June 16, 2019

Ever think about going to Managua?

It's a bit of a link-heavy edition this week. Normal analysis of the rest of those short story Eisner noms shall continue next issue.

Deadlines y'all.

Links

• David Harper of SKTCHD and the excellent Off Panel podcast has an interesting long-read on how the act of comic creating (and who is doing the creating) has changed in the last few years.

"The concept of breaking in to comics has morphed alongside the medium, as we’ve seen a change in comic formats, distribution channels, and even, perhaps most crucially, the ways you can make money off your work."

• I'm tooting the CrimeReads horn again. This article by Zach Vasquez is a look at the careers of James Ellroy and David Milch, exploring the similarities in the themes both creators explore in their work.

• I enjoyed this interview with writer/editor Harry French over at Comics Anonymous. Harry touches on a really pertinent point when asked why he chose the one-short format for his most recent project, Slow Shutter:

"I feel like saying necessity makes it sound like a compromise? Which I guess it unavoidably is. But I’d done a four issue series, and tried to do another four issue series (I’m not a sensible man), and always tried to pay collaborators as much as I could. Not only does it run roughshod over your finances in a way that’s not fair to the woman you live with who has to buy all the shopping, but it also means you’re really limited in what you can put out. Basically, I can maybe afford to do a book a year. After four years I’d rather have told four complete stories,than one story in four parts, and one shots mean I get to do that."

• Travis Woods has a fantastic piece on Friedkin's Sorcerer (one of my all time faves) over at Bright Wall/Dark Room that is absolutely worth your time. It's a long read but beautifully written.

• Craig Mod's newsletters are always a welcome sight in my inbox. He recently finished walking from Tokyo to Kyoto sending out updates along the way via newsletter dispatches and a kind of semi-public picture feed via SMS.

  In his latest newsletter he talks about the physiological reactions to being back on the internet fully in the first time in four weeks.

"It begins in the gut, a kind of clenching of the intestine, a warmth below the belly button. Then, a radiating of heat from the chest. A sensation of being pulled forward. A tensing of the face, around the eyes, the middle of the brow. The breath gets oddly shallow, a mild hyperventilation. Something fires off in the back of the skull, and then again. No conscious complicity, all autonomous, micro-stimulations. Triggered by: A scroll, a reload, a pull to refresh, a like, a share, the right headline. I can now pinpoint this sequence of involuntary response to be the tiny physiological loop my body runs through when using Twitter or Instagram."

During said walk he also experienced long bouts of, well, boredom. This is not the bad thing it's often presented as:

"Easing into boredom is like easing into a big run. The first few kilometers of a run — for me, anyway — always hurt. My body always rebels. Boredom functions similarly. Since we’ve trained ourselves to reach for our smartphones when presented with even three seconds of potential boredom, the first ten, twenty, thirty minutes of boredom are excruciating.

This pain is a withdrawal symptom. But if you get over that compulsion for info-stimulation, you are presented with an opportunity to replace the tiny loops with much more rewarding activities."

• Bello Collective asks if podcast overwhelm is a thing. One way around this (at least for me) was to use an app called Castro. The way the UI works and the way in which they present the feed almost gives the user 'permission' to feel like they don't have to listen to every episode of a podcast. Invaluable.

• This is very niche and very British, but I found it hilarious so here it is. Vice's brief history of the 'hun'. U ok hun?

• Someone on GoodReads made a list of all of the books mentioned in Rage Against The Machine's Evil Empire liner notes. It has one of my all time favourite books on there, Killing Hope, so I heartily recommend it.

• Kameron Hurley on 'the hustle' and writer's burnout.

• I'm kind of obsessed with analytics and how they relate to sports (blame Moneyball) so this article on Liverpool's recent success was fascinating.

• I'm a huge fane of Robert Macfarlane's work. His books cover nature, landscapes and history in a really satisfying manner. The New Yorker has an excerpt from his latest book, Underland, focusing on the catacombs beneath Paris.

"All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere. Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone quarrying began in the thirteenth century, and Lutetian limestone was used in the construction of such iconic buildings as Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and Saint-Eustache Church. The result of more than six hundred years of quarrying is that beneath the southern portion of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, extending beneath several arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières—the quarry voids, the catacombs, which together total an underground space around ten times the space of Central Park."

• Autumn Christian has an excellent article up at LitReactor about 5 things that writers can learn from video games. There's an excellent rec list at the end of the article too. I also heartily recommend Autumn's newsletter.

"It's important to remember when writing books, that you are not creating a painting, a movie, or a game. You are relaying a narrative via text. Too often writers will try to create a story like they are describing a movie, and it shows. The text is sparse. They set up a "shot" by describing everything in the background. The "camera" of the POV is zoomed out, so we never get a glimpse into the character.

I think this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that the story itself is all that's important, not the package it comes in. Text is not just an inconvenient vehicle for your vision. It is a part of the narrative itself."

• Aaron Z. Lewis has written an article on post-truth and the internet today. It's basically Black Mirror the article and there are a mutitude of idea seeds for stories here (Via Ospare @ Restricted.Academy):

"Few people ever searched for “Sutherland Springs” until November 4, 2017, when news started coming out that a shooter walked into a Baptist church and began shooting. As news rippled out, people turned to search engines to understand what was happening … Adversarial actors, intent on capitalizing on what would be a sudden interest in a breaking news story, decided to take advantage of this opportunity. They turned to Twitter and Reddit in an effort to associate both the town, and shortly after, the name of the shooter with the term “Antifa” … Their goal in creating this association was to provide a frame that journalists would have to waste time investigating (to eventually debunk). Furthermore, they wanted early searchers to believe that this shooter’s motives were part of a leftist conspiracy to hurt people. In short order, these adversarial actors managed to influence the front page of search queries, inject “Antifa” into auto-suggest, and trigger journalists to ask whether Antifa was involved. In a matter of hours, Newsweek ran the headline “Antifa’ Resonsible for Sutherland Springs Murders, According to Far-Right Media.” This influenced the news content, which search engines take more seriously, and increased the visibility of this association."

• Finally, Tori Telfer (of the ace Criminal Broads podcast) has written a piece on gender, murder and whether Jack the Ripper was really 'Jill'.

===

I'm off to wish my Dad a happy Father's day - see you in two!