate, Alex Burns, Alice Marwick, André Carrington, Patrick Barber, Lily Brewer, Alfie Bown, Charles Mudede, Mike Daily, Brian Tunney, Gerfried Ambrosch, Jussi Parikka, Paul Levinson, Steve Jones, Peter Lunenfeld, and myself. Prepare yourself for a hefty stack of pages with words.
As always the book links on this page will lead to Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon: the biggest and best bookstore on the planet. Read on!
Gabourey Sidibe This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017): I’m already enjoying this a few chapters in, because the chapters read well on short trips. It’s not only funny, it’s genuinely touching. Sidibe has been a breakout star thanks to TV, but what has really flipped the script on her tragic/triumphant character in Precious is her incredible wit. I’m excited to see how she writes about her successes and the setbacks put in her way.
Janet Mock Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (Atria Books, 2017): I read Redefining Realness (Atria Books, 2014) in like t-minus three days. I was so into Janet Mock’s voice and her ability to move me, as a reader, through times and places while conveying really important principles she’s come to value in her life as a Black trans woman with Native Hawaiian ancestry. The twenty-something memoir is an interesting genre that I hope will help me age into mentoring relationships as I approach my next decade. Mock is already decisive about putting her own life lessons and interests into forms that connect with more and less privileged people, and I expect that she’s even more reflective in this book. Recently, she launched a podcast, Never Before, and the first episode with Ms. Tina Knowles-Lawson was just… poise.
Regina Bradley Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South (Peter Lang, 2017): Regina is a colleague whom I’ve had the distinct honor of befriending earlier this year. I bought this book for my partner, and I’m going to have to get my own, because I need to read these stories as much as anybody else. I made my way through some classic short stories while teaching a course on science fiction, recently, and there was nothing like this that blended hip-hop, Southern everyday life, and race consciousness; there should be, and now, there will be. She’s giving you a voice from the South for the 21st century and beyond.
Mehammed Amadeus Mack Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017): While it’s hard to keep pace with contemporary criticism, because of the pressure on academics to increase productivity, just like in every other profession, I want to say I’m catching up with people who have done the work in areas I care about. This is a study on desire, the nation, ethnicity, and religion, as well as sex, gender, and sexuality. I’m going through 2017 without knowing if there’s any such thing as loyalty to the field of queer studies. So, for me, it’s important to do work that makes academia a space where we can exist, as desiring people, from marginalized backgrounds, engaged in a dialogue that implicates all of the social formations that claim us.
Simone Browne Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015): A fantastic and long-overdue intervention, arguing that surveillance practices cannot be understood without interrogating the long history of policing Blackness.
Christo Sims Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism (Princeton University Press, 2017): Sims spent years inside an experimental NYC public school built around gaming. Its story becomes a cautionary tale of well-meaning tech philanthropy and how idealized educational technology often reinforces the status quo rather than upending it.
Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (William Morrow, 2017): I read every Stephenson new release and although I wasn’t a huge fan of Seveneves (William Morrow, 2015) this techno-thriller about an academic, magic, and time travel seems more up my alley.
I don’t mean to brag, but I was very fortunate to be able to see the musical Hamilton on Broadway this spring, and that has whet my appetite for the biography that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Penguin, 2004). And from a different era of American history, I plan on reading American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth by Gene Smith (Simon & Schuster, 1992). In case you’re wondering why, Edwin Booth, who was the most famous stage actor of the 19th century, was the founder of the Players club in Manhattan (Mark Twain was a co-founder), and over the past year I’ve been organizing events for the New York Society for General Semantics at the club, a historic building that once serve as Edwin Booth’s home (and still preserves the room that he lived and died in).
Reading biographical and historical accounts is one method of time travel, and I also intend to read up on the subject more generally by diving into James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History (Pantheon, 2016). Time being a topic of great interest to me, another book on my summer stack is Now: The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller (W.W. Norton). Two books on language also have caught my eye and are on my pile, The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe (Little, Brown & Co., 2016), and Words on the Move by John McWhorter (Henry Holt, 2016).
Lastly, I look forward to savoring the recently published collections from two of my favorite poets, Mata Hari’s Lost Words by John Oughton (Neopoiesis, 2017), and Ego to Earthschool by Stephen Roxborough (Neopoiesis, 2017).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (Haper Perennial, 2007), a thoroughly depressing and vitally important work of non-fiction (first published in 1973), will probably ruin your summer, but, in the long run, it will give you a profound understanding of what life was like under communism. Suffice it to say, George Orwell’s dystopian—and somewhat prophetic—depiction of a totalitarian Soviet-like state in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker & Warburg) was no exaggeration. Solzhenitsyn points out the crucial role of ideology—in this case, Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism—in the formation of totalitarian societies.
Douglas Murray’s new book, entitled The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017), gives an unsettling account of the recent refugee crisis and why it really is a crisis. In his rather pessimistic view, Europe is on the rocks because it has failed to assert a meaningful first-person plural that autochthonous Europeans can identify with and immigrants can integrate into. The British journalist (The Spectator) and political commentator argues—compellingly—that Europe’s current discourse around identity, immigration, and Islam is dominated by a sense of surrender and cultural masochism, which has played into the hands of far-right groups and parties.
One of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read is The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, 2011) by the American cognitive scientist, psychologist, and linguist Steven Pinker. Pinker’s optimistic book traces, in compelling prose, the decline of violence in human societies from the Stone Age to the present, explaining the social, cultural, political, and psychological factors behind this surprising phenomenon.
If non-fiction isn’t your thing, you might want to pick up Alex CF’s 2016 fantasy novel Seek the Throat from which We Sing (self-released), “a visceral tale of animal mythology, of dark and foreboding rite and ritual and the desperate rasp of life.” Seek the Throat… is the prolific British artist’s stunning debut as a novelist.
The summer between my second and third year of what I once heard Matt Morris call “Doctor School” is dedicated to the delightful if not academically required preparation for my hotly anticipated comprehensive exams. Because the History of Art and Architecture department at the University of Pittsburgh has a flexible exams program, I am putting my 70-book-and-article reading list to use toward three projects, one being an online publication entitled Sedimenta. Sedimenta, to be a semi-annual collection of critical engagements with contemporaneity, is accreting intellectual efforts toward tracing, for example, shifting subjectivities in the Anthropocene and the deracination of modernist philosophies of nature and landscape toward contemporary philosophies of ecology and deep time. Philosophically Pessimistic attitudes toward artistic practice in the final decades of a green planet are always an alluring line of inquiry as well. After the first edition, Roy Christopher will team up with me as print editor. Most of the books I’m reading this summer are to this end.
A few I’d like to highlight are: Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which caught my attention with its unsaturated hot-pink cover; Former West: Arts and the Contemporary After 1989, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (MIT Press, 2017), which I have already lit up with tabbed passages. The intellectual enterprise of “formering the west” and its Modernity, so far, is a challenging and important one; Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago, edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin (K. Verlag, 2017), confronts nineteenth-century will-to-knowledge and challenges colonial science and its reverberations in the Anthropocene. In the last year, I have become very excited about K. Verlag’s series Intercalations. In fact, it was in Land and Animal and Nonanimal (2015) I saw the word “sedimenta/tion” broken over two lines, which unearthed Sedimenta in name; Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), is likely to be my most anticipated this summer after seeing Douglas Armato flipping it backward and forward in a tweet. I anticipate that this book will enlighten-up my Pessimistic attitude toward artistic practice on a dead and dying planet. I would also like to note that whether by dexterous memory or by Freudian slip, I keep spelling it “damnaged” planet.
