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UofWinds 417, Week 31 2025: The Invisible Chain that Holds Us Together, It’s telling how telling a telling can be, Marking the Dispossessed


Good morning. I have written another summertime edition of this newsletter – which means I wrote most of this the night before because we're going away this long weekend to see family as soon as everyone is sufficiently awake and packed.

Last weekend, we drove to Stratford to see Macbeth and it was single-day road trip out of the city with our EV. Until this trip, we had never charged our vehicle outside of a garage. On this occasion, we didn't charge our car during the play, or even during our dinner. Instead, we were able to sufficiently charge our VW ID.4 using a fast charger while we had soft-serve and coffee. The charge cost us $15 (which was less than our snacks) before heading home.

Macbeth was a treat to experience. It also featured EVs.

The Invisible Chain that Holds Us Together


I have pronounced to my friends – at least twice now – that this summer I am going re-invigorate my slagging reading habit by switching to science fiction and fantasy, instead of the work-related or sobering non-fiction that I usually read. And yet I have not started doing this.

Instead, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time listening to podcasts while editing Wikidata. A podcast that's new to me that I've been enjoying is Our Opinions Are Correct.

It’s the podcast that won three Hugo Awards and built a giant robot out of synthetic bacteria! Explore the meaning of science fiction, and how it's relevant to real-life science and society. Your hosts are Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction, and Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who is obsessed with science. Plus, there’s a delightful cast of contributing hosts! Every two weeks, we take deep dives into science fiction books, movies, television, and comics that will expand your mind – and maybe change your life.

While I haven't gotten far through the podcast's back episodes, I will venture to suggest that I think one of their most recent missives lives up to their billing: Episode 180: The Invisible Chain that Holds Us Together (w/ Alexis Madrigal).

We keep hearing about the supply chain lately... but what is it? And how do all these shipping containers moving around the world shape our lives? We talk to Alexis Madrigal, author of the brand new book The Pacific Circuit, about how trade with Asia has changed Oakland. Plus we talk about how science fiction deals with the idea of the supply chain, and what can go wrong with it.

It is somehow very difficult for our collective us to spend time considering and supporting the necessary regular, invisible work that the Maintainers do (or try to do) around us. Sometimes we have to consider that work in outer space in order to see this work to appreciate its impact and import.

It’s telling how telling a telling can be


Another reason why I haven't been doing much leisure reading recently, is that when I have been reading, I am in the weeds reading academic scholarship for a paper that I have to write before I present it in September. I have been reading some library science and some legal scholarship, and I have been knee-deep in the footnotes.

How do we decide what to do with footnotes? I guess it’s a case by case thing, dependent on priorities… I learned that most publishers are fond of endnotes because they make it faster to edit and design a book with everything tucked in the back as opposed to handling page-by-page space negotiations. Authors and designers will have their own opinions. So will readers. With no one-size-fits-all, as I carried on researching, it became clearer to me that we shouldn’t take for granted the traditional placement of footnotes just because it’s the rule. In view of the danger of minimizing important information by using the default, my take is that everything is up for grabs when typesetting a page. If the standard doesn’t serve the project, switch it up. 

The above is from Luiza Dale's illustrated essay dedicated to marginalia called, It’s telling how telling a telling can be.

If words are your business[1], I think you will also find this essay illuminating.

Texts become canonical because they repeat a dominant view and marginalized because they challenge it, presenting possibilities for difference. Bennett’s lecture title was The Difference It Makes Who is Speaking. Her point was that who does the telling plays a role in how the story is received, documented, and shared over and over. In her slides, she showed many examples of main texts, central to the page of a book, and footnotes, where peripheral but important information lay smaller than everything else.

  1. I thought this phrase was the title of work by Marshall McLuhan, but I misremembered. The title I was thinking of is Culture is our Business. ↩︎

Marking the Dispossessed


In Dale's essay above, there is a paragraph which informed me of an art project called, Marking the Dispossessed.

Danielle Aubert collected, scanned, and compiled 100 used copies of Ursula Le Guin’s 1970s sci-fi novel The Dispossessed to make Marking the Dispossessed — a version of the book that features annotations and marginalia only. We don’t see the words so we can focus on how others have experienced them in the past instead. 

This is what Aubert says about her work:

The project of compiling readers’ marks began after I first read The Dispossessed, around 2009. I was so moved by its contents and the possibility of a different social order that I didn’t want to leave it. This is something that often happens with good books — I am completely sucked in while reading but as soon as I’m done I immediately start forgetting why I liked it so much. This project is, in a way, an exercise in trying to spend more time with The Dispossessed.
I started buying used copies here and there when I encountered them, I thought there was something tautologically satisfying about collecting dispossessed copies of The Dispossessed. I also liked to see the different covers and the signs of previous ownership — the occasional dog-eared pages, receipts, or bookmarks left inside the pages. I began ordering them online, it was almost too easy to get them, and they were cheap. In less than one hour of searching online I could find five or eight used copies, and they would be shipped to me from around the country. I imagined these copies of The Dispossessed languishing in warehouses with no windows, with bar codes on their spines to make them easier and faster to track and find. They ended up in these warehouses, I imagined, after having been a part of personal collections, where they might have been sitting in someone’s basement. Several of the copies were disaquisitioned from libraries (e.g., New Tecumseth Public Library in Ontario and the Ruiz Branch of the Austin Public Library in Texas).

I had an idea of bringing them together, like farflung brethren. Or maybe a sisterhood of books. That had been dispersed through the world, read (consumed), and discarded. But then I doubted my own impulse to collect, especially a book of anarchist fiction. Many passages in The Dispossessed describes possessions as “excrement”. On Anarres, the accumulation of stuff is a sign of poor health, of badness and grossness. (“They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison.” p. 138) And here I found myself, confusingly, collecting old copies of this book, which I liked so much, and the more copies I had the more it turned into stuff.

As I was looking for copies of Marking online, I thought I found a pdf version on the Kregse Arts Detroit website, but when I followed up on my curiousity, I learned that it was only an excerpt used to illustrate her Kresge Arts Fellowship page.

And that's how I learned that Danielle Aubert lives just across the river from me.

In fact, last time I was in Detroit, my family and I likely walked past her apartment, that is, if she hasn't since moved since this video was made.

I think I'm not going to be reading any science fiction this weekend. Instead, I'm going to be reading more about the Detroit Printing Co-op [pdf].

One of the earliest and best-known publications printed at the Co-op was
the first English translation of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.
It had just come out in French in 1967. A group of six friends, including
the Perlmans and Campbell, met every day to translate the text. The
French language edition has no images at all; it’s laid out with wide
margins and follows classical typographic conventions. The English-
language edition, which would be published by Black & Red, is full of
photographs that the group found to be resonant with Debord’s text. They
used images without permission or attention to copyright law, and without
consulting with Debord. Many of them came from the Detroit Public
Library Image Collection, still located on the third floor of the Main
Branch in Detroit.

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