Last week, my new book Escape Philosophy: Journey's Beyond the Human Body was released by punctum books. Many thanks to those of you who helped make it a #1 New Release and a Top-Ten Bestseller in Heavy Metal Music Books on Amazon!

Here's an Escape Philosophy playlist I put together featuring all of the songs and artists discussed in the book, including Godflesh, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Throne Room, Celtic Frost, and Jawbox, among others.

Play it while you read the Introduction from the book below.

Well, I feel foolish... and I apologize for this extra email.

That last newsletter went out earlier than planned and its announcement was premature (Shouts to the troopers among you who found the book on Amazon anyway).

Please read the following as if you didn't already see it. Hey, maybe you didn't!

My new book, Escape Philosophy, really is available now!

I am very excited to announce that my new book, Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, is now available from punctum books!

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

The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

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

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

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

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

Starting with...

Summer Reading List, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, it's the...

15th ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLOW FOR NOW:

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

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

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

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

[Portrait by Chris Mars.]

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

Here we go:

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

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

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

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

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

• I did a fairly lengthy interview with Fifteen Questions.

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

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

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

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

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