Status:

Slept for a good 12 hours last night and into the afternoon, so I must have been wiped out. Reckon it was the writing what done it, on top of fallout from Wednesday. It’s a clear sign that while I might be managing the pacing and avoiding the booms and busts, my actual capacity has not changed too much over the last year. I still can’t do fuckall of note compared to my pre-CFS self. What I can do is squeeze out moments of clarity where I can be relatively normal, make the most of them, and then not crash too badly afterwards. Or something like that.

In heatwave news we have a date and a deadline to get the mirrored shades on the front of the house. Hope to have something up by Wednesday.

Big Read:

‌Paul Soulellis: What is queer typography?

This is a really interesting lecture transcript, or illustrated essay if you prefer, on the aesthetics of queer media through the last half century, coming out of the 70s, through the AIDS epidemic and into the digital era.

I’ve long held a maximalist definition of queer, one that goes beyond sex and gender into complimentary weirdo (queerdo?) spaces, so I was pleased to see this paragraph on the overlap with zines by “radical artists, punk musicians, poets, political activists, and other marginal communities and movements” which fits with my thinking. (My emphasis)

Looking back now, from more than 50 years in the future, I hesitate to identify these designs themselves as queer. These materials do not define a queer aesthetic, and it would be misguided for us to arrive at that conclusion. Many movements towards liberation used similar tactics, like feminism, racial justice, labor, and anti-war movements. But still, there is something queer going on here, I think, in the moves and the acts and the attitude—design decisions that were made out of necessity, outside of the dominant forces of the design industry and mainstream publishing. These were decisions that were made without access to sophisticated tools, or editorial design expertise. In a very broad sense, queerness can be located in the radical, outsider status of these publications and their designs. This is queerness as an underground, alternative way of creating networks of care. Queerness can be located here in the scrappy, ad hoc, and sometimes homemade designs that were directly related to the urgency of protest and activism and survival.

There’s also some good thoughts on legibility and visibility, given how a lot of this stuff is quite hard to read at times.

And so for decades, we’ve seen how the fight for queer visibility — the fight to be seen by the state, to become clearly read units — leads to status and success shaped not on our own terms, not on queer terms, but by heteropatriarchy: terms like marriage equality, inclusion in the military, and the ability to accumulate and reproduce wealth. Participation in these logics of success demands legibility. A clear reading and gridded organizing of bodies and identities leads to prediction; predictive models lead to policing, and modes of surveillance that accelerate and engage with every aspect of our lives.

I find myself torn on this sort of thing. On the one hand I’ve often sought invisibility and the desire to hide away from the normies, from dressing neutrally to finding safe spaces. But within media I demand clarity and legibility. I hate messy design that gets in the way of understanding. I read this essay using my browser’s reader mode so I didn’t have to deal with that pink background and tight linespacing. For me, illegibility is how the world keeps me from knowledge and therefore power. It also keeps me from connecting with others like me — I need my work to be a clear signal to penetrate the mainstream noise.

But if the political wind were to permanently blow towards authoritarianism I can definitely see how that legibility and visibility could be a problem. (This is the premise of the excellent Tip Toe, that maybe coming out of the closet was a mistake.) We’re going to need to learn, or re-learn, how to go under the radar while still staying in contact. In online terms it’s all bit Dark Forest Internet, sending quiet, coded messages that pass through or are ignored by the bad algorithms. (I know I’ve felt a lot of relief from realising Google no longer sends random search traffic my way.)

Anyway, plenty to ponder.

The lecture was given a few years ago and has been developed into a book, Survival by Sharing: Essays on Queer Typography which is published in October.

Reading:

• Why can’t Britain turn its green revolution into cheap energy? A visual analysis — Interesting powerpoint presentation, sorry, “interactive essay” from the Guardian on the pipeline from planning to generation for wind and solar farms.
• Tips for coping with heatwaves for neurodivergent people — Mostly applies to all people but a few interesting extras, particularly around not being aware of what your body needs.

Listening:

• The Dark Truth About Mount Rushmore — I knew a load of this but can’t remember where I saw or read about it, so this is a nice reminder of how something I grew up thinking was just a thing they had in the US is actually where some baaad shit that down.

Looking:

• Burning flags, busty blondes and bison skulls: 48 photographs that capture America at 250 — Something something 20th Century’s art form something American Century something.