rinsemiddlebliss

One more cup of coffee for the road

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

In November, I painted my cappuccino for the first time. The cup and saucer were so graceful. The light was good. I liked how it came out, and more importantly, I enjoyed painting it. I got out for coffee every Saturday, and painting my coffee became part of the habit. One coffee painting a week for a few months and it starts to look like a series. Heck, maybe I've become a regular: that person who paints their coffee each Saturday. Hard to say for sure.

To make the pattern visible, I've organized my watercolor sketches by the type of coffee cup I painted. I also included the swatches and fast sketches. Sometimes the miniature sketches have more of the feeling of the cup than the full sketches. Even when it's the same coffee cup in the same cafe in the same seat, the light is always a little different, the paint mix is a little different, and I'm a little bit different. I enjoy seeing the variations emerge. With each painting, I learn a little bit more.

All of these pieces are watercolor paint on paper.

Orange coffee cups #

November 2025. A cappuccino with heart-shaped latte art in sepia-toned coffee cup on a saucer.

November 2025. A cappuccino with flower-shaped latte art in an orange coffee cup on a saucer.

December 2025. A cappuccino with flower-shaped latte art in an dull orange coffee cup on a saucer

December 2025. A cappuccino with flower-shaped latte art in a bright orange coffee cup on a saucer

Practice sketches for orange coffee cups #

2025. Practice sketch for just the latte art.

December 2025. Warmup sketches for coffee cups and latte art.

Black coffee cups #

December 2025. A black coffee cup.

December 2025. Another version of a black coffee cup on an orange saucer.

February 2026. A black coffee cup on an orange saucer with a flat white.

December 2025. Sketches for a black coffee cup painting.

No blood for oil #

January 2026. Caption for the image.

January 2026. Practice sketches and swatches for "No blood for oil."

Coffee and croissant #

February 2026. Croissant as well as coffee.

Speckled coffee cups #

March 2026. First version of the speckled coffee mug.

March 2026. Second version of the speckled coffee mug.

Abstracted

2026-02-27T00:00:00Z

I've been playing around with mark making. Mark making is a fancy term for doodling with expensive materials. Sometimes I just want to put shapes on the paper and see what happens. It's relaxing and it lets me try out new paints and brushes and techniques without the pressure of messing up a planned painting. It's also easier to do when I feel rather abstracted myself.

All of these pieces are watercolor paint on paper.

Floating teacups in a violet cloud #

Pastel color swirls on a paper coaster #

Red, gray, and black swirls on a paper coaster #

Angular forms dappled in their own colors #

An orange and silver seascape #

Another world is possible #

Cozy watercolor

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

I gave myself the luxury of a whole week off for Thanksgiving, and no travel. I slept late, read Pride and Prejudice, cooked elaborate meals, continued my ongoing battle against oxalis, and painted with watercolors. It's been a pretty good month for watercolor painting, despite my worry that I wouldn't have many chances to paint outside. I had plenty, but I also tried to paint more ordinary things inside to be less precious about it.

Beautiful and dangerous #

Sage bushes bloom purple and red.

Early in November, I got a new red paint: cadmium red. Yes, it is made with cadmium. When I started painting I was scared of using it because cadmium is a toxic chemical. As I gained more experience, I grew frustrated with the warm reds in my palette. They never seemed to mix right. I learned what many artists learn: there's not really a good replacement for cadmium red. At the same time, I read more about how to use the color safely to mitigate its dangers, and decided I could use it with little danger to myself, people, or animals. And, I'm sorry and/or happy to say that it's beautiful. It's vibrant alone, and mixes without getting dull.

Coffee coffee coffee #

Latte art inspired latte art

A cafe in my neighborhood serves the cappuccinos in graceful orange cups with matching saucers. Most of the time, the baristas adorn them with latte art. There's a sign by the bar with a taxonomy of possible shapes, though it also says "no requests." I assume there's an element of randomness to how it comes out. I love this kind of cup, and I've been doodling coffee cups for ages, so I thought I'd try to do a watercolor sketch. I'm trying to just paint more, so I didn't worry about getting the shape or the color perfectly accurate. Use the subject to paint a watercolor, not the watercolor to paint the subject, as an art book told me once.

Another day, another latte. I quickly painted the cup and the latte art, then had my breakfast. When I was done eating and drinking, I added the shadows to the cup. I’m just learning about shadows so at first I was worried I ruined the sketch but as it dried, it started to look right.

I have a rule not to eat or drink at the same time as I'm painting, to avoid ever accidentally drinking some paint water. I know it sounds improbable that it would happen, but it happens to lots of artists. You get really absorbed when you paint. Anyway, painting a coffee cups while following my rule is a little tricky and I'm bending it a bit by even having food and drink on the same table as paints at the same time. I do all the painting and put it away, and then I eat and drink my breakfast. It motivates me to paint quickly so the coffee doesn't get cold.

An Americano coffee in a blue mug

Another day, and this time a different coffee. An Americano is not nearly as interesting as a latte or cappuccino. However, the mug was an intriguing shape and color. I don't think I captured either all that well. It was still fun to paint and I learned something from it. Possibly that I should keep painting cappuccinos instead.

That tree again #

A pine tree in Holly Park

I'm fascinated by this particular tree. This is at least the second time I tried to paint it. In May, I included a lot of busy background, whereas this time I just focused on the shape of the tree, and left the background out. I'm going to go back and paint it again soon, because I realized that even though it feels like I should paint it on a piece of paper that's taller than it's wide, I should actually use a squarish piece. The tree occupies a squarish amount of space because the crown is very wide.

My beautiful cat #

Shinjuku, my beautiful cat

She looked so cute that I decided to try to paint her portrait, even though I had never done anything like that before. I quickly painted the contour and her important features from life, and then I took a photo in case she shifted position. A moment later she did, so I was glad I had it. I used the photo to finish the portrait, plus she was still right there to look at for general reference. I'm very pleased with how the cat portrait came out. She looks a bit more fierce and spiky than in reality, and yet I think her personality is correct. That's what I enjoy the most about watercolor. Even though I'm still learning, I can catch the feeling of places, or things, or as it turns out, cats, without necessarily going for full verisimilitude.

I will definitely be painting more cats in the future.

A cheese detective, an academic witch, and a planetful of sentient spiders

2025-11-22T00:00:00Z

I've read a few new books recently, mostly fiction, so it's time for another set of reviews. I've also done a lot of comfort re-reading. Since the last review roundup I re-read the entire Locked Tomb series (again) and the entire Starship Teacup series. I only finish books that I like, and I only review books that I finish, so generally speaking you can consider the existence of a review from me to be at least a mild endorsement.

Shadow Ticket #

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (2025)

Shadow Ticket is a detective story (sort of) that starts in 1930s Milwaukee and follows a private eye who is trying to locate and return a cheese heiress. I wanted to love this book but I only liked it. I'm fond of classic detective fiction and Pynchon, especially his last few novels, so I came in with high expectations. The specific setting didn't grab me, and the point of view character wasn't enough to make up for that. The language and humor and high weirdness were strong as you would expect from Pynchon. I would recommend Shadow Ticket on the strength of that alone. I think many other people will find the setting and main character more compelling and will love this book. Bleeding Edge remains secure as my favorite Pynchon.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster #

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (2025)

A graduate student in present-day New England teaches her mom magic and things get weird. I felt like this book was written personally for me with all the things I want in a contemporary fantasy novel. First off, there is no way to say this without sounding like an incredible weirdo but: this is the most accurate portrayal of magic as it actually works in real life I have ever read. Modern hedge witches, this one's for us. IYKYK. Second, did you know that Anders spent a bit of time as an erotica writer? I sort of knew, because she talks about it in her newsletter sometimes, but it faded into the background. So, there are a few, short, and not super-explicit but very hot sex scenes sprinkled through this book. These sex scenes include characters quoting philosophers and economists as part of foreplay and look, again, if this is for you, it's for you, and you know. It probably sounds too conceptual to be hot, but, and this is why I mentioned Anders' background in erotica writing, she has the skill to pull it off. Third, OK, you know, this is starting to escape the bounds of a mini-review. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough if you like magic, academia, nested narratives, strangely satisfying family drama (I didn't know I like that until I read this book), and New England academia vibes. Also, seriously, I'm so glad Anders returned to adult fiction because her continued growth as a writer shows in this book with a more complex structure, versatile voice, and depth of character.

The AI Con #

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (2025)

This book was a fucking breath of fresh air amidst all the AI hype I'm subject to in my industry. I don't know what it's like for people who work outside of Silicon Valley. Maybe it's this bad everywhere. My favorite part was the explanation about how the human act of interpreting language assumes a mind and thus the language generating models will tend to get anthropomorphized. For people who know Dr. Bender's work online, including her many essays, posts, and podcast, some of the material in this book will be familiar. It was to me. Still, I liked reading it all organized into a structure.

Children of Time #

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)

Children of Time is a generation-spanning space opera half from the point of view of a rapidly evolving society of spiders, and half from the point of view of humans escaping a poisoned earth on a degrading sleeper ship. It's an very genre-savvy work with lots of allusions to other science fiction so if you're well-read in the genre, you'll enjoy those. I read it because a colleague recommended it for its excellent world building. I found the spider side world building more interesting and robust than the sleeper ship (turned accidental generation ship) side, because Aurora has permanently spoiled me for generation ships. The story slows down a bit, because the spiders--who are honestly way more interesting than the humans--are not one character whose lives we can get attached to but rather a series of generations of spiders who are referred to by the same set of names for narrative continuity. There was one scene, when the spiders first go beyond the atmosphere, that made me tear up.

Still lifes will continue until morale improves

2025-10-31T00:00:00Z

"Nights are drawing in," is uttered evenings at my house pretty much as soon as it turns September. By the 21st when the world daylight widget on the clock display turns from the familiar sine wave to a straight line between light and dark, the nights are decidedly drawn in, but it's not the nights that get to me, it's waking in the dark, or at least, waking in the dark gets to me first. Then the dark nibbles the light from both sides, as we pay down the borrowed light from the summer, and I get very intense about gardening, all caught up in anticipatory FOMO^[1], thinking soon the time when I have to be at work and the time when it is light out will very nearly overlap, and what then, eh? Moreover, what if it rains? And worse, what if it doesn't rain?

In either case, the opportunities for plain air painting decrease decidedly with the rain^[2], and decrease further as the days get shorter and there's less and less light to work with, and the overlap of when it's not raining and it's light and I have enough time to go hike to find a subject and paint gets smaller and smaller. Here you may imagine some kind of overlapping shadows slowly eclipsing the small Time Available to Paint Outside.

To cheer myself up, I bought some lovely tulips. Then I painted them.

