My Radical Sabbatical

I’m stoked to announce that next week I’ll be joining the teaching faculty in the School of Communication at the University of North Florida, thus ending three years of unemployment. I’ve been calling this my “Radical Sabbatical,” as I spent a lot of time on my BMX bike and my skateboard, but I also did a lot of writing. I really did a lot of writing.

I looked hard for a job when I left my last one in June 2020, but it being the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown, I quickly found that no one was hiring. Fortunately I’d been able to save a lot of what I’d made at my previous position, so I decided to just try to earn it. My dad always says to make sure you accomplish something every day, so I applied a strong reading of that advice and got to work.

I already had a few book projects in various stages of the publishing process, but I dedicated my time to getting them all out there. I also made a new zinedesigned some logosappeared on a few podcastswrote some essays, and had my first solo art show, but finishing books was my main focus.

So, as I start a new phase, what follows is a brief roundup of the results of my Radical Sabbatical. Read on!

A few spines of mine.
Abandoned Accounts

When the lockdown started, I found it difficult to focus on the larger projects. 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 pile of poems.

Abandoned Accounts collects those silly memories I started writing down, including reflections of walks in the woods at my parents’ house in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama, encounters with favorite bands and somewhat famous people, tales of travel and intrigue, and a few stray poems from as far back as 1990. It was an unexpected project, and I’m really proud of the results.

Fender the Fall

Fender the Fall is a short story about Chris Bridges, a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save her life and his marriage. As you might expect, the plan doesn’t go as planned.

Tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back.

It was briefly available as a standalone novella from Alien Buddha Press. I was fortunate enough to get Matthew Revert to design the cover and Mike Corrao to do the typesetting. As a result, it was a sharp-looking little book.

Though the novella is no longer in print, it will be included in my forthcoming short story collection, Different Waves, Different Depths (see below).

discontents

My friends Patrick Barber, Craig Gates, and I put together the pilot issue of a new zine called discontents. The content covers the usual concerns: music, movies, books, and poetry. We reached out to all of our old zine-era friends, so it includes writing by Cynthia Connolly, Peter Relic, Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, Fatboi Sharif, Timothy Baker, and Greg Pratt, artwork by Zak Sally and Tae Won You, as well as work by Patrick, Craig, and myself. Subjects include Ceremony, Unwound, Hsi-Chang Lin a.k.a. Still, Charles Yu’s Interior ChinatownCrestone director Marnie Elizabeth Hertzler, Coherence director James Ward Byrkit, and others.

We did this one as a proof of concept (high-end content, lo-fi production) and will be releasing a full debut issue in the near future.

Follow for Now, Vol. 2

My second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2, picks up and pushes beyond the first volume with a more diverse set of interviewees and interviews. The intent of the first collection was to bring together voices from across disciplines, to cross-pollinate ideas. At the time, social media wasn’t crisscrossing all of the lines and categories held a bit more sway. Volume 2 aims not only to pick up where Follow for Now left off but also to tighten its approach with deeper subjects and more timely interviews. This one is a bit more focused and goes a bit deeper than the last. It includes several firsts, a few lasts, and is fully illustrated with portraits of every interviewee.

“Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.” — Maria PopovaBrain Pickings

There’s an updated version of Follow for Now, Vol. 2 coming soon!

Midnight Diamond by Human Recreational Services.

Human Recreational Services

My old friend Erik Ellington asked me to write some things for his luxury shoe brand, Human Recreational Services. The collection I worked on is called Midnight Diamond, and I have to include it here as it was one of my favorite opportunities from the last few years. Here’s one bit I wrote:

As if trapped in a photograph by Ed Ruscha hanging on the wall in a David Lynch film, a young couple find themselves stranded along the lost highway in the deep desert. At a gas station, they stumble upon a door that leads to unexpected delights, a sudden contrast to their desolation. Figures emerge from the scene promising not safety but salvation, their boots made of distressed leathers studded with jewels, their movements imbued with the gestures of ceremony. Shoes sparkling in the sand, secret messages from parties hidden in back-masked 1980s metal. The flickering signifiers of ritual, dirty glamour marked by the patina of time. Midnight Diamond blends surrealism and serendipity with mystery and metaphor. Mining diamonds in the desert rough, uncertain times demand the discovery of unseen strengths in unexpected places.

