Daily Cosmonaut #1

January 04, 2016 — by Joe Biel

With rumors circulating of the potential impending collapse of our local conservative daily newspaper, The Oregonian, we decided that it was time for a back to basics around here. For those of you who have been Cosmonauts since before 2005, you may remember a time when I would write “articles” on our blog about things that I was thinking about, decisions that we had made, and things that could narrowly pass for “news” around here. We’ve found that as the meta-commentary from behind the scenes became less and less, there was more and more misunderstanding about what Microcosm was up to or why we would do certain things. Honestly, that had more to do with an increasing workload and a period of time where the voices and work emanating from our office were decidedly intended to seem more anonymous. But, of course, that made even less sense when the voice contradicted itself.

But it’s a slow time around here, at least around the couch that I pushed into the corner of the office so Ruby, my medical alert dog, can nap with her head on my lap while I work. So we thought it would be a good time to pull up the curtains and reveal a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes. Most of it is admittedly pretty entertaining. Like the time that a thief stole our entire stack of outgoing UPS boxes a few weeks ago, only to discover that the boxes were full of books and disappointedly deposited them in front a school who was polite enough to call the customers. It could have been a total tragedy but there was a perfectly happy ending. And not to jinx ourselves, but that’s how tragedies tend to go around here.

We’re going to have some daily news from here on out! Let us know what you want to hear about from this side of the curtain.

Rampant Media Consumption: What we Read, Watched, and Listened to in 2015

January 04, 2016 — by Microcosm workers

junun album cover 2015 kept us all busy! Our next blog post, containing our annual report, will show you how and why. But somehow along the margins we found chances to read books and articles, watch movies and tv shows, listen to music and podcasts, and consume other assorted media to inspire us and keep us going. Here’s a recap for the last month bleeding into the last year.

Tomy

I’ve been obsessed with an Animal Planet show called Monsters Inside Me. It’s a show about potentially deadly parasites. Premise one: First-worlders contract parasites while attempting to prove they’re capable of vacationing in unsanitary areas around of the world. Premise two: Unsuspecting first-worlders eat foods that are contaminated, raw, or improperly cooked. Episodes include: sick people, dramatizations, menacing music, medical specialists, formulaic TV-show suspense, and a hunky/nerdy bat biologist. Super fun!

Reading poetry by Franz Wright because he recently died.

Also reading/studying Fine Gardening magazine and This Old House magazine because I’m chin-deep in home renovation.

Taylor

I read: Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson

Libra by Don Delillo

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

…and listened to Lana Del Rey’s newish album Music to Watch Boys To

Thea

I’ve been trying to ignore this book series by Elena Ferrante, but now I’m intrigued after this VF article.

Finally got around to reading Every Last Tie, an amazing and incredible recollection/reflection by the brother of the Unabomber.

Happy to have discovered the wild & wacky history of coloring books.

Jeff

Can’t stop listening to the Junun album.

Also i’m finally getting around to listening to Four Tet.

Watched this crazy documentary about Scientology.

Joe

In November I resolved to read books faster than I accumulated them. So far I have been tremendously successful.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

I should probably get it out of the way that Jon Ronson is my favorite author. His stirring mediations, objective analyses, and carefully considered conclusions feel like the journalistic work that I would be doing if my childhood had been more privileged, my dreams had been supported, and I had gone to college. Rather than regrets though, my lived experiences allow me to enjoy Ronson’s work for its brilliance and beauty. While Them, his look at hanging out with a dozen extremists of various kinds after 9/11, was an incredibly balanced work that offered deeper perspective about things we don’t get to hear much about, like The Bilderburg Group, this book takes his thinking and writing skills even further. Jon holds himself culpable as he criticizes the emergent culture on social media that leaps to attack a stranger before the evidence is on the table or sometimes even requested. He learns about himself when strangers create a Jon Ronson parody Twitter account. He takes a prolonged look at how the result of one bad joke can cost you your job, your friends, and your entire reputation. He examines the way that privilege can sometimes allow someone to recover from a public shaming and resume life as usual. And he evaluates how the distance between our self-image and the public’s image of us allows for shaming to affect us. It’s important to note that this book is as appropriately funny as it is clever and revealing. When Ronson works with Reputation.com to restore the future career of one young social worker, he simultaneously points out everything that is strange about the whole affair. Our culture rewards innocuous blandness and creating a new public persona for someone that has nothing shocking to say can restore credibility. At the same time, the man who seems to have suffered the least has a more interesting sex life than anyone I know so the book is fairly intriguing in its analysis. Most importantly, Ronson helps us take a more nuanced look at every situation without jumping to conclusions, which is something that would be good for all of us, whoever we are.

