Roy Christopher's Blog

Politics are way off-brand for me, but I am interested in the use of allusions in any context. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently quoted a speech by Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) from the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction, claiming he was reciting scripture. As Mary Ginther reports, “Hegseth seemed certain he was delivering a powerful faith-filled moment this week when he recited what sounded like scripture during a Pentagon worship service. Instead, critics quickly pointed out the dramatic passage was dialogue made famous in Pulp Fiction, turning the scene into an instant headache.”1

Pete Hegseth, trying real hard to be the shepherd. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

It’s a bit more complicated than that though.

Pulp Fiction cowriter and director Quentin Tarantino prides himself on alluding to other movies in his movies. The very ontology of his movies is movies. Gary Groth writes, “Tarantino’s characters inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product.” He goes on to call Tarantino a “cinematic kleptomaniac.”2 To wit, Tarantino told Empire magazine in 1994, “I steal from every single movie ever made. Great artists steal; they don’t do homages.” The last part of that quotation is itself stolen from something Pablo Picasso supposedly once said: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Pulp Fiction draws its influences from Deliverance, The Wild Bunch, Band of Outsiders, Psycho, Shaft, The Warriors, Nightfall, Kiss Me Deadly, and Repo Man, among others. Julia Kristeva once said that every text is a “mosaic of quotations.”3 No filmmaker has taken that to heart as strongly or with greater effect than Quentin Tarantino.

Jules’ speech in Pulp Fiction, purportedly from Ezekiel 25:17 in the Bible, is actually lifted from the 1973 Ryuichi Takamori film, Bodyguard Kiba, in which Sonny Chiba says,

The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the iniquity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the father of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them!

Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), about to lay his vengeance upon Brett (Frank Whaley) in Pulp Fiction (1994).

The many examples from Pulp Fiction and other Tarantino films—piles and paragraphs of which I’m sparing you here—are stylistic. They represent what Ritva Leppihalme designates as macro-level allusions, as they involve “the internal structure of the entire text and its interpretation: its narrative and poetic structure, dramatic intrigue, and authorial comment.”4 Tarantino uses these allusions self-consciously. That is, they’re not mistakes. He recognizes the practice in other movies and characters as well, pointing out that Taxi Driver alludes to Fydor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and that Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds) in Deliverance is a man made up of them. “He’s full of consumed facts, rather than experience-derived wisdom.”5 Tarantino knows what he’s doing.

“Tarantino’s movies are obsessed with pointing self-consciously to their own knowledge of the position they occupy among the disposable (but infinitely recyclable) entertainments of American pop culture,” Richard Greene writes.6 Tarantino is commenting on movies qua movies, conversing with other films, filmmakers, fans, journalists, and genres. Greene continues, “Nonetheless, much of Tarantino’s appeal to intelligent viewers has less to do with any positive beliefs or values evidenced in the films than with their exemplifying a larger trend in pop culture towards texts (movies, music, books, images) that flaunt their knowing enmeshment in and dependence on a multi-layered network of other texts.”7 Too many allusions and all you get is cultural churn.

As it always does, advertising finally swallowed up Pulp Fiction as well, connecting it to still further texts. In 2020 a Capital One commercial, featuring John Travolta as Santa and Samuel L. Jackson as himself, made many references to their lone movie together.

Lattice of Coincidence

Tarantino has mentioned a fondness for the movie Nightfall from 1956, in which the hero happens upon a package that is the loot from a heist, but some say the briefcase in Pulp Fiction is a reference to 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly, in which “the image of uncontainable energies is attached directly to the object in the briefcase, an unstable material that explodes as the film concludes.”8 Others say it’s a reference to Repo Man, Alex Cox’s 1984 punk classic featuring Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez as Bud and Otto, souped-up, methed-up repossessors. The briefcase glows when opened like the trunk of the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man. Both items are McGuffins: Things sought after in a story that move the plot forward but are of no real consequence to the story. We find out that the Malibu is hauling fissile material, radioactive enough to vaporize a police officer and leave nothing but his smoking jack boots on the side of the road. We never find out what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, but it doesn’t matter. That’s what McGuffins do. They hijack our attention while the real plot unfolds around them.

In Repo Man, Miller, an eccentric among eccentrics, gives a brief monologue to young Otto while burning garbage in a barrel on the repo lot. He says, in part,

A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidences and things. They don’t realize that there’s this like lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I’ll give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you’re thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody will say like “plate” or “shrimp” or “plate of shrimp” out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

All of these allusions, echoing through the time marked by movies, are not that far from a cosmic unconsciousness, a lattice of coincidence. Some of them are planted there, simply enough, but a lot are just floating around, popping up for us as reminders of how slipshod our realities really are. As Phillip Nguyen observes,

All these arbitrary verses from the bible and random kung-fu movies seem to make Pulp Fiction a train wreck of a film. However, despite how incompatible the Bible and kung-fu are, Tarantino’s incorporation of Sonny Chiba’s Ezekiel 25:17 verse into Pulp Fiction in conjunction with these elements of martial arts not only highlights biblical significance but also sheds light upon morality and righteousness as well.9

So, what does Pete Hegseth’s use of the same fake scripture shed light on?

I’ll get to those other allusions in Tarantino’s many films—as well as many, many others—in the book, The Grand Allusion, which I’m finishing up now.

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

Mary Ginther, “‘This is Embarrassing!’: Pentagon Scrambles to Bail Out Pete Hegseth After His Cringe Prayer Backfires — Then Critics Spot One Detail That Turns It Into a Full-Blown Disaster,” Atlanta Black Star, April 17, 2026.

2

Gary Groth, “A Dream of Perfect Reception,” The Baffler, December 1995, 189.

3

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, 66.

4

Ritva Leppihalme, Culture Bumps: An Empirical Approach to the Translation of Allusions, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1997, 31.

