For anyone who’s tried it, writing is challenging in many different ways and at many different stages. The writing process itself is long and full of its own inherent challenges, but getting editors or agents to read and publish your work presents another course of obstacles. Once you’ve written something and gotten it published, the last challenge is getting people to read it.
My friend Gareth Branwyn always says, “Writers write.” Writing and publishing are privileges, and I take both the work and the opportunity seriously. So, I appreciate your time and attention when I invade your inbox every week or so.
What follows is a roundup of a few things I’ve recently gotten published in one form or another, with thanks to the editors and publishers who found these words worthy.
The Bitten Word
I have a piece (and an illustration) up today called “The Bitten Word” on Lit Reactor. As I did in a newsletter a while back, I propose a writing exercise based on interpolating the work of others. Here’s an excerpt:
Quoting and paraphrasing are common in writing disciplines such as journalism and academia, but plagiarism is anathema, punishable by excommunication. While endemic to the creative practices of hip-hop, the practice of interpolation also hotly debated. The orthodox rule there was no biting, but if you can take what someone else wrote and make it better, that’s worthy of respect. “I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard,” Rakim once rapped, “Flip it, now it’s a daily word.” Because of the perils of plagiarism, in writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted, but it can be quite fruitful.
Read the full column at Lit Reactor.
Phantom Kangaroo Newsletter
My “Calm in the Chaos” security-envelope liner collage that first appeared in issue #26 of Phantom Kangaroo was in the first edition of the new PK weekly newsletter, both of which are edited by the magical and multi-talented Claudia Dawson. You should subscribe to this and her Many-Worlds Vision newsletter immediately.
Irony is for Suckers
I know you read it already, but my essay on irony from a few weeks ago is up on Sublation Magazine. Here’s the beginning:
“Irony used to feel like a defense against getting played,” writes the novelist Hari Kunzru, “a way for a writer to ward off received ideas and lazy thinking.” Broadly speaking, irony is the rhetorical strategy of saying one thing yet meaning another, usually the opposite. It also might be the most abused trope of our time. It’s beyond substance over style. It’s the absurd over the authentic. “It also made us feel nihilistic and defeated,” Kunzru continues. “More recently we’ve seen how it can be a screen for reactionary politics.” In the preface to his 1999 book, For Common Things, Jedidiah Purdy frames the overbearing irony of our era as a defense mechanism: "It is a fear of betrayal, disappointment, and humiliation, and a suspicion that believing, hoping, or caring too much will open us up to these." It’s an escape route, an exit strategy, a way off the hook in any situation, it’s become the dominant mode of pop culture, and we’re all tired of it.
Thanks to Alfie Bown for giving this one a second home. If you missed it somehow, you can read the full piece at Sublation.
“Messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.”
As you know, I have a couple of new books out. I’m still trying to spread the word, so if you know anyone who might be interested in either of these, let ‘em know.
BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism
(Strange Attractor Press)
Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop and co-editor of Freedom Moves, says,
Roy Christopher’s dedication to the future is bracing. Boogie Down Predictions is a symphony of voices, beats, and bars messing with time, unsettling histories, opening portals.
Through essays by some of hip-hop’s most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.
Featuring contributions from Omar Akbar, Juice Aleem, Tiffany E. Barber, Kevin Coval, Samantha Dols, Kodwo Eshun, Chuck Galli, Nettrice Gaskins, Jonathan Hay, Jeff Heinzl, Kembrew McLeod, Rasheedah Phillips, Steven Shaviro, Aram Sinnreich, André Sirois, Erik Steinskog, Dave Tompkins, Tia C.M. Tyree, Joël Vacheron, tobias c. van Veen, K. Ceres Wright, and Ytasha Womack.
ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
(punctum books)
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
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.
As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet writes, “Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.”
As always, thank you for reading and sharing.
More soon,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com