Finished drafting and scheduling newsletter just in time for my hot date (it's nice to attempt to go about Friday nights like other humans every once in a while). This is edition 212 and it is about the art of subversion.
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I'm doing something a little different with the final chapter of THE SOLAR GRID in that I'm adopting something of an assembly line approach to working it, despite my being the only person actually working on it (This is potentially somewhat ironic given the Luddite segments featured in the previous two).
I've basically divided the chapter into three chunks of 12 pages, tackling one chunk at a time. I've done all the panel layouts for the first chunk, now onto filling them with actual characters and scenes, first in pencils, then in inks.
What this means is that each chunk, or pile rather, gets three passes before moving on to the next: first pass for laying out panels (based entirely on the thumbnails), second pass for doing the actual drawings in pencil, third pass for inking everything up. Dividing the work up this way makes it seem more manageable somehow, less daunting.
I quite like looking at the pages at this stage, with just the empty panels laid out. Pages stripped to the musicality of their compositions.
American Christianity & The Religion of Whiteness — Baker Briefing Podcast
A Day Will Come—Desiree Dawson
“We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.”
The fundamental thought-deficiency to be found in the heads of most tech billionaires and tech bros more widely. More:
“Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.”
From Marc Andreessen's The Techno-Optimist's Manifesto.
Applications currently open for the Atlanta and Boston chapters of the Artadia Awards. Houston opens on Oct 1.
My good friend and amazing actor and multi-hyphenate of many talents Dana Omar over in Chicago is putting together a pilot for a powerful passion project of hers called STUCK. She's reached a good 49% of her funding goal and has about 17 days left to raise the rest! Many great rewards ensue.
“If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.”
What would essentially become the Netflix model described by Italo Calvino as far back as 1979 in IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER.
“There's a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other are those who read them, so I take care always to remain on my side of the line. Otherwise, the unsullied pleasure of reading ends, or at least is transformed into something else, which is not what I want. This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased: the world of those who deal with books professionally is more and more crowded and tends to become one with the world of readers. Of course, readers are also growing more numerous, but it would seem that those who use books to produce other books are increasing more than those who just like to read books and nothing else.”
Not gonna lie, sometimes my mind drifts off to a world where overnight I obliterate all trace of my online presence and pick up and move someplace I can slip into anonymity. Mexico perhaps, someplace I know no one and no one knows me, and where I don't even know the language. Set aside any semblance of professional pursuit from my creative endeavors and instead get a job waiting tables or tending to a bar or working at a bookshop, a day-to-day affair that requires no longview, all while speed-learning Spanish and spending my free time doing nothing but reading and sketching till the end of my days.
The excerpt at the very top is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, which may just be the most post-modern book I've ever laid hands on. It's about an apparently misprinted book, whereby every other chapter seems to belong to a completely different book. In that regard, it can be quite challenging to get into, but in so doing it held up a mirror to me and reminded me of a thing I did in THE SOLAR GRID, in which I relegated the half of each chapter to what may seem like a completely new story, until much later you discover that it is all in fact one story. Which made me realize how challenging I must've made it for readers too.
Sticking with Calvino pays off though, because by around the 75-page mark, you're hooked, and the brilliance of Calvino's ploy begins to dawn on you like eureka.
Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
How appropriate to come across these lines after having splurged on an order of 10 books (Ten?! What brand of demented gluttony is this?).
The excerpt is from Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER which I've had shelved for a while waiting to hear its call. Having just finished Dylan's contemplative CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE (which may just be the best autobiography I ever read) and spent the afternoon lost in play and laughter with the little one—now sound asleep—I feel in the right frame of mind to drift away with Calvino.
“Daddy, are you an artist.”
Yes I am, Moony.
“That's so cool.”
Ha! I used to think so too, kiddo, once upon a time.