5

Quentin Tarantino, Cinema Speculation, New York: Harper, 2022, 74.

6

Richard Greene, Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy, Chicago: Open Court, 2007.

7

Ibid.

8

Edward Gallafent, Quentin Tarantino, New York: Routledge, 2005, 54.

9

Philip Nguyen, “The Bible and Kung-Fu: Jules Winnfield’s Moral Journey in Pulp Fiction,” Medium, February 23, 2016.

I recently rewatched Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina. I’ve seen it several times, but the Jackson Pollock painting scene stuck out differently this time. In the scene, Nathan (Oscar Isaac ) is trying to explain inspiration and the creative act to Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) using Pollock’s “automatic painting” technique. He says, “Jackson Pollock. The drip painter. He let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random. Someplace in between. They called it automatic art.”

Jackson Pollock, “No. 5” (1948), as seen in Ex_Machina (2014).

Nathan then poses the question, “What if Pollock had reversed the challenge? Instead of trying to make art without thinking, he said: ‘I can’t paint anything unless I know exactly why I’m doing it.’ What would have happened?” Caleb correctly answers that Pollock wouldn’t have ever painted anything, and Nathan concludes: “The challenge is not to act automatically. It’s to find an action that is not automatic. From talking, to breathing, to painting.”

There are plenty of people trying to get at the heart of creativity, where it comes from, and how to get there. All of us at some point need that creative spark, and sometimes it can be so elusive it’s difficult to imagine it happening at all. But knowing more about the cognition of creativity is like knowing how a car engine works: It doesn’t make you a better driver. Finding the creative Edge is a far more personal quest.

In his short story, “New Rose Hotel,” William Gibson writes,

The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

Part of conjuring that Edge is making space for it to happen. Finding the space rarely works, so you have to tip it in some way. Just going for it is one way. Setting aside all of your fears of failure, self-editing, and just getting out of your own way. Ice-T puts it bluntly and succinctly, “You could gamble too much, and it’s that edge, but in that edge which is is so dangerous and so profitable, on the other side is where creation lives it’s it’s where it all happens. You making a mistake, driving too fast and killing yourself. That point where it happens, that’s where everything happens. If you don’t ever go there, you’ll do nothing.”

As Ice-T mentions, Edge gets you right in the middle of that creative process.1 you have to step outside of your comfort zone and find that space where it happens. Like the dreamers in Inception (2010), creating and experiencing the world simultaneously.

If you’ve ever seen anyone rap off the top of their head or improvisation well done, you know what getting in the middle of that process looks like. When someone is truly, spontaneously in the present moment. You can do it with any creative endeavor. Writing and riding are the two activities where I most find I need the Edge, and sometimes lightning does strike, but it’s all too rare.

My friend Alex Burns described that zone to me as “hot space,” the place where creativity is happening in your head right then. After bouts with creative blocks, it’s namesake, Queen’s 1982 record Hot Space, was recorded in short bursts of studio time.

Similarly, the flatland BMXer and Heresy Bikes founder Alexis Desolneux writes,

One thing I learnt riding this twenty inch wheels bicycle for so long is that only what feels good and right will remain. I’ve lost some riding or I’ve left some riding behind but some moves always feel complete and satisfying no matter how far you’ve pushed your riding in the past or you’re still pushing it in the present day. I’m sure that because they’re both self-propelled and under fragile control, these fakie whips fall into that category of « feels good »riding. The first whiplash creates the second one and so on, all you need to do is play with the weight of the bike, the momentum, the glide, breath calmly and find the right rythm in transferring the energy.

More like a tangible glimpse of infinity over an illusion of immortality, you can feel it for a few seconds, it is real… And surreal that flatland can give access to that unique feeling of a complete move, one that is absolutely sufficient to enjoy riding. I would believe that Phil Dolan felt that when he started to control his early nose manuals over 25 years ago, Alex Jumelin with the « unreal » pumped nose manual in circles or just a few days ago Uchino Yohei with the infinite fakie manual in tight circles. Landmark moves which feel (and look) complete today… Or in a hundred years. These few, rare and « simple » moves make all the sense and validate the whole journey. They even validate BMX flatland and BMX itself to the eyes of the World when such moves are nowhere else to be found.

That rare feeling is addicting and we are looking to recreate it whenever we can. Like glimpses of infinity in that very short life of ours.

Each of us have different limits, but we all have to venture outside of them once in a while. As Ryan Kidwell once told me, “Playing it safe isn’t interesting.” If you only ever act automatically. If you never cross the line, you’ll never know where those limits are, and you may never find the Edge you need to get past your obstacles.

Push Your Self.

Doesn’t Your Shelf Deserve an Upgrade or Two?

(This is the part where I try to get you to buy a book so I can keep doing all of this stuff.)

My two newest books are still available where fine books are sold! Charles Mudede says of The Medium Picture, “Roy Christopher wields criticism as deftly as he creates connections, proving himself as much an heir to Mark Fisher as he is to Marshall McLuhan. Part music-fan memoir, part DIY-media manifesto, The Medium Picture is an impassioned instance of post-punk media theory.” And Robert Guffey calls Post-Self, “A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”

Check them out!

Thanks to Alexis Desolneux, Alex Burns, William Gibson, Ice-T, Alex Garland, and Ryan Kidwell for sharing their thoughts and ideas, and for inspiring me to create.

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

This isn’t the first time the worlds of William Gibson and Ice-T have collided. The Iceberg was the leader of the Lo-Teks, “J-Bone,” in the Gibson-penned, 1995 movie, Johnny Mnemonic, based on his 1981 short story of the same name.

One of the perks of being a writer is being asked by people you like to write about stuff you like. Another one is when people you like write about your stuff. That impulse, that desire to tell others about something cool, is the core reason I do just about everything I do. It’s the reason I make zines. It’s the reason I make websites. It’s the reason I’m a writer. It’s the reason I’m a teacher. It’s the reason I’m writing this right now.

