Status: 6 Mar 2023

We cleaned out the storage space chaos at the top of the wardrobe over the weekend and assembled an impressive list of rubbish, old clothes to be donated, and a graveyard of dead and unused modems to transport to a recycling centre. Among the detritus was a promotional postcard for 2009s Interfictions II anthology that’s been blue-tacked to the wall of multiple offices, but never found its way onto the walls of the current flat because there’s no actual office space.

I loved this anthology series and the sponsoring org, the Interstitial Arts Foundation, which always seemed to be a place where I found interesting work that pushed boundaries. Both strike me as an artifact of a very different era, where conversations about art and digital publishing focused on what you could do with the new tools and distribution methods. These days, I feel like the voices focused on what you should do typically drown out everything else, and the focus lies on replicating the space once occupied by mid-list titles. There’s still some excitements there—digital publishing spaces seem to grow new cult-hit subgenres that boom out of nowhere—but it’s harder to find the wild, experimental stuff.

(This, of course, assumes that I’ve not become so old, isolated, and spoiled-by-algorithms that I simply miss the wild experimental stuff. Odds are, this is the stronger possibility…)

ON THE DOCKET

Today there are copyedits to process and a new book announcement to organise on the Brain Jar Press front, and we’re definitely in my last-day-to-to-finalise-Eclectic-Projects-003 before I blow the end of the month publishing date. There’s a meeting with a writing mentee this afternoon which will require some prep.

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 15

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 13

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 4

There’s more movement on these three than the numbers would suggest, especially the personal inbox which sees a pretty constant flow of new stuff that needs handling.

RECENT VIEWING

I talked about Cocaine Bear in Saturday’s post, but I’m flagging that my beloved and I have started working our way through Star Trek: Enterprise and just hit the middle of the first season. The passage of two decades has rendered the series an oddly fascinating experience—it’s part of the transition between purely episodic television and the slow drift towards the aesthetics of Jason Mittel’s Complex TV where the expectation of repeated watching on DVD (or streaming) drives more ambitious, arc-driven storytelling. You can see the echoes of what’s to come in Enterprise, but it’s also oddly milquetoast and there’s so damn much of it.

I keep marveling at the fact that all TV used to be like this, aimed at a general viewing episode that might see one or two episodes and rarely follow the continuity, with the occasional bright spot where someone took chances.