My catch-up reading is E.M.Cioran’s A Short History of Decay (Arcade Publishing, 2012), Eugene Thacker‘s latest damnaged-planet trilogy (Zer0 Books, 2011-2015), and as many of Robin Mackay’s Collapses (Urbanomic, 2006-2014) I can get my hands on; and I’m finishing up Justin McGuirk’s Radical Cities (Verso, 2014) and Rachel Price’s Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (Verso, 2015), the latter of which is a critical exemplar of applied planetary thinking for my future academic projects.
As above, Lucy Lippard‘s works are always so gently quaking below.
Those are for my eyes. For my ears, I have Brian Eno’s Small Craft on a Milk Sea (Warp) from 2010 on eternal repeat while writing for said comprehensive exams. More on personal brand, I’m playing Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There (Jagjaguwar) from 2014. Special thanks to David Lynch (and earlier, Brit Marling), for bringing her again to my attention from the Bang Bang Bar.
Brian Allen Carr Sip (Soho Press, 2017): After reading Brian Allen Carr’s The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World (Lazy Fascist, 2014), which reminded me of the masterful compression achieved by Kenneth Gangemi in his ’69 “miniature novel” Olt, I numbered myself among his fans. I haven’t read any of Carr’s other books. Sip will change that. Take a minute and six seconds to watch the trailer for his “lyrical, apocalyptic debut novel about addiction, friendship, and the struggle for survival.” I guess TLHNitHotW was considered a novella…
Knut Hamsun Growth of the Soil (Vintage Books, 1921): “The typical quirks of Hamsun are still present, and avid readers will find his unmistakable voice booming from the pages.”– s.penkevich on Goodreads (5-star review).
James Joyce Ulysses (1922; Random House US edition, 1934): Time feels right to read Ulysses, I thought as I perused a used hardcover with dust jacket copy from a bookseller’s shelves inside an Ashland antiques emporium. It’s the complete and unabridged text, corrected and reset, containing the original foreword by the author (who “punningly referred to himself as ‘Shame’s Voice,'” wrote Paul Strathern in James Joyce in 90 Minutes), the historic decision by Judge John M. Woolsey whereby the Federal ban on Ulysses was removed in ’33, and a foreword by Morris Ernst.
My 2017 summer reading list was probably the least consequential thing to change on November 9th, 2016, but change it did. As the U.S. has careened towards authoritarianism, I’ve been trying to learn more about 20th century experiences with totalitarian governments — and especially the early stages, as that seems most relevant to the U.S. context at the moment. I visited Auschwitz last summer during the annual digital humanities conference in Poland and wanted to learn more about how norms eroded in the run-up to WWII; so, I’ve begun by reading Volker Ullrich’s new biography Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (Knopf, 2016). Ullrich’s careful account of Hitler’s rise to power is engrossing, readable, and distressing. What’s clear is that Hitler’s agenda was right out in the open from the beginning; as Ullrich notes, “even in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews” (104). Replace “Jews” with “immigrants” and we have reason to fear Trump’s next moves. I’ll likely take up books by Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) and Czeslaw Milosz (The Captive Mind) this summer if I can get through the Ullrich biography quickly enough.
As I continue making my way through these academic texts, I’m looking forward to catching up on some pleasure reading; on the top of my list right now are Zachary Mason’s Void Star (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (Penguin, 2017), and Philip K. Dick‘s The Man in the High Castle (Putnam, 1962). It’s looking like a dystopian summer all the way around, unfortunately.
Mike McCormack Solar Bones (Tramp Press, 2016): This novel came recommended to me as a book about memory, family, and small town life in Ireland. If anyone has a unique perspective on those, it’s the Irish. I’m greatly looking forward to reading this one.
Larry Loftis Into the Lion’s Mouth (Caliber, 2016): This is an account of the life and exploits of Dusko Popov, a fascinating figure in Allied covert operations during World War II. Largely unheralded (at least in the U.S.), it is claimed he served as the template for Ian Fleming’s James Bond character.
Nicholas Stargardt The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (Basic Books, 2015): Two books in one summer related to World War II is twice as many as I’ve read in the past ten years. There’s no accounting for it. What caught my eye about The German War is its focus on the breadth and depth of German attitudes and behaviors before, during and after the war, that is, it explores the varieties of Germans’ experiences from within, on Germans’ everyday experiences and struggles with the moral and practical dimensions of the war.
Olja Savicevic Adios, Cowboy (McSweeney’s, 2016): This one caught my eye at first due to its title, which evoked the song “Cowboys Lost At Sea,” by For Stars, causing me to take it down from the shelf at the bookstore and rifle through its pages. Then the prose caught my eye, parsimonious and evocative.
Rick Shefchik Everybody’s Heard about the Bird: The True Story of 1960s Rock ‘n’ Roll in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2015): It wouldn’t be summer if I wasn’t reading at least one book about music, and this probably won’t be the only one (George Harrison’s expanded I, Me, Mine is a contender, but when it comes to the Beatles I’m mainly waiting for the second installment in Mark Lewisohn’s masterful biography of the Beatles, which I predict will be titled Turn On — you heard it here first!). I’m keenly interested in the local nature of music, its formation, its sound, and one of the most interesting and intriguing — and brief — early 60s rock scenes formed, in of all places, Minnesota. From what I can tell, Shefchik has done a yeoman’s job of unearthing details, including first-person accounts.
Meryl Alper Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality (MIT Press, 2017): As computers have been increasingly employing speech synthesis and voice recognition I’ve become more interested in how humans and machines communicate, and Alper’s book seems like an excellent critical look at mobile media, voice (both literally and figuratively), disability, and equality. I began reading this mid-May and am actually re-reading it over the summer with the thought of incorporating it into a seminar in the fall.
Joachim Kalka Gaslight (New York Review Books, 2017): As a lover of the ideas and literary mode of the German critic/philosopher Walter Benjamin, I could not resist this little book. It’s about the cradle of many of our troubles and so much of our optimism, the 19th century. Detectives, railways, gothic architecture, exoticism, new and strange technologies, the rise of mass consumption–these are few of my favorite themes.
August Wilson Joe Turner’s Come and Gone(Theatre Communications Group, 2008): I’m actually reading all of Wilson’s plays this summer. I have a good reason for this reading project. Black English, like Irish English, is very musical. The same is not true, for say, Shonanized English, which is more philosophical than musical. Anyway, Wilson writes like he is playing the blues on the piano. With his work, the connection between Black English and the blues is made clear. I usually read the books of Zora Neale Hurston for this kind pleasure–the music of words and sentences. But this time I’m reading Wilson.
One other thing. The great novelist Richard Wright once bemoaned that Black American literature did not have a Remembrance of Things Past. In a way, Wilson’s plays, which are set in Pittsburgh, are a working-class Remembrance of 20th century Black America.
Peter Wohlleben The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Greystone Books, 2016): Though this book is written by a German forester, Peter Wohllenben, it’s inspired, indeed has an afterword, by Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. She is just wonderful. I’ve had the pleasure drinking with her. Her aura is not totally human. Much of it has fused with the forest: the canopy, the understory, the roots, that hum of wood. Simard discovered the mother tree. It’s not only huge but shares nutrients with other, weaker trees around it by a fungal network in the ground.