How To Ru(i)n A Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records

Larry Livermore has lived an almost unbelievable life. In these pages he recalls attending the original Woodstock, seeing the Supremes homecoming in early 1960s Detroit, witnessing MC5 at a battle of the bands on a tennis court, and joining the White Panther Party. Of course all of this could not prepare him for an even more regimented and controlled life in his depictions of a cultishMaximum Rocknroll house. While Larry deserves much credit for displaying the East Bay punk rock scene and reviving punk rock in a global way from 1987-1997, what’s interesting is what’s not in this book. Despite a long-passed statute of limitations, Larry does not address the rumors of whether Lookout was founded with money from pot sales as co-founder David Hayes alleges. Similarly to Bob Mould’s See a Little Light, we get to see Larry as an insecure, less-than confident individual who seems to be successful both because of and in spite of himself. While there is plenty of self-effacing commentary in these pages, Larry’s depictions of other people seem less aware of the implicit power dynamic in their drastic age differences or how others might be reacting to his unique personality. A stirring commentary on building a scene in a material way, it’s compellingly well written and a perfection companion to Punk USA: The Rise and Fall of Lookout Records, with a parallel narrative. It’s the story of how one off-the-grid hippie-turned-punk agitator, despite all odds, managed to introduce the world to the likes of Green Day, Operation Ivy, Screeching Weasel, and a hundred other artists. And how an awkward relationship with being the boss and personality disputes that could ultimately disrupt all that had been built. This story is magical because it shows us that someone with enough stubborn passion can leave their mark on the world and write history and that the best things don’t last forever.

The Rosie Project: A Novel

I complained in the last chapter of Good Trouble about the lack of Aspies depicted in culture and media. So it was exciting and refreshing when our proofreader, Markell, recommended this book to me. Just so we’re on the same page, this is the third work of fiction that I’ve read in the last 25 years. It helps, of course, that the Aspergian literalist in this story could easily be based on my life. He rides his bike everywhere he goes, argues about the definition of a jacket with restaurant waitstaff, finds the emotional communications of others difficult to understand, and uses science as a way to find a suitable date. The narrative strikes me as completely lacking in class analysis and how the professor’s position is what has prevented him from having to face these revelations or his behavior earlier. Of course this book also ties up in a bow and a happy ending, which real lives often do not, but it was a refreshing change of pace. Every paragraph contains a clever reminder of what living with Asperger’s is like and there are constant surprises and plot twists throughout. I am left wondering if it would not be more effective to pick a real person and write a novelized biography of their life. In my experience, the events that happen in real life would often not be believable in fiction.

Making a Murderer

My friend April recommended this ten-hour Netflix documentary to me. To their algorithm’s credit, Netflix had also figured out that this would be something that I would be interested in. I don’t veer away from difficult subjects and this extensive review of the events and cases posed against Steven Avery were as much of an indictment against the judicial system as the actions of the allegedly crooked cops and prosecutor. Through extensive tampering with evidence, a couple cops and a small town courtroom was seemingly able to frame Avery for two separate crimes with extensive imprisonment while ignoring evidence about who the actual perpetrators were. Avery and his nephew who was also convicted both have low IQs and while well meaning, were quite prone to tampering by the police. Through It’s chilling and illuminating narrative about the flaws in the system and how class and status seem to have a greater access to power than truth or justice, these hard-working filmmakers will hopefully one day free Avery and his young nephew.

Elly

It’s cold which means a lot of time hunkering down to read. I’ve read a lot of books lately with the idea of learning new life and work skills. The best two have been Difficult Conversations (holy crap, there are some pretty basic things I’ve been missing), and a very unlikely favorite, Bobbie Thomas’s The Power of Style—my natural tendency is to gravitate towards jeans and t-shirts, which doesn’t really cut it everyday, so I set out to look for a book like Apartment Therapy but for clothes. Despite its bubble-gum, cake-makeup packaging, this book is the real deal. Thomas was a sexual assault crisis counselor before she became a tv personality and stylist, and her message is all about using clothing intelligently to communicate the messages of your choosing to the world and to yourself. In the same vein, I reread big chunks of Women in Clothes, which is a nicely designed look through hundreds of eyes and formats at the huge variety of perspectives and practices and meanings we put into what we wear.