Even a very quick painting of tulips before I had to go out and use the light for other obligations was quite satisfying. At the time I pained these yellow tulips, the light was right behind them, kind of shining through the petals, an effect that inspired the way I expressed the colors here. That's the sort of thing I find impossible to get a satisfying photo of, yet even a rather simplified painting gets the feeling.

So I bought more tulips the following week, and painted those, too.

It was cloudy day, maybe even rainy, so the light didn't shine through them as much. Also, these were a different color.

Finally, I also bought some cranberry beans and painted one along with a pumpkin and a gourd I previously purchased to celebrate decorative gourd season^[3].

Painting still lifes indoors is more fun, I think, than painting from reference. Of course, there's no pleasing some people.

Fear Of Missing Out ↩︎
The garden needs it, though. ↩︎
See also my earlier post, Decorative gourd season. ↩︎

All empires end

2025-10-17T00:00:00Z

ALLEMPIRESEND. All one word like that. Version two of what was meant to be a continuing expansion from a sketch watercolor I made in August has been pinned to my fridge for months. Even though it's a work in progress, or a partial work, I like it more and more as it hangs there. I like the message and I like having it up even though it's a work in progress. I mean, really, what isn't?

It reminds me of that great quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

Le Guin argues something a bit more hopeful, that all this can change, and can change for the better, if we imagine and work towards a better world.

A woman in a red coat writes in the sand with her bare toe.

When I went to Angel Island last December, a group of young people were on the beach, dressed for December but barefoot, you might even say frolicking. Certainly, they seemed to be in good spirits. One of them wore a magnificent red coat, and with her bare toe, wrote a message in the sand in large letters.

And what she wrote was, "All empires end."^[1] It's a statement of fact. All things end. Even the sun will eventually cease to be. So, maybe you won't live to see it. Or maybe you will.

In Foundation^[2], it's also a threat. Empire (both the personification as the genetic dynasty and the reified concept) is terrified of anyone who even dares to suggest it might end, seeing it as a threat. A statement of fact about impermanence can be a threat to an organization whose foundational myth includes its eternal continuation. Part of the myth of empires (and definitely Foundation's Empire) is that they are inevitable, unstoppable, and enduring.

A small, simplified painting based on the photo, a sketch in watercolor.

"All empires end" is also a statement of hope. If all empires end, then this situation, no matter how enduring, unstoppable, or inevitable it seems, will also end. "End" is a more hopefully word than "fall". Maybe we can choose to end it, voluntarily. Maybe we can take it apart. Maybe when the imperial boomerang^[3] comes whizzing at our heads we can catch it and break it instead of tossing it out again at the periphery. Maybe we build a better world together. Maybe we just collectively refuse to participate in oppression, just walk into the forest and never come back. Metaphorically or literally, depending on preference.

A somewhat larger watercolor painting based on the same photo, with the words all run together, ALLEMPIRESEND.

The slide towards authoritarianism is not inevitable. All empires end. All things made by humans can be changed by humans. It's hard. But, in my experience, everything is hard. Even painting these little watercolors has been hard. All empires end, eventually, but our time as individuals is short, so why wait around?

Want to do something? #

And hey, if you're reading this on October 17 in the USA, consider going to your local No Kings protest march tomorrow, October 18. They're having them all over. The one last time was basically a huge party. It's the most friendly protest march I've ever been to, and I think this one will be similar. You don't need to bring a sign or a fancy costume. Physically showing up sends a message.

You can't see that in the photo because it's from when she started writing. By the time she finished, the angle wasn't as good, and anyway I couldn't get the entire phrase and get the right kind of contrast to have it show up, though I tried as you can see at the end of that other post. ↩︎
Both in Asimov's Foundation stories and in the Apple TV adaptation, though to be honest I am much more familiar with the adaptation. I read the first book of the Foundation stories and didn't like them much. Character development is a waste of page count better taken up by other things seemed to be Asimov's general approach to storytelling. The TV show has its own faults, but it has good character and beautiful world building and that works better for me. ↩︎
"The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens." Text from the Wikipedia article "Imperial boomerang." ↩︎

Decorative gourd season

2025-10-10T00:00:00Z

I don't know if you're aware, but it's decorative gourd season. There's a pretty famous essay about it, in point of fact^[1]. I am quite fond of decorative gourds, pumpkins especially, and threatened to spend my bonus this year on pumpkins to lavishly decorate the stairs and front porch, though after I did the calculations, it became clear that one, if I spent entire bonus on pumpkins it would be more pumpkins than would fit there, two if I attempted to fit them anyway, they would likely crush and destroy the stairs, and three, then I would need to somehow earn another, substantially larger bonus to cover the costs of repairing the stairs. So, I decided to express my passion for decorative gourd season in a more measured and practical way. I took a watercolor class about painting gourds and stuff. I also bought some modestly sized decorative gourds to use as my subjects.

In the class, the instructor walked us through painting several different kinds of gourds and seasonal produce. It was an online class, so although she had the items in front of her, I suppose I was painting more from reference. As I worked on it, I didn't think my painting was particularly good and I especially didn't like the technique of using white gauche instead of preserving white space to represent light bits. After it dried, I liked it better, though I still didn't like the parts with gauche as much as the parts where I just left it blank.

In the days following the class, I painted several other gourds. This time, I painted from life, though I used the same technique of assembling the still life objects on the paper rather than by putting together a whole composition and painting them all. I skipped the gauche, too. I'm sure there's ways of painting with it that look good, but I think it's actually harder as a beginner to get gauche right than preserving white space.

I was going to paint more objects around this fantastically textured pumpkin. That was the plan. Then, as I thought of how I might arrange other gourds, I realized it would look better as it was with plenty of blank space around it so it could breathe, as it were. That's an ongoing lesson in watercolor painting. Don't overwork it, which mostly means don't keep messing with it and adding more detail. But I think it's also good to leave of blank space.

For this one, I gathered some pretty weird objects. The thing that looks like a bizarre pine cone is I guess a magnolia pinecone, or seedpod, or whatever. These strange objects fall from magnolias and I love how complex and fuzzy they are. I'm also mildly obsessed with buckeyes and fill my pockets with them every fall, so of course I had to try painting them. In this painting I decided to try some shadows to give the objects a little dimension.

Now I have a shelf full of gourds and paintings of gourds, and a technique for painting still lives, which will be a very nice thing to do during the rainy season and when the days are short so I can't go out and paint outside.

The essay is, of course, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers by Colin Nissan. ↩︎

Autumn in the garden

2025-10-05T00:00:00Z

Converting even a small yard from grass to drought-resistant perennials and native plants is a ton of work. I started three years ago with just a little patch where I dug up grass and planted thyme. Each year, I've done a little more. Sometimes, when things get too much and I'm totally drained, I can't even bring myself to do art or write. The garden though, remains a refuge. The very fact that it’s so much physical work actually helps.

I get the itch to garden in the spring, and that's fine, but it's held me back. In San Francisco, fall is the rainy season, which means that if you want seeds to grow or seedlings to root, the best time to sow and plant is well, just about now. When I plant something in the spring, it struggles in the summer, even with regular watering, and then roots well in the rainy season, and then takes off the following spring. By planting in the spring, I've been slowing down my perennials. I had to see it happen twice before the lesson sunk in.

This year, when rain showed up in the 10-day forecast I got to work. I trimmed the dead grass and dug up a good part of the lawn. I bought native wildflower seeds, compost, and more ground cover seedlings.

For two weekends, I worked hard in the yard, digging, planting, and sowing. I created protective cages for the seeds and little plants out of chicken wire.

The rain came last Monday, as predicted.

Even when it wasn't raining, it's been damp overnight, and my work seems to have paid off. The seeds I sowed last weekend are already sprouting, and thanks to the protective cages I constructed, the squirrels can't dig them up.

Mark making and color

2025-09-13T00:00:00Z

On the one hand, I like to paint things, I mean representations of objects, both real and imaginary. On the other hand, I like the act of painting with no specific goal. I like putting down shapes and colors on the page. It's deeply enjoyable to load a brush with color from the pan and make a mark on the paper. It's even more pleasant to mix a color, or dilute it to various consistencies and observe how it shows up on the paper.

It's wonderful to feel the shape form out of the organic movements of my body, my innate gestures, and see what happens. The action of paint with water, the way layers of transparent color show up on top of each other when dry, or the way they interact when wet, all of these actions and reactions are a pleasure.

Since I got over my fear of wasting the good paper, I've been playing like this with watercolors. I have always enjoyed making shapes. When you do it with a pencil or pen, most people call it doodling. My doodles have gotten very elaborate and have a vocabulary of shapes. I decorate many of my posts with these shapes that look almost like writing. However, when it came to watercolor, I felt for a while that I needed to paint in response to objects instead of just out of the spontaneous shapes as they came out.

Where do these made up rules come from? Why did I need to have a teacher show me that I could break thm? It seems that with every art form, there are these made up rules that are so ingrained we don't even know them. Unknown knowns, if you will. There are also real rules that we do have to learn like don't lick your brushes and how pigment numbering works, and that the shapes of things in reality are different than you think they are.

In the language of fine art, doodles and stuff like that are called mark making^[1]. I noticed a lot of my favorite classes mentioned mark making or "the practice of mark making" in their description, and I got curious about the term. I would doodle with paint anyway because I like it. However, understanding the concept of mark making has freed me to do it more, and to think of it as both an end in itself, and as a way to develop my familiarity with my medium, tools, and even my own gestures. I have a lot to learn about watercolor. I'm in this exciting space of being enough of a beginner that I can make quick progress and at the same time have spent enough time that I have ideas about what I should practice and what I might want to learn next. Art and creative work are wonderful in that you can always learn more, of course, but this is a particularly sweet spot in the learning process.

I still want to represent objects. That's a big part of the appeal of watercolor, that it lets me capture the sense of an object I like, for example a landscape or a plant. Sometimes an exercise that start out as just mark making with no particular intention becomes representational when I notice the blobs and shapes suggest an object and add details to create better suggest that object. Over time, I hope these happy accidents and discoveries will build up a set of skilled practices I can use when I want to represent something specific.

Of course, I am simplifying. The Tate museum's Mark Making Coursework Guide has a pretty good introduction. ↩︎

Imaginary horizons

2025-09-05T00:00:00Z

I took another watercolor class through Case for Making in August. In "Horizons," taught by Melanie Lan, I learned how to use atmospheric perspective to create an effect of depth and distance for mountains. First, we used fairly high-value colors and wet-on-wet technique to create colorful skies. Then, using multiple layers of less vibrant colors, we created the mountains. The layers have to dry between each level of mountain, so an interesting technique I learned was to use a hair-dryer to quickly dry the painting.