Imagine the fate of a hypothetical forest–let’s call it the Forest of Friendship–in which, by some mysterious concordat, all the trees have somehow managed to achieve the desirable aim of lowering the entire canopy to 10 feet. The canopy looks just like any other forest canopy except that it is only 10 feet high instead of 100 feet. From the point of view of a planned economy, the Forest of Friendship is more efficient as a forest than the tall forests with which we are familiar, because resources are not put into producing massive trunks that have no purpose apart from competing with other trees.
But now, suppose one mutant tree were to spring up in the middle of the Forest of Friendship. This rogue tree grows marginally taller than the ‘agreed’ norm of 10 feet. Immediately, this mutant secures a competitive advantage. Admittedly, it has to pay the cost of the extra length of trunk. But it is more than compensated, as long as all other trees obey the self-denying ordinance, because the extra photons gathered more than pay the extra cost of lengthening the trunk. Natural selection therefore favours the genetic tendency to break out of the self-denying ordinance and grow a bit taller, say to 11 feet. As the generations go by, more and more trees break the embargo on height. When, finally, all the trees in the forest are 11 feet tall, they are all worse off than they were before: all are paying the cost of growing the extra foot. But they are not getting any extra photons for their trouble. And now natural selection favours any mutant tendency to grow to, say 12 feet.
This way of thinking turns out to be a lot of nonsense. There is actually a Forest of Friendship. It is connected by “wood-wide web” that links roots to roots like soul to soul. And, as Wohllenben points out in his book, which I’m reading for the third time and is written with almost no poetry, trees do stifle competition. For some trees, growing too fast and with no checks is dangerous. The slower you grow, the longer you live. Of course, Dawkins, the neoliberal of the biological sciences, doesn’t have the capacity or ideology to see this socialism. He can only see competition where ever he looks.
Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016) is a remarkable, detailed and acute revisionist history that overturns our understanding of the transition from water-power to coal-burning energy systems which were more costly and far less efficient (but – spoiler alert – made it easier to control workers, suppress wages and offset costs onto the public purse). It is the best book I have read so far this year – though I am looking forward to the stiff competition China Miéville’s October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017) will put up. Dipping into it has persuaded me to clear a day so I can read it in a single sitting.
One of my regular train journeys is the ideal length for Tor’s fantastic (in both senses) novellas – unless, of course, there are cattle on the line between Bath and Chippenham. Which happened a couple of weeks ago when I was reading Gwyneth Jones’s hard-sf-thriller-cum-ultimate-locked-room-mystery Proof of Concept (Tor, 2017), leaving me bookless between Reading and London. Every bit as good is Everything Belongs to the Future (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), Laurie Penny’s dystopian vision of endless Tory austerity, and I am looking forward to the otherwise dully familiar trips that will get me to the Lovecraft revisionism of Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor, 2016) and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (Tor, 2016), as well as Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: Home (Tor, 2017) and Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior (Tor, 2017).
My summer will be devoted to getting through the William T. Vollmann backlog. He only writes big, fat far-from-portable hardbacks, so they’ve been stacking up for a while. But I hope to spend at least some of this summer sat on my fat lazy arse -– also catching up on recent novels by Andrea Hairston, Cixin Liu, Mohammad Rabie, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Sofia Samatar.
Summer mostly means novels to me; an all-too brief respite from academic writing.
Having said that, I’m very much looking forward to an advance copy of Margret Grebowicz’s contribution to the excellent Object Lessons series, on Whale Song (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
I’m also looking forward to re-reading Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2003), which has just been re-released. It’s a unique instance of “incoherent geography,” and arguably the best novella to come out of Australia. Fans of Calvino, Borges, Casares, etc. should take a look.
John Cowper Powy’s ever-unfashionable Wolf Solent (Simon & Schuster, 1929) is a book I’ve been circling for decades, so will likely finally take the plunge soon.
Otherwise, I just finished Paul Beatty’s brilliant, exhausting, hilarious, and provocative novel, The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), and can’t recommend it highly enough.
Book that came out before summer: Mariana Enriquez Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories (Hogarth, 2017): It’s one of the best short story collections of the last decade. I couldn’t have loved it more. A heady mix of Gothic, weird, realism, and politics. Now I anxiously await for more of her books to be translated.
Summer books out now: Stephen Graham Jones Mapping the Interior (Tor, 2017): A ghost story, a story about fathers, and history… The amount of creepiness, ambition, and emotion Stephen packs into this novella is unfair.
Victor LaValle The Changeling (Spiegel & Grau, 2017): I’m reading it as I type, but already this dark, melancholy meditation on parenting is messing me up.
Summer book out later: Nadia Bulkin She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017): I had the honor of writing an introduction to this short story collection. This astonishingly fierce, intelligent, disturbing collection of sociopolitical shockers will be the perfect way to end your summer and dread the fall.
Keith Morris My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor (Da Capo, 2016): From 2011 through 2015, I ended up living in this forgotten about tract of Los Angeles called The South Bay. Not that it is actually forgotten about in the present tense—people still there—but the area was once home to a thriving BMX and punk rock scene, and those aspects of the land are largely forgotten about in the present tense, replaced by sprawling bars, expensive parking, and overpriced surf shops.
I picked Redondo Beach to live in, mainly because I grew up reading the town name in BMX magazines and in the liner notes of records released by SST Records. I had visited once in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, but aside from that, I felt I had a brand of adopted familiarity with the place. That led me to renting a house on Mathews Avenue in North Redondo, not far from a 7-11 on Artesia Blvd.
Something about the heightened curb outside of this particular 7-11 struck me as so familiar, but for the life of me, I couldn’t place it at first. Then it dawned on me. It was the site of a photo of Henry Rollins, while he sang for Black Flag, from 1985. And it looked almost exactly the same in 2011 as it did in 1985. I never knew an address, but from that day forward, I acknowledged that I was living in the same neighborhood that Black Flag used to practice in many years before me.
I was light years away in suburban New Jersey, listening to those Black Flag songs in early skate videos, and here I was an adult living blocks away from one of the creative homes of Black Flag. It then became a past time for me to zero in on locations formerly known for their influence on SST Records releases or in past BMX magazines.
So it came as no surprise that I read My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor by Keith Morris, in little more than a day when I bought it. Morris was the original singer for Black Flag, an original Hermosa Beach local, and one of the squares that didn’t fit into the round hole of the South Bay in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Morris and his family lived in Hermosa Beach. His dad owned a bait shop, and Morris borrowed generously from his dad’s cash register to get into all sorts of mayhem as a teen. Through the early parts of the book, Morris also animates a version of Hermosa and Redondo Beach that I never got to know — seaside working class communities unaware of their future sitting on million dollar properties, or past as a vibrant punk rock community. Morris sings for Black Flag down the street from my second house on PCH, walks the streets of Pier Ave., and parties a mile north in Manhattan Beach.
He eventually escapes his hometown, touring with The Circle Jerks, living in Silver Lake and never really returning home to The South Bay in his later years, because, in his words, he doesn’t recognize the place he came from.
Last summer, I visited Hermosa and Redondo again after being away for little over a year, and it was a strange visit. The place that had formerly forgotten or never acknowledged its punk rock roots, now had murals of bands birthed in The South Bay painted on electrical boxes. It was still expensive as shit to even be there, and a little lonely just like I had remembered it, but at least someone in Hermosa Beach had remembered the influence of Black Flag and Descendents.
I wasn’t crazy — all of the mentions of Hermosa and Redondo that I read as a teenager in New Jersey had happened. And Keith Morris’ book is a definitive place to start to learn about the history of punk rock in the South Bay.
It’s also a lesson in understanding one’s place as a legendary influence, but never attempting to capitalize on that legacy. It’s about always moving forward, wherever that road may lead.
