In the end you have to pick a side. All the way.
Many may recall that with the launch of Elision, grievechronic book eight KPM Press decided not to release an ebook variant of said title.
Now let me be clear: God love ebooks.
A lot of my world building research these days has to go down via the usage of ebooks so I have been very grateful for them in that regard. But they were not ever in key with the spirit of Grievechronic in a philosophical sense.
I begrudgingly offered them eventually, by request…so I could understand what people were getting from them specifically in regards to my literary universe, beyond ease of access and veritable weightlessness. In other words, as a lab, an “experiential” experiment to gauge what was really going on with all that.
That being said, ebooks never sat right with my art or logos souls because it was anathema to something God knew was what geeked me out most about this whole publishing imprint production arc in the first place when he lured me out of fashion into fiction.
AB
I’ve been a laidback student of global civilizations for as long as I remember.
But my …kink… has always been the outsider, outlier and othered components of it seemingly lost to “history” in their current events sense, but that oftentimes end up being the only proof of real lives lived, rife with fully formulated and contextualized to their times thoughts ‘thunk’ that we end up having from civilizations that have dropped off the grid.
Most People today don’t comprehend what it means that Dante, Ovid and even John of Patmos were EXILED when they wrote their most widely known books, or what exile really meant in their time periods. Y’all are not students of history who rock with them. The entire time y’all have been fucking with dissidents boldly speaking truth to power when doing so got you fed to lions or forced to drink hemlock for refusing to shut the fuck up.
There’s been an underground throughout time, and most of the old souls I found in the rank and file whirling around within this society’s fin de sicle variant of it all had one atavistic version or another of it tatted all over their spirits, even as they housed each other in the then here and now.
Old renegade souls abound underground, and as the most formidable – and sentient latter-day Ancients of Days we’ve got.
Revolution is Never initially popping off in the numbed out or dopamine- chasing mainstream. It eventually gets there. But the change that comes with true revolution( as opposed to the Animal Farm-esque revolting dualistic reboots that just lead to the Have-nots playing in the clothes they ripped off the last set of Haves) always have their roots in a fully formed and despotically effective, old school, operational underground.
Lovely. What the fuck does that have to do with God and ebooks, Glyph?
…the Pecans (we don’t foster peanut galleries around these Kokopellima Press parts, but we’ll respect the queries of the Walnut & Pecan nutters).
I am a true Bohemian. But the meaning of that is lost on most rocking with the title of this mag or the moniker my AOLAB events have been pipelining out into the world via for 20 years.
Kokopellima Press was born in the spirit of the Czechoslovakian samizdat, arthead-wise. Understood as such, especially in light of the types of unconventional books Kokopellima Press produces a lot of the confusion from the outside looking in falls away. There have been explorations and modifications KPM Press has danced through over the years, some almost strong-armed into responsively… but it always comes back to it’s true nature.
AB
E-books do not fall into that nature. They were edging that field for a while, when the web was more wily. But today as always, The most dangerous motherfucker in the black market is the one with the audacity to sell haptic Books while everybody else out there is selling bodies and organs for some semblance of power. An ebook can be a firecracker, even a cherry bomb against the onslaught of stupid things trying to psychologically be afoot… but the real TNT out of imposed by society jail cells will always be an idea, in a book, haptic-ly held in hand.
Fuck a Fahrenheit 451 ( said with love and bluster). That’s why the Library of Alexandria was burned to the ground. That’s why every crew who unified historical China burned all the books. That’s why the German student unions showed out in 1933, and why the cloak and dagger shit is afoot regarding the Malian library that has been on the move since 2004 from both Muslim and oppositional extremists trying to burn those records out of existence. That’s why CRT is trying it so hard in the last five years.
A book in hand is often one of the first crimes “they” are willing to openly attack their fellow man regarding. Because it’s that life-changing. Seeing shit in black & White changes things.
That’s WHY the united daughters of the confederacy spent all that time perverting the textbooks this country would eventually use everywhere, and why idiots like de Santis and Ted Cruz are in lockstep with those trying to do so all over again in this country. There’s a false sense of incontrovertibility to print.
That’s even why so many Catholics and “traditional Christians” across the board end up losing their faith when they actually start reading their holy books in their own laps instead of having dudes invested with telling half-truths to lull them asleep with singing the scriptures to them.
There are people running around grasping at games that are so out of the purview of what God gives me the opportunity to do that nothing I do in this makes sense to them. And that has always been fine for me. I am all for it. Sfumato. Because they are not the battalions entrusted to my wild-assed, god-given worldview.
I ran the lab on ebooks to see if the ones assigned to me were going to make spelunking down into that digital wormhole to set captives free part of the call. And then came my despots, the outlier gangs scattered heavily across the throngs of Zoomers… bulk buying vinyl records, hunting down typewriters and old Nokia phones on eBay so they can have dumb phones on hand for when the shit hits the fan, and hitting up thrift books like a motherfuck.
They’ll be able to pass the gnosis on to their digitized baby brethren when the time comes, coming up bilingually alongside them. Just like the radical hippies outfitted the sleeper cells among us Genxers to be able to keep the faith until it was go-time.
Saying all of that to say…
The Kokopellima Press ebook lab ends in earnest August 2024.
I agreed to write Grievechronic in honor of the shit that got done by my tribe during the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia.
& I have lived long enough to see these fuckers set in motion the infrastructure to make the latter day version of that revolution necessary.
We’ve all got our callings, right?
*
So…if you are an ebook addict…all the way about it, bout it when it comes to ebooks, you should probably mosey over to Amazon.com and grab your digital copies of the Origin era of Grievechronic books today before they are finally, and with lots of love…pulled down so they will never circulate again. Maybe one day they’ll be passed around as bits of 0s and 1s to shore up the resistance if shit still has to get worse before it starts to get better.
But my battalion of concern is the book in hand tribe.
The kindle price is $8.88. Because it has been nothing but joy TO run this lab.
The paperback price for the Grievechronic Origins books on Amazon.com is $11.11 right now too.