Then I needed an antidote to all this earnest instruction, so I got started on Patti Smith’s new memoir M Train, which my sister sent me for xmas (good call, kid). Patti Smith waxes exuberant about Murakami, who I’ve been ambivalent about, so I checked out his recent Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. In this book, he finally stopped trying to tie his plot up into a neat, tidy bow and the result is super powerful—I’m still thinking about the story, weeks later.

A People’s Guide to Publishing Podcast

January 03, 2016

Looking for the latest episode? Click here!

In 2012, Microcosm founder and CEO Joe Biel started writing blog posts. Biel wanted to share 25 years of experience and how Microcosm sold millions of books to leave a trail of bread crumbs for others to have similar success. Biel has also written a book about the topic, A People’s Guide to Publishing.

Joe and Microcosm’s marketing director Elly now make the weekly People’s Guide to Publishing People’s Guide to Publishing podcast. You can listen to it on your preferred app, or watch the video version as a vlogcast.

Got questions about the publishing industry or need help troubleshooting your own process? Submit your question to podcast at microcosmpublishing dot com, and we’ll try to address it on an upcoming episode.

Find the series of blog posts that started it all here:

An overview

What a Publisher Does

Paralleling the Dinosaurs

Title Development

For authors: How to Pitch Your Book to a Publisher

Data About Your Book’s Details (MetaData)

Profit & Loss Statement

Am I Stealing Your Art?

The Economic Case for Traditional Format Offset Printing

Distribution Question (with infographic)

The Print Run

Working with The Printer

Formatting for Print

How to Pack Books for Shipping

Social Media for Authors

Self-Promotion for Authors

Organizing a book tour

Dispatch from the Education Front: An Interview with Kaycee Eckhardt

December 28, 2015 — by Elly Blue

Katrina’s Sandcastles packs a lot of book into 192 pages—it’s a personal memoir of learning to become a teacher, an—at times hopeful, at times critical—portrait of the charter school education system, and a recent history of New Orleans in the decade since the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the botched governmental response, and a compelling look inside the lives and prospects of some of the most underpriveleged kids in the US. So when I finally met its author, Kaycee Eckhardt, it didn’t surprise me that she’s doing eight things at once—making tea, tending her dogs, talking about big ideas, and planning the details of her day—all at a mile a minute without even looking particularly frazzled. I sent her a few questions over email, and she miraculously found some time to answer them.

1. The end of Katrina’s Sandcastles sees you leaving the New Orleans charter school of which you’d been a founding faculty member and planning to pursue non-classroom work. What have you been up to since then? Where are you right now?

I have a lot of gratitude for the work that I am able to do now. As a teacher, I had a great impact on the students in my room and school, and while I miss that work terribly, my current work allows me to share what I have learned and to work for education reform on a national scale. I run a summer institute for experienced teachers, where we learn about the real causes of the literacy gap and how to combat them with students in high needs schools. I also work directly with some K-2 teachers and classrooms on their early literacy instruction, and with some early career teachers in Nashville on curriculum preparation. All of my work is focused on high standards and high expectations for students, as well as pushing for equity in schools and districts. We are in the middle of a sea change in education right now, and it’s an exciting time to be doing good work for kids.

2. The charter school that you describe in the book had a militaristic approach to discipline and structuring the students’ (and teachers’) activities. What are your thoughts about the benefits and drawbacks of that model?

We need to take a close look at what we are asking from students, and why. Students do need a high level of structure when they first enter a school – they need to understand the culture and what is expected. The purpose of initial compliance is to create an environment in which students can learn. However, often teachers and schools end up focusing on compliance instead of remembering that structure should be a means to an end = student’s learning. And often developmentally appropriate learning doesn’t look like students sitting quietly while the teacher presents, or until she involves them. It’s often messy and loud—it involves debate and discussion, group work and also a lot of time to think critique and contemplate. Teachers need to get out of the way and allow students to do the work—this means allowing some rule-breaking in place of academic experimentation. Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves constantly if the rules we impose on students—and teachers!—are a means to an end, or if they stifle the creativity and freedom of thought we want to foster in children.

