Seb Emina
Interview by Jennie Edgar
Photo by Dimanche Creative
July 1st, 2023
Why reading is an active resistance to distraction.
Seb was the editor-in-chief of The Happy Reader from its beginning in 2014 until its final issue, out now. He spoke with us about AI generated art, a song from the 70s, his career trajectory, and tells us what book he was reading when he met his wife. He lives in Paris.
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose life-forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
The Hitchhilker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
You’re lucky enough to make a living from your love of books. Tell us about yourself and what you do.
I’m the editor-in-chief of The Happy Reader, a biannual publication that tries to rethink what a literary magazine can be. Half of each issue takes the form of a long interview with a significant cultural figure, centered around their reading habits. The other half is in the orbit of a Book of the Season, a classic work of literature that is used as the basis to make a magazine for anyone to enjoy, by which I mean it can be read both in tandem with that book or as a standalone experience. I’m also a freelance editor and editorial director.
What’s it like to work as an Editor-in-Chief?
Mostly I make the magazine from Paris where I still live. As I write I am sitting with my laptop in a cafe called Bokbar, in Belleville near my flat. Every issue has a process, from commissioning writers to fine-tuning the layout. At some point we will be closer to the print date and I’ll be spending a lot of time screen-sharing with the designer Matt Young, making sure the magazine works on a visual level. Often we rethink a whole issue quite radically several times before settling. But I’m also always fixated on making sure the articles in each issue are amazing and unusual, that it doesn’t just become a sort of design exercise. There’s always a risk of falling into that ‘beautiful print’ comfort zone.
What was the first book you remember falling in love with?
It was a picture book in the library of the first school I went to, which was in Oldbury, in the Black Country. It had twelve spreads, each displaying an illustration of the same street. As you turned the pages, the street became subject to different wind speeds, from ‘1’ for a light breeze to ‘12’ for a hurricane. Eventually the trees were uprooted and the nice semi-detached house had its roof ripped off.
At So Textual, we reflect on our reading lives as a practice akin to a “literary autobiography.” In light of that concept, what books have been especially meaningful to you?
This is a really hard question, not only because there are so many to choose from, but because the fact of whether or not a book has been meaningful or not is hard to easily discern. There are books that had no lasting impact on me although I remember the experience of reading them quite vividly, and there are others, or at least I suspect there are, which acted as a kind of railroad switch, nudging me off on a new track before being left behind and forgotten. I know that when I was around ten The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams said to me ‘it’s fine to puzzle over the nature of the universe in a maximalist and hilarious way’ and that was quite meaningful. I remember reading Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf at university and feeling like I’d never seen language get so close to whatever reality looks like beyond what our senses give us. A few years later I read Labyrinthes by Jorge Luis Borges during lunch breaks spent in a greasy spoon in South London, and I remember half-expecting that an invisible hand might emerge from the page and physically slap me around the face. Mythologies by Roland Barthes made me realize the language normally reserved for ‘high’ culture can quite happily be turned on the ‘low’ as well. White Teeth by Zadie Smith was the first time I’d seen a London I recognised written about in the vernacular with which I had been surrounded during my childhood. One of my grandparents (I barely knew him) was a postwar immigrant to London from Nigeria, and although Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is more about immigrants from West India, it is a portrait of that ‘Windrush’ era and so, rightly or wrongly, I felt it gave me some sort of access as to how it must have been for him. Species of Spaces by Georges Perec seemed uncannily in line with the preoccupations I’d formed during the era when I was a world leading expert on the subject of breakfast, and although I’ve long since left that subject matter behind, I am often still thinking about his concept of the infra-ordinary.
What other cultural resources were important to you growing up?
I loved the Muppets. I did the puzzles on the backs of cereal boxes. I sought out limited-edition soft drinks. I played sprawling video games. All these fed into who I became, I guess. I was obsessed with an animated TV show called Once Upon a Time… Man. Its opening sequence started with the Big Bang and ended with people fleeing to space from an exploding Earth — all to the sound of Bach’s Toccata in Fugue D. That left a mark. Later on, I’m sure the way I idolized certain bands and films had a huge influence on my development, though not always a healthy one.
As a child I was also really into Fighting Fantasy, the ‘choose your own adventure’ books that were a bit Dungeons & Dragons, a bit Tolkein. It would be such a poignant, nostalgic experience to do one now. Some friends and I then used to make our own versions but we would also write ‘magazines’ of about 4 pages where we’d review each other’s efforts. I guess that was my first magazine! I have no idea what became of them.
Tell us how you became the EIC of The Happy Reader.
In 2013 I quit my job as an editor and producer for the arts organisation Artangel, moved to Paris and started working full-time as a writer. This was made possible by the fact that my book The Breakfast Bible, about the theory and practice of breakfast, had attracted a lot of attention. Seemingly every day for a time, something new was coming out in the papers about my take on morning eating. Commissions were flowing, and among other outlets, I became a regular contributor to both The Gentlewoman and Fantastic Man, and not only on breakfast but all kinds of subjects: pockets, floristry scissors, salted liquorice... One day, those magazines’ founders told me they’d been approached by Penguin to devise a new publication based around books and classic literature and asked me if I’d like to edit it. Of course I said yes.
