journal features

notes from a novel

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2023.09.02

My brother passed along this rather incredible account of typeset in the Star Trek movies and TV shows. It was pretty great! I buy the argument that the book on the inner workings of the Enterprise - which included some details on the fonts in play - was a part of the story in bringing the movies about in the first place.

All that Star Trek reading reminds me of course of The Kirk, The McCoy, and The Spock. Forming a Freudian Trio, they can be the center of a Five Man Band. Which is how I'm playing it in my novel.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)