3. A lot of the book is about your struggle to maintain your health and personal life in the midst of an all-consuming and high-stress job. That’s something a lot of readers in many fields can relate to—can you offer any life advice for your fellow committed-but-overwhelmed workers?

I don’t know if I have any advice, given that this is an ongoing struggle for me, as it is with many of us. But I do know that sometimes we forget that our relationships, families, and our bodies are jobs as well—they take effort, consideration, attention and a lot responsibility. Too often we allow our “work” to consume us and we allow that to be an excuse for investing less in what actually, in the long run, matters more. If I had any advice, it would be to ask yourself if you allow your “job” to give you a reason not to attend to other important things—yoga class, a bike ride with your partner, a dog walk, sitting down to dinner that you prepare, calling your grandmother, painting that wall in your house a joyful orange. Caring for yourself and what sustains you is your most important job.

4. If you were to sit down with the president tomorrow, what three policy proposals for education would you recommend?

If I could wave a magic wand, and address three issues in education today, it would first be to put a great teacher in front of every child, regardless of that child’s neighborhood, city, socioeconomic status, race, or age. Great teaching is the number one indicator of academic success in students: a student with a great teacher can generate 5-6 months more learning in a single year than a poor performing teacher. But poor school leadership, low pay, and lack of support and training drive many of our best and developing teachers from the classroom. Retention of our best teachers need to be a major focus—and this includes the removal of teachers who are not up to par.

I would also ask for a significant focus on early education. A child’s reading level by third grade is one of the most consistent predictors of success or failure. A child who can’t read on grade level by 3rd grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who does read proficiently by that time. Add poverty to the mix, and a student is 13 times less likely to graduate on time than his or her proficient, wealthier peer. This should call our attention to what is happening before third grade—not after. A greater focus on knowledge-building, vocabulary, read alouds, and literacy in all content areas would shore up some of this—and there are some great programs, like Core Knowledge (which is free!) to do this.

Finally, I believe strongly that the adoption of the Common Core State Standards was the right move for our country. Contrary to the white noise of the media and a few loud, uneducated people, the standards do not mandate curriculum—they simply outline what student should know at the end of each grade. We are falling further and further behind other first world countries and this, in great part, has been due to the fact that we have been teaching to low standards, or erratic standards that changed from state to state. I encourage anyone who’s skeptical to go read them—they outline a clear, rigorous progression of what a student needs to do to be a competitive critical thinker by the end of high school. The shifts for Literacy and Math called for by the Common Core call for powerful changes in our classroom practice and changes that, if we stay the course, could increase equity in our schools, as well as drastically improve the quality of instruction.

This is part of a series of interviews with Microcosm authors. The most recent one was with another New Orleans writer, Urban Revolutions author Emilie Bahr.

Urban Revolutionary: An interview with Emilie Bahr

December 14, 2015 — by Elly Blue

Urban Revolutions from Micheal Boedigheimer on Vimeo.

urban revolutions book cover Emilie Bahr’s new book Urban Revolutions: A Woman’s Guide to Two-Wheeled Transportation just turned up from the printer, to the delight of everyone at the office. So much hard work and love went into this book. Emilie fully deployed her chops as a journalist and urban planner, her hard-won knowledge of urban transportation bicycling, and her love and knowledge of her home city of New Orleans (we’re pretty sure this is the only book out there with advice about biking during Mardi Gras!). Pretty much everyone at Microcosm worked hard on this book, and our graphic designer Meggyn actually started biking while laying it out. She’d been wanting to ride for a while and reports that this book “answered a lot of my questions… that I didn’t want to ask!” With a pre-publication track record like that, we have high hopes for the rest of this book’s life!

In honor of the book’s existence (it officially comes out on April 12th, and is available directly via Microcosm until then), we sent the author some questions about how and why the book came to be, New Orleans’s surprising rise to bicycling prominence, as well as (feeding a longstanding fascination of mine) the role of bicycles during and after Katrina. Read through to the end for an extra surprise!

