What's coming, January-March 2023
With a bit of looking back. Time to rejigger and renew and introduce some posts I'm thinking about.
Read time: about 11 minutes. This week: Looking ahead a couple months. I’m making some changes that I hope will be fun and easy. Next week: Probably a consideration of form. How genre changes what you see.
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With this first post of the year, I shift attention and remodel a bit. Many of last year’s posts — especially those appearing from August to December — related to a seminar I taught. In effect, Technocomplex was on the reading list, though it never warranted a pop quiz on the contents.
Since that phase is done until August 2023 rolls around, I now turn to other projects with their own histories and requirements. My posts will orbit those projects, and I secretly hope that what you read here in coming months will be reshaped and renewed in those projects. Maybe, if I’m really lucky and hold my mouth just right, that writing will make its way to print after giving my newsletter readers some pleasure.
Last year’s collection of posts reflected projects and activities behind the scenes of my newsletter. Upcoming ones do, too.
What are these projects?
I have two projects foremost in mind, though I really should only have one. They fight with each other about which should claim my time and thought.
A long-time book project and a somewhat related photography essay. Many of us have projects that linger. Here’s one of mine. I became interested in how the automobile took over, so to speak. How it was adopted as a new technology but became less a tool for use and more a thing beloved, fetishized, and central — especially to American culture. The book project started with a car restoration (chronicled here) but quickly took on a broad, cultural, artistic focus — a consequence of my back-and-forth wrenching and writing. I’m maybe about two-thirds finished with a draft.
Part of the book attends to the interplay of media and its role in the development of a complex identity for the automobile, an identity that had its origins and derived much of its cultural power from art and imagery. These have influenced car design, of course, but art has also imbued cars with enormous — and I think underestimated and unappreciated — cultural power that shapes human society, sometimes with blind force and even violence. I’ll be working on aspects of that in the coming months, as well as some considerations of work and labor, which play a role in the later parts of the book. Readers who have been with Technocomplex for a while will have seen some of my musing about cars. Those fit into the plan, too.
In car mode, I’m also looking forward to looking at some car photography and field notes by a prominent photographer of the latter half of the twentieth century. This work is part of a collaborative project that I think will situate some really interesting commercial photography into larger historical (maybe even biographical) and cultural contexts. Though independent from the book, this project complements that work, and I’m sure to discover some interesting things.
A stab at a screenplay. I have an idea for a movie. I’ve never completed a full-length, 120-minute screenplay, just short ones for modest video projects. In December 2022 I started a screenplay that hatched as a by-product of misgivings (and various episodes of psychic self-flagellation) I had about one of the readings I used in my fall seminar. In the obsessive reading I did (partially in penance and curiosity) I ran into dramatic stories of flight and resettling of scholarship in the run-up to the Second World War — not that such scholarly migration was unknown to me, but I wasn’t very aware of its drama. I didn’t know about many of the exciting parts or the victories that came out of the confusion of the time.
That made me wonder whether scholars and scholarship can wrap up a suspenseful flick with a happy ending.
We’ll see how the screenplay first draft turns out. I’ve got about twenty percent of the script drafted, so there’s much more to go. Of course, the other projects are restless and demanding attention.
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I’ll be playing with new forms in the newsletter
Podcasting. I know. Last time I did one of these roundups of coming attractions, I mentioned podcasts. I did dig a bit into the process, only to abandon the idea. Podcast production is more than speaking into a microphone, and I wasn’t ready to scale the learning curve to do it right. But I still think making at least one podcast would be a good thing.
I may dip into previous posts to find one that might be rendered into audio. I figure to do it right, I’ll have to use at least a few sound effects — punctuation for the ears — and produce some sort of “intro” and “outro.” The next few months might give me time to do this. Could be fun, too, though I’m a complete noob when it comes to matters of “Foley.”
Frequency? At what point does a weekly post become too much for readers or too much for writers? In 2022, Technocomplex included 48 posts, all falling on Thursdays throughout the year, some more ambitious than others. Sometimes, I have to admit, the deadlines were not exactly welcome and crowded out other things in life. So I utter aloud what every other Substackian has probably wondered: What is the magical timing that keeps readers engaged, writerly attention sharp, and keeps ambition and hope alive?
I’ve toyed with the idea of changing frequency to every two weeks — in effect halving the output — by issuing posts on the first and the fifteenth of the month. I briefly thought about once-a-month frequency but cast that aside. After all, I don’t want readers to forget the newsletter, and I don’t want to get lazy.
It’s likely that I’ll stick with Thursday posts, partially out of inertia and partially because, well, weekly still feels right. But I might pull back from planning 48 posts in 2023. Forty-five? A longer summer break?
“The Boulangerie.” My weekly posts run between 1,500 and 2,000 words (sometimes more, rarely less), so they classify as “longform.” I think I’m going to put together much, much shorter pieces, perhaps even just photographs. Half-baked? Discards? Compelling sentences and paragraphs? Random thoughts? Whims? Attempts at humor? Sure! And I’ll group them into a section called “The Boulangerie,” since after all, they’re half-baked ideas.