Check out the video that goes with the words.

Escape Philosophy

Using extreme examples from heavy metal music and science fiction and horror movies, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body is a survey of all the ways we try to shuck off the shackles of our physical forms.

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.”  Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

There’s a new edition of Escape Philosophy forthcoming. More on that soon!

Boogie Down Predictions

While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. 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. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.

Me and Ytasha Womack talking hip-hop and Afrofuturism. Photo by Shannon Keane.

Ytasha Womack, who wrote the Introduction, and I did an event for Boogie Down Predictions this July at Volumes Books in Chicago, and you missed a treat if you weren’t there.

“Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.” — Jeff Chang, author, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

First Friday Art Crawl

I had a collection of illustrations and logo designs up at Reset Mercantile in Dothan, Alabama. The clip above was shot by Ryan Mills for Big as Life Media. If you’re interested, you can see a few pictures of the pieces on the wall or check out my illustration portfolio. Many thanks to Justin April for the opportunity.

Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love.

 

Different Waves, Different Depths

My debut collection of short fiction, Different Waves, Different Depths, takes its name from a comment an old crush made once about her feelings for the author. It also describes these nine stories, varying in style from the literarily weird to the science fiction and in length from the flash to the novella. There’s even a pilot script in here.

Impeller Press will be releasing Different Waves, Different Depths on September 12th, and you can preorder your copy now!

“Working the borderlands between philosophy, sci-fi, and ultra-contemporary social critique, these stories illuminate our strange cusp moment in a deeply humanistic and bracing manner. A sharp, propulsive, and canny collection.” — David Leo Rice, author, Drifter

Dive in deep, ease in the shallows, or just let the tide lap at your toes. Different waves are waiting.

Cover object and image by me.

The Medium Picture

At long last I have finished my post-punk media theory book. Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from music (e.g., Fugazi, Radiohead, Gang of Four, Run the Jewels, Christian Marclay, Laurie Anderson, et al.) and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, it shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.

“Very much looking forward to reading new Christopher, exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson

The Medium Picture is forthcoming.

Deborah Harry in 1976 vs. Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in 2016.
The Grand Allusion

I also signed on to write The Grand Allusion for Palgrave Macmillan as a part of their Pivot series. I’m only a few chapters into this one, but it’s shaping up nicely. My dissertation was on the use of allusions in rap lyrics, and I’ve since wanted to expand the analysis to pop cultural references in other media. Our media is so saturated with allusions to other media that we scarcely think about them. Their meaning relies in large part on the catching and interpreting of cultural allusions, on their audiences sharing the same mediated memories, the same mediated experiences.

The Grand Allusion explores these experiences, yielding a new understanding of our media, our culture, and ourselves.

Hope for Boats

Somewhere in there, I decided I wanted to try to write a novel. The seed situation was a funeral and a parade on the same day in a small town, and the story has grown from there. On October 11, 2022, I read the Prologue of “Hope for Boats” to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which the fictional town in the story is loosely based. If you’re into it, you can read the excerpt along with me at Malarkey Books

More on this one as it develops.


I don’t know if I quite earned three years “off,” but I definitely tried. With all of that said, I’m looking forward to getting back into the classroom, corrupting young minds. My creative output might return to a somewhat normal pace though. You’ll be the first to know.

Many thanks to everyone who had anything to do with the above projects — writers, designers, editors, contributors, collaborators, even if you just read one of them — I appreciate it. Without you, all of this would just be scribbles in my notebook. Special thanks to my parents for tolerating me for the last year.

All of these projects are up on my websiteCheck ’em out!

