Reading, writing, radio
A chat with Seb Emina on new chapters, creative projects, and his long-time love of all things audio.
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I first heard — or rather, read —
’s name signing off the editor’s letter in an issue of The Happy Reader five years or so ago. Looking back through my emails, I’m also reminded that since its first send-out on the 2nd of July 2020 until its final farewell earlier this year, I was a dedicated subscriber to the magazine’s accompanying newsletter, Happy Readings. Every fortnight, it would land in my inbox, bringing with it stories and snippets that always connected to thoughts and happenings in my own life.Both the magazine and the newsletter have now come to a close, a fact that I was understandably quite sad about having felt so psychically seen by them for so long, but as Seb tells me, sometimes it is time for something new. He has since started his own newsletter,
— a delightful conglomeration of ‘editorial objects’ that never fail to make me laugh or think or discover something I wouldn’t have otherwise come across. We also talk about reading as a resistance to distraction and the distractions that arise nonetheless, the tensions of writing and editing your own work, and his decades-long love of radio.Seb seems to me the kind of person blessed with infinite creative ideas, many of which are brought to full fruition through a healthy mix of humour, thoughtfulness, and a commitment to originality, all of which I think come through in this conversation. For paid subscribers, he has shared a selection of books he has read and loved recently, as well as the radio stations he revisits time and time again — most of which I am sure none of us would have stumbled upon unguided.
The way I usually start is by asking who you are and for you to say a few words about yourself.
That’s a tricky question, isn’t it, on some level? I’m a freelancer, so I don’t go to an office, I work for myself, basically. Usually, I say something like, I’m an editor and writer or a writer and editor, depending on who I’m talking to I put one or the other first. Lately, that has also occasionally spilled over into being a co-curator. I have a lot of imposter syndrome surrounding that, but it’s undoubtedly true so I have no choice.
Then I’ve also been involved in projects that are more about making — a kind of contemporary art thing as well, but I’m not going to call myself an artist because that really is too much. But yes, generally, I’m an editor and writer who works across lots of different kinds of projects. I’m perhaps best known for editing a magazine called The Happy Reader for the last decade or so, but I’ve also worked for other magazines, including Fantastic Man, and as a frequent contributor to The Gentlewoman, so that little family.
Before that, I wrote a book about breakfast called The Breakfast Bible and my first big editorial project was a website called The London Review of Breakfasts, which I founded in 2005 and ran for 10 years as well. So I have these kind of 10-year projects. I didn’t set out like that but that’s the rhythm at which I seem to do things.
All of them are such delightfully original projects which I feel like not many people get the opportunity to work on. They are each these lovely nests of creativity in their own right. But I’d love to talk about The Happy Reader — that went on for 10 years and recently came to a close and I wondered how you were feeling about that.
The thing is, I knew that it was coming to a close for roughly a year before it did so, but we didn’t announce it publicly so for me the worlds in motion were kind of at a lag with what I had gone through. The final issue came out in June 2023 with Tilda Swinton on the cover and I had known that that would be the final issue for quite a while. I think I felt a combination of deep sadness because it was a really amazing project to do — a dream project!
If you’d come up to me before and asked me what my dream magazine would have been, I’m not even sure I would have had the gusto to imagine something so tightly aligned to my interests and being supported so well by Penguin and Fantastic Man in the way that it was. It was a complete pinch-yourself dream to get to do for that long. But you do anything for 10 years and some part of you is rearing to do other stuff in your life and wonders, “Is this it then? Am I just going to do this forever?”
So yeah, on some level there was also a tinge of relief because I was never going to walk away from The Happy Reader, so someone had to let me be free to think about what might be next and to build new things. It was always a freelance project so someone might have argued that I was never full-time on The Happy Reader, I could have done other things, but I put a lot of my creative energy, if you want to call it that, into that magazine, and I always found it hard to do much else beyond that. It would be so intense before an issue went to print and then I would just kind of lie on the floor for a few weeks afterwards and then start the next one.
It sounds pretty dreamy, really, and just thinking about the most recent one, the interview was with Tilda Swinton by Deborah Levy, who I love, so it was such a great interview to read. Each issue had the same format of an interview to start and then focused on a book in the second half — this last one being the Odyssey — and I thought that the way you tackle one single book in such a diverse way, all the different articles took a completely different angle, and it just captured the richness of a text and how people can have such different perspectives on a single story. The magazine captured that so well and it seems like reading is a really important thing in your work, in general.