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I anticipate running about one or two of these a week. Very short and not at all intrusive. By the way, don’t expect an email from The Boulangerie.
How will you know about what’s in the oven or rising in a warm place? I’ll link in the weekly posts and probably post on my Mastodon account (@mrdelong@mastodon.online). If I can figure out the levers to pull in the Substack control room, maybe people might be able to subscribe to this section, too. Then they’d get an email, maybe.
Guest writers going forward. Last year,
, the author of , was 2022's only guest contributor, and his post was praised and continues to be read. It was really great to have him write a post, and that was doubly so because it allowed me a chance to serve as first reader and editor. (One thing I'd really like to have help me with Technocomplex is an editor, sometimes grumpy but usually perceptive.)I’m hoping to have a guest contributor about every quarter. If all goes well, I already have a guest contributor lined up for the first months of 2023.
Letters. One of Substack’s innovative suggestions in 2022 had to do with letter-writing between ’stack authors. I’d seen it well done, and it is refreshingly low-tech — no special buttons to push, just two authors who agree on a general topic, and an exchange of “letters” in posts. I’ve wondered whether it’d be possible to have, say, three authors exchange letters. I don’t see why not, though it might be a bit more complicated for readers.
I think I’d like to try out this kind of correspondence. I don’t have any other details yet. Just the intention.
“Going paid.” Substack, Inc. likes writers it hosts to “go paid,” a revenue stream both for writers and for the company. I understand the reasoning, and I’ve been hesitant to flip the switch. I think I'll "go paid" at some point this year. However, “going paid” will not mean paywalled posts. Rather, it’ll be an opportunity for enthusiastic readers to support the newsletter if the choose, even though they could continue to read everything for free. Some writers, like
at , have had success with this plan, and Anne has a lot of fun with her newsletter. So do her readers.Topics and posts I’m considering
The Garage Mahal notebook.
's delivers great reading and wonderful illustrations she's found in notebooks, papers, and journals -- many shockingly and deliciously inventive. Jillian's post on James Baldwin's notes made me think again about my own scrappy notebooks, and one in particular -- the one on a workbench in the Garage Mahal out back. The last time I wrote about upcoming posts, I was cautious: "It may be too much navel gazing for my taste," I wrote. I'm getting closer to writing a post that takes a look at the old notebook, and I even pencilled it in for sometime in February. The Garage Mahal notebook is a hodge-podge mess of a thing. But then, so were Baldwin's. Maybe it’s okay to notebook messily? What are the functions and rationale for the Garage Mahal notebook, and what do the entries say about the place itself? Or the guy who penned them?The colors of writing. I wrote an email to
of as I was seeking something -- anything! -- to do other than write on my new screenplay project. It was a throw away email, good for procrastination, but I think it tried to flesh out a truth: Sometimes the form of writing itself leads you to new insight. I found that was the case with screenwriting, since everything is distilled or retouched into visuals and sound. Stories almost effortlessly become episodes, a flow of scenes, revealing missing pieces and, er, superfluities. As I went through some of what I wrote in the screenplay, I discovered that my urge to tell obscured the mandate to show.Forms of writing arrive with their own distinctive palettes. Their colors transform the landscapes that writers create. I’d like to explore that more fully.
Rambunctious beginnings. A gathering of notes that begin to tell the story of early days of four wheels and a motor. Plus, some images, including a parade of pity for the last days of the horse.
When fathers pass. The day after Christmas, Terry Freedman, author of
, wrote a moving piece about the death of his father, who died on December 26, 1976. I suspect many of us return to that page in our histories — at least the ones who were lucky enough to be present when their fathers died. I’d like to add my story to Terry’s.
Shirley’s around, even in the digital age For her, it’s not just chemistry. This post will be from the pen of a guest contributor, I am hoping. There’s much talk and argument about “systemic racism,” and in a concrete way this post considers how depictions of people of color in photography reflect an industrial and commercial system defining who is seen — and who is not. It was (and still is) a matter of norms already dialed into film and processing and, thus, very much a matter of systems — mostly invisible systems at that. Though much is a matter of chemistry or, today, electronics, many choices of who photography shows are not bound by physical properties.
Of course, we’ll do catch-up links, too.
Got a comment?
Tags: plans, editorial, fatherhood, death, photography, racism, genre, writing form, automobile, car, World War II, WW2, journal, notebook
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
The dedication is a nice letter to a friend, Sir Thomas More: Erasmus, Desiderius. In Praise of Folly, Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts (1509). London: Reeves & Turner, 1876. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30201/30201-h/30201-h.htm.
Very happy to hear about all of these projects! I love the range! I've never thought about writing a screenplay, so I'd love to hear more about the process. Looking forward to a new year of Technocomplex.
I’m in awe and even a tad envious (likely because, as I noted in my chat thread, the blocked feeling I’m having right now). It all sounds wonderful, but I’m especially eager to read more about the letters (Mark D and Alison and I kinda did that with 10 questions to each other) and the Garage Mahal notebook...and the Boulangerie sounds like a fine addition.