Category: Admin

Egress — Coming Soon from Caja Negra

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Matheus Calderón‘s Spanish translation of my old blogpost “The Capitalist Realism of ‘Capitalist Realism Is Ending'” has been published on the Caja Negra blog to coincide with the publication of volume two of the K-Punk anthology into Spanish.

There’s also a little announcement tucked away in an image caption:

Egress… Futura publicación de Caja Negra Editora.

I’ve been very excited about this. It is always an honour to be translated and especially in such great company. Caja Negra not only has the coolest name — Spanish for “black box”, tracking those lines of flight — but also an amazing roster.

Matheus has also been wonderful to chat to over recent months and I am really humbled that he would undertake this project. Go check out his work!

I hope to have more information for Spanish readers soon. Watch this space.

The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism — Course Out Now!

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Following our one-hour promo chat from the other day, I’m very excited to announce that The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism, a collaborative course written by James ‘@meta_nomad‘ Ellis and myself is now live at teachable.com.

The course is a two-parter, with James covering the philosophy of accelerationism and me on politics. (I’ll put the full course outline after the jump…)

We’re both very excited to be coming together on this. The course comes in three tiers. Tier 1 (£100) gives you access to all the course materials — almost seven hours worth of video + audio + lecture transcripts; Tier 2 (£150) is the course materials and the opportunity to take part in two seminars with James and myself; Tier 3 (£200) is all of the above and you also get a one-on-one seminar (or more like a threesome) with James and myself as well.

As we discussed the other day, we’re both very excited about the kinds of conversations that the course might generate — Ed Berger has already written a genius blogpost in response to the promo chat. So please join us for what we think will be a really exciting set of conversations.

Continue reading “The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism — Course Out Now!”

Quarantine Clear-Out: XG’s Rare (and Not-So-Rare) Art Books

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Just a shameless shill post: I’ve been trying to clear out a load of stuff at my parents’ house over the last few years and have scraped through the layers of previously ill-advised purchases and childhood mementoes until I’ve reached the stuff that I can’t just throw away.

I’ve just started a new eBay account and I’m going to be using it to list rare art books and photo books (and the occasional comic) I own and really don’t have the space for anymore. The photo above is everything I’ve just listed. Have a browse here if you’re interested.

Back Soon

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Off to Cornwall for a week, staying in some hut without Wi-Fi or an indoor toilet. The weather is meant to be shit all week but, to be honest, I think Cornwall is even more beautiful when it’s grim. (Photo above from last year of Robin in the rain walking towards Lanyon Quoit.) Back to our usual programming soon.

Xenogothic Turns 2

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It’s my bloggerversary today. Two years since I thought “xenogothic” could be a good pseudonym to shitpost about philosophy behind. It’s been a wild ride so far.

I’ve started getting paid by people to write essays and I’ve got my first book coming out. I’ve gone from <10 people in my life knowing I had a blog for the first year of its existence to getting recognised by strangers down the local pub.

This isn’t really what I expected to happen when I started here but I’m not complaining. Thanks for all the support and all the hellthreads. Here’s to loads more years to come.

I’m crazy busy this week with a lot on my plate and I’m a little sad I don’t have the time to really celebrate this. It feels like something of a rebirthday so I’m strangely invested in it and I’m sad it’s snuck up on me. I had no idea it was on the horizon until yesterday.

I’m hoping that this Sunday will be a better day to kick back and take a few hours out to do another celebratory livestream. There’s a poll going round for people to decide on what it will be and it’s surprisingly close at the moment. Go vote. Chances are I’ll get some beers in and chat shit and maybe play some games. Time TBC.

Dunwich Thoughts

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We spent the day at Dunwich (again). No exploring this time — just reading on the beach. I’ve been popping into every second-hand bookshop in Suffolk this week, trying to scratch an itch, but I think the real itch is — now that Egress is finished — I’m having serious thoughts about book #2.

I’m thinking it’ll just be called “Xenogothic” — a proper statement about why I think the only way to be Goth in the 21st century is to plunder the outsides of the Gothic’s tired old boundaries.

I’m not sure how I’m going to structure things yet but I’m still thinking a lot about the American West and the playful but more socially realist multiplicity of the American Gothic (relative to its UK Jekyll-and-Hyde counterpart).