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? In a way, I think it’s funny that I ended up doing that magazine because I’d done all this stuff about breakfast for 10 years and I suppose the underlying quality that the breakfast stuff — The London Review of Breakfasts and The Breakfast Bible — had was taking breakfast incredibly seriously, which is to say, taking breakfast as seriously as we’re supposed to take literature and reading.
That was both a way of making people laugh but also a way of getting at the depth we can find in quotidian activities such as eating breakfast. We had some amazing pieces both in the book and on the website that were often funny, but also poignant, sad, inspiring, and then I did an article for The Gentlewoman about breakfast that they liked a lot and asked me to do more and more different kinds of pieces, eventually asking me to edit The Happy Reader.
I only thought of this towards the end, but it was almost like having taken breakfast as seriously as literature, we were now going to take literature as seriously as breakfast. It was both a way of opening up that subject and trying to do a different kind of literary magazine. I love The London Review of Books, I love The Paris Review, I love Granta, I love these publications, but they all have a certain approach and tone of voice in common, I think. A certain self-seriousness which I think can actually make people feel that there is an inside and an outside, and I wanted to make a magazine that didn’t feel like that, that still took books and reading very seriously, implicitly, but never felt that it was a specialist topic. That’s why we used the term ‘reading’ a lot, as opposed to the term ‘books’ or ‘literature’, which sounds weird but those terms when you pair them with terms like ‘magazine’ and ‘subject matter’, there are people who love reading but they immediately think, “Oh well that’s not for me, that’s for the kind of literary in-group”, you know? Many magazines feel like they are written less for readers than for writers, I would argue.
I guess you want to avoid mysticizing things so that everybody feels like they can have a little bite of it…
Well, avoiding mysticizing and avoiding fetishizing.
Yes, exactly because then it really gets a bit wanky, doesn’t it?
But with fetishizing, if you think about social media as well, there’s a huge Bookstagramer, Booktok thing where it’s all about the physicality of the book and having these really strange still lives and overhead shots with a kind of mise-en-scene around the book, and that’s interesting. Reading is so big right now and in a sense, it’s strange that we finished The Happy Reader because it feels like every celebrity is launching a book club.
And isn’t that such a funny thing to say though, “reading is so big right now”. It’s so true!
But I mean, reading or even literature as an aura, as a set of visual prompts, as something with a cultural cache that people want to tap into. And brands are at it as well, really you’re seeing little conglomerations in fashion boutiques, in hotels…
There is even text from books on clothing, so it’s a big thing, but it’s funny, I was listening to a podcast or reading a newsletter about this very thing the other day and they were talking about how literature is now having a moment in high fashion where they are taking passages and putting them on a pair of jeans and it’s so funny to me that reading can have such a “moment” when to me, reading it just such a constant through life and a guiding force. I don’t think it’s bad that it’s having a moment because maybe this moment will stay and people will keep reading lots which is always good, it’s just interesting that it can go in and out like that.
Well with fashion, for a long time, it was art and the art world. Fashion loves to find a way to be different and it’s almost as if slowly they are realising that there’s this other very distinguished, prestigious art form over here that they’re going to start tapping into instead. Maybe it will be contemporary classical music in five years or something. But you’re right, for all these art forms we’re going to have those of us who have just been enjoying them for their own sake forever, so that kind of thing will always seem bizarre to the people who do that, but you’re right it’s a strange time.
I guess maybe it has something to do with how everybody gets so into their screens that actually sometimes they need to swing the other way and do something totally analog. One thing about reading, which you said in an interview, it was about reading as an act of resistance to distraction and I thought that was such a good line because one of the reasons I love reading so much from a book rather than audiobook is that you can’t really do anything other than read when you’re reading. I wondered if you might be able to talk about that sentiment a little bit.
Well, I just finished one of the books that was often recommended by The Happy Reader cover interviewees which is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Have you read that book?
I haven’t but I’ve read interviews with her about it and I really want to read it.
It’s one of those books where I was like, “Oh yeah, I kind of know what it’s going to say,” and then I read it and I didn’t know what it was going to say at all! It’s so good and so well argued and so interesting. Part of what I really liked about it was that she uses a lot of artwork to support her core argument which goes beyond “stop looking at your screen, it’s a waste of time” and into how social media, algorithmic media, addictive media is of a piece with a form of capitalism that is colonising the parks and libraries of the mind.