The 33 1/3 entry on The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is excellent. The album is one of my favorites and the book covers a lot of the details you want to know as a fan. It goes into the recording of most of the songs and in the order they happened, so you get a nice feel of how the album was constructed. Definitely in a similar style to Dan LeRoy’s exemplary 33 1/3 of The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique(Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).
I also recently read J-Zone’s Root for the Villain: Rap, Bull$hit, and a Celebration of Failure (Old Maid Entertainment, 2011) which was as hilarious and insightful as I had hoped it would be. This is a must-read if you’re a hip-hop fan, even if you’re not too familiar with J-Zone’s music. It combines a behind-the-scenes underground rap expose together with some in-depth opinions and observations from a true hip-hop head and music lover.
This one isn’t actually out yet, but it should be on people’s radars: Martin Connor’s The Musical Artistry of Rap (McFarland & Co., 2017). Martin is a musicologist who breaks down rapping with tools from traditional music analysis and this is his first book, hopefully the first of many. I’m not sure if you can get it in time for summer… If not then maybe spend the summer preparing for this book by brushing up on your music theory, etc.!
When Roy Christopher’s Summer Reading List email lands in my inbox I become paralyzed. I tend to shy away from even attempting to get my head around which books or authors I should be sharing. Roy never nudges me with follow up emails, I just get one. The guilt is unbearable. That’s surely his plan, because at the last minute I get it done. So, another year, another list. Here goes:
In the latter half of 2016 I began collecting many of Jim Harrison’s books. It became a minor obsession. Perhaps his death spurred me to backtrack through his work. I have collected a dozen of his past works of fiction, finding them in online used bookstores, recovered from libraries. Of all of these books, none have struck me as deeply as Sundog (E. P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence), first released in 1984. I know I added Harrison to Roy’s 2016 list, but I felt it only right to go with this first.
Changing gears, or rather countries, H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape, Ltd, 2014) by the English author Helen Macdonald had been sitting in the unread pile for two years. After reading the rave reviews the book had received, I was concerned that it would be a mawkish read and that wasn’t a frame of mind that I felt was desirable to me at the time. I was mistaken. Having read her articles on nature and natural history in the New York Times Magazine, I felt that I should put my feelings aside and give the book a chance. It is far from mawkish. Ironically, I should have noted that Jim Harrison gave it a great review, which makes perfect sense. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say: “A lovely touching book about a young woman grieving over the death of her father and becoming rejuvenated by training one of the roughest, most difficult creatures in the heavens, the goshawk.” Macdonald’s book is a wonderful meditation on life; part memoir, part grief, and lots of soul-searching.
Mary Gaitskill’s latest book of essays, Somebody With a Little Hammer (Pantheon, 2017) had my head spinning. I became fascinated as she moved through the world of music, literature, politics and society, covering date rape, Charles Dickens, John Updike, Bob Dylan, Bjork, Talking Heads, Norman Mailer, Dubravka Ugresic, Hanan al-Shaykh, and more. She muses on Nabakov’s Lolita. Of Linda Lovelace she writes, “Icon of freedom and innocent carnality; icon of brokenness and confusion; icon of sexual victimization, sexual power, irreconcilable oppositions.” The book contains 31 riveting and concise essays. I suspect it is one I will go back to often.
Joan Didion South and West: From a Notebook (Knopf, 2017): Didion shares with us but two excerpts from her notebooks that up until now she has never revealed before. “Notes From The South” covers the road trip with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June of 1970, traveling through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Her eyes and ears capture everything around her as she describes a South that is largely unchanged today.
“California Notes” came about when she was assigned by Rolling Stone to cover the Patty Hearst trial in 1976. She never wrote the piece. Instead, being in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West, the Hearsts, and her own upbringing in Sacramento. It is a short book, I read it in a single day; a day well spent.
Thinking how to respond to this call, my first instinct was turn my head towards the left, and look at my office bookshelf to see all the volumes that I have had not time to look into over the past months. There’s lots. So some of the books mentioned below are texts that I will read, some are what I want to read and some are what I would anyway suggest to read. I will start with the latter and cheekily, suggest two recent books in our Recursions Series: Ute Holl’s fabulous study (translation) Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and Liam Young’s just published List Cultures (Amsterdam University Press, 2017)– a book on cultural techniques of listing.
I wrote the Foreword to J.R.Carpenter’s experimental writing take on clouds, The Gathering Cloud (Uniformbooks, 2017), but I will read that again over the summer. I would like to find some time to read the new Simondon translation that Univocal published: On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017). Also on my list is Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (eds. Tsing, Swanson, Gang and Buband) that was just published by University of Minnesota Press. It promises to be a lovely looking têtê-bêche edition. Brian Massumi’s The Principle of Unrest (2017) is just now out from Open Humanities Press, and I hope to get a chance to have a look at the book soon enough. I was hoping Matthew Fuller’s forthcoming book How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) would be out sooner but I’ll have to wait until next summer’s list to add that one.
Otherwise, I will be reading a lot of things that relate to my current research projects more directly. This will mean reading about labs, art and technology, making, and such things, but a lot of that material won’t be in books but in various articles, shorter texts, interviews, and such. It also includes going back to reading or re-reading some material such as Johanna Drucker’s Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (University of Chicago Press, 2009). My other writing addresses imaginary media and imaginary futures, so I am reading also some fiction for that one, for example the collection Iraq +100. Stories from a Century After the Invasion (Tor, 2017) that Hassan Blasim edited.
I’m currently reading two books, each a tour-de-force in its own right/write, and I’ll definitely be continuing in their pages this summer.
The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction by Hugo Gernsback and Grant Wythoff (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) shows how Gernsback, generally regarded as the grandfather, father, or some kind of primary progenitor of science fiction, did the same for media theory, presaging Marshall McLuhan’s way of thinking about technology and communication by decades. Wythoff’s 59-page Introduction is itself more than worth the price of admission.
I’ve never not been an ardent Beatles’ fan, so I can’t quite say that Rob Sheffield’s Dreaming the Beatles (Dey Street, 2017) rekindled my love of this group’s music, but it certainly placed it first and foremost in my brain this summer, and Sheffield’s masterful, delightful prose makes great accompaniment to the Beatles on the new Beatles Channel on Sirius/XM Radio.
And while I’m here, a few recommendation for books I’ve already read, but which would make wonderful summer reading for anyone who hasn’t: Bonnie Rozanski’s The Mindtraveler (Bitingduck Press, 2015) is one of the best time-travel novels I’ve ever read. David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton’s Red Moon (Breakneck Books, 2007) is a novel you can’t put down, with a science fictional but who knows explanation of why the Soviets lost the space race in the 1950s.
Most of my year was taken up with prep for my new book (The Playstation Dreamworld; Polity, 2017), but for the summer ahead I’d rather recommend the two better forthcoming books in the series, Xenofeminism (Polity, 2017) by the brilliant Helen Hester and Narcocapitalism (Polity, 2017), the English translation of Laurent de Sutter’s L’âge de l’anesthésie, which I read earlier in the year. Hester, a member of Laboria Cuboniks and the Xenofeminism movement, is among the most exciting writers of recent years and work on feminism and technology seems as important as anything else I can think of. Complementing this intervention, De Sutter’s book shows how living in modern society means living in a world in which our very emotions have been outsourced to chemical stimulation.
