Gosh, it's been awhile. You would have been forgiven if you had thought that Habits of Waste had subsided into that state that afflicts so many web publishing ventures, large and small; we mean the state of perpetual non-updating. As a matter of fact, we thought that a few times ourselves. Just what have we been up to? Well, life has had it's way with us, which is not altogether a bad thing--in fact, it can often be a very good thing. But, good and bad, it's mostly kept us away from HoW. And yet our appetite for film, music, and books remains undiminished. But more about our appetites in a moment.
First of all, we need to thank the contributors to this issue for their extraordinary patience. HoW's uncommonly elastic publishing schedule is mostly due to the fact that article submissions come to us slowly. Yet, even after we had all of the current articles in hand, it took us much longer than is usual for us to get things together. However, we couldn't be more pleased about the articles we're able to share with you. Helen Donlon has written a thorough and engaging survey of the career of Pierre Clémenti, probably most famous for his role in Belle de Jour. Miguel Ramos and Allen Frost conducted an interview with special effects master Ray Harryhausen when he was in Bellingham; there's even video. Andrew Hedden places a Seattle Mariner's cap on Theodor Adorno's head--both through the magic of Photoshop, and through the older magic of analysis--to see how it looks. And Allen Frost continues to work in a genre that he created; in this instance, imagine gorging yourself on the novels of Jack Kerouac and on some classic films noir; and then imagine falling asleep and dreaming about these things; and then further imagine that your dream has extensive footnotes.
This will be the last issue of HoW in its current form. We've thought about making changes for quite some time. Someone remarked a little time back that the website has a very 1999 look. Also, the length of time between issues has tended to increase over the years. We doubt that we ever quite came out on a quarterly schedule, but that's been especially true the last few years. So, we'll be updating the look of the site, and the format. We'll continue to publish articles, but these will come out as we get them, rather than waiting until we have a critical mass for an issue. We will also be posting shorter content--news, observation, etc.--on a more frequent basis. Yes, we suppose we're describing something rather bloggy but are trying to avoid using that word.
Back to our appetites: we've immersed ourselves in our customarily wide range of interests lately. One reason that we've considered moving to having shorter, more immediate content (okay, blog posts) is that we think it might allow us to track our diverse interests better. If you've spent any time with HoW, we think that you will understand it when we say that we've always had a queasy relationship with the "pop" part of pop culture. Most of what we pay attention to isn't remotely popular, nor will it ever be. We've toyed with the idea of calling it HoW, or Reflections Not About Pop Culture, in partial homage to Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, or Letters Not About Love. But whatever we end up calling this venture, and whatever form it takes, we hope that you'll drop in every once in a while--and maybe even send us your own article about (or not about) pop culture.