I thought that was a really nice analogy, in the same way that parks and libraries are always under threat, under pressure in the real world, it’s as if they’ve found ways to get to those things in our own brains which are the equivalent of parks and libraries. Jenny Odell would categorise that as “doing nothing” from the point of view of being a consumer, being a subject of a capitalist state, as such. I don’t want to get to much into that C-word Capitalist stuff, but there’s just something about it that isn’t always about being useful or feeding into productivity or whatever, it’s just something else.
So yes, reading as resistance ties into all that stuff as a concept, but it’s hard to do because I don’t know about you but every time I read I have this kind of urge to look at my phone the whole time which I resent and hate and I try to find ways to stop myself, not from looking at my phone, but just that constant drag on me…
Even wanting to look at it!
Well, exactly, even having to resist that urge takes energy and time which is profoundly depressing in many ways. I was just looking at an old article I did for Fantastic Man, actually, a very short thing about taking a pile of books you’ve been meaning to read in the morning, and reading each one for five minutes and five minutes only to a stopwatch.
I do that sporadically because I find that if I put a stopwatch on, the urge to actually look at my phone completely evaporates because I’m now at the bidding of my past self who said “I’m going to read for this time”, so what kind of a schmuck would I be to look at my phone in the five minutes that I’ve assigned? It’s a very effective way and in fact, that was the more powerful part of the recommendation than per se, zipping through a bunch of books.
So, The Happy Reader has come to an end and now you’ve got your Substack. I used to subscribe to the Happy Reader newsletter as well, so I was very sad when it was all finishing, but then I read your first newsletter and thought, “Well, everything is going to be fine.” I enjoyed it so much, and I love reading them when they come out. I think what’s so nice about them is that there is such a great curation of original, delightful, surprising little bits and pieces. There’s France’s best rabbit, all sorts of interesting correspondence and conversations, the bit about writers’ robes, just super surprising stuff, and I thought it would be nice to talk about how you approach bringing it together.
Well, first of all, what I didn’t want to do was just a continuation of The Happy Reader or carry on doing the newsletter Happy Readings on a different platform, but I did want there to be enough commonality there that I could bring some of the old Happy Reader audience with me because of course I cherish all of them, all of you, and I wanted to do something that people would carry on enjoying. There was a slight tension between those two urges that started to grow into what Read Me became, I guess. And then there’s the tension between me as a writer and me as an editor — the two practices are quite different and you seem to do the same, so you will recognise those urges as being slightly different. I do both things but I think I am a slightly insecure writer and a slightly confident editor, so perhaps that’s why I like to assemble these sprees of shorter items that are constantly surprising and take funny yet somehow logical hand-brake turns in the middle of proceedings if you see what I mean.
So there was that tension, and then a feeling that I get a lot of newsletters from writers that I really admire, but when it’s an essay of 1000, 2000 words, I’m not always in the right mindset to read it immediately, and then if I don’t then the chances of me ever doing so are, unfortunately, greatly reduced. So, I had this notion that there must be something good, something fun, something interesting that could be done with this format of between 5 and 15 — I saw the phrase somewhere “editorial objects” and I quite like it — so I like to conceive of every item in the newsletter as an editorial object. I want every issue to have some sort of contact with the world in it, I don’t want to just sit here at my desk writing something, I want to talk to someone, email with someone, go somewhere, so hence France’s Best Rabbit — I was going to the Salon d’Agriculture, France’s biggest farm show anyway, so I just thought that this was a really good opportunity for an item in the newsletter.
Then I kind of use some of the access that doing The Happy Reader, Fantastic Man, and other projects has given me with artists, celebrities, whoever. There’s a kind of question you can ask people where it’s almost quicker for them to answer it than to tell you they don’t want to answer it, so I quite like doing that as well. I’m starting to do a few longer interviews, which are almost Happy Reader-ish, but at the same time I’m trying to work out how to make them less so, and then I’m trying maybe to work out how that fits in because I’m a bit on the fence about suddenly having a 1000 word interview in the middle of an issue.
In general, I want to make something that people are excited to see in their inbox and want to open and sit down with and everything is hell-bent on that goal. I don’t want it to be too themed or easy to describe in terms of what it’s “about”, I want it to be more about approach and for that to be the thing that people are excited by. Both The Happy Reader and the London Review of Breakfasts were very themed projects, which I really enjoyed, but some part of me just wants to do something that’s almost impossible to easily define, which is probably quite stupid of me from the point of view of getting subscribers and earning money from it, but nonetheless, it’s where my heart is pulling me, so for now I’m going to stick it out. Does that answer the question at all?