1. Congrats on your new book, Urban Revolutions! What’s the origin story of the book—what gave you the idea to write it?

Although I haven’t always known how to define it, as a longtime fan and observer of cities, I’ve always been interested in how the shape of our environments affects opportunity: everything from transportation options to health to access to jobs (all of which, in the end, are fundamentally related). At a very basic level, the book was inspired by forging connections over the years between these ideas. It’s also inspired by my own experience as a pretty typical, car-dependent American who was woken up to another way of getting around not all that long ago and who suddenly felt (at the risk of sounding melodramatic) as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes. As I started using my bike more and more to get around, I realized that there were lots of other people out there like me – and yet also many more people, including many of my friends, for whom the idea of using the bike as a means of transport was as foreign a concept as it had once been for me. I was especially interested in this latter group and what it was exactly that kept them out of the saddle, and that became the basis for my graduate school research. I also noticed that among my friends who didn’t bike or who didn’t bike regularly (most of them women), many were intrigued by the idea of biking, but were held back by various obstacles, and a number of them really had no idea where to begin. I wanted to create a tool to help them overcome those barriers by really honing in on their specific concerns.

2. The book’s subtitle is “A Woman’s Guide to Two-Wheeled Transportation.” Why that subtitle? Is the book only for women?

It turns out the resistance to bicycling among women isn’t unique to my friend circle. Nationally, only about a quarter of transportation bicyclists are female, a phenomenon that is not universal in the developed world and likely relates to a whole variety of factors, from social policies and norms that place more of the burden for household and childcare duties on women to very valid concerns in our car-centric environments about vulnerability to traffic crashes and crime to the fact that women are simply not as exposed to the practice, which means many of us don’t even consider it as a possibility. This book started out as a how-to guide designed to address concerns that are specific to women, though many of these concerns are also shared by men too. And I would say it turned out to be much more than a how-to guide. In the end, it’s really an exploration of the state of the American transportation landscape, how it’s changing, and what this means for everyone. I think this book should appeal to anyone who is interested in urban environments, how people get around, and who might want to brush up on how to ride and maintain a bike.

3. Two chapters of the book are devoted to your home city of New Orleans, which is one of the best unsung bike cities in the US. What makes cycling work there? What makes it different?

I said earlier that my own experience helped inspire this book, and that experience is inextricably tied to New Orleans. I write in the introduction to Urban Revolutions about hearing about what then sounded to me like a crazy plan to begin installing bike infrastructure in New Orleans. I was working as a reporter and decided to write a story about this, in part because I wanted to find out what insane people would dare ride a bike in my city. What I didn’t realize at the time was that New Orleans already had a strong bicycling culture – it had just been sailing under my radar.

In terms of what makes New Orleans different, this city has a number of inherent advantages over many other American cities, and particularly many other southern cities, when it comes to bicycling. We developed before the rise of the car, and we’ve retained a lot of the street connectivity, intermixing of land uses, and pedestrian-scale development patterns that come with that that really facilitate bicycling. It also helps that we’re flat. Moreover, we’ve seen pretty substantial infrastructure investments here in recent years that I would say have helped to advertise the bicycling possibilities that have long existed and helped make many more people feel comfortable bicycling here.

emilie and trailer What’s also important to note about New Orleans is that we’re a poor city. Our poverty rate is significantly higher than the national average and a large proportion of people don’t have access to cars, so there are a number of people who get around by bike and have for many years before the infrastructure was installed because they have no other option. I would say that our bicycling community is very racially and economically diverse, which is increasingly true across the country, but New Orleans bicyclists really defy the stereotype of bicyclist as wealthy, white male. More and more, I notice a whole lot of women biking here too.

Another thing that I think really helps to set New Orleans apart from much of the rest of the world is that we have these massive street celebrations here several times a year, the most famous and massive of them, of course, being Mardi Gras. At Mardi Gras, our streets are essentially shut down to automobile traffic for days at a time, and residents are forced to reconsider our relationship with the streets, even if for a finite period. I would say that Mardi Gras and some of our other major festivals are what introduce a lot of people to the possibility of biking and help us to think about the streets as being something other than channels for moving cars as quickly as possible.

4. There’s been a lot of focus in the news lately around the 10 year anniversary of Katrina. Were you in the city during Katrina? Did bikes play a role in disaster relief or recovery? Or did the hurricane pave the way for bike infrastructure and culture in some sense?

