Greetings from the start of calendar month February.
This is a clerical update from Monk to announce that we now have bookmarks to accompany our Style of Attack Report book. As of this writing we await a 150-count print run of the book, our fourth printing of the 3rd edition, putting us over 1000 copies given or sold to-date. A toast to you, dear reader.
A toast as well to the few small booksellers across the landmass who see to it that our book stays in stock in their establishments—we know it’s more work to order directly from a DIY outfit like ours than it is to shoot off purchase orders to one of the 3 monolithic imprints (Penguin/Random House, Hachette, big daddy Ingram). Distribution infrastructure and production resources, whew. So, check out our stockists if you’re trying to patronize a bookseller near you (or contact us if you want to become one).
Meanwhile, Rasheedah Phillips continues her incredible mind-expanding work as a civil defense lawyer and internationally recognized theorist-artist-author. Please connect via Black Quantum Futurism, her collab-collective with Camae Ayewa. She has several accessible theory books, fiction zines, and essays available at her Future Sciences Distro—highly recommended.
Alex Smith is, as usual, working on several collaborative and individual projects at once. Word on the street is that he’s got a comic book in the works, and a reprint of his sold-out short story collection, ARKDUST. In 2020 he was awarded a PEW Fellowship, one of the city’s biggest awards for artists. Absolutely major. Keep up with him via Alexoteric.com.
Cutty bka R. Cutlass Mashramani came out of 2019 with a Blade of Grass fellowship, and continues the work of their collectively-run service projects, Deep Space Mind 215—”an emerging collective of healers with lived experience of mental health challenges dedicated to redefining wellness, justice, and joy in the city of Philly”— being one of them. Wander through their artist website if you like at CutlassTheory.com.
And me, M. Téllez, I continue to pack and ship book orders while sending out the occasional audio newsletter on topics of sci-fi fantasy and speculative media criticism, occult cyborg skillshares, and politics × technology hot takes. It’s what I do while I agonize through my All That’s Left project about post-binary cyborgs finding hope while working exploitative start-up jobs in an environmentally devastated landscape.
In our 2020 post, I wrote that Metropolarity fell dormant after the election of 45. The crew has not done any public-facing work under Metropolarity for a few years now, and I have thought about letting our book go out of print several times. But each time, people appear out of the ether to ask for more copies. So, it stays in print. And one of our purposes is to control and disseminate our own stories on our own terms.
This was before the #ownvoices hashtag emerged, before the #queerscifi hashtag became inundated with images of hairless white beefcake, before #afrofuturism (and non-linear Black time) was a commonplace topic in every art and educational institution vying for relevancy.
I say this because I have archived the fruits of our efforts extensively—you can look back through our Tumblr, our events calendar, our Instagram, or maybe one day peruse the paper archive I’ve maintained all the while. The arts and publishing and celebrity social justice worlds continue to turn, and though Metropolarity often exists as a fleeting-yet-mind-altering entanglement with those who came to interact with us, I know that it’s also been through our own archive that we have managed to be remembered.
Writing, the printed word, captured audio-video media are time capsules, after all. We’ve made our many time capsules freely available, until we come together once again, whenever and wherever that will be. For now, we continue to love and rage and despair and dream big.
We were not the first to do what we do, and we won’t be the last.
In solidarity,
Monk @ MP HQ