There’s a chapter on the West in Egress already but I still have so much to say about it, so today I’ve been reading the collected short stories of Tennessee Williams and I even dipped into a bit of Mark Twain. I need to get this out my system and then get back to what I love about UK Goths.

Other thoughts had in Dunwich: why would you build two nuclear power stations — and propose a third — that are visible from a stretch of coast most famous for the fact a whole city was quickly destroyed by the sea there?

Tempting fate a bit, surely… The energy industry’s death drive writ large!

No News is Good News

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As was recently tweeted, things have been quiet around here of late but for very good reason: I’ve just finished my first book.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tentatively made this declaration, and those who have been around these parts for a while might be feeling a bit “boy who cried wolf” about Egress — as it’s long been called.

But it’s for real this time. I signed a book contract back in July. It’s been read twice by an editor. It doubled in size in the process. And now, after receiving this hugely gratifying (and hugely redacted) email, it feels somewhat out of my hands.

The process isn’t over, however — it hasn’t even been officially announced yet — but it feels like it is well and truly over some sort of threshold and on course for a release in the first quarter of 2020.

I don’t really want to say anything too much more about it here until the point of no return has most definitely passed because I’m still shitting myself that I’m going to jinx it and that nothing is real so let this be an update to say we’ll be back to our usual programming soon. I have a bunch of drafts to finish and pastures new to move onto because I’ve been wrapping up the last three years of my life in this book here and it’s all been a bit traumatic if I’m honest.

For now, I need a quick breather so I’m going to go on holiday for a week and a half. Fittingly, I’m off to the Suffolk coast for a week. I’ll probably write about it again, but for now expect a week of photography whilst I recuperate my brain a bit.

Trouble

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I’ve been coming to this pub for about three years now to write all my shit. Whenever I need to concentrate and maybe loosen up my fingers with a couple of pints (and a pack of cigarettes), it’s the best place for me to get work done. (They’ve got plug sockets in the beer garden, you see.)

This is Trouble. He’s always around to stick his head in my bag to see if I’ve got any food and lounge around in the sun. He was good company yesterday.

I finally broke through a blog blockage that has been building up on my desktop since at least December of last year. Expect new essays elsewhere over the coming months and also a new series that is already complete but which I’m gonna break up, posting one part a week until it’s done. First part is coming on Monday.

Watch this space.

Plans for Patreon #1

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So I soft-launched a Patreon a few weeks ago and after posting about it on Twitter, I’ve been really grateful to the first 12 people who have signed up. Your support means the world to me.

Now that things are on the move, I wanted to update the blog with a post about how things have been going and what I’ve got planned for it in the future.

First things first, the Patreon currently has two main tiers:

A $2.50 ‘Supporter’ tier which doesn’t currently get you anything but my gratitude. If you’re willing to part with this amount on a monthly basis, it can help me carve out more time for writing and updating the blog with more and more stuff. Every little helps and it means the world.

At $5 things get a little more interesting. For this amount you can join my dedicated Discord server where we’re currently planning events, reading groups, sharing resources and also having a lot of great discussions. Whilst it’s currently a small group, the more people join the more time I can dedicate to do more private events and things in that space.

At present, it’s acting as a private discussion forum and also as a private comments section where I am always on call and happy to answer any questions or give any advice. Also, with an RSS bot that updates the Discord with a link to every new post, it makes for a really natural and fluid private comments section of the kind that the blog and Twitter has never really managed to establish before.

We have other plans in there also. Starting in June, we’re going to start a monthly reading group for Gilles Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition. This was a book requested to be read by Patrons and this is something I intend to facilitate and chair going forwards. I’m also going to start doing Open Posts on the blog, where once a month I write something on a topic requested by Patrons and conversations had in the chat may also help towards feeding the output — I’m already thinking about writing something on Land’s Thirst for Annihilation after it generated a really interesting discussion last week.

If this sounds interesting to you and you’d like to help grow this space, which in turn I hope will help me improve the blog, you can click through here and subscribe.

More updates in future.

[As a side note, it’s been brought to my attention that Patreon has been fucking up autogenerating Discord access codes, so if you choose to sign up or have already but haven’t been able to get into the Discord, please email me or DM me on Twitter, and I can sort this out for you ASAP.]

3000

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Last week, I promised that when I hit 3000 Twitter followers I would show you all my Minecraft world to celebrate.

I thought that would take a few weeks but the recent viral tweet led to an extra 100+ followers overnight so here we are. Kicking off at 1600.