Analemma #1: 41 Translucent Purple Audio Cassettes
The literary scammers come out in full force.
Welcome to Analemma! The goal for this substack is one half commonplace book and one half a voyage into various rabbit holes every Friday. And if you're wondering about the name: an analemma is a figure-8 shaped figure used to mark the passage of time over the course of an entire year, just like this is supposed to capture the ebbs and flows of digital bullshit.
Speaking of calendars, it's the 6th day of Prairial, or the day of Lemon Balm (author note: having a broken 6 key has made this day miserable to write about. There’s a specific circle of hell where the punishment is googling "number six" every time you need to write it). The date in question isn't from a fantasy novel or any kind of constructed worldbuilding. Instead, it's from the French Republican Calendar, which was made with the intent to:
… celebrate the real treasures of the rural economy. The grains, the pastures, the trees, the roots, the flowers, the fruits, the plants are arranged in the calendar, in such a way that the place and the day of the month that each product occupies is precisely the season and the day that Nature presents it to us.
Sure, some of the holidays that it made in lieu of the ones that they kicked to the curb would be right at home in an "innovative" health scam (days to celebrate the Cult of Reason, the Cult of the Supreme Being, the Decadary Cult, and Theophilanthropy were just a few of them!), but of any and all attempts to rework calendars, it's got a certain flair that I've always loved, especially with regards to looking towards the natural world. If you're going to have to live with the constant and incessant churning of time, adding a bit of drama makes the grindstone of being slightly more tolerable.
Digital Detritus
Tumblr's rolling out a new feature for notifications! I'm honestly just excited for this because it color codes if you follow someone, if you're mutual with them, etc. This is a feature that users have modded in with XKit, but it's nice to see Tumblr seeing how its users want to use the platform and actually respond in a positive manner. It feels less like the siloing of different tiers of users that Twitter tried and more like a way of honing in on people who you know quickly, without the rest getting lost in the process.
My Tumblr blog is probably one of the longest running digital scrapbooks I have. I barely touch my Facebook, my Instagram has been archived and pruned, and I wasn't active on Twitter until the tail end of high school. Tumblr, on the other hand, has been there since I turned 13. If someone were to say... pull a Caprica or a "You, Me, Her, You, Her, I" and try to recreate my personality from the digital detritus left behind, Tumblr would probably be their best place to start. All of this is to say: the fact that Tumblr is constantly working to improve the experience of being on it is something that can't be understated, especially when the internet is constantly crumbling to bits.
Ephemera
My New Year's Resolution for 2023 was to send more letters. I'm awful at remembering to text people, and my attention span can be approximately the size of a pea. Letters provided a good in-between: they're a physical object that prompts a response, and they let me have longer, ongoing discussions. I've always been big on physical ephemera and fiddly objects, always been the person that has at least two notebooks on my person at all times. Which is why Jeeyon Shim's Field Guide to Memory has been scratching a tactile focused creative itch.
It's a "keepsake" game, where players are prompted, over the course of 20 days, to write and scrapbook about a cryptozoology mentor gone missing. It guides through a story, and at the end of the day? There's a physical object that you took the time to make. Like I said before— the internet is rotting! Having physical media that you've gotten to write has a grounding effect; it gives me a second to forget about my phone in lieu of scribbling away about local plants or an imagined dream. And at the end of the day, I do get something that’s unique to me: a physical object that can be revisited and thought about in the future, without worry about it vanishing into the ether.
Marginalia
Erica Western Teleport by Emperor X has been my song of choice lately. The fact that it works well for looping, "don't think of her porous membrane" is a line of all time, and the fact that to promo the album it’s on, Emperor X hid 41 translucent purple audio cassettes and slowly released the GPS coordinates to find them all add up to potent experience. I’m late to this specific party, but the repetitive nature of the lyrics tied together with various lyrical quirks keeps making me want to relisten to it!
Lollygagging
Finally, what is the literary world without a brand new scammer? And no, Dan Mallory isn't back !! This time, the suspect of the day is PK Mancini, who went viral on TikTok for a video advising authors to force reviewers to sign a contract if they wanted to do advance reader copy reviews of books. Which is a) ridiculous advice if you've even spent a modicum of time in the literary world, and b) somehow only the tip of the iceberg.
On Twitter, Foz Medows dug into Mancini and her advice and found that she not only were her editorial services deeply suspect, but she used to be a "professor" as something called Aphrodite University which was the "holy grail of new age feminine mystique bullshit scammery". She’s moving on from doing VIP Pink Diamond Luxury packages to editing services, but the intent seems to remain the same.
Speaking of scammers!! Ms Caroline Calloway herself is back! Her book Scammer is being sent out to purchasers on June 16th and is both aggressively self-published and aggressively aware of that fact by pitching itself as “The world's first (self-identifying) manic pixie dream book.” It's, uh, interesting to note how this coincides with ex-CC ghostwriter Natalie Beach's book, Adult Drama, being released on June 20th. Calloway is one of those online figures who makes me want to bang my head into a wall. There's an oblivious self-awareness, a constant recalibration of self-mythology, a way of acting like she is both in on the joke and outside of it at the same time that makes me twitch. But that's part of her appeal, isn't it? The self aggrandizing way that she moves through the world while pretending at a modicum of self-awareness. It captures attention and conversation like a whirlpool and refuses to let them go.
Being a literary scammer seems to require a temerity of being that frankly makes me nauseous, so I think I'll leave that to the experts, for now!
This has been Analemma! Thanks for reading, see you all next week! Who knows what I'll end up dredging up in the process. If you've got thoughts, opinions, dreams of becoming a scammer, etc, feel free to hit me with them @hedgefruit or @hedgefruit.bsky.social.