I created the first four paintings as exercises during the class. In the next few days, I started applying the technique more, combining what I learned in the land and sea class earlier in the summer, and also trying to use it with reference photos I've taken before. With each class, I'm building up a repertoire of techniques

Indigo mountains with birds #

Abstract mountain ranges with atmospheric perspective, creating a sense of distance through color gradients from blue to pink to yellow and different values of indigo.

Blue sky, funky mountain #

Abstract mountains with a blue sky and some bigger trees in the foreground. This painting was based on a reference where the mountain in the background was so huge it loomed over the foreground mountains. While trying to get that scale, I completely missed the contour and so the mountain came out a bit funky. Still, I like the colors and the pine trees in the foreground.

Coral sky, indigo mountains #

A coral pink sky with layers of mountain underneath painted entirely using indigo diluted to different values.

Bright orange sky, blue mountains #

Another bright sky with more muted colors for the mountains below.

Gray sky and blue water #

Mountains and hills in muted colors that run into the sea. This is a purely abstract scene.

Green springtime mountains #

This painting is roughly based on a photo I took in the spring around Mt. Diablo a few years ago, when everything was green.

Cliff House on Ocean Beach #

This last painting doesn't use any of the techniques from the class, and in fact I painted it before the class. I painted it from life while sitting on the beach. As often happens when I paint from life, I painted the colors too faintly. Watercolor always looks darker when it's wet so you want to make it darker than it feels like it should be. I saw that during the class, where the colors that seemed to be way to saturated when I painted dried to a color that felt realistic. I'm including it because I'm happy with how it came out despite the faint color, and I think it's an interesting contrast with the more abstract paintings.

Water wealth

2025-08-29T00:00:00Z

The late-summer green of forests, marshes, swamps, and riparian verges shocked me again as it always does when I visit the East Coast. Coming up from Washington, D.C. to Bradley, CT, I watched it all stretch out below me, first abstracted ribbons of river meanders and forests like green fur, and slowly resolve to the over-saturated reality of forests and trees at landing approach. As a California, which I think I can now say I am after over 20 years, I see the water and the evidence of water and I think "what wealth!"

Right now, this moment as I write this, it's raining, a perfectly ordinary thing for late August in Connecticut. And yet, still, I think, how extraordinary and wonderful, how lush and rich. People on the East Coast, and other places where it rains year-round like this, I suppose don't think of water so much, because they don't need to.

In her essay "Holy Water" (1977) on the California water system, Joan Didion wrote, "Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive." And later in the same essay, she wrote, "Water is important to people who do not have it." In a contemporaneous critical review, Martin Amis wrote about "Holy Water" that Didion "indulg[ed] her curious obsession with Californian waterworks." Of course an English man, living in England where they are are so wealthy in water that they hardly think of it, would find Didion's interest in waterworks a "curious obsession." It is difficult to understand, to imagine, to deeply internalize that what it means to live in a place without enough of a resource that falls freely from the sky at all times of the year and in fact so much so as to be a nuisance or even serious problem.

"The West begins," Bernard DeVoto wrote, "where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read[...]. - Didion, "Holy Water"

Perhaps, if I ever moved back to the East Coast again, or moved to another water-wealthy part of the world my mind would recalibrate to what shade of green is normal for late August, and begin to take for granted or at least plan my garden around the idea of regular rain. For now, each time I visit these places, I remain surprisingly surprised.

Recent reading

2025-08-22T00:00:00Z

Last weekend I went to a wedding that had a Wolf Hall book club as part of the celebrations. The other conversations also, naturally, drifted to books more generally. As I enthusiastically swapped book recommendations with people, I thought, not for the first time, that few things are as fun as talking about books. So, I've decided to do a quick round up of my recent reading.

Some Desperate Glory #

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (2023)

It's a fun, fast-paced space opera that undermines the concept of the heroic human holdouts fighting against an alien menace. My favorite thing about it was that humans are the most physically imposing species, big, strong, durable and kind of terrifying to every other sentient they encounter. We are the orcs.

Divisions #

Divisions (The Fall Revolution #3-4) by Ken MacLeod (2009)

Divisions is actually two books in one, The Cassini Division (1998) and The Sky Road (1999). I loved The Cassini Division, which is a space opera about an anarchist army that operates roughly on the principles laid down by Max Stirner. Their mission is to keep the artificial intelligence swarm that has eaten Jupiter from encroaching on earth. It's hilarious, philosophically rich, and fun.

The Sky Road is an alternate history of the same timeline. It imagines what would have happened if the anarcho-primitivists had won the Fall Revolution instead. My favorite thing about it was the imagined economic system, and the way the flashbacks to the historical moment people in the book's present moment mythologized complicated and undermined the myth.

Engines of Light #

All three by Ken MacLeod:

Cosmonaut Keep (2000)
Dark Light (2001)
Engine City (2002)

The central technological premise of this space opera series is that people can travel at the speed of light, but, and this is a central problem the characters try to solve, it is very difficult to go somewhere that isn't already mapped. Naturally, the travel time is instant to the people on the ship while hundreds of years pass to people planet-side, and that causes interesting social problems. Also, there are some very interesting aliens. My favorite part was the conflicts between Soviet hold-over tankies, neo-anarchists, and apparently classical Epicureans. I didn't like these books as much as the Fall Revolution, but I would still highly recommend them to anyone who like space opera.

The Wheel of Time #

All by Robert Jordan:

The Eye of the World (1990)
The Great Hunt (1990)
The Dragon Reborn (1991)
The Shadow Rising (1992)
The Fires of Heaven (1993)
Lord of Chaos (1994)
A Crown of Swords (1996)

When the Wheel of Time TV show was cancelled, I wanted to know what would happen next. I read the first seven of fourteen books in the series before I fell off. I read them one after another, like I was eating popcorn or cotton candy. I think the series is competently written and has fun world building and--at least at the beginning--good plotting that makes you want to keep reading to find out what happens next. But at length it starts to sag under its own weight and especially at the pace I was reading the flaws began to show.

My favorite thing was the character arc of Mat Cauthon who starts out as the perfect archetype of a D&D rogue. He literally steals a cursed dagger and gets cursed after being told not to take any stuff from the cursed city. Over time, he turns into a reluctant hero, but, at least in the first seven books, his self-image of just being a gambler and schemer never fades. I would happily just read all about Mat. Of course, those kinds of books exist and they're generally classified as sword and sorcery rather than epic fantasy.

Wolf Hall #

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

I read Wolf Hall right after my Wheel of Time spree, and it's some readerly whiplash to go from Robert Jordan to Hillary Mantel. More happens in 20 pages of Wolf Hall than 200 pages of any given Wheel of Time book. Because it's so emotionally dense, Wolf Hall is harder to read. The emotions are almost unbearable. I've never had children, but Cromwell's family dying of the sweating sickness and his pervasive grief feels like my own. His real interiority is almost unbearable. Previously, I read most of Wolf Hall but fell off at around 80%. It is not a page turner. It's dense and beautiful and emotionally painful. I also find it painful to think about how horrible monarchy is. How awful persecution for religious beliefs. How disgusting hereditary nobility.

Wolf Hall is perfect in almost every quality, yet it does not draw me in. It's not that kind of book. You have to choose to go in. In this way, it's a bit like reading or watching horror. You choose to go in to the story knowing in some way you'll be hurt. And you will be hurt, right? That's the point. I knew almost the whole story, both from history and watching the TV adaptation. It ends badly, for everyone. I mean, it's historical fiction. You know everyone dies. That's just the start. I knew about some of the specific events, too. I remembered the sweating sickness, and but I didn't remember how emotionally intense it was to read about the deaths and the grief.

Mantel's Cromwell is such a relatable character. When grief strikes, he fills his time with busyness, with business. I can see myself in him sometimes like that. I love the detail about Polish being worse than Welsh to learn, but he goes for it anyway. Then his wife dies just in that moment.

Story of O #

Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954) translated by Richard Seaver (1965)

I first read this book when I was 19 or so, and upon re-reading I liked it much better. Having read de Sade, as well as a lot of romance, in the meantime helped me place it in its literary context. It's an unrealistic and dreamlike erotic fantasy that evokes a mood and, to paraphrase de Sade's intro to 120 of Sodom might excite the reader even as it horrifies them. It probably deserves a full-length review, and I might get to that one day. When I was 19, I read it too much as a story with a plot, and expected realism and balance and reasons for why characters did what they did. Coming back to it, I had no such expectation, and was impressed by the quality of the prose, which is not normally much of a consideration in erotic romance.

Automatic Noodle #

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (2025)

When I picked it up, I meant to read just a little bit of Automatic Noodle, but I slurped it up in one go. It's a novella about robots who start a noodle shop in San Francisco. Because the action happens in parts of San Francisco I know particularly well, there was an extra layer of fun in seeing how the author imagined the city changing and staying the same in the future.

Expansible Egg and Leomund's Tiny Hut

2025-08-15T00:00:00Z

The Dungeons and Dragons spell Leomund's Tiny Hut bears a strong resemblance to the the Expansible Egg artifact in Jack Vance's short story "Guyal of Sfere." I think it's likely the latter directly inspired the former, and while I couldn't find a direct quote from Gary Gygax saying so, I think there's enough direct evidence to consider it probable.

Expansible Egg expounded extensively #

In "Guyal of Sfere" the Expansible Egg isn't a spell, but rather an artifact. Guyal's father gives it to him along with several other useful items and a blessing when Guyal sets off on his quest:

"I will bestow on you my fine white horse, my Expansible Egg for your shelter, my Scintillating Dagger to illuminate the night. In addtion, I lay a blessing along the trail and danger will slide you by so long as you never wander from the trail." - Jack Vance, "Guyal of Sfere" collected in Mazirian the Magician (aka The Dying Earth)

The item is mentioned four more times in the story. It's large enough that both Guyal and his horse fit inside. It protects him from the elements, and doesn't let any creatures in from the outside:

"By night he surrounded himself and his horse in his magical habiliment, the Expansible Egg -- a membrane impermeable to thew, claw, enscrolment, pressure, sound and chill -- and so rested at ease despite the efforts of the avid creatures of the dark." - Ibid.

It's ambiguous if the Expansible Egg lets light in from the outside:

"Stiffly he slid from the saddle, brought forth the Expansible Egg, and flung it around his horse and himself. Ah, now...Guyal released the pressure of his breath. Safety. [Section break] Wan red light slanted through the branches from the east. Guyals' breath steamed in the air when he emerged from the Egg." - Ibid.

Because of that section break, I'm not sure if we're meant to read that the light streams in, Guyal sees it, and then he emerges from the Egg, or if on the other hand the break means a break in the action and we are seeing Guyal again after he has emerged from the egg as he sees the "wan red light" and his steaming breath.