In my Hong Kong Review of Books duties, the most exciting book I encountered was Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic Media, 2016), which he answered our questions about last month. Another book for the serious philosopher to look out for is Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza (Northwestern University Press, 2017), the latest in the Slovene-Lacanian revolution and coming soon from Northwestern. Last year’sAbolishing Freedom by Frank Ruda (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) is equally exciting, arguing for a renovation of attitudes towards the complicated signifier “freedom” that could get us out of the political crises we face today. In a world in which the corporate establishment and the far-Right make use of the term to assert their agendas, Ruda asks us to think again about the functions and effects of the word “freedom.” Experimental poets–of which I’m really not one–might like Robert Kiely’s How to Read (Lulu, 2017).
After all that hard work, I’ll settle down to the long-awaited new novel from the king of Scandinavian crime noir, Arnaldur Indridason. If enjoyment is everything, The Shadow District(Minotaur Books, 2017) is the only book you need.
Maile Meloy Do Not Become Alarmed (Riverhead, 2017): I finally got a copy of Maile Meloy’s new novel, Do Not Become Alarmed, and somehow I am managing to save it for next week’s Solstice campout. Meanwhile, I’m taking the opportunity to re-read Meloy’s story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2010). It’s gratifying to warm up to a new book from a favorite author by revisiting her older books. I should do this more often…
Meloy has an amazing touch with characters, particularly in the form of a short story. Her writing is crystal clear, seemingly without affect. The stories manage to be both hard and tender. There is a lot of loneliness, and few happy endings, yet the stories don’t seem dark or brooding or pessimistic. She lights up the way people make their way through their lives; their thoughts, their self-reflections, their awareness of and fealty to their own weaknesses.
Like so many in the summer of ’17, I’m still trying to figure out what happened in the fall of ’16. I’ve avoided Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan Books, 2016) which came out before the election. I suppose that’s because it’s a direct attack on the Democratic Party I’d supported and which had shaped so many of its policies around the concerns of people like me. With the GOP holding the presidency, both houses of Congress, the last and probably next Supreme Court appointments, and too many state legislatures and governorships to recount without weeping liberal tears, maybe a rethink is needed.
Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zer0 Books, 2017) is another, more techno-cultural tool for me to use on the political and social practices we inherited from the 20th century that just seem broken at the moment. Nagle is merciless in her analysis of the techno-utopian hopes of early Internet cheerleaders, and sets up a cage match between identitarian Tumblr and the lol fascism-light of the mouth breathers on 4chan. Its like cross-breeding Greshem’s Law and Godwin’s Law, wherein shit-posting drives out coherence.
I refuse to consecrate the whole summer to hair-shirting myself for my own liberal normie tendencies, so I’ll read lots of fiction, almost all revolving around Los Angeles. Top of the pile is Dodgers by Bill Beverly (Crown, 2016) about a low level drug kid from the South LA projects who gets sent deep into the Midwest to commit a murder.
Should be good, but the kid could probably cause more disruption by staying in the Midwest, registering, and voting Democratic.
I’m finishing up the research on my book Dead Precedents (Repeater Books, 2018), which tellingly is what I was researching during the list last year. There’s plenty of great, new work to read though.
Paul Youngquist A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism (University of Texas Press, 2017): Not since John F. Szwed’s Space is the Place (Pantheon, 1997) and the first two chapters of Graham Lock’s Blutopia (Duke University Press, 1999) has there been an in-depth study of Sun Ra that connects as many dots as Younquist’s. Most studies of Afrofuturism trace its roots at least back to Sun Ra, but none have done a study so specific, and studies of Sun Ra don’t necessarily make such an explicit connection to his Afrofuturist legacy (Szwed mentions the word once; Lock doesn’t use the term at all). For a broader picture, read along with Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’ recent edited collection, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lexington Books, 2016).
Greg Tate Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (Duke University Press, 2016): If you study Black Atlantic art or music, you will contend with Greg Tate. Always a worthy opponent or worth a thorough read, Tate’s work is shiny and sharp and reflects the culture that it cuts. Flyboy 2 is the second such collection of his writings for the Village Voice, Spin, the Wire, Ebony, Paper, and many other publications, as well as some previously unpublished joints.
Dominic Pettman Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World) (Stanford University Press, 2017): I need some of what Pettman has in the way of finishing books (this is his second so far this year), as well as his well-crafted prose. His books are always a joy for the brain, and this one doesn’t look to abandon the pattern.
In her book The Social Machine (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath outlines designs for living online. Echoing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), she writes, “We are embodied beings, who have evolved in the physical world; our thoughts and imagination are rooted in the sensory experience of our physical surroundings. Online, there is no body; there is only information. We comprehend abstract ideas by reframing them in metaphoric terms that ultimately derive from physical experience” (p. 9). One needn’t look any further that a computer’s desktop to see this in action. “Immersion” was once a strong notion in computer-mediated communication studies, online communities, and virtual reality. Now we are not so much immersed in media as we are saturated by it.
Donath points out that these are boundary issues. Walls, fences, locked doors, online moderators—“the doormen of discussions” (p. 159), spam filters, and other gate-keeping contrivances protect the private from the public and vice versa. Even with such boundaries in place, our embodiedness is still at risk. We are as sieves, filtering news from noise, or as sponges, soaking up information and influence of all kinds. The latter evokes Psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s “saturated self”:
Emerging technologies saturate us with the voices of humankind—both harmonious and alien. As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons, they become a part of us and we of them. Social saturation furnishes us with a multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the self (1991, p. 6).
Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte (1995) pontificated on the fading boundaries of the “post-information age,” writing,
In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in specific place at specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible. In the post-information age, since you may live and work at one or many locations, the concept of an “address” now takes on new meaning (p. 163).
The history of the internet is largely a story of broken-down boundaries (see Grodin & Lindolof, 1996; Jenkins, 2006; van Dijck, 2013). Its architecture “rests upon principles of convergence, which enable multiple and overlapping connections between varieties of distinct social spheres” (Papacharissi, 2011, p. 305). The inherent irony of Negroponte’s observation is that since physical location no longer matters in the digital, post-geographic workday, it makes it matter even more. If you can work from anywhere, where you live means more than ever. You can live wherever you want regardless of where your work is. The old boundaries are gone.
The overwhelming irony now is that where we are matters less than the digital wares with which we saturate our selves. On the commute, at school, at work, at home, on a trip, visiting friends—the smartphone usurps all of these with a persistent and precise hold on our attention. In William Gibson‘s term, the online world has “everted” itself into physical space. The fact that it is now inescapable is what writer Michael Harris calls “the end of absence.” His is an example of what I have called the Advent Horizon. We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable—differently on an individual and collective level—in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. It takes 30 years for a full, generational change and with that a full shift in advent horizons. Harris notes, “If you were born before 1985, then you know what life is like both with the internet and without. You are making the pilgrimage from Before to After” (p. 15).
Reaching across one of these divides, Thomas de Zengotita (2005) writes of digitally zombified youth,
… It was if they were somnambulating, hypnotized, into some newborn zone of being where hallowed custom and bizarre context were so surreally fused that the whole tableau seemed poised to shimmer off into the ether at any moment (p. 155).
Ours is a chronic presence in a chronic present. Donath (2014), writes of our online personal presences, “The stranger, as we think of him now, may cease to exist” (p. 336). But Harris (2014) adds, “Before all memory of those absences is shuttered, though, there is this brief time when we might record what came before. We might do something with those small, barely noticeable instances when we’re reminded of our love for absence. They flash at us amid the rush of our experience and seem to signal: Wait, wasn’t there something…?” (p. 8).