In August 2005, I was splitting my time between New Orleans, where my boyfriend at the time lived, and Thibodaux, a small town about an hour’s drive from the city where I was working for the local newspaper. Before the storm, I evacuated from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where my dad lives, and spent a long night until the power went out desperately trying to figure out what was going on in the city, the extent of which wouldn’t become clear to us for some time after the rest of the world knew.

So much can be and has been said about Katrina and its aftermath, but one of the things the storm revealed was just how cut off a modern society becomes when electricity and gasoline lines are severed. I sneaked back into the city about a week after the storm, and even in places that didn’t flood, it resembled something out of a post-apocalyptic novel: there was no power, no gas, military people marched in the streets. And the people who refused to leave had to rethink how they got around. You might say they resorted to old-fashioned means, using canoes, bikes, their own two feet. For many people, getting in to see their homes, especially in flooded areas, required using a bike, and some of the most powerful early footage of the damage from the storm was shot by people riding around on bike.

In the recovery from the storm, one of the silver linings has been that it’s allowed us to reconsider how we do things here. I wouldn’t say we’ve fully taken advantage of these opportunities, but one area in which it’s really caused a shifting in the public consciousness is transportation, and this is in part because the city suddenly got a lot of federal rebuilding money to redo its streets after the storm. Starting in 2008, thanks to the advocacy and creativity of a number of folks here, many of the streets that were being resurfaced were striped with bikeways for the first time. A few years later, a local city councilwoman who cares a lot about transportation beyond just moving people in cars successfully won passage of citywide policy requiring that all users – pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, people with physical disabilities, and drivers – be considered in rebuilding our streets. At the same time that this new infrastructure continues to take shape, we’ve experienced a surge in new people moving to New Orleans post-Katrina. Many of them come from cities with strong bicycling traditions and they have continued to spread the gospel in their adopted home, even if it’s just by example. There was a time not all that long ago when a bike commuter would have seemed like an exotic species here. Today that is definitely no longer the case.

5. Anything else I ought to ask you about?

Well, I guess I could mention that I’m six months pregnant. I write in the book about parenthood as one of the obstacles many women face in getting on the bike, and I’m interested to see how pregnancy and motherhood affect my own bicycling patterns. I’m determined to continue biking but this will definitely require tweaking my routines. Already, I’ve found myself opting for my upright, Dutch-style bike over the speedier model I typically ride because it more readily accommodates my rapidly-changing figure. That said, I’m excited about the challenges and the new perspective parenthood will provide. And I’m looking forward to having a reason to invest in some of those adorable contraptions for toting around kids on bike.

This interview with Urban Revolutions author Emilie Bahr is part of a series. The last interview was with Alexander Barrett. The next one is with Kaycee Eckhardt, author of Katrina’s Sandcastles.

Rampant Media Consumption—November 2015: Confessions and Guilty Pleasures

December 07, 2015 — by Microcosm workers

dil to pagal hai A year ago when we first launched the RMC, people were pretty excited about it, and would send in their short book + movie + tv + art + more experimental media (like the sounds on the bus) links and reviews every week. But participation dwindled. We started posting monthly, and then less than once a month, just when enough people had sent that in. Then, during a staff meeting, it came out that a lot of us feel a little self-conscious about what we go home and read/watch/listen to unwind. So we decided that this month we’d all be super honest and not worry about meeting some invisible cultural bar.

So here it is, the RMC guilty pleasures edition!

Jeff

My mom got me into watching Dr. Who. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but it’s strangely addicting.

I found a free Hank Williams record and said “Why not?”

But I’m not sure why I keep playing it.

Hadn’t seen the movie Trading Places in a long long time. So yeah, I watched it again.

Meggyn

Erykah Badu’s new mixtape “But You Cain’t Use My Phone” is hands down my favorite release this year. It was released today and it’s a careful selection of phone related songs that have been important to the r&b/hip hop scene for the past two decades. This is important.

[Meggyn also wrote: “I made a playlist called Velotronica on Spotify full of my guilty Vegas dance favorites. Should I link? (They power me through the hardest hills.)” But she did not send the link.]

Elly

I watched the whole latest season of Project Runway. Then for a while I couldn’t stop watching all the Bollywood movies that are hitting Netflix, especially the amazing ones from the 90s starring Shah Rukh Khan—my favorite was Dil to Pagal Hai (The Heart is Crazy), which left me feeling weirdly giddy and whistling the tag line on my bike for a week.