What follows are a few recent blurbs I’ve done for friends’ books, an article about some friends, and an article by a friend that mentions one of mine. Read on!

Shadowspheres

I was honored to be asked to write a blurb for Chris Kelso and Ewan Morrison’s Shadowspheres, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, mixing speculation and philosophy into a powerfully bitter little brew.

Chris Kelso and Ewan Morrison’s Shadowspheres (Merigold Independent). Cover by Samuel Laubscher.

As I wrote about it,

“Is your learned uselessness a coincidence or a conspiracy? If we’re at the end of remainder humanism, then Chris Kelso and Ewan Morrison have parsed the patterns and given us lenses for the blinding light of the cyborgian future.”

Get yours now from Merigold Independent!

(On the low, Chris and I are working on a project together. More on that as it develops!)

Song of the Unsung Mushroom Sarah Clarke Stuart’s Song of the Unsung Mushroom (Connected Editions, Inc.)

I also blurbed Sarah Clarke Stuart’s recent debut novel Song of the Unsung Mushroom (Connected Editions, Inc.):

“Glimmering with the excitement and danger of exploring a childhood world that never ends, Song of the Unsung Mushroom unearths the damp, soggy soil of the posthuman spirit.”

And since Sarah is local to my current home of Jacksonville, Florida—the book is set on the banks of the St. Johns River—I got to go to the launch event at Happy Medium Books Café.

Sarah Clarke Stuart signing my copy of her new novel, Song of the Unsung Mushroom, at Happy Medium Books in Jacksonville. Picture by Anondi King.

Get yours now from Connected Editions, Inc!

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Bust a Move

And coming out in June, Bust a Move, my friend Peter Relic’s book about Matt Dike and Delicious Vinyl!

As I wrote about it:

“Part mystery, part oral history, Bust a Move exposes a hidden hub in the hip-hop network and the characters it connected on the cusp of the 1990s. This is the secret story of music obsessive Matt Dike and a Who’s Who of those who knew him, as well as a fresh look at how LA Loc’ed and loped onto the map of rap—Relic’s writing is as delicious as the vinyl.”

More on this one as the release date approaches!

dälek in The Wire Mike Mare and Will Brooks are dälek. Photo by Rafael Rios.

This has nothing to do with me, but my dudes dälek are on the cover of the March 2026 issue of The Wire. To accompany to the interview by Joseph Stannard, they put together a sick mix. Check it out!

And check out their new record Brilliance of a Falling Moon on Ipecac Recordings!

(Also on the low, Mike and I are working on a project together. More on that as it develops!)

Post-Self in The Stranger

In his latest piece for Seattle’s The Stranger, my friend and mentor Charles Mudede quotes my book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (Repeater Books). Mudede tackles the dread that only comes from the threat of nuclear apocalypse (a dread Generation X is all too familiar with).

Describing the emergence of personal computers, cyberpunk, and the Cold War, he writes in part,

Many of these monumental transformations in consumer products are described by music and culture critic Roy Christopher in his new book Post-Self. So considerable and novel were the new receivers, distributors, and processors of data that cyberpunk, a movement at the heart of Post-Self, imagined a future where we could download our self-awareness into the electronic ether of cyberspace and live for as long as no one in the real world pulled the plug.

My generation was also the last to live, as young adults, within a social reality described as the Cold War. We saw the bomb shelters, and were taught in school to “duck and cover” if a nuclear weapon, launched by the Soviets or its allies, hit our city.

Indeed, In Post-Self, Roy Christopher recalls watching an episode of the The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which was about a bespectacled and bibliophilic bank teller who survives the detonation of an H-bomb because he happened to be in the bank’s vault. He then roams the ruins of a world that has no other people, but lots of books to read.The bank teller, however, accidentally breaks his glasses and is left practically blind. “The trepidation of that tragic moment,” writes Christopher, “recombinant with worries of the apocalypse, was a seed planted in my head. And more than any other Cold War-era image of imminent destruction splashed on the television during my childhood…”

Post-Self on Charles Mudede’s desk (check the shelf for another familiar spine).

Read the whole piece on The Stranger and more about Post-Self on my website.

Thanks to Chris Kelso, Sarah Clarke Stuart, Paul Levinson, Peter Relic, Mike Mare, Will Brooks, and Charles Mudede for sharing early reads, their time, talent, and attention.

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

I wrote before about interstitial spaces called edge realms, spaces in between accepted categories or genres. In her book When Plants Dream, Sophia Rokhlin describes them as “thresholds of potential and fecundity.”1 An edge realm is a wilderness, a mutant space ripe for new forms, and they’re everywhere in our hi-fi, wi-fi world. In his 2010 book Acoustic Territories, Brandon LaBelle notes, “The wired-up walker enacts a sort of ghosting of the sidewalk—we may never know what sonic matter is floating through the ear of the iPod user, whose step occupies the vague threshold between zombism and activism.”2

“Black Metal logos, all elbows and knees. Hell up in my headphones, if you please.” Sketch by Roy Christopher.

The transitional periods have all the properties of the threshold, the boundary between two spaces, where the antagonistic principles confront one another, and the world is reversed. . . . The rites associated with these moments also obey the principle of maximization of magical profit. —Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

The mental space just before we feel oriented and something feels familiar is the discernment of difference, a threshold of perception. Gérard Genette calls the textual peripheries of books—forewords, prefaces, and so on—“paratexts”: “More than a boundary or a sealed barrier,” he writes of such introductory material, “the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or—a word Borges used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside.”3

A beginning is a bifurcation, a deviation that leads off from the current path. Everything starts with a choice between one direction or another. A decision regarding which way to go marks the beginning of possibility while foreclosing another. One possibility is sacrificed so that another may be pursued. The first steps beyond that point take you into alien territory.