Leomund's Tiny Hut #

Leomund's Tiny hut is described in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Editions Players Handbook thus:

"When this spell is cast, the wizard creates an unmoving, opaque sphere of force of any desired color around his person. Half of the sphere projects above the ground and the lower hemisphere passes through the ground. Up to seven other man-sized creatures can fit into the field with the creator, and these can freely pass into and out of the hut without harming it, but if the spellcaster removes himself from it, the spell dissipates."

Leomund's Tiny Hut also protects from heat and cold, thought with some limitation at the extreme ends, and further more "provides protection from the elements, such as rain, dust, sandstomres, and the like."

Unlike the Expansible Egg, Leomund's Tiny Hut is not impervious to magical or physical attacks, or rather, it's not harmed by them but neither does it protect the people inside^[1]:

"Missiles, weapons, and most spell effects can pass through the hut without affecting it, although the occupants cannot be seen from outside the hut."

Finally, Leomund's Tiny Hut is transparent from within but not from without, which the Expansible Egg may also be, depending on how you read it.

If Leomund's Tiny Hut was as good as the Expansible Egg that Guyal's father granted him, it would be too good a spell, I think. Even as it is, I saw various discussions on gaming forums and videos that Leomund's Tiny Hut is too good because it lets player characters rest for the full 8 hours needed to regenerate their magic spells even in the middle of a dangerous dungeon^[2].

The circumstantial evidence #

Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, explicitly names Jack Vance and his Dying World books as an influence on D&D. Jack Vance is named in Appendix N among others^[3].

In "Jack Vance & the D&D Game" by Gary Gygax^[4], Gygax writes "Later, when I picked up THE DYING EARTH, I was treated to more of the same sort of fanciful tale, an environment whimsy with characters to match." The Dying Earth was the original publication title of the book that contains "Guyal of Sfere." So, we know that Gygax definitely read the story.

Another artifact from Vance's fiction, the Ioun Stones, made it directly into D&D, with Jack Vance's permission:

"Anyway, later on when I got in touch about the Ioun Stones, permission was graciously given, and so a new and unique set of magical items was added to the AD&D game."^[5]

Not to belabor the point, but Gygax says throughout the essay that Vance was an influence, that he tried to get some of the flavor of The Dying Earth into D&D, and names a specific artifact that did make it into D&D from Vance's fiction.

Eggzactly #

Leomund's Tiny Hut isn't an exact replica of the Expansible Egg, but there are striking similarities. There's the dome-like shape, the opaqueness from the outside, the protection from the elements and the size. At the same time there's direct evidence that Gygax read the Vance story where the Expansible Egg appears, as well as direct statements from Gygax that aspects of D&D were inspired by The Dying Earth.

To me, the most striking thing was the feeling, the vibe if you will. When I read "Guyal of Sfere" and he set up his ridiculous-sounding but actually super-useful magical shelter the first time, I was like, oh, it's that spell from D&D that I found so risible 20 years ago. Not that "Guyal of Sfere" is a story that takes itself all that seriously, either. In fact, the match of the feeling was so compelling that I want down this whole rabbit hole to try to find evidence that would prove or disprove the connection.

On the other hand, there are many "Leomund's" spells in D&D and perhaps they are all named after some specific dude and the Tiny Hut has nothing to do with Jack Vance. However, I wasn't able to find any information about Leomund except for a Greyhawk fansite with 1990s website aesthetics (fitting).

Given the evidence I have been able to find, I think the Tiny Hut was likely inspired by the Egg.

At least as of 2nd Edition, who knows what has happened in D&D since 1989. ↩︎
Which is funny to me, because when I played AD&D in college, I distinctly remember us mocking Leomund's Tiny Hut as a silly and pointless spell what would never come in handy. The mage might have taken it anyway? This was a long time ago. Not actually 1989, but before 3rd edition came out. ↩︎
"D&D's engine of memorised spells is known as the "Vancian magic system" after the work of Jack Vance, who also inspired the Thief player class, and several early spells. Vance freely gave permission to Gygax to use his Ioun Stones as a magical item in the game on the condition that his books received a mention (as they then did in the Appendix)" from Appendix N entry in the Wikipedia. ↩︎
Jack Vance & the D&D Game by Gary Gygax, 2001. https://archive.org/details/gary_gygax_jack_vance/ ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎

Imaginary islands

2025-08-07T00:00:00Z

I've been painting imaginary lands and seas ever since I took the class at Case for Making in June. It's relaxing because I never have a particular landscape in mind, so there's no messing it up. It lets me play with color and wet-on-wet technique and just experiment and observe how the paint behaves and how the brushes behave.

Since these flow as they flow, I don't have much to say about what they depict or mean either, so I leave them without more commentary.

Gray and blue imaginary islands #

Green imaginary islands #

Blue and brown imaginary headlands and islands #

Blue and brown imaginary islands #

Brown and red imaginary islands #

Imaginary islands on a green sea #

Headlands in shades of blue and green #

Green headlands and sunset #

Second-rate synthetics

2025-08-03T00:00:00Z

A coworker asked me if I had found a way to get LLMs to generate good writing because he was not satisfied with what he was getting. Like pretty much everyone, we're under pressure to "leverage AI."^[1] I looked around, saw most people were gone for the day, and said no, it's always second rate.

If you have the taste to know LLM output is not good enough, you can do better. If, on the other hand, you think synthetic text is as good as what skilled writers can produce, you have no taste and are a bad writer. Furthermore, if you think what the LLM produces is better than anything you could write, you are correct. And a bad writer.

If you are a bad writer or not fluent in the language, LLMs will help you produce second rate, formulaic writing. That might have its place^[2]. But if you need to express original ideas clearly, give a precise judgement, or persuade people, synthetic text is not useful.

It is possible that some people who make their living as writers are in fact bad writers. I think they would do much better to put in the time to get good instead of using "AI" to generate synthetic text for them. Synthetic text can't express your ideas for you clearly because synthetic text generators don't have ideas, and they definitely don't have your ideas. And if you don't get good, you won't even have the taste to know the synthetic text is ineffective. You will waste your time and your editors'^[3] time iterating second rate synthetic text variations instead of realizing that you unclear prose is a hint that your understanding is incomplete and thus hone both the ideas and their expression.

LLMs were trained on what's on the internet, and most writing online is just filler and fluff between ads, so that's what the synthetic text generators predict as the most likely next token. It's the pointless intro before a stolen recipe on an ad farming site. It's the waffle around reporting on reporting on reporting on a press release.

That stuff is of no use to a professional writer who needs to inform or persuade. It's no use in business writing, either, whether you are a professional writer or not. A skimming reader might be taken in by the surface gloss and the generally right vibe of it all. But if they look closely, it crumbles. Even though much business writing is formulaic, it still needs to be precise to accomplish its goals. If you bring a product requirements document, a design document, a business case for an initiative, or an analysis to a, let's face it, unfriendly or at least critical audience, that surface gloss will not last more than a minute, and your edifice of strange synthetics will serve you poorly.

You will have wasted your time and other people's time. Even setting aside aesthetic and ethics, which is setting aside quite a lot, the output is not useful. And no, a better, longer prompt with more examples or a better model won't help.

Like apparently every technical writer, I'm constantly pressured to "leverage AI" or perhaps "utilize AI." And yes, it's always "leverage" or "utilize" and never plain old "use" in these you better use this solution in search of a problem or else situation because the people making these demands are philistines. ↩︎
Like, for example, if you need to write a condolence card in a language in which you are reading fluent but not fully writing fluent and want to show through the act of having sent a grammatically correct card that you care. ↩︎
I know, funny joke, who has editors these days; I sure don't. Just look at all these sentence fragments and run on sentences and absolute wasteland of totally self indulgent polemic. You'd think I just read PJ O'Rourke's How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink and I will say, you've got me there, though it's been a few weeks and I've read several thousand pages of Robert Jordan so you should be glad it's the O'Rourke that stuck. ↩︎

Ruth Asawa Retrospective at SFMOMA

2025-07-25T00:00:00Z

The Ruth Asawa Retrospective is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from April 5–September 2, 2025. Learn more at the SFMOMA website.

If you live in San Francisco, you've probably seen Ruth Asawa's artwork. She's best known for her woven wire forms, most often loopy enclosed spheroids, organic forms hung from above that evoke fruit or insect or bird nests. She lived most of her life in San Francisco and she was also commissioned to make many public artworks in San Francisco and the Bay Area. You can come to take her for granted.

Ruth Asawa Retrospective (installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, April 5–September 2, 2025); artwork: © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy David Zwirner; photo: Henrik Kam via SFMOMA

When you think of Ruth Asawa, you probably think of something like this photo from the SFMOMA retrospective. And there's a good reason Asawa is know for these looped wire forms. They're amazing. They're unique. She developed a whole expressive vocabulary with them.

That's what drew me to go to the Ruth Asawa Retrospective at SFMOMA. I really wanted to know more about how she made them. They look kind of like knitted or crochet fabric, except they're wire and huge. I mean, they're often bigger than a person.

While the retrospective had a little bit of information about how Asawa developed the technique, it focused more on how she developed the idea for the shapes. Her early works in two dimensional media repeated similar loopy, lobed, organic forms. You could see how the recurring fascination with a particular kind of form developed into a distinct artistic language.

One very interesting thing about Asawas was how she kept on making things. She didn't just evolve her woven wire baskets and work through those, though she certainly produced a huge body of those sculptures. She also painted in acrylic and watercolor, sketched, worked with markers, repurposed stamps, made ceramics, made jewelry, cast bronze, designed gardens, and worked with play dough! When she had health problems later in her life which limited what she could do, she took up more sketching and watercolor in place of weaving wire forms.

That would all be impressive enough, but she did it all while raising six children. Six! Can you imagine? I find it difficult to imagine being so prolific and productive if she had no other work than making the art. At the same time, I notice that often when I've seen plaques on Asawa's art, she's been described as a housewife, in a way that made it sound like she was only an eccentric lady who did art as a little side hobby between her housework, nearly an outsider artist. The exhibition definitely dispels that impression. She went to art school and studied formally, was dedicated to her art and worked on it through her whole life, and maintained a strong connection to the artistic community she entered while at art school throughout her life.

I was most surprised, and inspired, by Asawa's watercolors. The description of a watercolor painting of eggplants quotes one of her grandchildren:

"She always had an idea," remembers Asawa's granddaughter Lilli Lanier, who grew up nearby. "Come over tomorrow. We're going to draw eggplants. And then we're going to eat them. We'd draw food…. and then [it would turn] into a cooking lesson-how you make Japanese noodles with cilantro and the eggplants you've just drawn."