Well, was there?
References:
de Zengotita, Thomas. (2005).Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury.
Donath, Judith. (2014). The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gergen, Kenneth. (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books.
Grodin, Debra & Lindlof, Thomas R. (1996). Constructing the Self in a Mediated World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Harris, Michael. (2014). The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. New York: Current.
Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Negroponte, Nicholas. (1995). Being Digital. New York: Knopf.
Papacharissi, Zizi. (2011). A Networked Self. In Zizi Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 304-317). New York: Routledge.
van Dijck, José. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press.
The closer we get to each other, the less likely we are to have things in common. The more we know about each other, the more likely we are to fundamentally disagree on how the world should work. The more intimate the details we share, the more likely one of us has done something unforgivable in the eyes of the other. Dig deep enough inside anyone and you’re going to find something you don’t like. As my friend Lucas Molandes puts it, the only reason you’re with the person you’re with right now is because all of your previous relationships failed.
Human relationships are messy. We get involved only when we have to. We skim across the surfaces of each other. We give and get only what is needed in each situation: filling out forms, ID numbers, driver’s licenses, log-ins, passwords, online presences, social networks. We inconvenience ourselves for institutions and one another. Even our personal opinions and comments have migrated from scattered sites and blogs to social media silos, soon to be replaced by Likes and Re-Tweets. The illusion of being in touch. Spam disguised as social interaction.
It’s global. It’s local.
It’s the next thing in Social.
Hip-hop, rockin’, or microbloggin’ —
You get updates every time you log in.
So, come on in, we’re open,
And we’re hopin’ to rope in
All your Facebook friends and MySpace memories.
There’s a brand new place for all of your enemies.
You don’t really care about piracy or privacy.
You just want music and friends as far as the eye can see.
So, sign up, sign in, put in your information.
It’s the new online destination for a bored, boring nation.
Tell your friends, your sister, and your mom.
It’s time for something-something-something.com
The numbers say that social media doesn’t replace face-to-face communication, it enhances and encourages it. The numbers say that older people are uncooling social media and driving the youth to other means of interaction. The numbers tell them what we’ve bought in the past, what we’re buying now, and predict what we will buy later. The numbers tell them where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. The numbers know who we are and who we’re likely to become. We are the products of social media. We are what it buys and sells.
And when time like the pyramids has worn away
All the mountains and the valleys of the words that we say
We have got to make sure that something remains
If we lose each other we’ve got no one to blame
— Oingo Boingo, “My Life”
The numbers can’t tell them what it’s like to hold her hand. How nice it is when she’s here or how empty it is when she’s not. They can’t quantify the unashamed laughs of children or the smiles in the eyes of parents. There’s no database for the barely perceivable daydream-driven smirk, no pivot table for the way that curl hits that curve in her neck just so. Big data seems so small in the face of real human detail.
Getting close to someone else is a sloppy, risky mess. The things you love most can quickly become the things you loathe. Taking that chance is the best thing in the world though. And there is no app for that.
I’ve spent the last month in a leg brace and the first two weeks of it on crutches. The experience has slowed me down in many ways, not all of which were bad. I’m not recommending cracking a kneecap to get reacquainted with reality, but a good jarring of the sensorium might help us all once in a while. As Doug Rushkoff said recently, “Reality is the human’s home turf.” Nothing brings reality crashing back in like crashing into reality.
In addition to my patella, I also smashed my phone. The cracking of its screen left it useless for texting or taking pictures. Ironically, the only thing it will do now is send (provided I know or can find the number) and receive calls. I also haven’t been wearing headphones as my injury already makes me an easy mark. These two things — no texting and no headphones — reconnected me with aspects of my days I’d been avoiding or ignoring.
Also, I’ve had to change up my commute. For one thing, I haven’t been able to ride my bike to work (obviously), which is what I was doing when I crashed. And I haven’t been able to take the train because I couldn’t walk that far on crutches. It should also be noted that there are only a few CTA train stations with elevators. Stairs were out of the question for a few weeks. This put me on a multiple bus-route commute that took me through parts of Chicago I’d never seen.
Possibly the most important factor that has made this an enlightening experience is sociological rather than technological. Collectively we tend to other the impaired among us. That is, there seems to be a clear delineation between the impaired and the normal; however, if one of us is only temporarily injured, we sympathize, empathize, or pity them.
In the month that I haven’t been texting or listening to music and have had a bum leg, I’ve had countless uplifting and informative conversations with people whom I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise and who wouldn’t have spoken to me for one reason or the other. All of the above has made me feel far more connected than any technology or so-called “social” media.
Speaking of, I posted this on Facebook about a week into my recovery, and I repost it here because it garnered the most response of anything I’ve ever posted on there:
My smashing my knee into the pavement at the origami triangle fold of traffic that is the intersection of Elston, Fullerton, and Damen in Chicago has shoved me out of my comfort zone in several ways. One thing I noticed today on my temporarily revised, much-longer commute to campus is a lot of needless anger: a man walking by the bus stop, angry at his dog for being a dog; a lady with her children, angry at them for being children; people on the bus, angry about being on the bus; the bus driver, angry about the people on the bus; and on and on.
I’m not exactly happy that my right patella is fractured in two places, and I’ve certainly had good and bad days since I broke it, and I’m not better than any of those mentioned above, but I try to smile at everyone, laugh at my fumbling around on crutches, do my work, and generally let others carry the anger.
It’s so easy to be angry, but it doesn’t take much more effort to be pleasant, and being pleasant makes everything easier for everyone.
Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be quite so uncomfortable, but sometimes being forced is the only way for it to happen. It feels like I needed it.
With that said, a physical therapist saw me out walking with my leg brace on the other day. He stopped and asked me about my injury with genuine and professional interest. He then informed me that a broken patella is the most painful kind of injury, which, he added, is supposedly why it is the chosen punishment for those late on their loan or gambling payments. I don’t recommend getting behind.
When I was growing up, the year 2000 was the temporal touchstone everyone used to mark the advances of modern life. Oh, by then we’d be doing so many technologically enabled things: Cars would fly and run on garbage, computers would run everything, school wouldn’t exist. We were all looking forward, and Y2K gave us a point on the horizon to measure it all by. When it came and went without incident, we were left with what we had in the present. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff argues that the flipping of the calendar to the new millennium turned our focus from the future to the never-ending now. “We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot-com boom, the long boom, and all that,” he tells David Pescovitz, “It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived.”
“We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day,” he continues, “But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.” A digital clock is good at accurately displaying the time right now, but an analog clock is better at showing you how long it’s been since you last looked. Needing, wanting, or having only the former is what present shock is all about. It’s what Ruskoff calls elsewhere “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now — and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” As the song goes, when you say it’s gonna happen “now,” well, when exactly do you mean?
Michael Leyton (1992) calls us all “prisoners of the present” ( p. 1), like runners on a temporal treadmill. He argues that “all cognitive activity proceeds via the recovery of the past through objects in the present” (p. 2), and those objects often linger longer than they once did thanks to recording technologies. In 1986 Iain Chambers described the persistence of the present through such media, writing,
With electronic reproduction offering the spectacle of gestures, images, styles, and cultures in a perpetual collage of disintegration and reintegration, the ‘new’ disappears into a permanent present. And with the end of the ‘new’ – a concept connected to linearity, to the serial prospects of ‘progress’, to ‘modernism’ – we move into a perpetual recycling of quotations, styles, and fashions: an uninterrupted montage of the ‘now’ (p. 190).