New Books Network

I had the pleasure of talking with Alex Kuchma of the New Books Network podcast about my recent edited collection, Boogie Down Predictions, as well as my books Dead Precedents and The Medium Picture. A student of hip-hop culture like me, Alex is steeped in the stuff. He came to the discussion with sharp questions and insight. It was a pleasure.

Check it out here, on Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Many thanks to Alex and the New Books Network for the interest and the opportunity.

 

 

Talk Your Talk

My dumb face.

I’m on Talk Your Talk with my man Alaska this week. I’m the first guest on this spin off from his usual show, Call Out Culture with Curly Castro and Zilla Rocca, on which I was also the first guest. I did the artwork for their Michael Myers/Nas-themed “Killmatic” episode, too.

In this new one, we talk about my books, new, old, and not-out-yet, as well as a few high-minded social-science theories… and the raps, of course.

You can listen to our brief discussion via the podcasting network of your choice.

R.I.P. Kelly Lum

Love is pure
1173 miles away

You know how every recipe online comes with a life story? Kelly Lum ran a site called Just the F*cking Recipe. She was very good at just that kind of finding and fixing a problem we all knew was there but never bothered to do anything about. If you look around online, you’ll see how much everyone who knew her loved and respected her. 

I found out this morning that Kelly passed away last week. It feels silly to say, but Kelly Lum was my first online girlfriend. We met through her website (spinsugar.com) in the late 1990s, and we stayed in touch for a long time thereafter. I hesitate to post anything like this, but given its online nature, I wanted to try to honor the memory appropriately. 

Me and Kelly at UGA in the fall of 1999.

She called me Chris, and I called her Lummy. That is until she finally told me that she hated the name. She had a special way of being brash and bashful at the same time. She was a truly unique person with a talent, a genius, and a wit all her own. She was way smarter than I am, and I miss the way she kept me sharp.

Kelly used to do drawings and write poems for the zines I was making. We did a website together for a few years in the early 2000s. It was sort of an online journal that we both posted to. Sometimes we were talking to each other, sometimes we were just posting nonsense. We started it when I briefly attended the University of Georgia. She came to visit me in Athens while looking at schools. In a letter from her just after that visit, dated November 13, 1999, she asked, “Will you take over the world with me?” She didn’t end up going to UGA, and I moved to Atlanta and then San Diego not long after, but we continued the site even after I moved again, back to Seattle.

The early days of blogging: epithet.nu by Kelly Lum and me.

We kept in touch off and on over the years, but I hadn’t talked to her in a long time. Her passing has me thinking hard about the nature of online relationships, and how to honor and memorialize seemingly such a tenuous connection. She and I weren’t together that long, and we only met IRL the one time, but she had a profound impact on me. Her passing has me mostly thinking hard about her.

Kelly behind the wheel.

She had a clarity of intent that sometimes came off as something else. The last book she posted about was The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. The phrase on page 66 describing windows like eyes as intimating “not concentration, but heavy sleep” has new meaning now.

I lost a hard drive full of writings not long after we broke up. It contained a whole directory about her called “The Lum Diary.” I wish I could share something from that time. 

The Later Lum. Photo by Zach Lanier.

Kelly Ann Catherine-Xavier Lum… Rest in peace, Lummy. I’m sorry I ever called you that.

wow&flutter

In 1997 I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas. There were regular live events and several specialty stores, and I tried to bring them all together under the banner of sound experimentation.

wow&flutter was intended as part of a series, but the second issue, attack&decay, featuring interviews with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Warren Defever of His Name is Alive, among others, never made it to press. I still love the idea of noise and hip-hop coming together, and there are others who’ve merged them in the meantime better than I could have imagined (e.g., dälek, clipping., Ho99o9, Death Grips, Cloaks, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, et al.)

It’s been 25 years since its release, but maybe it’s worth another look. Download this .pdf of the first issue, and you’ll see the seeds of my future projects like Dead Precedents and Boogie Down Predictions.