ON WORKING AND THE RICHMOND BOOK OF THE DEAD: MARGINAL TRANSMISSION 1.3
What I Was Working On, and What's Coming for the Substack.
This is both a promotional post and an update.
Recently, I became aware of the story at VCU involving a number of students taking the blame for a protest gone sour, and decided I’d use what connections I had to try to publish a real piece of journalism on it. The result was “Nothing Uncommon Here: VCU’s Neoliberalism”, a polemic that follows the steady hollowing of education at VCU. I had a number of discussions with people around the university, relied on some primary sources by Goad Gatsby, and used that to piece together a narrative around austerity, both in expectations of what a university can be and what’s actually happening. The argument stops short of arguing for May ‘68 but American, but I don’t think there’s really any point in shying away from that. In essence, I’m trying to square the difference between journalism and essay writing by allowing you to pleasurably follow the logic of an argument. An essay of that type is basically an argument made pretty, and I’m very proud of the work I did. I should be: it took close to two months.
With that, I’m working on finishing up issue #27 of Kentucky Meat Shower. These are works on a continuum. One uses standard journalistic, documentarian technique to tell a story, while the other uses more fictive narrative techniques. But the continuum they are in line with the mission of Kentucky Meat Shower, which is the ruthless criticism of culture, alienation, boredom and despair. Beyond this, however, issue #27 was going to serve as a bridge to the next portion of issues.
After I finish issue #27, I have to sit down and do some work on other projects, which will be updated here. In 2024, I expect to be back to working on Kentucky Meat Shower. However, there will be a scheduling change. Rather than attempting to write issues as the crow flies, instead, I’ll be plotting out and writing the issues in advance. When those issues are released, they’ll then be done in a fell swoop, possibly every two to three weeks. There will be a delay, but it’s not exactly a hiatus. My expectations for what I can do are through the roof, and in order to do that, I need the time to write this almost like writing a book. That sounds like a lot, and it should.
After all, the only way I can really describe what I’m doing is by comparison with prior periods of the Substack. Initially, it was a newsletter updating everyone on what I was doing. Then it became something a lot closer to a zine.
This year, I wrote the first suite of issues. This year when I wrote that suite, I had a horrifying realization: nobody is going to remember the story you’re trying to tell unless they read it in quick succession, and I am not a quick writer because I toss a lot. In order to better serve what I’d like to do, I need to prewrite what I’m writing. I’d rather be deliberate and slow than burn out and start sucking ass. Sure, it’s better to burn out than fade away, but not everybody who tries to burn out manages to, and those people do just fade away.
So with that, I should at least say that issue #27 is a bridge, but that bridge is onto a suite of issues that I want to describe as the Richmond Book of the Dead. And I’m excited to show that to you as soon as it’s done, as I am issue #27 and all the other things I have planned for us.
Expect issue #27 before the end of June.