Reasons to Bow

A Midsummer, Substack Anniversary Update and Grace-Giving

“Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.”

- John 4:38

A year has come and gone. In June 2023, Substack became the new home for both my writing and the podcast. At the moment, we’re halfway through a new season of The End of Tourism. Quixote’s Media Meditations is my homage to how important media ecology is in a culture almost entirely devoid of the study. And, here I’ve been able to release the essays that others such as the Dark Mountain Project, Liminal Journal, and Ritona // A Beautiful Resistance have deemed worthy of their readers.

Zelnik, Zbog and the Gods (The Dark Mountain Project)

The Automatic Myth (Liminal Journal)

The Permanent Vacation (A Beautiful Resistance)

Life is good, despite the mania and malaise gripping the world. That reminder, that ability to strive for beauty and redemption, I owe partly to each of you. While it’s true that I don’t do what I do for a target audience or clickbait, I’m deeply indebted to those of you who subscribe and share my work among your people. This gift economy (i.e. “management of the household”) is sustained by your capacity to support my work, both socially and financially.

As you may know, I don’t use paywalls and for the foreseeable future, I won’t. That means both you and I subsidize this commitment by offering what we can and in so doing, undermine the unequal, tiered architecture that platform capitalism promotes. For now, it’ll have to do.

To make my work more navigable, I’ve recently added the “Leitmotifs” and “QMM” pages to the menu bar to explore podcast episodes via theme and to view chronologically my media ecology meditations.

All of that said, everyone has to get paid. You and I have to eat, which in our times, for better or worse, means buying our food. And so, for those of you who can, please consider continuing to support my work however you can, either socially (by liking, commenting, and sharing among your people) or financially (by offering a gift of your choosing) or both.

On this end, I raise my glass to you and set out towards the well to see what the great below has to offer, to slake.

Thank you. To each of you for your continued support.

Bless!

Brick by Brick

Currently underway behind the scenes is production for the next two seasons of the End of Tourism, the next in Spanish and the following one in English.

I just recently finished rewrites on a manuscript regarding the dark side of the psychedelic culture and looking for a publisher for that if anyone knows anyone.

Lots of essay writing on this end about needs + neediness, identitarianism and tourism as kin, time travel, the dead and finally degrowth. Here’s an excerpt:

If we travel to different places, why don’t we travel to different times? How is it that we readily understand geographies to be myriad, but the calendar to be monocultural? What does this do to our capacity to pilgrimage and not just travel? What do our understandings of time and history do to our (in)ability to show up as honourable guests among foreign hosts? To re-member the peculiar diversity of time(s), to subvert the colonization of time, we must ask how it came to be this way. We must understand how we’ve neglected our place as time travellers.

Most of that will be coming your way in the next six months.

Pounded Pulp Poetry

Thankfully, this year I’ve made more time than usual to dig into the depths of my small library.

• Among friends, we recently began a book club on Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, delving into Marshall’s considerations and how they apply to our current times.

• Finally got around to reading

  Martin Shaw
  ’s Courting the Wild Twin, a brilliant, folkloric dive into the otherworld:

  “Culture is defined not by what you gain, but by what you were prepared to live without.”

  Martin will be speaking alongside Stephen Jenkinson on June 15th in Totnes, England for a very special night on Prayer. What a gift for those who’ll be there.

• The Macedonian literature I’ve sought out has been surprisingly well-wrought, but unsurprisingly intense. I very much recommend Pirey by Petre M. Andrevski if you can get your hands on a copy. A book that melds war and magical realism. Not for the faint of heart.

• Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History by Peter Fritzsche is a fascinating, albeit somewhat dense take on the French Revolution and how the events of the time spurned our contemporary ability to think historically. In other words, historical thinking might be a modern phenomenon and this book explains how it came to be.

• After five months, I managed to finish Leslie Marmon Silko’s tomb Almanac of the Dead. For those of you familiar with Ceremony, consider taking half a year of your life and committing yourself to this:

  “No wonder the blood sacrifices and the blood-spilling had stopped when the people reached this high desert plateau; every drop of moisture, every drop of blood, each tear, had been made precious by this arid land.”

• Finally, one of my favourite films OF ALL TIME is Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival. It was adapted from a short story by Ted Chiang, entitled “The Story of Us.” I picked up the collection, later renamed Arrival and good goddamn!Chiang is a sci-fi genius. Science fiction with soooooooo much soul. If you’re ever going to read from the genre again, let it be via these stories.

Sounds of Solace

As I’ve had a little more time to read this year, I’ve been blessed with a little more time to listen to music and I’ve found some gems. If you don’t already know of these artists and bands, please give them a listen:

• Drone-folk quartet Lankum (Ireland)

• Double bass jazz soloist Kham Meslien (France)

• Eclectic jazz multi-instrumentlist Shabaka (England)

• Electronic musician, producer and DJ Four Tet (England)

That’s all for now, folks. If you feel inclined to reach out for any reason, to wonder together, collaborate, or say hello, please feel free to do so.

We get this one little chance to be human for awhile. “Human” if we’re lucky and “awhile” if we’re luckier still. These thanks and blessings don’t come automatically. They come from knowing how life could be otherwise (and often is). They come from not taking for granted this precious time. May we be on the same page in that regard.

Sincerely (without wax),

Chris

---