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One Fire, Three Ways of Knowing
At a September campfire in South Brent, Lin Yutang’s poet, peasant and vagabond become three ways of knowing: seeing, touching and moving through life.
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Still Following the Enterprise
On Star Trek at 60, the fictional heroes who offered me possible selves, and the frontier that kept moving from ships to terrain to the page.
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The cave has Wi-Fi now
What catches me in Angie Hobbs’s talk isn’t simply the claim that Plato anticipated fake news, demagogues and the slide from democracy into tyranny. Ancient philosophers are forever being advertised as having predicted the present. Give Marcus Aurelius a smartphone and he becomes a productivity guru. Give Plato an algorithm and suddenly the cave is…
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The Monster in the Mirror
The mirror is a monster for a lot of people. I know this because I have stood in front of it and felt the room change. Not every time. Not dramatically. No gothic apparition rising out of the glass. Sometimes it’s much quieter than that. You’re brushing your teeth, washing your face, catching yourself in…
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Time Is on Your Side: Listening to Coldplay’s Amsterdam
Time Is on Your Side: Listening to Coldplay’s Amsterdam Coldplay’s Amsterdam begins with a star going out. A man is swerving, losing his grip, blaming himself for moving too soon and then insisting that he waited as long as he could. He can’t get the timing right. That feels true to the way despair works.…
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The Golden Apple Has Entered the Server Room
A discord transmission from the point where magic, media language, pattern recognition and the Guerrilla Blogger interfere with one another.
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Take back the web. Make it weird again
Bob Sassone’s website is thirty years old. Thirty years. Older than Google. Older than the word blog. Still there, still being tended, still refusing to accept the repeated announcement that blogs are dead. Congratulations, Bob. Thirty years of keeping a patch of the web alive is no small thing. His anniversary post reads like a…
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Working Notes from the Textual Underground: Weekly Notes #001
24–29 August 2026 Editor’s note I had coffee with Dave, on Friday, in a small-town cafĂ© in the middle of nowhere. During the conversation, something came to light that I already knew but hadn’t had a chance to follow up on yet. Subscribers to Soulcruzer receive an email whenever I publish something in the main…
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Three Chords and a Web Domain: A One-Act Radio Drama
A one-act radio drama Three Chords and a Web Domain sends Clay Lowe and his Inner Council into a pirate radio studio with one live transmitter, one empty sentence box and nineteen minutes to decide what deserves to be said. Running time: 20–25 minutesSetting: beneath the Textual Underground—or inside Clay’s headForm: one act Radio drama…
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Poem of the week: Is Your Country a He Or a She in Your Mouth by Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood’s poem Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth? removes country from the map and puts it inside the body. The title doesn’t ask whether a country is male or female. It asks what the country becomes in your mouth. The mouth pronounces the nation and gives it a pronoun,…