Needless to say that the situation has only been exacerbated by the onset of the digital. In one form or another, Rushkoff has been working on Present Shock his whole career. In it he continues the critical approach he’s sharpened over his last several books. Where Life, Inc. (Random House, 2009) tackled the corporate takeover of culture and Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010) took on technology head-on, Present Shock deals with the digital demands of the now. A lot of the dilemma is due to the update culture of social media. No one reads two-week old Tweets or month-old blog posts. If it wasn’t posted today, in the last few hours, it disappears into irrelevance. And if it’s too long, it doesn’t get read at all. These are not rivers or streams, they’re puddles. All comments, references, and messages, and no story. The personal narrative is lost. It’s the age of “tl; dr.” The 24-hour news, a present made up of the past, and advertising interrupting everything are also all about right now, but our senses of self maybe the biggest victims.
“Even though we may be able to be in only one place at a time,” Rushkoff writes, “our digital selves are distributed across every device, platform, and network onto which we have cloned our virtual identities” (p. 72). Our online profiles give us an atemporal agency whereon we are there but not actually present. On the other side, our technologies mediate our identities by anticipating or projecting a user. As Brian Rotman (2008) writes, “This projected virtual user is a ghost effect: and abstract agency distinct from any particular embodied user, a variable capable of accommodating any particular user within the medium” (p. xiii). Truncated and clipped, we shrink to fit the roles the media allow.
Mindfulness is an important idea cum buzzword in the midst of all this digital doom. Distraction may be just attention to something else, but what if we’re stuck in permanently distracted present with no sense of the past and no time for the future? If you’ve ever known anyone who truly lives in the moment, nothing matters except that moment. It’s the opposite of The Long Now, what Rushkoff calls the “Short Forever.” Things only have value over time. Citing the time binding of Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, Rushkoff illustrates how we bind the histories of past generations into words and symbols. The beauty is that we can leverage the knowledge of that history without going through it again. The problem is that without a clear picture of the labor involved, we risk mistaking the map for the territory.
James Gleick summed it up nicely when he told me in 1999,”We know we’re surrounding ourselves with time-saving technologies and strategies, and we don’t quite understand how it is that we feel so rushed. We worry that we gain speed and sacrifice depth and quality. We worry that our time horizons are foreshortened — our sense of the past, our sense of the future, our ability to plan, our ability to remember.” Well, here we are. What now?
The existence of this book proves we can still choose. In the last chapter of Present Shock, Rushkoff writes,
…taking the time to write or read a whole book on the phenomenon does draw a line in the sand. It means we can stop the onslaught of demands on our attention; we can create a safe space for uninterrupted contemplation; we can give each moment the value it deserves and no more; we can tolerate uncertainty and resist the temptation to draw connections and conclusions before we are ready; and we can slow or even ignore the seemingly inexorable pull from the strange attractor at the end of human history (p. 265-266).
We don’t have to stop or run, we can pause and slow down. Instant access to every little thing doesn’t mean we have to forsake attended access to a few big things. Take some time, read this book.
References:
Chambers, Iain. (1986). Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. New York: Routledge.
Leyton, Michael. (1992). Symmetry, Causality, Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Morrissey, Steven & Marr, Johnny (1984). How Soon is Now? [Recorded by The Smiths]. On Hatful of Hollow [LP]. London: Rough Trade.
Rotman, Brian. (2008). Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rushkoff, Douglas. (2013). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Current.
I just came across this full-length video of the SXSW panel I was on this year with Dave Allen, Rick Moody, David Ewald, Jesse von Doom, and Anthony Batt. The panel is called “What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology?” and we spend about an answer trying to answer the question [runtime: 57:49]:
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Thanks to my friends and co-panelists for the opportunity and the great talks, including the one you see here, and to Philip Goetz for recording and posting this.
Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media (1988) opens with the claim that each of our artifacts is “a kind of word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form to another” (p. 3). For a man of letters to use a linguistic premise upon which to build the laws of media is not surprising. It was McLuhan (1951) after all who pointed out that advertising employs the same strategies as poetry. If we treat software (specifically microblogging platforms) and cities as artifacts, the emergent form seems to be the evolution of language itself: causal, casual language. New slang manifests from urban areas to online services.
A few of Eisenstein, et al’s linguistically linked cities.
Georgia Tech’s Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues have been studying the conflation of urban populations, microblogging, and the evolution of language. Jim Giles of New Scientist reports one such study:
Slang that would normally remain isolated in one urban area until picked up by some mass medium or transmitted by traveling users is now narrowcast via networks. Innovators of utterances share their new words without ever seeing another’s city.
Though one can scarcely discuss the transgressions of language, poetry, and the city without mentioning Guy Debord and The Situationists, Michel de Certeau is perhaps the most famous theorist to conflate the urban and the linguistic. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered,” he writes (1984, p. 97). “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’. All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker” (p. 99). These thoughts of walking in the city, which is incidentally the name of the chapter from which they are cited, evoke the language of appropriation, allusion, remix. De Certeau continues elsewhere:
Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (récits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories (p. 186).
In other words, we make meaning by appropriating (see also Jenkins, 1992; 2006). William Gibson (2005) writes, “Today’s audience isn’t listening at all–it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.” Slang is not necessarily remix, but it often involves the appropriation of utterances that once meant something else, a recontextualization of their meaning. The use and evolution of slang operates on the same basic premise of sampling and remix, as well as that of metaphor.
The widespread dissemination of pop culture is nothing new. As Todd Gitlin writes in his book Media Unlimited (Metropolitan Books, 2001), “Poetry and song migrated across Europe hand to hand, mouth to ear to mouth. Broadsheets circulated. From the second half of the fifteenth century on, Gutenberg’s movable type made possible mass-printed Bibles and a flood of instructional as well as scurrilous literature. Even where literacy was rare, books were regularly read aloud” (p. 27). Though Gutenberg’s printing press represents what McLuhan (1964) referred to as the first assembly line — one of repeatable, linear text — and is what made large-volume printed information a personal, portable phenomenon, the advent of the telegraph brought forth the initial singularity in the evolution of information technology. As James Carey (1988) observed, the telegraph separated communication from transportation. As news on the wire, information could thereafter spread and travel free from its human progenitors. Information was thusly commoditized. Liberated from books and newspapers, new slang and ideas have since become a larger part of our culture than physical products.
The telegraph is so far antiquated in the landscape of communication technology, simply bringing it up in a serious manner seems almost silly. It’s quite literally like using a word that has fallen out of favor. Words are metaphors, and metaphors are expressions of the unknown in terms of the known. Once a new word is known, it becomes assimilated into the larger language system. The same transition occurs in the evolution of technology: Once a device has obsolesced into a general usage, we forget its original impact. The technological “magic” dissipates.
Slang is verbal violence on new psychic frontiers.
It is a quest for identity. — Marshall Mcluhan
In an interview we did several years ago, Paul D. Miller pointed out that McLuhan once said that “the forces of language in an electronic context would release the ‘Africa Within'” (quoted in Christopher, 2007, p. 244). As Eisenstein and his colleagues seem to have found, our tribes come together online, and language evolves from streets to Tweets.
References:
Carey, James W. (1988). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: HarperCollins.
De Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Eisenstein, Jacob, O’Connor, Brendan, Smith, Noah A., & Xing, Eric P. (2012, October 23). Mapping the geographical diffusion of new words. Retrieved November 24, 2012 from http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5268
Gitlin, Todd. (2001). Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1951). The Mechanical Bride. New York: Vanguard Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
McLuhan, Marshall. (1970). Culture is Our Business. New York: Ballantine Books.
