Hello, folks — Festivus greetings to all our sweeties and babies who have followed this blog and our work for the last 16 years. I am happy to say, as your unassailable and insolvent commander Naima Day, that I have a new book that will be forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. I am still rewriting, fact-checking, and tweaking the geek out like someone from a Mountain Goats song, but it should be done semi-soon. Given how a production cycle works, that would mean a publication date some time next year.

This project has been dear to my heart for years now, but I was not sure anyone would take interest in it. It broadly concerns a range of films from the early twenty-first century that express and convey the general sense of apocalypticism, nihilism, and malaise that characterizes films of our time such as Children of Men, Snowpiercer, Sorry to Bother You, The Life of Chuck, and so on. The central conceit is that a vanishing horizon of possibility is represented in these films — drawing on the idea that we can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as the late British philosopher Mark Fisher aptly dubbed “capitalist realism.”

There appears to be no way out. But what do we do in an existential sense when we face this condition of no escape? We still possess free will, to an extent, and we still tell stories about protagonists who are confronted with impossible circumstances.

What I am most interested in is the dignity and persistence of characters in crazy circumstances, like the young girl in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, set against the horrors of the Spanish Civil War but also imbued with magical possibilities. To me, Pan’s is one of the most relevant films of the early twenty-first century, reflecting the madness of so many other historic misadventures and acts of needless cruelty that I need not enumerate, because I think you already know.

How do people face the end — or if not the end, the impossible? We tell stories so that we can make sense of the world we live in, in much the same way as our brains put together dreams at night and create little mini-movies that usually don’t make almost any sense, but still process our experience. That is what this book is about, and I hope that it comes out well. I want to commission artists to do some original illustrations for it, so if anyone has any ideas I am all ears. (I have large ears.)

I am incredibly grateful to the friends, family, and colleagues who kept me going through the last five or six years, which were challenging in a multitude of ways, as well as the editors and peer reviewers who were willing to give this work a generous hearing. I am a movie nut, as most readers and friends already know, and I cannot wait to share this book with you, you goofy little gullible darlings that I love so much.

Holt Boulevard
Between Garey and White
Hooked up with some friends at the Travelodge
Set ourselves up for the night
Carpenter ants in the dresser
Flies in the screen
It will be too late by the time we learn
What these cryptic symbols mean

Rutgers University Press is an incredible institution that has published so many powerful books, including, if we can be so bold, our own East of East about the deep history of the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California. They do so much awesome stuff, and as we have always said on this site, university presses are some of the most beautiful, utopian enterprises that exist in this cursed world we are consigned to live in. If there is any way you can think of to support a university press (such as buying a book or donating), please do so because we believe they are some of the greatest things in the world.