I think that was perfect. It’s interesting what you’ve just said about not wanting to be too themed, which is a bit of a leap from your two previous projects that had quite defined constraints. Those kinds of parameters can be really helpful to move a project forward because you’re not sitting in front of a blank page without anything to guide you, whereas now you are kind of shedding that and doing something completely different!
I have a lot of rules that I don’t share. I set myself constraints. One of which is that I try as much as possible not to talk about the newsletter in the newsletter. Sometimes I do, but where I do there’s a reason for it. And then, another one is that I don’t — actually I’m not going to talk about the other ones, but there’s a whole series of them that I enjoy setting for myself.
You know, web developers talk about the back end and the front end, and I like to think of a newsletter and the creative process that goes into it as having a front end and a back end. So, there’s a lot going on in the back end that people will never see, but hopefully it brings something invaluable to the experience of reading it, which is like five minutes or something that it takes to read it. I do put a lot of energy and thought into it.
Then with the insecure writing thing, what I mean is that I might spend 45 minutes writing and re-writing a paragraph or something, which will go from dense and knotty to really breezy and readable and back again a few times before I settle on what it is, slightly regretfully realising that the second draft was the best and that I’ve lost it, I don’t know where it is.
That is sort of the writer’s constant issue, isn’t it? Trying to express something that’s maybe a bit complicated and finding a way to say it in a clear way, it’s like solving a puzzle or something, and then when you get it to a point that you’re happy with, you’re like, Oh! Great!
Yeah, I just don’t know if I ever get to that point, actually. At some point, I don’t really understand what any of it means anymore or a certain comma position becomes a little in-joke with myself. Again, all of that happens in the tension between a writer and an editor, right? I love other people editing me, I think it’s fantastic, in fact, I think it’s possible, whereas I don’t think it’s really possible to edit ourselves effectively.
Apart from Read Me are you working on anything exciting at the moment? What is your world looking like?
Yeah, there is this whole other wing of activity which is audio work. I don’t know if you saw but last year I launched this project, a sort of curatorial project called Five Radio Stations. It ties in with this long-standing preoccupation I have with the medium of radio, by which I really do mean radio, not podcasts, not listen-again, I mean live, internet radio. I think one of the last great pleasures of online life is listening to radio from places quite far away. It’s not algorithmic, it’s not putting us in a filter bubble. It’s very much the thrill of the internet as it was in the 90’s where you were receiving really random stuff from places you would otherwise not have considered, like college radio from Mexico.
I did a project 10 years ago or so called Global Breakfast Radio which was a radio station with an artist called Daniel John Jones and it plays radio from wherever in the world the sun is rising right now, 24/7. So if you listen to it now, we’re talking in the afternoon, so it would be American radio — it would be radio from New York or Arizona or Brazil or Nova Scotia.
Then more recently, I got into a conversation with Lab’Bel, this art fund in Paris and this curator called Sylvia Guerra. Somehow my enthusiasm got to her and she said, “Well, why don’t we commission a series of artist radio stations?” So, we asked five artists to make an artwork which is also a radio station and we launched that in October.
Daniel and I did a new project as part of it which is Infraordinary FM, which is basically the world’s first rolling news radio station communicating completely ordinary news from around the world — breezes blowing, wallets lost, birds sighted, pinball scores, this kind of stuff. That’s been a lot of fun and some people have really gotten a lot out of it, I think! We thought people would think it was a cool idea and then flick it off or something, but people listen to it for hours at a time! People have actually been listening to Infraordinary FM and the other ones too.
One is by this Icelandic musician and artist called Benedikt Hermannsson, and it’s literally 24 hours of audio that he recorded over several months. It’s him rehearsing, it’s him walking, it’s him in the car listening to the radio, and it’s a loop of exactly 24 hours, so you can set your watch by it. You’ll hear the same thing at 4pm every day and I really love that day-long length. You can visit it like a gallery, you can visit 3pm, and then when you’re home late from the pub or something you can visit 2am and see what that’s like as well. We just extended the run of that, it was going to finish in March and we’ve just had confirmation that we can keep going for a while, no end date yet.
Also, we’ve been looking for what we call listening posts, so places that will play the radio stations. For me, I love the idea of radio being treated like radio, so it being just on in the background in different places. At one point we were even talking about having our own airport transfer service in Paris, where you would sit in the back of a taxi and you would hear Infraordinary FM as you came into town, or the one that we had an artist in Nigeria do which is Lagos street sounds, but you’d be in Paris. For me, the most evocative place in the world to listen to the radio is the back of a taxi in a strange city. We couldn’t afford that or find some start-up to pay for it so we didn’t do it, but we’re doing a second season of Five Radio Stations, so who knows for the future.