In the chapter on sidewalks from her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), Jane Jacobs wrote,

When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks. But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks.4

Between your ears, between destinations, thresholds abound. LaBelle adds, “The sidewalk is a threshold between an interior and an exterior, between different sets of rhythms that come to orchestrate the dynamic passing of exchange each individual body instigates and remains susceptible to.”5 The jostling of physical bodies on their way somewhere else, a mix of minds that wouldn’t otherwise meet is only possible in these unattended spaces. Such serendipity is analog.

So we might suggest that the apparent vacuity of the Walkman opens up the prospect of a passage in which we might discover . . . those other cities that exist inside the city. There we move along invisible grids where emotional energies and the imaginary flow, and where the continual slippage of sense maintains the promise of meaning. —Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity

There is a threshold within all of us, a point past which we become a recognizable self, an entity capable of creation. In his 2011 BAFTA screenwriters’ lecture, the luminary of the liminal Charlie Kaufman confesses that a large part of his work is just him trying to get us to like him, what he describes as “an ancient pattern of time usage”:

This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound, and paints it with bright colors. It’s a sleight of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulated.

The wound is his threshold. It is where his being becomes the thing we call Charlie Kaufman, and we all have one. He continues,

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay is born.

What is my point of threshold? What does it mean to dance on a public stage? Everything is getting vague. But just because I am constantly taking into account that I am overcoming a threshold, is this a cartographic initiative, an attempt at localizing myself within an environment? Or am I realizing that I am an environment as such?
—Min Tanaka, “Body-Assemblage”

A lot of the thresholds inherent in our selves and in our world are unknowable before we confront them. They lead us into the interstitial, the liminal, the edge realms, the in-betweens of existence. The place where all real discovery and real revelation happens.

Messing in the dark and walking all alone
Alone in the streets I know just where I'm going
Chilled to the bone, chilled to the bone
Hot wired heat all the way home
—The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Sidewalking”

Further Reading:

Some of this jumbley mess is from the beginning of my book The Medium Picture. Some of it is just my thinking aloud as usual.

Regardless, thank you for reading in between,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

Sophia Rokhlin, When Plants Dream, London: Watkins Media, 2021, xi.

2

Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, NewYork: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010, 98.

3

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 1-2.

4

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 2961, 29-30.

5

LaBelle, 2010, 88.

To declare something as posthuman is to draw a line between what is human and something that is not. In Nietzsche’s Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Edgar Landgraf proposes Friedrich Nietzsche’s “overhuman” (Übermensch) as well as the cyborg as shorthands for the posthuman.

The cover image of Edgar Landgraf's Nietzsche's Posthumanism designed by Elizabeth Mandel.

Landgraf quotes Bernard Stiegler, who, summarizing French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistorical research, argued that “it is the tool that invents the human, not the human who invents the technical.” We invent ourselves by externalizing our thoughts and ideas—“by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” in Stiegler’s terms. As John Culkin wrote describing Marshall McLuhan’s work, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” In other words, humans and technology are always already co-constituting each other. Nietzsche saw the influence of technology as a matter of degree, not one of “absolute difference,” once writing that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” He was writing specifically about his new typewriter, but the sentiment is easily more broadly applicable to the massive changes in media technology—and its human users—since.

“The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through a new, stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography by D. Harlan Wilson. Cover design by Matthew Revert.

D. Harlan Wilson, author of over 30 books, among which are several biographies including Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023). Some of these 123 chapters read like the journal entries of a man grappling with not only Nietzsche but himself. Its pithier entries, some only a sentence or two long, read like David Markson’s meandering novels of aphorisms and out-loud thoughts. In addition, the book even includes a set of 26 “Aborted Chapters” and Appendices at the end.

Wilson has also written similar “biographies” of Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and Frederick Douglass, as well as a more traditional one of J.G. Ballard. If you’re looking for an off-beat view of any of these thinkers and their thoughts, D. Harlan Wilson has your fix.

As always, thank you for reading and responding,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

“How easily we forget how bright the moonlight can be when we spend our nights in the wan glow of artificial light.”

I found the above quotation on page 40 of a book. I don’t know what book. I’m usually more diligent than that about such pertinent details in my notes, but in this case all I have is the quotation and a page number. I’ve done countless searches and asked several librarians, to no avail.1

Appropriate, perhaps.

It’s important where such quotations were found, and it’s important who wrote them—for now. In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, finding more Rebecca Solnit and Guy Debord, discovering Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. I remember the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost completely unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I’d read what and who had written it. So, I started a research notebook.

A spread from one of my research journals.

My research notebook has always been a sort of commonplace book, an idiosyncratic mix of journal and scrapbook, collecting drawings, diagrams, clips from magazines, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books. Commonplace books have been used as personal repositories of wit, wisdom, and knowledge at least as far back as the 15th century. With the emergence of printed text, its recycling of and relation to other texts were taken as a given. As Walter Ong wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,

Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing.2

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke started maintaining a commonplace book in 1652. He wrote an elaborate guide to commonplace books in 1685 in French, and in 1706 it was translated into English as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. The writer and NotebookLM cofounder Steven Johnson has compared the commonplace book to the link-laden, hypertextual environment of the internet. Like our digital devices, these books represent what Jonathan Swift once called “supplemental memory.”3 Once we write something down and keep it, we no longer have to actively remember it.

“We read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words.” — Victoria Chang, “Language,” Obit

A memex, as described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think."

Proposed in his 1945 article “As We May Think” published in The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush’s memex (itself a portmanteau of “memory” and “expansion”; or “memory” and “index” according to some sources) was a kind of proto-personal computer, expanding the commonplace idea to a desk-bound apparatus for research. The memex was a dream machine for navigating and researching with the vast stores of information of the time using cameras, microfilm, and print—an annotated analog hypertext system. Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”4 He continued,

When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.5

Though commonplace books and Paul Otlet’s 1934 Traité de Documentation prefigured Bush’s automated analog library and its “associative trails,” the memex is a closer precursor to our current personal archiving devices (e.g., cloud-storage services, smartphone-camera rolls, social-media posts, blogs), “a sort of mechanized private file and library,” as he put it.6 We all have just such an archive in our pockets now.

