Laden...
The Narrows of the BookOn the compression of a project and its re-expansion IRL (also contained herein: my March book tour dates)
My book, The Pacific Circuit, officially publishes next week from MCDxFSG. There is also an audiobook that I recorded this winter with Macmillan. It’s all happening! Pre-orders are important for a lot of reasons, so don’t wait. Here’s the official book page and a little site I threw together with blurbs from Rebecca Solnit, Hua Hsu, Jenny Odell, and Steven Johnson. As I get to this milestone, and the book reaches people’s hands, I keep having this thought about the book process. Long ago, pushing kids in swings on Bainbridge Island, the writer Jon Mooallem told me that a book is made of other books. One interpretation of this gnomic wisdom: in the course of crafting a book, there are shadow books hovering around and inside it. Of course, there are all the gaseous possibilities that preceded distillation into the particular words between the covers. (I probably wrote close to 2x the number of words that made it in—and have fragments and half-formed side quests beyond that.) But there’s more to it: a book is not just an object. For me, it was a vast reporting project, a community archive endeavor, an organizing principle for seeing the manifolds of Bay Area life. My fave strange biologist, Michael Levin, regularly points out that all kinds of biological systems have a “bow tie” shape. Some enormous amount of information gets compressed down or encoded through a narrow bottleneck. Then, later, that information is recovered or regenerated on the other side. (LLMs take this form, too.) To me, my printed book is that narrows. Forcing years of work into a hundred thousand words is useful and clarifying. But the conversations the book prompts allow the re-expansion of all those other possibilities in the latent space. Which brings me to my other interpretation of Mooallem’s line, and it’s that books form a network, a web of sources and influences. Other people’s books (and other projects) go into your brain and that fragile grey thing is never the same again. I wanted this book tour to reflect that, too, and I’ve been lucky enough to get interlocutors for the different events who have shaped my way of thinking. I can’t wait to expand and regenerate with them, and I anticipate each discussion will be wildly different. So, here, let me lay out very briefly, the different tour stops and ~vibes~. I hope you can make one that works with your geography and taste. MARCH Tour Dates
I start out back east in conversation with Anand Pandian, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins. His work “[wrestles] in various ways, with the problem of environmental ethics: the cultivation of ecological sensibility, the pursuit of livable relations with the natural world.” I mean… Me too! I’m also excited about visiting Baltimore because I have to admit that the tiniest kernel of this book probably lies in Season 2 of The Wire, the best season, of course. If anyone can take me on a port tour, lemme know. Politics and Prose, Washington, DC I’ll be in conversation with Adam Harris, who wrote a brilliant book on the long battle for racial equality in higher education, The State Must Provide. It’s one of those books that makes you realize how long and winding the fight for justice has been. How many attempts had to be made on the fortress of Jim Crow? So many. I’m really looking forward to digging into the racial mechanics of city planning and urban renewal with Adam. P&T Knitwear, New York Jenny Egan! You may not know this, but she’s a big port nerd. Her book Manhattan Beach told a beautiful story rich with historical texture about the shipyards, and I had her in mind throughout the editing process for The Pacific Circuit. I cannot believe that we’ll actually get to talk maritime on the book’s actual release date. Green Apple Books, San Francisco Lauren Markham’s book, Immemorial, traces this beautiful arc through the feeling of climate change. In her other work, she tries to report out and imagine California’s future. I am pretty sure we’ll discuss some of the book’s environmental and labor themes, but this could go anywhere, really. Live taping of East Bay Yesterday, Oakland East Bay Yesterday is basically an alt weekly in podcast form. Liam produces some of the best reported, most illuminating features on the past and present of the Bay Area, and I feel so lucky that I get to do this live taping. Noni also had a huge influence on this book, both as a character in it and someone who really helped me understand the feeling of West Oakland, before and after the ‘89 earthquake. KQED x The Pacific Circuit, Oakland I love Jenny Odell’s books, their powerful ideas and strange textures, and I can’t imagine someone better for this big event. We will also be blessed by two of the coolest people in town, multi hyphenate Thao Nguyen and Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, who are gonna spin some records after the conversation. We’ll also be sharing some sweet artifacts from my old dockworker buddies, including a film made in the 1970s called Longshoremen at Work and a selection of audio recorded by Brian Nelson back then. And more… !In April, I’ll be at the public library in Oakland, the City Club in Berkeley, then I’m headed up to Portland (!) at Powell’s (!!) and then Seattle (!) with Angela Garbes (!!), before doing a conversation with Dorothy Lazard at Heyday and then some San Francisco Climate Week events. More on all this soon. That’s all for now. Buy the book! Come to an event! Tell your friends! You're currently a free subscriber to oakland garden club. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2025 Alexis C. Madrigal |
Laden...
Laden...
© 2025