McLuhan, Marshall & McLuhan, Eric (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
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This piece is another of my many early rough drafts that I’m working on extending elsewhere. Thanks to Brian McFarland for links and correspondence. Apologies to Carrie Fisher for the title.
I think “round glasses” is the only accurate part of this: a new theme from Findings.com:
Gibson‘s favorite book is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He has no more than four cats, no less than three. Gibson doesn’t open a terminal, Gibson boots in terminal. Gibson adjusts his round glasses, swigs some more coffee, and types “swordfish.” “I’m in!” he declares.
In the March 19, 1990 issue of Newsweek, they unsurprisingly attack Hip-hop with everything from unfettered racism to ignorant fear-mongering. I say “unsurprisingly” because in March of 1990, rap music was still the bane of popular culture. Yo! MTV Raps had barely started its decade-long run, N.W.A. had yet to release records from their separate ways, Public Enemy was just on the verge of dropping Fear of a Black Planet, and Tipper Gore’s PMRC was advising parents not to let their kids listen to rap. In Newsweek‘s cover story, “Rap Rage,” with the cover copy, “Yo! Street rhyme has gone big time, but are those sounds out of bounds?” Jerry Adler attempts to describe music made by groups “most Americans may never have heard of,”
…music so postindustrial it’s almost not even played, but pieced together out of prerecorded sound bites. It is the culture of American males frozen in various stages of adolescence: their streetwise music, their ugly macho boasting and joking about anyone who hangs out on a different block—cops, other races, women, and homosexuals (p. 56).
Bill Adler (1999; absolutely no relation) writes of the cover story,
It was so off-base that 49 music writers, led by Entertainment Weekly‘s Greg Sandow (and representing publications including Time, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice) wrote a letter to the editors of Newsweek insisting that [Jerry] Adler had “invented a nightmarish and racist fantasy about ignorant Black men who scream obscene threats. This is more than artistic misjudgement. Adler has slandered a major strain of contemporary Black culture” (p. 145).
To the Newsweek‘s left in the photo above is the October 18, 2012 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times in which they do much the same thing over 22 years later, furthering Chicago’s Chief Keef’s place as an ephemeral media lightning rod. All the bias, misinformation, and well-worn themes from the past two decades of mainstream Hip-hop coverage are here, from jail time boosting record sales to record companies exploiting violence. I call Keef’s treatment ephemeral because comparing him to Tupac and T.I.—as Thomas Conner does—is ludicrous and illustrates how little these writers know about their subject matter or care about reporting it accurately. It also shows how desperate their employers have gotten, especially when major news outlets sport inset “tl;dr” boxes in their articles, as if that makes them hip instead of hopeless.
Keef has popularized a rap style called “drill music” that originated in Chicago’s south side. Its use of truncated half-bars made up of single statements chanted one at a time rather than rap’s signature flowing poetry over beats makes it a distinctive vocal expression, possibly only prefigured by other one-offs like early-1990s dis-rapper Tim Dog or NOLA’s hoarse-voiced Mystikal. It’s a style that other rappers sound cramped attempting to emulate, as proven by Kanye West’s remix of Keef’s one hit “I Don’t Like,” featuring the ample vocal skills of Pusha-T, Jadakiss, Big Sean, and West himself—all veterans compared to the 17-year-old Keef. “Mr. West has rarely sounded so out of place,” writes Jon Caramanica, “and the original trumps the remix in every regard. ‘I Don’t Like’ is all hard angles and concrete walls, resistant to whatever nuance Mr. West wanted to add.” The drill sound’s closest contemporary analogue lies in the gang-fueled, club anthems of Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame, which feature a little more in the way of flow but are no less clipped and shouted. He’s already outlasted his critics’ expectations though and has made the transition from street tough to entertainer with a sort of gangster’s grace. That shift still remains for Keef, and for argument’s sake, here’s the original house-arrest version of his break-out hit “I Don’t Like” [runtime: 5:09]:
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I do like the song as well as his mixtapes, but I can’t say that I hear evidence of a talent like Tupac, T.I., or, more germanely, Tyler, The Creator. Mark Brown opens his Chicago Sun-Times article about record labels exploiting violence such as the gun waving seen above, by writing, “There probably ought to be a rule against a guy like me writing about somebody like teen rapper Chief Keef, the gulf between our worlds so vast that there’s no way I can relate to his life experiences let alone his music” (p. 5). You might be onto something there, Mark. He adds later, “I decided long ago there’s no value in old white guys wagging their fingers about the dangers of rap music lyrics that glorify guns, drugs, violence, and other criminal activity. I don’t like them. So what?” (p. 5) So, why did you just spend nearly 800 words doing just that?
Chief Keef’s raps are like Tweets: one-line, stand-alone missives; all comment, no story. Another Sun-Times article that emerged as I was writing this revisits how social media fuels public feuds. Much has been written about the role Twitter played in Keef’s rise to infamy, mainly due to gang rivalries that bubbled up into the music and possibly resulted in the death of his south-side rap rival Lil Jojo. “THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert,” writes Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, “Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.” The immediacy of such a channel—someone once called it “the death of the unspoken thought”—lends it to hotheaded responses and eventual regret. “I think it’s pretty likely that instantaneity means there is no chance to ‘count to 10’ in hopes that things might cool off a bit,” says my colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steve Jones, who’s quoted in the Sun-Times article. “I don’t pin that on Twitter, though, as that is the case with other synchronous media — Facebook, [texting], etc. . . . There’s probably some perceived advantage to the public-ness of Twitter, that it seems like more of a mass medium than other options at this point. It also has the perceived advantage of having messages amplified via retweeting. If Facebook is a wall, Twitter might be a bullhorn.” The bullhorn is the perfect symbol for the nodal point I’m trying to reveal here.
In writing about these articles, I feel kind of like the people who wrote them, like I’ve gone looking for something to be outraged about. And that’s a large part of the problem: If you go looking for something to be bummed about, you will find it. Unless you want to be up on the latest trends in rap music, Chief Keef is really none of your damn business. Journalism is like the postal service: They’re both dying businesses that continually do their jobs more and more poorly. So much so that they’re redefining what it means for media to “go viral” and what it means for someone to “go postal.”
It should also be noted that Newsweek announced last week that they are folding their print edition at the end of the year. I hope it means the end of their shitty rag in all its forms. Fuck them.
References:
Adler, Bill. (1999). Bill Adler’s Top 5 Mainstream Media Rap Coverage Travesties. In Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, & Brent Rollins (Eds.), Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists. New York: Ego Trip Publications.
Adler, Jerry. (1990, March 19). The Rap Attitude. Newsweek, CXV, 12, p. 56-59.
Brown, Mark. (2012, October 18). Record Companies Feed Off Violence. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 5.
Caramanica, Jon. (2012, October 4). Chicago Hip-Hop’s Burst of Change. The New York Times.
Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 18). Jail Time Might Not Hurt Sales. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 4.
Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 20). Rappers’ beefs sizzle on social media. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 3.
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Many thanks to Stacey Spencer who boosted me the one copy of Newsweek I’ve ever owned and to Zizi Papacharissi and Tim Baker for additional links and input.
One of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read is 
Summer books out now: Stephen Graham Jones 
The overwhelming irony now is that where we are matters less than the digital wares with which we saturate our selves. On the commute, at school, at work, at home, on a trip, visiting friends—the smartphone usurps all of these with a persistent and precise hold on our attention. In 
