Happy Hallowe’en for yesterday! I hope you all had a good time. I was, for the first time ever, not remotely in the festive mood. With a Christmas birthday that I never get to celebrate, I decided to spend the Hallowe’en weekend pretending I was 30 two months early and had a birthday party for myself at home. It was lovely and not remotely spooky and now I feel a little bit like I’ve missed the boat. But “the fear” I’m currently experiencing on day 2 of my hangover unreal.
Anyway, interesting month this month. So much drama?!
Repeater Buys Zer0
The biggest news this month is undoubtedly that Repeater Books has bought out Zer0 Books.
No one knows what this entails yet — although changes have already started happening. Repeater had previously been producing audiobooks for some of their best-loved Zer0 1.0 titles and they have started to talk about this a lot more openly, suggesting more of that material will be brought in line with Repeater’s overall catalogue.
But I don’t know any more than anyone else at this point. Watch this space, though. It’s going to be a very interesting transition.
Reflexive Impotence
Of course, the generally reactionary Zer0 2.0 authors have seemingly found this to be quite an ordeal, if only because much of Twitter decided to tell it how it really is. Issues that many have discussed for years, that Zer0 has gone well to actively suppress, all came out of the woodwork with statements from Alex Niven and Aaron Leonard once again being circulated.
If this drama is interesting to me, it is not only because I’m a staunch Repeater loyalist but because I think it chimes with a number of related conversations around free speech and political agency in the cultural sphere — which, in turn, is related to last month’s discussion around AOC at the Met Gala.
Below are a few posts that extend this into other territories, and there may even be more to come in November as this train shows no signs of stopping.
— Reflexive Centrism
— Funko Pop (Modernism?)
— Toothless Critique: Free Speech in the Vampire Castle
NFTs
Against all better judgement, I also wrote about NFTs again… I still think there is a great deal to be said for this emerging use of technology. The most visible examples are gross — no arguing with that — but as Lukács said, we should always strive to raise our knowledge of the world above what is presented to us by the ruling class in immediacy… (That was an unsent tweet, can you tell?)
Still Searching for Sebald?
The best thing I read this month was probably Ryan Ruby’s essay on WG Sebald for the New Left Review. I loved it so much I heavily annotated it on the blog.
Reading Group
In case you missed it, we were also back reading Bratton’s Revenge of the Real.
— XG Reading Group 3.4: The Sensing Layer
We have another session this week on Wednesday — check the Discord — and then after that we’ll probably have just one session left. After that, we’ll be moving onto this 8-week Fisher course I’ve had planned for ages. More info on that soon.
Photography
As ever, this is a lesser number of posts for me because most of my energy is going into book writing at present. But momentum is building as I begin to make some of this work public. I’ll giving a talk in Newcastle later this month, presenting on my research to some undergrads, and then I’m going on a retreat for a week to try and finish the last half of the book. More updates on that soon!
See you next month!