We do know that there is a small art festival in Lucca in Italy that will play the radio stations in a kind of ambient way for a weekend in May, and a bunch of high street shops have agreed to play the radio stations in another Italian city, Parma. Strangely enough, Italy is full of these artist radio stations and they are playing out of florists, clothes shops, cafés as if they are just hits radio stations on in the background, which is music to my ears, I love that idea.
That’s really fascinating because it totally takes you out of the algorithmic loop which I am sort of railing against at the moment because my Spotify keeps feeding me the same music over and over again which is very annoying. Actually, upon your recommendation in one of your newsletters, I think it was the one where you spoke to Louise Chen, I have gotten very into the NTS Breakfast Show. Not all of their shows throughout the day are necessarily my cup of tea, but the Breakfast Shows all throughout the week are so great. Speaking of Louise Chen, you featured her in another one of your audio projects which was the Wild Memory Radio project with WePresent. I was actually listening to it the other day when my boyfriend got home and he was like, “What on earth are you listening to?” But I went through and pretty much listened to all of them. I thought they were really mesmerising. Where did you get the idea for that project?
It was such a privilege to work on that, and with WePresent as well because they are this rare organisation that will fund quite ambitious, experimental online projects. They had really loved Global Breakfast Radio and they approached me to see if I had some other ideas that tied in with a sense of place, something audio. For them, I guess, they are interested in creativity and understanding where artists get their inspiration from and how the process works, so I kind of came up with this notion of listening to artists talking about a single location. I really wanted it to be as specific as possible, as zoomed in as possible, and I wanted it to be theoretically possible to actually go to the locations that the artists talk about and sit there or stand there while you listen to their memory. I thought that was quite a nice idea. Of course, almost nobody will do that because some of them are in, like, the South Pole or Iran, and I don’t know if WePresent has Iranian users, but it takes a big coincidence that you happen to be by this park bench in Venice or something. But I felt like knowing that you could do that would add something to the experience of listening to it from home, in a sense, and I think that’s true.
This was in the middle of the pandemic, so it was partly also about traveling through other means because we couldn’t really travel as normal back then, so could you travel through the memory of someone else in space but also in time. How I amassed it was just contacting a bunch of these people, some were very famous like Nadya Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot or Gilbert & George, and some of them were less famous but still incredibly accomplished, interesting artists, and usually, we’d just talk on Zoom, then we would edit my voice out, sometimes I’d talk to them for like an hour and it became a 3 or 4-minute monologue which I really like because only by cutting a lot of material do you get the kind of density of quality that you’re really looking for in stuff like this. So yeah, it was a very long lead time, that project, we started it in 2021, as I said, and we only launched it about 2 months ago into a completely different world, so that initial impetus of, “Hey, you can travel to other people’s memories”, it’s still interesting, just not like it was during the lockdowns.
But, it’s gained this whole load of other qualities relative to the AI revolution which we could never have foreseen back then. It’s that Blade Runner thing, isn’t it, where there are the replicants, they have false memories that involve real places and I think it’s very telling that Philip K. Dick made those choices about how they would convince them that they were human. So, for the first time ever, we’ve got some approximation of real AI coming down the line and the one thing that distinguishes us from that is that we inhabit meatspace — the real world — and we have actual memories from a genuine past.
One thing I really like about the radio and audio projects is that it’s an entirely sound-based experience, rather than visual. The other day I had a telephone call with a client and I found myself really gesticulating and trying to express myself with movement and expressions, but I was only on the phone, and I thought we’re actually such a visual world nowadays. We’re very reliant on things like zoom and everyone is watching videos all the time so maybe sometimes the sound element gets a little neglected. It’s actually quite a nice shift away from what is ordinarily quite a visual time to something more sound and listening-focused.
I think audio is just so powerful because it’s not so all-encompassing, I can do other things. I have a toddler, a daughter, and so I’m always folding stuff and dealing with things and doing the dishes and stuff, and what was a big game changer for me was AirPods. Bluetooth earphones have changed my life in more ways than most things I’ve bought in the last five years, say, because it can just add a whole layer to things. I don’t just have to sit there passively receiving, you know, I like to use my other senses while I am listening to something. Also, I often wake up at 4 in the morning and it’s how I get back to sleep again, I stick an earphone in and listen to a podcast or the radio.
Lull yourself back off to sleep.
The three most recent books I read and liked
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