A spare collection of sentences this week. Much of last weekend and this past week were devoted to mailing out the new edition of Networks of New York. Self-publishing always sounds like a great idea until you have hundreds of pre-orders to pack up and mail and find yourself constantly running out of packing tape and spare cycles (many thanks to the friends who showed up to help me pack most of the orders up last weekend).

Some other big stressful life stuff (some good, some less good, all basically manageable) also cut into reading time. Fall is such a frenetic season. Everyone and everything seems to be doing the absolute most in advance of winter setting in and the world becoming altogether too cold and dark and grim for new projects or baseline functionality.

I'm doing some walking tours on the occasion of the book's release next weekend; one at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria on October 10 and one at Pioneer Works in Red Hook on October 11. One in Manhattan with Rhizome tentatively for November, route TBD.

With the decade's end had come pastel light and a new cruelty.

The Rouse, China Miéville

I suspect I will actually set down to properly read this tome of a book in winter when I am trapped indoors with it; spooky season aside, the overwhelming sense of dread that permeates at least the first hundred pages seems better suited to December-January.

“Hosiery” is a weird word — you kinda have to swish it around your mouth like Listerine before spitting it out — but among accessory categories it’s unparalleled when it comes to adding a splash of “bad taste” to an outfit.

"Upper-class semaphore", Erin Wylie for her newsletter Blackbird Spyplane

Submitted by Julia.

I will always respect a leader who in their darkest moment finds the creativity and the wherewithal to put together a psyop video.

"Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn Will Always Be the BK Dems Chair—In Our Hearts", Holly Pretsky for Hell Gate

This is a song about leaving a room forever.

This Year: 365 Songs Annotated, John Darnielle

Whether or not it lives in Hell, the oyster, an ancient symbol of debauchery, is an odd avatar for landscape architects, generally strait-laced types who have tended to adopt a persona of responsibility, good health and temperance, and enlightened rationalism, at least since the days of Frederick Law Olmsted, a grade-A neurotic who gained celebrity on the strength of a Dixieland travelogue wherein he inferred slavery’s inferiority from the poor state of Southern room service.

"Plus Ça Change", James Andrew Billingsley for New York Review of Architecture

The title case on Hell is assumed here, as the opening of the sentence is styled uppercase. Also very good:

Yet an eternal 2011 reigns in the minds of the pathological optimists in charge of the American landscape.

You think a Swan out in the wild will wait for you to make your first move before it breaks your arm?

"Random Encounters are Annoying", Eric on their blog MOKKOGRAD

Submitted by Nathan.

If you're going to punch a wall, here's a suggestion: Don't.

"About Men: Hitting the Wall", Sebastian Junger for The New York Times

Aside from the comedy of Junger having written this (in 1992), I have a long-percolating idea to trace the history of the trope of a guy who gets so mad he punches a hole in the wall and its relationship to transformations in construction. Did drywall give men permission to punch the wall, or simply make it more destructive than an existing tradition of breaking one's fist against brick or wood? Was it a response to the underlying hollowness of the postwar condition, reflected in the hollowness of its building materials? What hath gypsum wrought, etc.