The exhibition also featured a watercolor painting of a bowl of cherries from a private collection, two watermelons, and tons of hydrangeas. The Asawa house was in Noe Valley, probably walking distance from where I live now, and I can imagine her painting some of the same things I look at and want to paint myself. Seeing her paintings of everyday fruits and vegetables made me want to try painting them too. Having gone to see the exhibition, I feel a strong connection to Asawa as my neighbor, if across time. I only moved to Noe Valley after she had already died.

Seeing the exhibition inspired me to try painting fruits and vegetables. I got home, I sketched some cherries, and when I went grocery shopping, I deliberately chose some interesting tomatoes so I could paint them as well as eat them. Since Ruth Asawa was so dedicated to arts education and involving other people in art, I'd like to think she would be happy to know that a neighbor across time has been inspired by her to make art of the objects found at hand.

Angel Island and Corona Heights

2025-07-18T00:00:00Z

I can't get enough of Angel Island. Some days fog obscures its feet, so it seems to float on a cloud in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Sometimes it rises out of the blue-green water with barely any clouds above, and the white isosceles triangles of sailboats cutting up the waves with white slashes in front of.

It's got such interesting shapes and textures. Like all the hills around here, it changes color through the season from lush green all over in the winter to a mix of parched browns and yellows dotted with greens in the summer.

So, of course, I've been trying to paint it. On the summer solstice, I went to Yerba Buena island, which turns out to have a great view of Angel Island, and got my favorite painting of it so far.

Angel Island sketch #

For a change, I sketched it first, to get the proportions. I didn't get it totally right, but it was a helpful reference.

Angel Island watercolor #

Then I did another, lighter sketch, taking what I learned from the first and painted the island as I saw it.

Angel Island watercolor, green variation #

Later, at home, I did two simplified studies from the same sketch. Rather than trying to get all the detail of colors and the water, I used a simplified palette. One of the studies focused on green colors.

Angel Island watercolor, brown variation #

The second simplified study focused on brown colors.

Corona Heights watercolor #

Two week later, I used the same approach to paint Corona Heights looking it at it from Bernal Hill. I was originally just going to sketch it so I used one of my practice papers rather than 100% cotton watercolor paper, but then I really liked the sketch and painted over it anyway. I quite like how it came out. I'm still learning how to give the feeling of fog and clouds. Just as with the botanicals earlier, it turns out sketching makes a big difference.

Idli obsession

2025-07-13T00:00:00Z

Idli are an everyday breakfast food and anytime snack in South Indian cuisine. They're small disks of white fluffy dough, about the size of a person's palm and convex on both sides. The flavor is mild, a little bit tangy like a delicate sourdough bread. They serve a role kind of like bread or tortillas; certainly tasty enough on their own but you'd usually eat them with some kind of topping or dipping thing.

Ideas about breakfast vary widely by culture, and much as I pride myself on being open minded (or open mouthed?) about new flavor combinations and textures, I have the hardest time adjusting to unfamiliar breakfasts. I grew up with normal Polish breakfasts, reassuring staple foods like rye bread with ham, farmer's cheese with scallions, boiled sausages, canned fish paste in tomato sauce, fresh buttered rolls with cherry conserves, scrambled eggs with onions and mushrooms, and so on. Obviously, not all of those things at once. I then slowly expanded my breakfast palette to include American breakfasts like cold milk soups with sweet crunchy corn flakes, hot oatmeal (in Polish cooking, more of a supper food, at least when I was a kid), and the strange but actually quite delicious combination of pancakes with small salty sausages with maple syrup poured over everything including the meat. But when I travel, that first breakfast is the hardest.

This last time when I was in Bengaluru for work, I had idli for breakfast on my second day, and every day thereafter. Idli are very mild, so they are welcome for a jet-lagged stomach. Idli are served with a variety of mostly savory sauces and sides, including sambar, which is warm and tomatoey and spicy, and a cool and cooling and mild coconut chutney. You can pace yourself with the spice as you adjust to South Indian flavor intensity, which has a much higher baseline than I'm used to. I don't even mean spicy as in hot-spicy. There's just a lot more complexity of spices and flavors all the time.

It took some months for me to crave idli again, because, as I said, I had them every day for breakfast for a week. However, idli aren't that widely available as a restaurant food in the US. I found some, but they were just OK. I made some from an instant mix at home and they were pretty good but again not as good as what I had in Bengaluru. So, finally, I decided to make them at home. Let me recount the experiment as it happened.

Idli at home, first attempt #

I have a four day weekend, an instant pot, and all the ingredients ready to go.

Urad dal are a legume. Idli rava is rice ground to the right texture. People who are very dedicated start with rice and grind it at home. I am not that dedicated. First, I need at least six hours to soak the urad dal.

I soaked the urad dal for about eight hours and the idli rava about two hours. I put the soaked urad dal in a blender to grind it, then also added the drained idli rava and some fenugreek and ended up with some nice smelling batter. It may be too watery, but too late to fix that now. Next, it goes in the Instant Pot on the yogurt setting for 12 hours. Maybe I will get idli for breakfast tomorrow? Fingers crossed I did it all right.

I gave the idly batter in the Instant Pot a sniff and after just one hour I can tell it smells right. I really hope I got the texture right!

I don’t have proper idli molds yet but I’ve been using these silicone egg steamers with instant mix so I poured the batter in them.

The idli look OK, less fluffy than I’d like. They taste OK but are too dense and lack the correct tangy flavor. I think the fermentation wasn’t strong enough.

Lessons learned from the first attempt #

I should have watched some videos before I did this but I just went by written instruction. The first thing I decided to change next time was do a full overnight soak for the urad dal and then process them in the powerful food processor instead of the just OK blender. In this video from Gita’s Kitchen, at around 2:30 she shows off a specialized kitchen tool, an electric stone grinder. If this is a normal appliance in an Indian kitchen, it’s no wonder so many recipes blithely say to just use the stone grinder. Aside from being impressed by the stone grinder, I was impressed by how fluffy the dal got as she processed them. This is like the magical process of whipping egg yolks until they are white and fluffy. Until you see it, you think surely this is not something that will happen. Well, it does, it just takes a powerful machine and quite a bit of time.

I got some good advice about doing the float test on urad dal batte to find out if it's fluffy enough. This is basically a home cook's method of determining specific gravity.

This excellent article explained how to grind urad dal using a mixer (aka "mixie") instead of a stone grinder, and how to avoid overheadting the batter when doing so. Because you have to grind the urad dal for a while, the dal can heat up from the friction alone, and definitely from the motor if the motor is right underneath the blades.

Idli at home, second attempt #

This time, I used my powerful Braun food processor to really grind the urad dal. Since the motor is in a side tower there’s less risk of overheating the batter. Still, there is some so I used an instant read thermometer to monitor the temperature along the way. It did get up to 87F (30C) just from the friction.

I forgot to take process photos, but idli, take 2 is now in the fermentation stage.

Idli take 2 went well. I made a larger quantity based on the assumption that fermentation goes better when there’s more mass. The batter had visible bubbles and a light feeling. Once steamed, the idlis had a very mild tanginess and a good crumb. They didn’t rise much in steaming but I think this is now down to using incorrect shapes. I am going to have to get proper idli molds. I used silicone madeline cookie molds to steam some of the idli and those were much better than the big ones I made in the egg poaching cups. They look kind of funny but the madeline shape is about the same thickness as a real idli.

I may have used a little too much liquid in mixing the urad dal. I was worried about the rising temperature. It’s a balance I think I’ll be able to achieve with practice though. Also, initially I didn’t want to get idli stands with molds because it seemed like I could get close enough with egg poaching molds. However, I was wrong. Maybe an experienced cook could intuit the amount to fill to still get a nice rise. Then again an experienced cook might put her foot down and insist that under such conditions we will make a different thing from this batter.

Idli at home, third attempt #

I made so much batter that I was making idli for a week. I finally broke down and bought some used idli molds on Amazon. I tried to find some locally, but I couldn't find any and I felt impatient.

Idli stands have multiple layers of these molds so you can make a whole lot of them at once. Or, you can just steam one or two layers at once if you prefer.

These look a lot more like the real thing.

Even though at this point the batter was in my fridge for five days, the idly still came out very tasty. You can see the crumb in the picture.

Conclusion #

Much as it irks me to admit it, having the right equipment makes a big difference. Similarly, from scratch do taste better than instant. That said, it's hard to make idli just for one. Paul finds idli just OK so I'm left on my own to make and then eat vast quantities. That's not as nice as it sounds. I tried making dosa with the leftover batter, but they came out terrible. You can get excellent dosa in San Francisco, unlike idli, so I'm just going to leave that to the experts. In the future, I may experiment with making a smaller batch or maybe even freezing batter or cooked idli. I don't have a good feeling about those last two options, though, who knows? Perhaps I can just convince people to come over and eat home-made idli. And, I may go back to using the instant mix sometimes when I really want idli and don't have time to plan ahead a day in advance.

Watercolor botanicals

2025-07-04T00:00:00Z

There's a beautiful hydrangea bush in my back yard, and I've been trying to paint it with watercolors. At first, I tried to use the same kind of wet on wet and layering techniques I learned in the landscape painting class last month. It just looked blurry and ugly, though part of that might have been the foggy afternoon. As I experimented, it became clear that I'd need to try some different techniques. For one, I might need to sketch a bit to get the shapes of plants and leaves, both for practice and perhaps as a guide for painting. Additionally, I'd need to try other watercolor techniques. Using layers of washes and letting them dry between applying layers seems to be particularly common for botanical painting.

Rather than just sharing the final versions that I'm satisfied with, I'm posting my attempts along the way.

Wet on wet hydrangeas #

This was the first attempt. I included too much stuff, and everything got messy. I don't like it at all, however trying it taught me that I had to change my approach.

I simplified the subject, but the exaggerated individual florets don't feel right.

The third attempt hardly looks like the hydrangeas, but I actually like it a lot more than the first two. I managed to abstract the subject more and it feels more like the bushes even if it looks less like them. The wet on wet got very muddy, though.

Purely abstract hydrangea florets #

I found a YouTube tutorial about painting hydrangea flowers and tried the technique it taught. It produces nice florets but I think it feels artificial. It might work if you made a very large painting and layered these within the big globes.

Pencil sketch base hydrangeas #

I sketched the shape of the bushes and some flowers, simplifying the subject in the sketch but keeping the actual organic shape of the orgs of the flowers. Then, I painted it using layers of color, drying in between layers for the most part. I did use some wet on wet to get the texture of the globes. This is my favorite so far, but because I painted it from a sketch and some photos, it isn't quite as a alive as I'd like.

Sage #

I brought a sprig of "Hot Lips" sage into the house and sketched it and then painted it. I definitely need more practice sketching to get contours right. Having the plant with me both while sketching and painting helped to make the painting feel more alive.