A hypertext network, as diagrammed by Ted Nelson in Literary Machines (1981)

“The fields are cultivated by horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery.” — from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

As we saw happen to music: As soon as music was replicated as digital information seared onto compact discs, MP3s, peer-to-peer trading, and streaming were inevitable as bandwidth increased to accommodate them. As soon as sampling went digital, music was poised to be parsed into smaller and smaller reassemblable bits, and we’ve taken full advantage of its malleability. As the historian Carla Nappi told me in 2019,

Several years ago, I took a digital DJing course and my first baby steps in learning the craft. I was immediately struck by how similar the art of a DJ was, at least as I was learning and experiencing it, to that of a historian. We amass archives, we tell stories that have a kind of narrative arc, we work with time as a material. Sampling is a kind of quotation. Distortion and other effects are ways of reading a musical text. There are just so many resonances, and I felt that thinking about these crafts together could be a way of informing and inspiring both of them.7

The most original DJ is still playing pieces of other people’s past songs. The most original writer is still using the same linguistic tools to reassemble pieces of the past into a form resembling something new.

“Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” — Rayna Butler, Orange Catholic Bible (from Frank Herbert’s Dune)

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes of what’s been called the ELIZA effect, after Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 therapist chatbot ELIZA, “the most superficial of syntactic tricks convinced some people who interacted with ELIZA that the program actually understood everything that they were saying, sympathized with them, even empathized with them.” Warren Ellis once observed, “If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” You don’t believe that the DJ is playing any of the instruments they sample, so why do you believe the AI is thinking or comprehending any of its responses? It’s a version of the ELIZA effect, but much bigger, deeper, all-encompassing, and disturbing.

A conversation with Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 program ELIZA.

As soon as word processing was available, providing the literary fodder for machines, chatbots and large language models were not far to follow. In his book Language Machines, Leif Weatherby writes,“Language models capture language as a cultural system, not as intelligence.”8 That’s a crucial distinction. What passes for AI these days can compose an essay, summarize a novel, or draft an email, but it doesn’t know why. The why is the whole thing. At the risk of oversimplifying a very complex situation, the why is the intelligence. We’ve been steadily removing the human—what Weatherby calls “remainder humanity”—from creative processes, offloading and outsourcing more and more of them to machines and computers. That’s fine, but we’re devaluing, defunding, or demonetizing a lot of the fun part(s).

What happens when writing is just prompting? When a library is just a giant generative machine that turns texts into the medium of your choice? Just as musicians became “recording artists,” writers will become something else, perhaps “prompt engineers,” until the machines no longer need prompts, until they no longer need human input at all. Until the wan glow of their artificial light is all the light that’s left.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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“That’s no moon...” — Obi-Wan Kenobi

Author Talk!

Hey, I have been invited to speak about my work and words at the University of North Florida's Thomas G. Carpenter Library on April 14th at 5pm! Save the date! More on this as it approaches.

Though I don’t mention allusions anywhere above, this piece is a rough draft of some of the research for my book The Grand Allusion. If anyone has any ideas about who might publish it, let me know.

Thank you for reading human writing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1

The last librarian I bugged about this citation came back with only a single blog post mention from 2015. The post was from my own blog.

2

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, New York: Routledge, 1982, 131.

3

Quoted in Sam Dolbear, “John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books,” Public Domain Review, May 8, 2019.

4

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 176, no. 1., July, 1945, pp. 101–8.

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid.

7

Quoted in Roy Christopher, “Carla Nappi: Historical Friction,” in Roy Christopher (ed.), Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews With Friends and Heroes (pp. 21-32), punctum books, 2021, 29.

8

Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the end of Remainder Humanism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2025, 5.

The slogan for 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Spike Lee and Monty Ross’s production company, was “Make Black Film.” After a successful run of movies in the 1980s, it was like a mantra. We saw it in the 1990s with Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Lee himself. It’s in effect again in the 21st century with boundary-bombing work by Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Arthur Jafa, Donald Glover, Terence Nance, Daveed Diggs, Jordan Peele, and Boots Riley. The latter’s Sorry to Bother You is not just a movie, it’s a statement, a stance, and a hopeful catalyst for change.

Cassius Green is sorry to bother you. Illustration by Roy Christopher.

Like any worthwhile project, Boots Riley had been working on this one for a while. The screenplay itself was finished in 2012 and published by McSweeney’s in 2014. I got it and started reading it before I knew it was a movie. Once I heard it got made, I had to stop.

At times, for obvious reasons, you can hear Riley talking directly through these characters. For instance, when Squeeze (Steven Yuen) tells Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that when they feel powerless to fix a problem, they learn to live with it. As surreal and wacky as this movie often is, social commentary rarely gets more germane than that.

Years ago in Chicago, I started a screenwriting class. I’d started trying to write a screenplay several years before just to see if I could do it. It’s a very different kind of writing than I’m used to, and I wondered what exactly you put on a page to make things happen on a screen. I never finished the script I started, so I thought a class might help me get it done.

Anyway, the teacher of this class made me very uncomfortable. It took me several days after our first meeting to figure out what it was. I am not easily offended, nor do I do passive-aggressive online reviews (I emailed the institution about this teacher; in fact, much of the description in this post is excerpted from that email), but I couldn’t shake my unease after that one class. My instructor had some very odd attitudes toward movies, stories, and, more specifically, people. His frequent jokes about Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey bordered on apologist, while his views on anyone who wasn’t a straight, white male were heteronormative in the extreme and bordered on the sexist, racist, and outright intolerant. He was a nice enough guy and a knowledgeable teacher, so I was trying to figure out what had me so on-edge after the one class. I kept coming back to things he’d said: subtle references, jokes, comments, and recommendations that I finally found I couldn’t ignore. I was unable to attend his class again.

