Dresden presentation in the can. Accounting taken care of. Laundry done. Inbox 0, RSS 0.
I can now spend the next couple of days tending to house things before boarding my flight with little worry.
From Ahmed Naji's latest:
“There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: 'Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet.'”
“I left Egypt alone. A writer with no affiliation to any political organization, wandered astray from my religious and national groups. However, once I arrived in America, this lost all value and meaning, for no sooner had I presented myself at the terminal gates did I not only receive the official government stamp, but left the airport branded with a whorish array of labels that I never got to have a say in choosing nor could make sense of.
“Soon, however, the minutiae of daily life in exile compels one, especially in the field of writing and cultural work, to gradually adapt to those labels invisibly branded on one’s backside. I recall that it was during my first few months in the country that someone asked me a question in which they referred to me as a brown writer —a term I was unfamiliar with at the time — and it was only after I asked for further explanation during which the same person stammered and fumbled to present me with an adequate answer that I finally understood it to be a term directed at writers who did not belong to the white or black race.”
From TAMING THE IMMIGRANT by Ahmed Naji.
“I have found that obedience and conformity in the United States are not strictly enforced or heavily guarded by armed soldiers or prisons, instead they present as a whisper, a sound vibration that crashes into your consciousness where they transform into ants that proceed to slowly and gradually eat away at your insides until they ultimately deform you after which they proceed to build you back up and mold you into what the system determines what you should become.”
Lords save me from this nonsense.
Many don't know this, but I never went to art school. Much to my misery, I actually ended up in business school (long story). Though not a very good one.
One of things I was most looking forward to upon graduating was pursuing art and design full time and never having to look at anything even remotely close to a ledger ever again.
How naive.
In other news, I keep coming up against hurdles in regard to finding an appropriate publication pathway for the collected edition of THE SOLAR GRID. While almost every editor I send it to does make it a point to acknowledge the book's merits; “a project of immense passion”, “unique”, “graphically sophisticated”, it still gets turned down for one reason or another:
And then there are the few odd correspondences where a publisher would express initial interest and then ghost you. I realize of course that rejection stories aren't cool to divulge unless you have a success story to go with (at which point, rejection stories become extra extra cool), but I don't think of this blog as a space to project any kind of awfully considered persona. I like to say it like it is, likely to my own detriment.
Two more days till I'm off to Dresden and there is just so much to do that I'd rather not have to do.
What do Norman Mailer and Charles Dickens have in common? – Crimereads.
The Nogood Book – Fonts in Use.
Vintage Egyptian cigarette packages – The Daily Heller.
Lots of boring accounting and excel sheets today.
But made a little somethin' somethin' for my special lady, which brought me much joy:
Bryan Johnson on eliminating death in an interview for the Interesting Times podcast. The irony is that it is so obviously a terrible way to live. But Ross Douthat really is an exceptional interviewer.
Shelfies #100: Jared Shurin – The sight of Jared's identical and perfectly shelved journals brings me so much inner peace and seething jealousy.
Random thought: The whole simulation theory thing that seems to be increasingly trendy these days actually isn't at all at odds with any of the traditional religious beliefs of old, the ones that imagined god as an anthropomorphized king on a throne in the clouds. Because simulation theory by definition implies the entire universe being created by someone somewhere. The anthropomorphized king in this case being a computer programmer. The throne: an ergonomic chair. Which, if you think about it, just so happens to be this decade's flavor of king.
Did a fun collab with Dominic Boyer for the delightfully demented Elon Magazine, which I should be able to tease soon.
Tomorrow I prepare my Dresden presentation and take care of some admin.
Season 1 and 2 of SILO were good. Season 3 is frustratingly dumb because the main character now has amnesia and we follow her unravel the shocking mystery of what happened to her over the last two seasons, which we, as viewers, already know.
34°C and sauna-level humid and the lack of AC in the studio is proving to be lethal despite all attempts at overt nudity.
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For the record, the only agents I have representing my work are Booklyn; who focus on placing reasonably-sized art-on-paper at institutional collections, especially within the U.S. They've been instrumental in getting my work into a number of university collections (listed here).
No art-dealer for larger works, no literary agent, and certainly no film/TV agent. Most of my dealings have been conducted as a “free agent” so to speak, which, quite frankly, I would like to change, because I am now spent af.
The latest newsletter finally went out. This is issue #235: Can't Stop Won't Stop.
As always, sign up lives here.
Recently, I had to turn down working with a novelist I admire. He had a fantastic idea for a graphic novel; an exhilarating historical epic that would need at least 500 pages to unfold and probably another 10 years of my life to make. Mind-blowing and attractive as the concept was, I am sadly way too burnt out after THE SOLAR GRID to plunge into anything that elaborate anytime soon.
Looking at STRANGE DAYS again. The seminal anthology miniseries by Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, and Brett Ewins. Each issue serializing 3 unrelated comics.
Picture a 4-issue miniseries kind of along the same line. Each issue containing 3 completely unrelated comix stories of different genres. Say a science fiction bit, a thriller, and a historical or romance thing, I dunno. Completely dissimilar, each with its own tone and depicted in a completely different visual style. Until the 4th issue where it is revealed that all 3 stories were connected all along.
It would kind of be the comicbook equivelant of Quentin Tarentino's PULP FICTION, but taken up a notch.