Wake Island

Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. He is the founder and co-host of the System of Systems podcast, and the founder and curator of the Safety Propaganda collaborative media platform. Communions is Adam's debut book - out now from Hyperidean Press.

Communions: Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.

As a writer, Lehrer covers topics such as contemporary art, horror fiction, noise and experimental music, cinema, and left politics.

David and I talk about the Truman Show in the intro. Interview starts at 19:25.

Follow us on social at:

Twitter: @WakeIslandPod 

Instagram: @wakeislandpod

David's Twitter: @raviddice

System of System Twitter: @SystemofSystem3

Safety Propaganda Twitter: @SafetyPropagan1

Safety Propaganda Instagram: @safetypropaganda

Adam's Instagram: @adamlehreruptown

In the intro we talk about Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and animating atmosphere of the desolate landscape of Pennsylvania's coal region with author Meghan Lamb. 

Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2022) follows the interconnected stories of three families as they navigate issues of disability, illness, and substance abuse in a former coal town: a landscape that is itself sick. A married couple argues over how to raise their neuroatypical child. A former nurse cares for her aging father, processing guilt over her addiction. A young man returns home after experiencing a traumatic brain injury, rediscovering a space where the past and present bleed uncannily together. Meanwhile, a two hundred-year mine fire burns beneath the town, a whispering dread that pervades the atmosphere. 

In addition to Failure to Thrive, Meghan Lamb is the author of All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020) and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She currently serves as the nonfiction editor of Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields. 

“Bridging the gap between dirty realism of Diane Williams and the uncanny ambiance of Tarkovsky, Meghan Lamb’s All of Your Most Private Places is an astonishing debut, one that immediately defines her as a force of expectation-bending, deep psyche fiction, culled from the most intimate, oft-suppressed depths of who we are.” — Blake Butler, author of Alice Knot 

 “Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark.” —Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere 

“Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun.” —Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

Follow us on social at: 

Twitter: @WakeIslandPod 

Instagram: @wakeislandpod

David's Twitter: @raviddice 

Apocalypse Party's Twitter: @apocpartypress

Meghan's Instagram: @lamb.like.the.animal & @significant_others_series

Will American fantasies of purifying violence dissolve upon contact with reality or will the illusion break into civil war? 

Find out on this eps w/ ⁦Stephen Marche‬⁩ author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future 

We also get into: American wildness, bloodlust, foment, genius, and the apocalyptic longing for an endless frontier. 

The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. 

No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government. 

“Should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government . . . The book alternates between fictional dispatches from a coming social breakdown and digressions that support its predictions with evidence from the present. The effect is twofold: The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —Ian Bassin, The New York Times Book Review 

Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, including The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Instagram: @wakeislandpod  

David's Twitter: @raviddice   

Stephen's Twitter: @StephenMarche

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world. 

You can download a free copy of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In at https://dylanmulvin.com/ 

In the intro David and I talk about Strange Days (1995) 

The interview with Dylan starts at 26:58 

Visuals referenced:  

29:01 -- NTSC color television test slides (Fink and NTSC 1955)

34:09 -- Vancouver as a non place (X-Files)

35:14 -- Indian-head test pattern

36:29 -- UK Test Signal 

38:58 -- Cleaning the Kilogram 

45:43 -- The Lena image 

51:53 -- Yodaville

53:28 -- Middletown 

1:08:44 Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A F*****g Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Twitter: @WakeIslandPod 

Instagram: @wakeislandpod    

David's Twitter: @raviddice    

Dylan's Twitter: @dwmulvin

JUSTIN KEENAN is a writer and narrative designer on Disco Elysium which is a groundbreaking open world role playing game. In it, you’re a detective with a unique skill system at your disposal and a whole city block to carve your path across. Interrogate unforgettable characters, crack murders or take bribes. Become a hero or an absolute disaster of a human being.   

In this episode we excavate the inner world at the heart of Disco Elysium and get into: Dark City (1998), RPGs, paranoia vs dread, world detectors, the future of video games, the state of noir detectives, and more... 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius      

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Twitter: @WakeIslandPod   

Instagram: @wakeislandpod   

David's Twitter: @raviddice   

In this episode with Jonathan Greenaway (Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century & The Horror Vanguard podcast) we arrive at the New Flesh while peeling back the layers of a nightmarish society in stasis.  

We get into: necro-neoliberalism, depressive hedonia, unspent energy mutating into gothic maw, our struggle to be and remain human, nostalgia neutralizing hope/fear instead of bringing us closer to history, the internet as a profoundly haunted and haunting device, Paul tells a dumb story about seeing Beyond the Black Rainbow on acid and the glorious weirdness of "Titane" 

Jon Greenaway is an academic, writer and teacher based in the North of England. He’s currently working on a PhD that focuses on philosophy, theology and the gothic literature of the nineteenth century. 

He’s also behind @TheLitCritGuy, a social media project that aims to bring critical and cultural theory away from its academic enclave and to the widest possible audience. He writes for a variety of publications online and blogs at thelitcritguy.com. 

He tweets @thelitcritguy. 

Find Jon on Youtube at Jon the Lit Crit Guy Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others – Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod    

Instagram: @wakeislandpod 

David's Twitter: @raviddice

James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is most famous as the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs. He worked as Burroughs’ assistant, and became his friend, business manager and editor until the author's death in 1997. Grauerholz wrote biographical sketches to a Burroughs reader Word Virus, and edited a posthumous release of Burroughs diaries Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Instagram: @wakeislandpod

Susan Sontag meets Hanif Abdurraqib in this fascinating exploration of the unexpected connections between how we consume images and the insidious nature of Fascism.

Patrick Nathan is the author of Some Hell, published in February 2018 from Graywolf Press. He lives in Minneapolis.

He also writes a monthly letter, which you can subscribe to here.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Patrick's Twitter: @patricknathan

David's Twitter: @raviddice

Blake Butler is the author of seven book-length works, including Alice Knott (Riverhead),  300,000,000 (Harper Perennial), Sky Saw (Tyrant Books), There is No Year (Harper Perennial), Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books), and Ever (Calamari Press), as well as the nonfictional Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT

We talk about: The Consumer by Michael Gira, insomnia, Penny’s notebook from Inspector Gadget, horror, internet gods and demons, forbidden books, courting insane energy, transcendence, the enduring low cost appeal of text, childhood portals, points of no return, The Bachelor and Blake’s relentless drive to write. 

Molly by Blake Butler

“A mastermind and visionary.” —Ben Marcus 

“Our premier literary shaman.” —Alissa Nutting 

“[Butler’s work is] wild but elegant and smart.” —Roxane Gay 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

Follow us on social at: 

Twitter: @WakeIslandPod   

Instagram: @wakeislandpod

Blake's Twitter: @blakebutler

David's Twitter: @raviddice