Geoffrey Miller vs diversity on Twitter.

One specific thing that instructor said is relevant here. He made the argument that if you’re telling a universal story—about love, loss, or coming of age—it doesn’t matter what your background is, your story will connect with an audience. While this assertion is true and could be the basis for a great argument for diversity, he used it to defend the longstanding white-male dominance of storytelling!

One of my other writing heroes, Tina Fey, does a great job of diplomatically explaining this issue to David Letterman on his My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. She uses the SNL writers’ room as a microcosm or cross-section of the audience at large. Explaining that things that might not have played well with mostly (white) men in the room, did when the room became more diverse. So, sketches that had never made it to dress rehearsal before started making it onto the show once there were more women and people of color in the room to laugh at them. That is such an important shift in gatekeeping, and it applies to all such gates, not just those in comedy.

While I’m writing here about voices in the figurative form, Sorry to Bother You uses them much more directly though still metonymically to make a similar point. The phrase “sorry to bother you” applies not only to the telemarketing refrain on which it’s based but also to the hegemony against which it stands.

Different Waves, Different Depths (Impeller Press, 2023): Cover illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love. Book design by Patrick Barber. Fender the Fall

This piece originally appeared on my blog on July 18, 2018. I didn’t take any more screenwriting classes, and my nascent script became a novella. “Fender the Fall” is the longest and last story in my collection, Different Waves Different Depths (Impeller Press, 2023). It tells the story of a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save his marriage and her life. The plan doesn’t go as planned. Its tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back. Check it out!

And as always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

I just talked to him last month on his birthday. I’d known him for 35 years, and he inspired me all the way through. He ran companies, organized events, fostered communities, and did it all with an infectious smile on his face. With the passing of Ronnie Bonner this week, the world lost an inspiration, BMX lost a legend, and many of us lost a friend.

Ronnie Bonner, me, and Thomas Durdin at Sparky’s Distribution in 2022.

Sometime in 1990, the National Bicycle League hosted a combination BMX freestyle contest and BMX race in my current home of Jacksonville, Florida. The contest was situated in the parking lot of the public library next to the BMX track, so there were races going on alongside the flatland and ramp contests. I met so many people there—Chris “Mad Dog” Moeller (the M of S&M Bikes), Root Girl, Ronnie Anderson, Perry Mervar—faces from magazine pages walking around in a parking lot. The one persistent name from that day was Ronnie Bonner.

At the time Ronnie was running a company called Underground Products. UGP largely followed the model of BMX entrepreneurship outlined by Bob Haro, making stickers, t-shirts, and number plates, all with a flair unique to Ronnie. I was making zines, stickers, and t-shirts, but at nothing close to the scale of UGP. We traded shirts and numbers and stayed in touch.

Ronnie’s old UGP business cards.

A year or so later, Ronnie and a couple of other BMX riders came up form Orlando to my parents’ house in Alabama. I had a stone-henge-style ramp, a wedge, a yellow parking block, and long PVC pipe for rail slides in our driveway. When the guys arrived late one Friday night, they tried to wake me up by throwing things at my upstairs bedroom window. When they were unsuccessful, they camped out on the ramps. When my dad got up the next morning, he let them in to sleep on the couch and living-room floor.

We had many such weekends over the next 35 years, usually in conjunction with some event that Ronnie organized. Just before moving from Atlanta to San Diego in 2000, I trekked down to Orlando for one of his Roots Jams. Aside from the main event held on multiple ramps and rails shielded from the Florida sun by a giant pavilion, there was the night before out in the city and the night after as well. Ronnie knew how to make the trip to central Florida worth everyone’s effort.

An Underground Products rug at Sparky’s Distribution.

After he sold UGP in 2005, he wasted no time starting new projects. The Shadow Conspiracy and SubRosa quickly rose to prominence with quality products, stellar aesthetics, and innovative marketing. On an Unclicked podcast episode from last year, Ronnie talked about his favorite art form: the art of execution. “Everyone has ideas,’“ he said, “but very few people actually fucking go for it.” Putting your ideas into action is the real art.

The ribbon-cutting at Juvee Hall, August 6, 2022.

The last time I saw Ronnie was at the opening of his bike shop in 2022. Juvee Hall is in a small building across the street from the warehouse that houses Sparky’s, the distribution arm of Ronnie’s empire, but it boasts a small showroom, repair shop, and an outdoor stage. It’s the only bike shop I’ve ever been to with cold-brew coffee on tap.

Like anyone who knew him, I could go on and on about all the cool things he brought into the world, his never-failing laugh and smile, and all the ideas he executed, but the short of it is that Ronnie Bonner was a mentor, an inspiration, and a friend, and he excelled at all of the above in BMX and beyond. He is already missed.

Thank you for reading.

Hug your friends and tell them you love them,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Today I’m sharing an excerpt from my newest book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (Repeater Books). The Afterword—which is about pain, a forced attempt to reconnect with the body, and one of the newer bits of the book—includes me breaking my knee, David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, and some further thoughts from and about Godflesh.

Be careful out there and enjoy!

“Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing — the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Eros on the Highway. Wreckage by Roy Christopher.A Chance of Pain

“One day you might find cause to ask yourself what the limit is to some pain you’re experiencing, and you’ll find out there is no limit at all. Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted.” — Detective Ray Velcoro, True Detective1

“You’re just generating more pain, more penance for the one sin you couldn’t help commit. The sin of being born.” — Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight2

“Pain’s a secret no one keeps.” — Publicist UK, “Levitate the Pentagon”3

“Pain looks great on other people.
That’s what they’re for.” — The Sisters of Mercy, “Wrong”4

If there’s anything that will bring you hurtling back to your body, it’s physical pain, a ready reminder that your physical form is inescapable. Even so, pain is intoxicating. We seek it out. We can’t live without it. It makes us feel alive in a way that nothing else does. Happiness, elation, ecstasy, excitement, contentment—these feelings are elusive and fleeting. Pain is certain and ready at hand whenever we need it.