This is my favorite botanical I've painted so far. I kind of cheated by holding the branch up to the light and tracing the shadow to get the outline. That helped to get a more graceful curve to the sprig. I'm also very happy with the way I managed to abstract the blossoms yet kind of keep the feeling of their fuzzy texture.

Abstract botanicals #

One important lesson from the landscape class was to paint more than one thing at a time. The impulse to keep futzing with a painting while you wait for a layer to dry is a sure way to ruin it. So, at the same time as I was painting the purple sage, I practiced gently layering colors and trying to create a sense of dimension with different values of the same color. It's almost a watercolor doodle, but I quite like it. It's interesting how you can get a jewel-like feeling from almost any color if you play with value.

More field sketching in my future #

I also recently painted some landscapes that started with sketches, and have been sketching a bunch in the garden. I hoped I could magically get better at watercolor painting without putting in the work of learning how to sketch. Sometimes you can go quickly especially with abstract landscapes. However, when I want to get the grace and flow of real mountains and trees, I will need to get better at seeing and drawing their shapes. And when it comes to plants, I think there's just no avoiding it. I don't like fake-feeling paintings of plants. To me, plants are like people's faces. Once I know a plant, I can always identify it. The shapes of leaves and flowers and stems feel completely distinctive to me. Abstracting a real subject is one thing, but there's no such thing as a generic leaf or flower. And sketching from observation seems like the best way to get good at seeing and drawing the shapes of things as they really appear.

Herding cats

2025-06-29T00:00:00Z

Ever since we adopted Shinjuku, I've been wanting to do clicker training with her. It was more of a fun thing than a necessity. She's a very good senior cat who doesn't require behavior modification. She already knew all the important cat stuff, like how to use the litter box and snuggle.

The joke is that you can't train cats, but actually, you can, and most cat owners probably already have trained their cats. Training isn't about getting an animal to obey commands. It's about getting the animal to associate a certain behavior with a reward so they do that behavior, even if it's not something that would be inherently rewarding for them. In that sense, pretty much everyone who has a cat has trained it. If your cat hears the sound of the treat bag rustling, does it come running? There's nothing instinctual about responding to plastic rustling. You've trained your cat that the sound of the treat bag means there's likely a reward.

You might also notice that the cat always comes running and use the treat bag noise as a way of summoning the cat. For example, if you're trying to figure out where the heck the cat got to and want to make sure it's OK, you might lure it with the treat bag. And then of course you give a treat, reinforcing that coming when the treat bag rustles is a rewarding behavior. This is the part where the joke that the cat has trained the human might get made.

I think a better way to think of it is that the human and the cat have found a way to communicate. Communicating across species boundaries is hard! Humans and cats don't share language and even our body language is very different. We communicate with behavior that the other party finds rewarding. You, the human, find it rewarding when your cute cat comes to you. The cat finds rewarding to get a treat. The cat learns that the treat bag means a treat. And you, the human, learn that you can use the sound of the treat bag to get the cat to come.

I could give a lot more examples of things like when you teach the cat that when you've put a blanket on your lap, it's OK to jump up an knead, or that the cat teaches you how to pet it by stretching out and purring, and so on. But I'll just stick to the treat bag example because it's so simple and vivid.

A more precise signal #

What if you want your cat to do something a bit more complicated than come running when the treat bag rustles? You could give a treat when the cat does something good, but it may be hard for the cat to know exactly what it did that was good, and might even get the wrong idea. It takes a while to get the treat out and the cat might have moved on to something else. Cats get distracted pretty easily.

This is where the clicker comes in. The click noise instantly communicates to the cat that whatever it just did was the right thing and that a treat is coming. If you watch cat training videos from something like Cat School you might get the impression that clicker training is magical and cats will do amazing tricks right away. Well, maybe if the cat is the talented Jonas from Cat School and you're an animal behaviorist.

Of course, a cat doesn't inherently know that click=treat. You have to teach that first.

A series of hoops to jump through #

The first thing I had to figure out what treats Shinjuku would like, or to put it in cat training terms, what was her most high-value treat that would motivate her. It was a slow process. In the beginning, Shinjuku actually ran away from treats. Any food not in her food bowl, she refused to even sniff. I started putting her treats in a little treat dish, and even took to pointing at the treat and explaining it was for her. Eventually I got her to eat some treats.

Then, I got the clicker and clicked it as I put down the treat. She startled and backed away from the treat. I tried a few more times but it seemed like it just stressed her out and made her less interested in the treats, so after a while I gave up.

At the same time, I continued to occasionally give her treats to figure out what she might like. I also used treats to encourage her to explore new objects. For example, when I bought a heated pad for her, I used treats to lure her on to it. (Once she figured out it was warm, she no longer needed luring.) Every time I wanted her to go on a thing and put a treat down, I had the habit of tapping it twice with my finger.

In January, I tried a new kind of treat, Greenies Dental Treats, and she was incredibly eager for them. Shinjuku is not a very food-motivated cat, but she would follow me around the house if I had Greenies. She also purred loudly while eating them. At long last, I had found the high-value treat that would motivate her! If only I could get her to stop being scared of the clicker.

One day, and I now don't remember why, I tapped the top of a box twice with my finger when Shinjuku was around. She made a happy mreow and jumped directly on top of the box. I realized then that I had slowly, and somewhat accidentally, trained her that when I tap something twice, she will get treat when she goes there. It had taken months because I wasn't very precise, but one day she just got it. And I got it, too. I immediately got some Greenies and fed one to her.

We had a motivating, high-value reward and a signal she understood.

When it clicked #

I started doing "cat agility" with her, tapping boxes, chairs, and others places and giving her cut up bits of treat when she went where I tapped. After a few days of this, I decided to try the clicker again. We had the treat she liked, and she got used to the idea that we'd do training together every day. Into this routine, which she seemed to enjoy, I added a new thing: the click.

I got a bunch of little treats, and gave her one. Once I had her attention, I clicked the clicker, and gave her another. She did not run away! I did that over and over with a bunch of treats. Click, treat; click, treat; click, treat. Over and over until click=treat. It didn't take long.

Then I did a little bit more of the usual training, tapping at a box, except this time when she got on, I immediately clicked the clicker and then gave the treat. She got it very quickly from that point.

As soon as I started using the clicker with her, she made much faster progress. Previously, she wasn't quite sure if she would get a treat just by putting her front paws on the box, and seemed a bit frustrated. Within a few rounds, she got it that all four paws (click!) was the required action. She also understood that if there was a click, she should stay where she was and wait for the treat.

After a few days, I noticed that she was following the hand with the clicker, not the pocket with the treats as before. The click=treat association solidified quickly.

Patience, patience, patience #

Training a somewhat timid senior cat is probably harder than training a younger, bolder, or more food-motivated cat would be. It took a lot of patience to even get to the point where we could do training. The sequence went something like this:

3 months: Get cat to feel brave enough to accept treats.
3 months: Find a treat the cat finds truly motivating.
3 months: Accidentally teach the cat that "tap, tap" means "Go here for treat."
1 week: Associate treats with "click."

Granted, most people might not want to go through all that. Cats mostly learn to do all the important things on their own. I think it's pretty worthwhile though because it's a fun activity for both the human and the cat. You can teach the cat fun tricks or useful behaviors that will help keep the safe, like staying in one spot or coming when called. It's fun to have a routine with Shinjuku and I love how excited she gets when it's training time. She runs ahead of me to the box fort where we train, tail up and proud. She makes the most adorable mreows and purrs loudly while eating the treats. It's a cooperative activity.

For me, there's an added reward: the fun of doing something that's supposed to be impossible.

Red Cat Ramen

2025-06-20T00:00:00Z

While watching Gundam^[1] I understood single words like 「あかい」 (red)^[2], 「わたし」 (I/me), and 「これ」 (this). Then, suddenly among all the war stuff, there was a subplot about cake. Now I was on familiar territory! I was thrilled when I understood a whole sentence: 「ケーキはおいしいですか。」(Is the cake delicious?)

I joked that if I watched a cooking anime, I might get the thrill of understanding whole sentences more often. Ideally, it should be a workplace situation so everyone is using polite forms, because that's what I'm learning first^[3].

Polite and about food #

In that mood, I started looking for cooking anime set in a workplace and found Red Cat Ramen on Crunchyroll^[4]. It's a gentle workplace comedy about a ramen shop run by cats, and one human. Her job is to brush the cats. It's even cuter than it sounds. Because it's set in a workplace, they use mostly polite Japanese. It's about food and cats, two subjects where my Japanese vocabulary is best.

In the first episode, the cats hire the only human member of the staff, Tamako Yashiro. As the show progresses, her duties expand and her relationship with the cat staff develops. Tamako serves as a proxy for the audience, and we learn about each cat's background and personality along with her. Not all the cats are happy about a human team member, especially at first, and resolving interpersonal tensions in the workplace is the main dramatic engine.

I don't want to oversell these interpersonal tensions. To give one example, Tamako proposes making a poster to advertise the Aka Neko Special. It's special because it's prepared with hand-made noodles--well paw-made, actually. These special noodles are made by the tiger, Krishna, who works in the back kitchen because she's shy. Tamako wants to use a photo of Krishna-san on the poster to promote the tiger-paw made noodles, but only if Krishna agrees. Persuading the shy tiger to be on the poster and thus be publicly praised for the delicious noodles she makes is the dramatic material of several episodes.

This is not a tense show, is what I'm saying. Even at its most intense, it's still sweet and cute. It's perfect.

Food motivated language learning #

The only danger of watching this show is it makes me crave ramen. Cats plate perfect bowls of ramen. Patrons taste the beautiful ramen and enjoy it so much they are overcome with emotion, which is how I felt when I had my first bowl of ramen in Tokyo this February.

Simplifying a bit, that is why I decided to learn Japanese in the first place. I want to be able to go back to Tokyo and order food politely. And take trains and buses to places where I can order that food. And read menus. And ideally, have pleasant small talk about food with people I meet so I can find even more delicious food.

Now, I'm watching an anime about ramen to help me learn enough Japanese to have polite conversations about delicious ramen which motivated me to learn Japanese. It's all one great circle of ramen^[5].

Image credit #

The header image for this post is a publicity image for Episode 3: "Nothing wrong with that" "Service First" and "The Masked Engineer" from the official Red Cat Ramen website .

