Monday 27th March 2023 6.30pm
A conversation with Jonathan Simons, founding editor of offline publishing house Analog Sea
We are delighted to welcome Jonathan Simons, founding editor of offline publishing house Analog Sea. Jonathan will read from Analog Sea’s newly published fourth edition of The Analog Sea Review and discuss offline culture and publishing in the digital age.
Analog Sea was founded in 2018 as a resolutely offline press, based on the conviction that books should be traded between human beings rather than via robots and algorithms. The publisher’s award-winning literary journal, The Analog Sea Review, an annual anthology of carefully curated new and old writing with color artwork, is available exclusively through physical independent bookshops.
In his “Offline Manifesto,” published in the third issue of The Analog Sea Review, Jonathan describes Analog Sea’s activities as “a search-and-rescue mission for a special kind of individual, endangered yet essential should we wish to preserve truth and beauty through another dark age. […] Eliminate the dreamers and we fall too easily for fascism and war. How desperately we need the strength to dream and the artists and thinkers to show us how.”
Turn your phones off, or better yet, leave them at home, and join us for a special evening of inspiring readings and thought-provoking discussion about how to nurture contemplation, culture, and community in our technology-
saturated world.
Jonathan Simons is the founding editor of offline publishing house Analog Sea and its literary journal, The Analog Sea Review. As a poet and essayist, he has written for publications including The London Magazine, PN Review, El País, subTerrain Magazine, and The Analog Sea Review. Jonathan researched Buddhist poetics at Naropa University and McGill University and was formerly a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Humans and Machines, in Berlin.
Praise for Analog Sea
“A hardback, print-only publication, it strongly opposes Internet culture and operates entirely offline, so that one must either find it and related publications in a real bookshop or write for the company’s stock list in Austin [or Freiburg]. Doing so is worth the trouble. If I had an actual guest room, The Analog Sea Review would be on its nightstand.”
— Washington Post
“One means of escape from broadsheet pontification is offered by the Analog Sea Review. “Art demands interiority,” writes Jonathan Simons. The internet is a “spectacular tool,” but one that can overwhelm those who wield it, through “pernicious groupthink” and the “philistine disruptions of big-tech capital.” They themselves are sufficiently overwhelmed to refer approvingly to “offline culture”: “We advocate for the human right to disconnect.” It’s just culture to us, but we get the idea, and rather like it.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Analog Sea faces the worst about the likely prospect of “downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and the world.” It turns to poets and artists, living and dead, to novelists, physicists, psychoanalysts, film-makers and philosophers, not only for their views on the pixelated madness, but for hints on how our relationship to primary experience could be restored.”
— PN Review