After a bicycle wreck in the busy streets of Chicago years ago, I spent several weeks in a leg brace and the first two weeks of those on crutches. The experience slowed me down in many ways, not all of which were bad. I’m not recommending cracking a kneecap to get reacquainted with the everyday, but a good jarring of the sensorium might help us all once in a while. Nothing brings reality crashing back in like crashing back into reality.

Gas face for the leg brace.

In addition to my patella, I also broke my phone. The cracking of its screen left it useless for texting or taking pictures. Ironically, the only thing it would do was send (provided I knew or could find the number) and receive calls. I also stopped wearing headphones as my injury already made me an easy mark. These two things—no texting and no headphones—reconnected me with aspects of my days I’d been avoiding or ignoring.

Also, I had to change up my commute. For one thing, I obviously wasn’t able to ride my bike to work, which is what I was doing when I crashed. I wasn’t able to take the train because I lived almost a mile from the closest station, and I couldn’t walk that far on crutches. It should also be noted that there are only a few Chicago Transit Authority train stations with elevators. Stairs were out of the question for a few weeks. This put me on a multiple bus-route commute that took me through parts of Chicago I’d never seen.

Possibly the most important factor that made breaking my kneecap an enlightening experience was sociological rather than technological. Collectively we tend to other the impaired among us. That is, there seems to be a clear delineation between the impaired and the normal; however, if one of us is only temporarily injured, we sympathize, empathize, or pity them.

In the month that I wasn’t texting or listening to music and had a bum leg, I had countless uplifting and informative conversations with people whom I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise and who wouldn’t have spoken to me for one reason or the other. All of the above made me feel far more connected to my fellow humans than any technology or so-called “social” media.

My smashing my knee into the pavement at the origami triangle fold of traffic that is the intersection of Elston, Fullerton, and Damen in Chicago shoved me out of my comfort zone in several ways. One thing I noticed one day on my temporarily revised, much-longer commute to campus was a lot of needless anger: a man walking by the bus stop, angry at his dog for being a dog; a lady with her children, angry at them for being children; people on the bus, angry about being on the bus; the bus driver, angry about the people on the bus; and on and on. I wasn’t exactly happy that my right patella was fractured in two places, I certainly had good and bad days recovering, and I’m not better than any of those mentioned above, but I tried to smile at everyone, laugh at my fumbling around on crutches, do my work, and generally let others carry the anger. Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be quite so uncomfortable, but sometimes being forced is the only way for it to happen. It felt like I needed it.

With that said, a physical therapist saw me out hobbling down the sidewalk in Logan Square with my leg brace on one day. He stopped and asked me about my injury with genuine and professional interest. He then informed me that a broken patella is the most painful kind of injury, which, he added, is supposedly why it is the chosen punishment for those late on their loan or gambling payments. I don’t recommend getting behind.

Pain is an early warning system, a physical sign of something larger gone awry.

Illicit Metabolism

“I’ve had minimal drug experiences because of fear,” says the artist Peter Gabriel. “I can trust machines, yet I can’t trust pills… A machine you can always switch off or get out of… whereas when a pill gets hold of your metabolism, you have to ride through.”5 Pain is the counterpoint. You either ride out the pain, or you ride out a drug to relieve the pain.­ But David Cronenberg reminds us, “We absorb all technologies into our bodies.” Drugs aside, we have to metabolize more and more of our gadgets and gear.

David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022)

“Body is reality,” reads the catchphrase for Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The writer and director says that the film “is about the crimes committed by the human body against itself.” He says it’s “a meditation on human evolution […] the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously.”6 He goes on to ponder, “At this critical junction in human history, one wonders — can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?”7

Channeling his former teacher Marshall McLuhan, Cronenberg reminds us, “Technology is always an extension of the human body, even when it seems to be very mechanical and non-human. A fist becomes enhanced by a club or a stone that you throw — but ultimately, that club or stone is an extension of some potency that the human body already has.”8 As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, “Our technologies change from being the tools humans use into the environments in which humans function.”9 Erik Davis adds, “Because the self is partly a product of its communications, new media technologies remold the boundaries of being. As they do so, the shadows, doppelgängers, and dark intuitions that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well — and some of them take up residence in the emerging virtual spaces suggested by the new technologies.”10 I belabor the point here because we don’t tend to think of our technologies as an environment. We don’t tend to think that we’re reshaping ourselves—and our bodies—with every new contrivance. In his introduction to Crash, J. G. Ballard wrote that “what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”11 Warning labels and warding spells: a future defined by risk assessment models and worst-case scenarios.

In The Idiot, Fydor Dostoyevsky wrote,

Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!

While pain connects us to our own flesh, it isolates us from others. In her book, The Body in Pain, Professor Elaine Scarry writes that to have pain is to be certain.12 To have pain is to be certain of your physical existence, to be certain of your living and being, and to be certain of your mortality. To have pain is to be alone in your body. Scarry writes, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”13 She also points out that to hear of another’s pain is to doubt them, thus exacerbating their pain and isolating us, each from another. J. Robbins adds that part of Jawbox’s song “Motorist” was about “imagining being stranded and injured in a place where you suppose nobody will help you.”14

Others might not hurt you on purpose, but they will let you.

“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.” — from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Mythology of Self

“I’m here to express the pain I feel,” Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick says in a 2023 interview with Decibel Magazine, “and I don’t take much pleasure in that at all.”15 There is a pain inherent to life, the pain of existence. “Pain is also a vehicle of knowledge,” says the poet Ocean Vuong. “It may very well be knowledge itself.”16 To many of us, to be alive is to suffer.