Specifically, the most recent one, Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX ( 機動戦士). ↩︎
Sorry, I'm not fancy enough yet to write these in kanji, even though I know common words like this would normally be written with kanji. I know the one for 「わたし」is 「私」 but I don't know the one for red and I thought it would look silly to mix and match, so you get hiragana. ↩︎
In addition to vocabulary difference, Japanese grammar is different depending on the level of politeness you use. Grammatically, there are three levels, with "polite" being the middle one. Most people start with polite because it's what you use with strangers and in workplace situations. It also has the most regular grammar. ↩︎
Crunchyroll is a streaming service just for anime. ↩︎
And other noodles, as well. ↩︎

Curfews are stupid

2025-06-13T00:00:00Z

The stupidest rule San Francisco enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic was a curfew. Many rules enacted then are silly in retrospect which at least made sense at the time based the available knowledge. But a curfew was idiotic. Like, what, do viruses wait until it's dark out to spread? The justification was something like, well, at night people go out to party and socialize, but in the same articles discussing that they'd be like, so you can have last call in bars at 9pm so people can make it home before 10pm^[1] for the curfew, implying that a virus, which as it was already obvious at the time is spread between people, somehow takes a lil' break during working hours, with maybe a little bonus time for happy hour. How polite of it!^[2]

Now, Los Angeles has a curfew because I guess it's offensive to to the authoritarian impulse that people express themselves after dark. Only, man, it's summer, and sunset is a little after 8 in LA with a bit of light after. Are people not allowed to go out and enjoy the sunset on the beach in fucking Los Angeles? Is this what we have come to? What's this all about? Do they really think a protest can't turn rowdy in the daylight? Or is it just more inconvenient for police and, oh my god, fucking military mobilized against civilians, to thrash people with sticks and blind them with rubber bullets after dark? Is it because it's harder for LAPD to aim rubber bullets at journalists in the dark? Is that why Los Angeles needs a curfew?

It's tempting to joke here, are we children with an 8pm bedtime? As if it's OK for children to have curfews. Yeah, I know, there are lots of curfews for teenagers and children in many places. But no, nobody should have a curfew. Not even 6 year olds. Sure, you can have an agreement with your housemates or your parents to come home at a certain time. You can have a bedtime. You can have a time by which you must feed the cat or else she'll be sad and so it's as good as an iron law. But a curfew is just an excuse for the naked exercise of power. It gives authority a sense of doing something, even though it accomplishes nothing useful.

A curfew is pretty great if you want to terrorize people, though. I lived through a period of martial law in Poland in the 80s, and while I was a toddler and too young to remember it, my relatives have told me about what it was like. A strict curfew was one of the oppressive rules imposed on the people. At first the curfew was 7pm-6am, and later it was eased somewhat to 10pm-6am. If anyone needed to be out at night for any reason, they were subject to harassment and arrest. People might furtively ask a passerby at night if there were any military police around as they scurried home. However, this was also an opportunity for thieves to rob you scott free once you assured them there was no military police around. You knew if you cried for help, the military police, if they did turn up, would arrest you, too. It might be much worse than losing some belongings. The curfew terrorized people but it didn't help enforce the rule of law. Quite the contrary.

A potentially rational curfew #

The only way I could imagine a curfew making sense would be if we were besieged by some kind of giant spider that only came out at night and murdered people. Then we could have Giant Spider Curfew. Get home by sunset, because at nautical twilight, They awaken and by astronomical twilight, They hunt. If you stay out, no one is coming to save you. We'll lock the doors and when we hear you scream, we'll put in earplugs and wait until morning to collect your bones and then hang them on the wall together with all the others as a warning.

But you know what? Even if there were Giant Night Spiders, you wouldn't need a curfew. Some people always defy curfew anyway. You'd just inform people about the Giant Night Spider danger. You don't need to menace anyone or lock anyone in or shoot anyone. You just point to the wall of bones and maybe some informative Giant Night Spider info graphics, and if someone is like, nah, I'm going to go out anyway, you just lead them to the airlock, and say, OK, but just remember, no one's going to save you, and they'd be like, yeah right, Giant Night Spiders are just a conspiracy theory, and then they'd step right out and after they got eaten, you'd collect their bones and add them to the bone wall, and maybe add the recording of their gruesome dismemberment to the collection of snuff films about people who went out and hope it persuades the next person.

What I'm saying is that even in this ridiculous made up scenario where it might make sense to have a curfew, you don't actually need a curfew. People wouldn't need to be coerced to protect themselves from Giant Night Spiders by not going out.

But there aren't any Giant Night Spiders in Los Angeles. And if there were Giant Night Spiders, I think Angelenos would go out and punch them in the head or run them over with hot pink SUVs instead of letting them steal the sunset and the night.

While I can't find verification for this online, I think that there was originally an 8pm curfew during the first stay at home order. That's also when they closed all the parks which was the second stupidest rule. That slightly made sense when they thought COVID-19 might be spread by fomites, but they kept the parks closed long after it was clear it wasn't so. However, as for the curfews I can only find details for the November 2020 order when social distancing measures were reinstated during a surge. In November 2020, the curfew was 10pm-5am. ↩︎
Obviously, no. Viruses do not take a break during working hours, daylight hours, or boring activities. ↩︎

Imaginary lands and seas

2025-06-06T00:00:00Z

Last weekend, I took a watercolor class at Case for Making. I waffled a bit if I should sign up for the class after I had already spent so much money on upgraded supplies, but ultimately decided that a 3-hour in-person class focused on the landscapes I keep trying to paint would be worth it. It was soooo worth it. I picked up a ton of technique, philosophy, and practical tips, too. The artist who taught the class, Dave Muller lives in San Francisco and taught us techniques specifically suited to painting the misty, hazy, and kind of muted colors we get here.

Every book and video about watercolor advises to avoid overworking the piece. But what does that really mean and how do you avoid it? Seeing a demo and also having a teacher give real time feedback like "You might be getting tempted to keep doing more and more to your painting, but perhaps it's time to stop," helped learn when it might be happening. One simple tip to avoid overworking? Paint multiple pieces at once, and as you wait for the layer on one piece to dry, go to the next. That was genius for me. If I'm in the mood to paint, I want to paint! I'm not going to sit there and watch paint dry. I am, however, perfectly happy to start another painting while I wait.

I also went into the class with the intention that I would learn whatever I could and practice the techniques as instructed even if it seemed to go against what I thought made sense. That was the right attitude. As I look at the exercises from the class and compare them to the things I painted the week before, when I already had upgraded my paints, I'm amazed by the difference. Just a little bit of technique makes a huge difference.

I started with some kind of light blue wash, something with a lot of cerulean, and slowly built up the coast. I had a different kind of rock when I started but it came out however it did.

I really didn't like how this one came out at first. At a certain point the instructor said, you can do something kind of extreme if you'd like, and totally change one of your paintings. You can paint the sky a strange color like, like brown or red, or whatever you like. Go ahead, choose one of the paintings you like least and try it. So I did that and now coming back to it, I think it might be one of my favorites exactly because the sky is so strange.

I think this might have been the first one I started, although I was rotating through all of them throughout the class. I decided I liked the monochromatic look, and stuck to pretty much just indigo. Maybe I added a little ultramarine. But mostly it was indigo of different values. Values means how intense the paint is, or put another way, how much you dilute it with water. I like this one, too. Sometimes the pacific ocean feels like this, especially as the evening comes on.

I made a pink sky here, and I like how that came out. My favorite thing about this one was how I got these scrubby bits of dune grass in the foreground. I was able to borrow some interesting flat brushes and very fine round brushes from the class supplies, and the grasses are mostly the edge of the brush.

This last one was a bonus painting. I was waiting for all the others to dry and needed something to keep my hands busy, to keep from overworking. I did all of this one very quickly, very carelessly. And yet I think it's probably my favorite overall. I got a very cool sky. The land shape feels like it has some real dimension to it. One of the interesting things about watercolor is that slow, careful movements don't necessarily produce the best effects. Yeah, there's skill and technique, but when you actually paint, moving quickly, fluidly and being kind of relaxed produces the best results. That's part of why it's so enjoyable. You basically have to loosen up and give up control to paint with watercolor.

Right after the class, I went out and made two little paintings from life applying the techniques I learned. I don't know where I put them so I'm not going to scan them today. I can't wait to go out again this weekend and try some more. I particularly want to try to get some of those hazy, layered hills.

Watercolor upgrade

2025-05-30T00:00:00Z

I took up watercolor painting last April when I bought a little travel box of Sakura Koi watercolors. It came with a water brush and a removable palette that stacked inside. At the same time I bought some paper. I took the little box with me wherever I could and tried to paint what I saw, or at least what I felt I saw. As I experimented, I also got books from the library and watched YouTube videos to learn some technique. I took a free class, also at the San Francisco library.

Over the year, I kept picking up equipment and accessories. A few brushes here and there, collapsible water jugs, a cute little sponge, a rollup pencil case to serve as a brush case, a second, smaller Sakura Koi paint set that was more convenient to travel with, and a selection of clipboards.

It slowly came to my attention that I might want to buy some better paints. Watercolor paints, I learned, come in two grades: student and professional (sometimes also called artist). The professional grade paints are considerably more expensive. Similarly, watercolor paper comes in student and professional/artist grade. I have been, I admit, a bit cheap with the paper. A coworker who has been painting with watercolors for a while and is considerably more serious than me offered to have a little painting class during lunch and suggested I try her paper instead. It made a huge difference. For the first time, paint was behaving the way the books and videos described it, especially in wet-on-wet technique.

And so, I bought some professional grade, 100% cotton paper and a set of Winsor & Newton tube paints.

Since I got tube paints, I now needed a dedicated palette, and ideally a travel palette since I like to paint outside. So, again at my coworkers' recommendation I went down to Case For Making in the Sunset and bought a lovely travel palette and a bunch of empty half pans. Oh, and just a couple additional colors. I filled up my new palette.

This was a little test image I painted before I had prepared the whole palette. I couldn't resist trying the CfM colors right away, especially the Cerulean. A little dab of yellow from the tube gave me a nice green. And soon I had a happy little tree. My scanner does not do those colors justice.

On the following day, I took the whole kit out to Holly Park and wandered around until I found a view I liked.

I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I must regretfully report that spending more money on good paper and good paints does make for better results.

Even thought it was quite cool and windy, I had such a nice time that I painted one more thing.

I like the tree in my painting, though I wish I had managed to capture more of its distinctive shape. I keep trying to remember the lesson to use the landscape to create a watercolor rather than using watercolor to paint the landscape. Nonetheless, there are certain shapes and feelings of shapes I wish I could capture better.

That will just have to come with practice. I signed up for a landscape painting class this Saturday, also at Case for Making. One thing seems to lead to another. I don't regret at all that I started with the inexpensive all-in-one palette last year. Without it, I would not have discovered I like watercolor painting so much. Something about this medium inspires a light-hearted approach. People say watercolor is unforgiving; I can't say I've found that to be true. You can't always get it to do exactly what you want, but if you go with the flow, you might end up with something unexpected and beautiful anyway.