I spend a lot more time every week than I ever plan to reading long articles online. Recent ones that stuck with me include Rebecca Solnit’s ultimate answer to the whole “having it all” racket + the tedious questions women are supposed to constantly field about our reproductive plans, and the super-long New Yorker article about Megan Phelps-Roper—every paragraph had a new amazing reveal. And here’s a real pleasure: Carrie Fisher and her dog Gary splendidly demolish inane interview questions on Good Morning America.

Thea

Can’t stop watching Spiral, the French crime drama.

Finally watched This Must be the Place movie with Sean Penn by Paolo Sorrentino. Wasn’t disappointed.

More BBC bicycle love.

Ack! Now even coloring books are gendered.

Tomy

The Great British Baking Show — It’s great. I don’t know what it is about it that makes me very happy.

Book Review: God, Forgive these Bastards

December 02, 2015 — by Natalie Petrellis

god, forgive these bastards book and lp set We ask each of our interns to review one of our books before they go. Natalie heads home to Australia next week, and left us with these thoughts on our first and (until April 2016) only work of fiction…or is it fiction? To tell the truth, we’re not totally sure.

I originally overlooked this book when I read the title on its spine—I was feeling a little lazy that day and so I was looking for something that had a more ‘familiar’ title. But after flicking through a whole lot of DIY books, I began to crave something with a solid narrative, and that’s when I reached for God, Forgive These Bastards: Stories from the Forgotten Life of Georgia Tech Pitcher Henry Turner.

Being from Australia, I don’t really know much about baseball or anybody named Henry Turner. After I read this book, I honestly don’t know what I learnt from it at all. I realised quite quickly that these stories weren’t really all that much about baseball. In fact, to me at least, it felt like they were more about America and the strange things that can happen to you here.

God, Forgive These Bastards begins with Rob Morton meeting Henry for the first time, at a bus stop in Portland, Oregon. Beginning in an ordinary biographical kind-of-way, the stories then take you into a direction that’s a little less predictable. Kind of like when you accidentally catch the wrong bus and end up in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Some of Henry’s stories are violent and sad, and it was hard to know if they were true or not—and while I was reading them, I really didn’t want to know the truth.

The whole concept of the book reminds me of when I ride the buses and see all of the other regular commuters. I try and imagine stories about what their lives were like before they ended up riding the same buses as I do—and unless they approach me to tell a story about themselves, I’ve usually been too shy to strike up a conversation.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, even though I’m sure that there are so many different things that you could take away from these stories, I feel like this book helped me examine how we perceive and contribute to our own ideas of ‘culture’. Like the way it feels as though we’re too absorbed in our own lives, and just too afraid of each other to talk and trade stories.

I did find that a couple parts of the book were hard to believe because it felt like there were missing details that I would’ve liked to know; nevertheless it was a good read. My favourite line from the book was in my least favourite chapter—my least favourite because all of the things that happen are just so dark and horrible. Henry explains how he is feeling at a time when he feels incredibly vulnerable: enry‘It was the kind of panic that I imagine the devil would make you feel if he walked over to the bed where you slept, lied down next to you, and wrapped his arms around your body.’ And I like this line the best because it describes exactly how I felt reading that chapter.

Morton also uses this book to talk about how down-and-out people like Henry are left unforgiven and hated. I don’t know if he’s really saying that we should forgive people for making us feel intense pain or for committing horrible crimes—it does come across that way—but Morton does explain that people shouldn’t be defined by the bad things that they’ve done, and I suppose that just listening to others to learn from their mistakes can be a good thing to do.

Henry’s stories are told with an honest voice, which makes the unbelievable, believable. These stories are crazy, and mean, and probably everything that you don’t want to imagine your life to ever be. God, Forgive These Bastards is definitely a book that I would read again, and the soundtrack by Mortons’s band, The Taxpayers, is equally as thrilling.

If you want to read the book while playing the soundtrack on vinyl, we’re doing another pressing, and it’ll be available again in 2016!

Rampant Media Consumption – September and October 2015

November 04, 2015 — by Microcosm workers

basically this is us Input inspires output! Here’s what we’ve been taking in this month:

Thea

Scoped these concept albums.