“Scrolling is something we do instead of thinking, whereas true reading is something we do to improve thought, to enlarge the reservoir of thoughts we can have, and also the kinds of things we can imagine.”
We were saddened to hear The Happy Reader is coming to an end. What other projects are you working on?
Yes, I’m sad to say that the issue of The Happy Reader we are currently launching, with Tilda Swinton on the cover interviewed by Deborah Levy, is to be the last. My side projects are about to become my main projects. Some of those involve trying to change what being an editor can mean, and lately I’ve found myself initiating some projects that are rooted in text but take place in unusual settings. I’m working on an online audio project about artists’ relationship with specific places, which will be available late this year in collaboration with WePresent. I’m also planning, and have funding for, a new work relating to radio, particularly internet radio, what it can do and be. Both are successors to Global Breakfast Radio which I made with the artist Daniel Jones a few years back. A friend and I also just concocted a T-shirt displaying the immortal creative-writing query ‘What’s at stake in this scene?’ which is available on Bonfire. There are other things looming that I can’t even hint at yet.
What gives you inspiration?
Anything that is not mediated through a screen, but also, conversely, I became interested for a time, like everyone else, by art that is made by artificial intelligence. I like how, despite the output being visual, it is generated by textual prompts. It’s also a form of writing or editing, even as it gets ready to put us all out of work. I love discovering new and old music and lately became obsessed with ‘The Kiss’, a song from 1973 by Judee Sill. It’s unlike any other song I know. There’s something going on with the interplay between the timing and the melody that gives it a sort of mystical undertone, like it’s a piece of music you’re hearing in a dream, and won’t remember it when you wake up.
Why do you think reading is a valuable pastime?
Beyond the obvious answers, there’s another reason that has become increasingly important in recent years and is well summed up by a tagline for the Italian publisher Feltrinelli: ‘reading is resisting’. Resisting what? Distraction. Manipulation. Studies of the brain show that reading, and especially reading from a physical book, fires up parts of the mind that online reading does not. That reading print is, contrary to assumption, more interactive than the one-way flow of information represented by its online equivalent, which might be better described as ‘browsing’, ‘skimming’ or, of course, ‘scrolling’. Scrolling is something we do instead of thinking, whereas true reading is something we do to improve thought, to enlarge the reservoir of thoughts we can have, and also the kinds of things we can imagine.
Do you have any romantic associations with books?
Some years ago, the woman sitting next to me in a cafe in Belleville asked me about the book I was reading. Now we have a two-year-old daughter, and are getting married in August.
And what was the book you were reading?
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s sci-fi novel We, which we then featured in issue 10 of The Happy Reader.
Did anyone ever gift you a book that felt particularly special?
I remember someone gave me two copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a hardback for the home and a paperback to carry around with me. I liked that idea, that a book could be so essential you needed it in two formats.
Undoubtedly, you’re reading a lot of books! How do you work it into your schedule? Do you have a reading routine?
I’ll read to a stopwatch. I had the idea after hearing that Hans Ulrich Obrist reads for fifteen minutes every morning, the moment he awakes. I realized that I can’t face reading that early, but I did find the idea of timed reading quite adaptable. There are different ways of doing it. If I put the stopwatch (which is actually a cooking timer) on for an hour it can quite simply protect me from the compulsion to check my phone. Otherwise I’ll read six books for five minutes each, to get a sense of them and to start my day with a chorus of voices.
Which author, living or dead, would you like to have an epistolary correspondence?
The Greek philosopher Zeno, founder of Stoicism. None of his writings have survived so I’d be the only person in the world to know what he actually thought.
In your opinion, who is an underappreciated or overlooked writer you think more people should read?
I think Mavis Gallant’s short stories should have a bigger readership. Her collection Paris Stories is just great, though as she herself said, they are so dense they shouldn’t be devoured in one go but read occasionally, punctuated by other things.
Anything else?
Because the magazine is finishing, I recently found myself looking over the first issue of The Happy Reader again. The introductory letter I wrote for that issue drew on a time in which I was working as an office temp in the pharmacy department of a London hospital. Each day I was entitled to a lunch break of precisely one hour, as well as two fifteen-minute tea breaks, and I would spend part of that time pelting down a maze of corridors to an obscure corner of the hospital where I knew I could read a book in peace. Reading this account again, it struck me that these were probably the happiest reading experiences of my life. To have been employed to turn my love of books into a magazine, was, of course, a dream job. But as I thought back I found myself yearning for the purity of the way I used to read, back before I had skin in the game, meaning I was always taking notes, reading to a deadline, looking for something I can use, back when it was just about unstructured inspiration and pleasure. I’m not complaining, at least I don’t think I am. It was just an interesting realization.
Books in Seb Emina's PERSONAL LIBRARY
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Mrs Dalloway by Virgina Woolf
Labyrinthes by Jorge Luis Borges
Mythologies by Roland Barthes
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Species of Spaces by Georges Perec
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant