Back in mid-November, I circulated my 2023 gift guide.
- If you missed it: give it a look.
- If you didn’t miss it: give it another look!
You’ll find a couple of late-breaking additions, items newly available: a cool synthesizer and a lovely book.
I appreciated this sentiment from Charlie Warzel:
Gift giving is such a skill … but so is thoughtfully curating things that might make great gifts. It feels like such a nice insight into a person.
I hadn’t ever thought about the gift guide as a light sort of literary genre until this moment; but certainly, it is, or it can be. A material memoir. Cool.
Is it overdramatic to say that a season of operating heavy machinery has just changed my life? Possibly. The fact remains, I have that feeling — you know the one — of a portentous experience working its way through my system, still only halfway metabolized. Across October and November, my days in the mill yielded the following discoveries:
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It is always possible to learn new things, sometimes very quickly. Whole crafts and competencies are out there, just waiting for you. It helps when you have no choice but to learn them: NOW.
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Tools make a difference. A productive machine is capital, in the deep sense: leverage. Don’t be afraid to invest in a serious tool when the time is right.
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If it requires three-phase power … all the better!
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My body appears to be much happier when I spend my days standing and circling, rather than sitting and typing. Hmm.
Longtime subscribers know that on New Year’s Day, I broadcast a live reading of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I took last year off; this year, the poem gallops forth again.
My reading will begin at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. GMT, and run for a bit under three hours. Play it in the background while you relax or putter; it would be my honor to be invited into your home on the first day of 2024.
The broadcast is already scheduled on YouTube, and you can press a button over there to receive a reminder, if that’s helpful. I’ll send a quick newsletter on the morning of January 1 with another link.
Cosmic rays
Here at the close of the year, I wonder if you might give another chance to The Greatest Remaining Hits, the second album from The Cotton Modules. If you’d like to skip the preamble story, or even most of the album, listen at least to the track titled Cosmic Hemophiliac; in a roundabout way, it is the song of a particular character in my new novel Moonbound, forthcoming in June 2024.
Bit of a sneak preview, there.
It’s always a surprise to discover that your sense of what the world wants is simply: incorrect. I love this album — the sci-fi concept, the tappable story, the songs themselves, my bandmate Jesse’s wonderful compositions … but/and it landed with a great resounding doink. Music is tough, I acknowledge; a whole different attention ecology. Bummer! Onward.
(Several years ago, the non-reception of my short story titled Proposal for a Book to be Adapted into a Movie Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson produced a similar surprise. Preparing to publish, I felt giddy: totally sure I had isolated and amplified a resonant cultural frequency. I was wrong!)
Speaking of Jesse Solomon Clark: earlier this year, he composed the immersive, multi-channel score for an absolutely wild installation that’s currently live in London. I wish I could teleport over and wander around in that phantasmagorical space with Jesse’s music in my ears.
Podcast as intellectual project
I’ve been listening to Big Biology. As a podcast, it is incandescent with ideas that are, as advertised, really big. It’s even more impressive, though, as an intellectual project. There is a sense of real work being done here, of ideas developing from episode to episode.
The hosts are nerdy and sharp, with an appealing sort of Bert and Ernie quality. They’re terrific at hopscotching around, recalling previous conversations, putting different guests into virtual conversation with each other.
So much media feels like a treadmill: writing for the sake of writing, talking for the sake of talking … even newsletter-ing for the sake of newsletter-ing, sometimes! This podcast is something really different.
The podcast has been running for several years, and there’s a big archive to explore. I started with episode 39, about bioelectric computation, which I strongly recommend as an on-ramp. The guest is terrific and the science is dizzying.
Episode 9 is wondrous; Sara Walker, whose lab investigates the origins of life, sparkles and provokes. In that way, the episode provides both an outline of cool new ideas and a portrait of a mind on fire.
My brain was vibrating in my skull as I listened to episode 10, about the tangled tree of life. The guest, David Quammen, is a science journalist: clear-eyed, well-spoken, even courtly.
I loved the wide frame of episode 63, about the survival and evolution of whole ecosystems (think: a savanna) through means other than natural selection.
It was episode 100 that helped me understand what’s really going on here. It’s a wonderful, integrative “clip show”, weaving together ideas (and snippets of audio) from all the previous episodes. How cool.
I’ve only listened to these and maybe three other episodes, total. There’s still so much to enjoy and learn as I make my way through the archive.
You listen to a podcast like Big Biology, you read a website like Quanta Magazine, and you understand that so many invocations of science in popular discourse are woefully out of date.
I’m thinking specifically about the way “survival of the fittest” is used as a master metaphor all over the place — in culture, business, politics, you name it. The metaphor is simple, linear, vicious; it is offered as reluctant acknowledgement of hard reality.
But evolutionary biologists left that model behind like … fifty years ago. The reality of evolution, as we understand it today, is so much richer: with cooperation right at the foundation of eukaryotic life (with the domestication of the mitochondrion and chloroplast), with the surprise of horizontal gene transfer (revealing, for example, the strong possibility that mammalian gestation and birth was made possible long ago by a VIRAL INFECTION) … It’s all so much richer and weirder than the vicious metaphor.
You listen to Big Biology, you read a website like Quanta Magazine, and you understand that there are people in the world investigating big, exciting questions every day; keeping at it, with stubborn curiosity, across decades. They have far outpaced the crusty metaphors. It’s possible, and very rewarding, to sprint and catch up.
(Still gnawing on the same bone here:)
Often, I’ve encountered the sentiment that materialism drains the enchantment out of the world; that it is bleak and mechanistic — a dry alternative to the spiritual nourishment of religion and myth.
Anyone making this claim doesn’t understand — has not bothered to check in with — the real conversations and investigations of materialists today. Even with Big Biology alone as your reference, you would conclude: this is wild, kaleidoscopic, thrilling stuff! The real story of life on this planet, on all scales, puts to shame every myth, every fable, every tale of the divine. (“On all scales” is important, because the myths aren’t interested in any scale except the human. That’s what gives them away; that’s the tell.)
To be clear, I like a lot of those fables just fine. Even so: the richness of real biology reveals them as scribbled crayon sketches.
I wonder, finally, if one of the key markers of human-ness, and human intelligence, is: the experiment.
All of these activities are points on the same continuum:
- troubleshooting a car
- debugging a computer program
- devising a science experiment
In all those cases, there’s a particular kind of creativity at work: engineeering these lenses, these filters, these … tweezers? to isolate new, reliable knowledge about the world.
I’m sure there are at least a few other animals who do simple experiments of their own — I’d love to know what they are.
Here’s a term that’s new to me:
Spolia, the Latin word for “spoils”, are defined as architectural fragments taken out of their original context and reused in a different context; essentially, pieces of structures transplanted into different structures. An example of unintentional usage of spolia is the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (modern-day Bodrum in Turkey). Following its burial due to an earthquake, both the Knights of St John and the Turks, who later settled in the region, viewed the former monument as a convenient source of construction materials, using spolia to build a castle and houses, respectively.
You probably “know” that car manufacturing is an amazing, high-tech process, but when’s the last time you actually saw a car factory?
This short promotional video from Toyota is bland and dorky, but no amount of dorkiness can dilute the fabulous engineering on display here.
It’s healthy, I think, to behold real INDUSTRY. In a world of so many ghostly promises, so many vague disappointments, this kind of work still inspires awe.
(Note to email readers: there’s supposed to be a short video here, but of course, such delights are not permitted in the inbox. You can see it in the web version of this newsletter.)
The game studio Inkle, who made one of my favorites of all time, has just released a new game. A Highland Song looks wonderful; I’ve purchased my copy and I can’t wait to play.
Here’s a short, perfect blog post from M. John Harrison.
Forget the wheel; it’s all about the tire.
Who and what was a knocker-upper? What an era; what a job.
Here is my favorite album art of 2023:
We love Guillermo del Toro! We love Hayao Miyazaki! We love Guillermo del Toro talking about Hayao Miyazaki!
I shared this video several years ago, and had occasion to watch it again recently. It remains wonderful: “I’m basically surfing a power plant on a river.”
In other power generation news: here’s the story of how the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry. This is a great chronicle of invention in the real world: slow but steady.
Construction Physics is a terrific project — I’m just so impressed by everything that Brian Potter writes over there.
During the olive harvest, I tried reading October, China Miéville’s history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was ultimately too boring and/or I was generally too sleepy; after chipping away three pages at a time for weeks, I set the book aside.
But not before learning the details of the legendary train that carried Lenin from his exile in Switzerland, across Germany, back toward Russia:
The “sealed train” would not technically be sealed: much stranger, it would be an extraterritorial entity, a rolling-stock legal nullity.
That’s so tasty it might as well be something from a Miéville story. It made me think of The City & The City, its incredible dramatization of legal and territorial marbling. That’s one of the truly great novels of the 2000s — highly recommended, if you’ve never read it.
Edward Penfield is a legend, of course; I have the sense of an illustrator’s style amplified or even “perfected” by the techology of his time. Look at a cover like this one—the way the wonkiness of the printing works both with and against the image. You could spend a LOT of time in Photoshop trying to replicate those effects.
I love the sort of … emotional narrative? … we can detect in the three covers above, which descend in chronological order, 1895 to 1896 to 1897. From a festive holiday at home, to a refreshing walk outside, to … leave me alone in the corner.
Happy holidays! Mark your calendar for January 1. The Green Knight awaits.
Back in Oakland,
Robin