Saw the BBC special about cycling, Victorian women, and healing through exercise.

Enjoyed reading Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s newest comics journalism on food & tradition.

Meggyn

The new Alpine album makes me want to treat myself to a nice vegan pasta dinner. The title has no indication of the sound. It’s glorious.

I started reading Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander, but I stopped when they referred to all designers as “he”. Debating on diving back into it.

Also thumbed through Fingerprint No. 2: The Evolution of Handmade Elements in Graphic Design for some inspiration.

Taylor

Been reading this.

And this.

Elly

I read two books on vacation: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (rumor has it that one of her earlier novels, All Over Creation, was inspired by the real life of the author of our book Maps to the Other Side) blew my mind. It’s about nature, quantum physics, japanese youth culture, and an anarchist nun.

Then I thought that Jo Baker’s Longbourne was going to be totally silly lite reading but it’s a really good book. Think class-conscious Jane Austin fanfic. Yup!

Love Letters to Cities: An interview with Alexander Barrett

November 03, 2015 — by Microcosm

alexander barrett with puppy Alexander Barrett had only lived in our city for a year when he wrote and illustrated one of our most charming books, This is Portland: The City You’ve Heard You Should Like, telling the real story of just how weird things are here…much weirder than as shown on the television show Portlandia, thank you very much. Later, he moved to China for a short time, and the result is the just-as-charming book about a very different place: This is Shanghai: What it’s Like to Live in the World’s Most Populous City (which, by the way, comes out this month!). He took a minute to answer some questions about his work and plans and where he’s at right now in San Francisco. Readers of This is Shanghai will recognize one important theme from that book which has stayed with him…as illustrated in the photos here.

1. Where are you *right now* and what is the most important thing to know about what’s going on around you there?

Right this second, I’m in a sunny edit suite in San Francisco, working on a short documentary about a street sign and getting ready for Beer Feelings, a show of illustrations I do in San Diego every November. But most importantly, I’m hanging out with a super chill puppy.

2. I know it’s crass to ask, but when you aren’t making charming illustrated books about places you’re getting to know, what exactly do you do for a living?

I used to know, I think. I used to be a copywriter at ad agencies. Now I’m kind of a copywriter and mostly a regular writer at YouTube. I guess I’m trying to put okay things into the world for a living.

3. What’s your favorite book that you’ve read this year?

This year I finally finished Raymond Chandler’s oeuvre. And that’s the first time I’ve ever typed “oeuvre.” I wish I could say I read The Long Goodbye this year, but I have to be honest and say Farewell, My Lovely, which is also incredible.

4. What’s next for you? Will there be a This is San Francisco? And finally, the question on everyone’s mind: Where will you live next?

With Portland and Shanghai, it took a year to realize I had enough stories to put a book together. I’ll see if that happens with SF. For the first time in a while, I’m not thinking about where I’ll go next. In between the Portland and Shanghai books, I lived in three cities. Three cities that didn’t inspire books. I’m really excited about being in one place for a while. One place with super chill puppies.

alexander barrett with people and puppies in china

This is the latest in our series of author interviews. The previous interview was with Our Bodies, Our Bikes contributor, Bikeyface.

Now Kickstarting: Feminist steampunk bike racing action!

October 30, 2015 — by Elly Blue

When I joined Microcosm at the beginning of this year, I brought along a lot of contracts for books that nobody quite knew what to make of. Several of them have come out since, including the feminist bicycle science fiction volume Pedal Zombies, which was met with quite a bit of skepticism—Microcosm has never published a straight up work of fiction before, much less science fiction. Would we be able to pull it off? Well, one successful Kickstarter campaign and a steady stream of kick-ass reviews later, it looks like it’s working for us.

And not a moment too soon. Today we launched a Kickstarter project for our second science fiction book: The Velocipede Races is Emily June Street’s steampunky YA tale of a young woman’s liberation, a comedy of manners combined with edge-of-your seat racing scenes.

It’s an exciting, page-turning read. Cherie Priest, New York Times Bestselling author of Boneshaker, says that it’s “Tense, thoughtful, and truly thrilling; The Velocipede Races is a marvelous fantasy of manners and machinery.” We hope you like it as much as we do: To learn more, check out the video below, and please consider backing the project before it ends on November 28th.