Godflesh has always induced a furious form of suffering on their listeners, and a lot of Broadrick’s music comes from some severe shade of anxiety. After years of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, which only made it worse, he was diagnosed with autism and PTSD at 52-years old. With that revelation, he was finally able to properly deal with his mental health, decades of compounded pain eased with new tools for coping and care.

“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to please everyone, to make myself feel comfortable,” he says, “a lifetime of not doing things because I’m uncomfortable. Now I’m not masking it so much anymore.”17 On “Nero” from 2023’s hip-hop beat-infused Purge, he barks, “Restrain yourself/ Betray/ Your needs,” and on “Land Lord” he says, “Bad seeds/ Own you/ Shape you/ Slay you/ Control/ Divide/ Enslave/ Destroy.”18 If ever his lyrics were masking his discomfort, they certainly aren’t anymore. Bassist Benny Green adds, “Our general abhorrence at the monstrous injustices humans have always inflicted on each other still impacts us to this day. We’d both quite happily hide away in a remote forest or cave in order not to have to deal with the horrors of mankind.”19 He finds solace in the sonorous: “For me, music, sound, tone, whatever you want to call it,” he continues, echoing Robert Fludd’s idea of a celestial monochord, “is the single most powerful and liberating thing there is, and the whole universe exists through vibrations and waves, music included.”20 Call it Godflesh, an all-encompassing energy that connects us all, each to another and beyond.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Post-Self is available everywhere from Repeater Books.

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

1

Nic Pizzalatto [writer], True Detective (New York: HBO, 2014).

2

Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight (Port Townsend, WA: Process, 1995).

3

Publicist UK, “Elevate the Pentagon,” from Forgive Yourself [LP] (Los Angeles: Relapse, 2015).

4

The Sisters of Mercy, “Wrong,” from Vision Thing [LP] (Los Angeles: Elektra, 1990).

5

Quoted in Daryl Easlea, Without Frontiers: The Life and Music of Peter Gabriel (London: Overlook Omnibus, 2014), 152.

6

Quoted in Angel Melanson, “’A Meditation on Human Evolution’ Crimes of the Future Redband Trailer Is Here!” Fangoria, May 6, 2022.

7

Ibid.

8

Quoted in Clark Collis, “Kristen Stewart Gets the Body Horror Treatment in the New Teaser for David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future,” Entertainment Weekly, April 14, 2022.

9

Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, 52.

10

Erik Davis, “Recording Angels: The Esoteric Origins of the Phonograph,” in Rob Young (ed.), Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (pp. 15-24), London: Continuum, 2002, 17-18.

11

Quoted in Paul March-Russell, “How writing about JG Ballard’s most controversial novel helped me cope with becoming a single parent,” The Independent, September 22, 2024.

12

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7.

13

Ibid., 4.

14

Email to the author, March 22, 2025.

15

Quoted in Daniel Lake, “Long May I Dream These Nightmares,” Decibel Magazine, July 2023, 56.

16

Quoted in Sharon Salzberg, “Why Buddhist Poet Ocean Vuong Practices a Death Meditation,” Tricycle, September 3, 2022.

17

Quoted in Lake, “Long May I Dream These Nightmares,” 58.

18

Godflesh, Purge [LP]. (London: Avalanche Recordings, 2023).

19

Quoted in Lake, “Long May I Dream These Nightmares,” 60.

20

Ibid.

To kick off 2026, I’m sending you my poem “A Prayer for a New Year.” I wrote this one over 15 years ago, and it still serves as a reminder of all the things I want more and less of.1

Whether you dig on poetry or not, please do take a moment with this one. And if you know someone who might like it, feel free to share.

Smith to abyss. Charcoal pencil and Photoshop by Roy C.A Prayer for a New Year

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

More hair, less cuts.
More ands, less buts.
More map, less menu.
More home, less venue.

More art, less work.
More heart, less hurt.
More meaning, less words.
More humans, less herds.

More verbs, less nouns.
More funny, less clowns.
More dessert, less diet.
More noise, less quiet.

More courage, less fear.
More day, less year.
More next, less last.
More now, less past.

Ashley Crawford in 2009. Photo by Sonia Payes.Remembering Ashley Crawford

My favorite medium is the magazine, and among my favorite magazine people was Ashley Crawford. During the 1990s, he ran the Australian cyberculture publication 21C.2 We didn’t cross paths until after it folded, when he was working with Mark Dery at Artbyte Magazine. Dery writes,

Editors, like translators, are reflexively demoted, in the popular mind, to mere adjuncts to writerly brilliance. Every writer knows better: they’re unacknowledged collaborators, essential foils who save the author from her own worst excesses, vaporizing bullshit on contact, and embolden her to stray beyond her comfort zone. Like all great editors, Ash brought out the best in his stable of hand-picked critics and theorists, exhorting me (and Erik Davis, Catherine Lumby, Darren Tofts, and McKenzie Wark, among others) to floor the accelerator of radically interdisciplinary, intertextual thought, right over the edge.

I can trace the roots of a lot of my current thinking and writing to those early days of this century and to Ash’s steady editorial hand. He gave me opportunities to publish my nascent words next to those of my mentors, and he generously contributed his own to my projects (frontwheeldrive.com, the Summer Reading List, etc.). No one gets where they are without help, and at a crucial stage, he helped me immeasurably.

There are far too few people like him, and now there’s one fewer. Rest in peace, Ash.

Thank you for your continued interest in my work and words.

All the best for 2026,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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1

I am aware of the grammatical inconsistencies in this piece, but I left them in for the sake of parallel structure. Call it “poetic license.”

2

If you can track down a copy of Transit Lounge, the 21C Magazine anthology edited by Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, it’s well worth your time. I snagged a replacement copy last year while doing research. Coincidentally, at some point I’d sold my original copy to 21C contributor McKenzie Wark.