Cursed wedding ideas

2025-05-23T00:00:00Z

When I was looking for a secular reading for my wedding, I found a lot of the suggested items were excerpts from literature taken rather out of context. And these excerpts, when taken in their full context, were not what I'd consider auspicious for a wedding. For example take this bit from Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2:

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.

Sounds nice, right? Except it's Polonius, Ophelia's officious father, who is reading a letter from Hamlet to Ophelia out loud to Hamlet's mother to prove that Hamlet has gone mad. And the audience knows that Hamlet has decided to fake being crazy as part of his convoluted scheme to get revenge for his father's murder. It's been a while since I've watched Hamlet but if I recall correctly, it's not clear that Hamlet actually loves Ophelia, or if he wrote this letter on purpose as part of his fake-crazy rouse.

Also, the attentive reader might notice that the full title of the play is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As a quick review, tragedies are plays that end with death, while comedies are plays that end with marriage. So that might serve a hint about how things go for Hamlet and Ophelia.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Image is in the public domain. See Wikipedia article on Ophelia.

Yup, that's a painting of Ophelia, dead, after she commits suicide later in the play, largely because Hamlet rejected her. Hamlet also kills Polonius, sort of by accident. And of course Hamlet also dies. Pretty much everyone dies. That's how Shakespearean tragedies tend to go.

I don't know about most people, but this is not the energy I wanted to bring into my marriage.^[1] People also love to quote Romeo and Juliet (spoiler: they both die) and occasionally Wuthering Heights (I don't even know what to say).

Similarly, when it comes to the first dance song people choose for their weddings, there are some pretty wild choices based on complete misreadings and gross misunderstandings of the work. Like, can you imagine choosing Sting's Every Breath You Take as your song? It's about stalking, not love, and it's not in any way subtle. And yet!

Do you want your wedding to be cursed? #

Yet some people make choices about their weddings that make quoting Polonius in your wedding vows seem smart, cultured, and thoughtful.

Did you know that there are people who hold their weddings on the grounds of former plantations? As in, the places in the south of the United States that before the American Civil War used people enslaved in the system of chattel slavery as their labor force? These pretty houses were built by enslaved people. Their wealth was their stolen labor and their stolen lives. The places are soaked in generations of cruelty and suffering. If you are having a hard time imagining what that might have been like, I recommend the film 12 Years a Slave (2013) as a visceral primer.

Last week one of these places, the mansion at Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned to the ground. Its current owners ignored the Nottoway Plantation's horrid legacy and instead marketed it as a resort and a place for weddings.

The AP reported that some people were sad about the shitty place burning to ash:

For others, it was a moment of sadness. Nottoway Plantation has for years been a venue for weddings and other events celebrating cherished milestones.

And then went on to say:

But some plantations also de-emphasize or overlook their full histories, foregoing mentions of slavery altogether. That is why the “good riddance” sentiment seemed to outweigh expressions of grief over Nottoway Plantation, which makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website.

As a result of the news, I've been thinking a lot about people who choose a former plantation as their wedding venue. Are they just completely unaware of the context? Is it a decision made out of pure ignorance? Or do they understand the historical context and horror of chattel slavery and think it's not a problem? Even if they don't give a crap about showing some respect and sensitivity, considering how much weddings bring out everyone's latent superstitions, wouldn't they reconsider getting married in a place so soaked with suffering and injustice, just for the selfish reasons, to avoid the potential bad luck?

The best I've come up with is that the generous interpretation is that it's an extreme version of the philistine ignorance that leads to preposterously ill-chosen wedding quotes. The ungenerous interpretation is that it's racism so toxic that they can't imagine the pain of enslaved people so it doesn't even shake their enjoyment of the vapid prettiness of the setting, nor twinge the slightest sense of unease and superstition.

Also hilariously, the supposedly immovable physical facts that the first part of the quote uses to establish the truth of the last assertion are not so unambiguously true. The stars are not fire, except in the most metaphorical sense. The sun doesn't move, at least not in the way the Ptolemaic model assumes. The whole syllogism isn't so neat anymore. If that is technically a syllogism. ↩︎

Haunted manuals lightning talk

2025-05-16T00:00:00Z

Last week, I presented a lightning talk at Write the Docs based on my haunted manuals series. A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube. While I've been thinking about haunted manuals for a long time, the 5-minute lightning talk was something of a last-minute decision. I didn't practice and I made my slides over the lunch break. So I was curious to see the talk and find out what I actually said. I'm pleased to report that I mostly made sense and got the gist of my point across.

In case the embedded video doesn't go directly to my talk, you can find it around 20:30. You could also listen to the other lightning talks, which were good.

I've also lightly cleaned up my slides from the talk, which, if you watch it, you'll see mostly didn't work. Nonetheless, here they are. If you click through and open the deck in a new window, you can see my speaker notes, unlike me during the talk.

Links to all the talks, photos from the conference, and sketchnotes of the main talks are on the Write the Docs blog at Portland 2025 Recap - Talk Videos, Photos, Sketchnotes, CoC Report.

A little aside about masks #

I still wear a mask in most indoor places, and I wore a mask during most of the conference. The space was large and seemed well-ventilated with plenty of open windows and outdoor hangout areas. I considered keeping my mask on during the lightning talk like the courageous and exemplary Ed Yong did during his talk at the last XOXO. However, I wasn't confident that I would be able to articulate and be heard well enough with a mask on, felt that my ability to emote and screw up my face was an important part of my communication, and finally, felt that the risk of taking it off for five minutes on a stage with a large volume of air around me in all directions was fairly low for and for others.

Masks weren't required at Write the Docs, though a significant minority of people still wore them indoors. I never felt even a little weird about wearing a mask. To be fair, I'm pretty resistant to feeling weird, that is, I often don't pick up the social cues that I should feel weird. Or, let me rephrase that more accurately: I feel awkward very often with little apparent correlation to how other seem to actually think about me and the situation, so I've taken to just feeling comfortable about feeling awkward. You might argue that if I'm comfortable about feeling awkward, doesn't that actually make me comfortable? I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes.

It's like not being anxious about getting anxious. I remember reading somewhere that after a person has one panic attack, they can get into a spiral of getting panic attacks about getting a panic attack. I think social awkwardness is kind of like that. Anyway, my real point is that beyond my usual sense of low-level awkwardness in social situations, I did not feel anyone judging me, even mildly, about wearing a mask.

Reset button

2025-05-09T00:00:00Z

It happened again: scope creep. When I re-started regularly blogging here in 2023 with Ignore previous instructions and resume shitposting I specifically said I would avoid the trap of only writing serious and thoughtful posts, because as we all know from that anecdote about the pottery class, the way you get good work is not by trying to produce good work but by producing a lot and then some of it will be good, and more overall works will be produced than if you just tried to produce one perfect thing.

I backed myself into a corner, being too serious. That's particularly problematic when you actually want to write serious things, which I have been. Then I had the great idea that I could shift my writing schedule to write and post over the weekend instead of writing on Thursday and the posting on Friday. Didn't work. All I wanted to do the last few weekends was work in my garden. At least I wrote about gardening, but, I didn't ever get around to sharing that post anywhere so only the most dedicated RSS followers saw it.

By the way, did you know this blog has an RSS feed? It does! It goes out automatically. I also send it out through a newsletter, but sometimes I forget to send a newsletter. I think I have like a 95% rate of remembering to send the newsletter, so it's pretty good, really?

What I've been up to instead of blogging #

First of all, gardening obviously. I have also been experimenting with esoteric techniques to trick myself into writing, specifically attempting to dictate voice to text notes for the thing I want to write about, like I'm a Star Trek captain doing the philosophical part of the Captain's Log. Voice to text is kind of OKish. Not really so good at live transcription, if I'm honest. But there are some tools that do a pretty good job of transcribing recordings. I'm trying out MacWhisper, which processes the speech locally. I don't quite understand the kind of AI/ML thing it is. I guess it's a large language model? Anyway it does a good job locally processing and transcribing stuff. I might do even more voice notes and transcription, though I will need a better microphone. I mostly want to record my notes when I'm walking. If I'm sitting down at home, I might as well pick up a computer and type.

I might write more about speech to text after I experiment some more.

I have continued to study Japanese. My pace slowed down but I'm still doing it and that's the important thing. If someone teleported me to Tokyo, I bet I could order food. At the very least, I could point to things and politely say "This thing, please," instead of just pointing to things.

I read the first book of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, which was fun and fine. I also read the last two books in Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series and tried, and failed, repeatedly to write about some ideas I picked up from it. I'm still working through them. Eventually they'll come together. It took me a long time to get my thoughts together about Derrida, too.

Write the Docs #

This week I attended the Write the Docs conference in Portland. The last time I attended in person was 2019. That was also the first time I attended. I remember how amazing it felt that first year. I had just landed my first technical writing job at an actual tech company, and I had so much to learn. I was the first and only tech writer, so the greater professional community was the only place I could learn from.

Six years later, even though I've learned and grown a ton as a technical writer, I found I was just as excited, and maybe more so! The more I've learned, the more I realized I still had to learn and the more capable I've become at absorbing more knowledge.

Haunted manuals lightning talk #

In addition to the planned, official speakers, Write the Docs also has lightning talks. Lightning talks are up to 5 minutes, and delivered with or without slides. At Write the Docs, they accept lightning talk submissions on the two days of the conference, and select 5 speakers each day. You find out if you've been chosen about an hour and a half before you speak. I waffled about whether or not I wanted to do a talk about something, and what thing. I tried to make some slides on Monday and kind of failed. Then, I impulsively submitted my talk proposal anyway, about 15 minutes before the Tuesday submission window closed. To my surprise and mild terror, my talk was selected.

I spent the lunch break putting together some rudimentary slides, which mostly ended up not working due to technical issues anyway, and some very basic speaker notes. I was so nervous that my smart watch kept alerting me my heart rate was high.

Then I went on stage, my slides mostly didn't work, and my speaker notes totally didn't work, and I had a fabulous time.

I love public speaking. It's a weird quirk. I'm scared of the concept of public speaking and before I am to speak I always get extremely nervous. However, when I actually get up and speak, I love it. I like it a lot more when I'm speaking before a live audience than when I'm presenting online. When I'm in front of an audience and they're looking at me, I can feel their energy and connect with them, and it helps me know what to say next. I feel their feelings and hear their reaction and it lets me know how to handle my pacing, too. The bigger the audience, the better, in my experience. Around 20 people is when it starts to feel good. 100 is great. That gets some real crowd energy and yet is small enough that you can connect with individuals. I think the biggest group I ever stood in front of was about 1,000, though it may have been more. I'm bad at estimating people after a certain amount, and that was poetry rather than speaking. There's probably a size where it starts to feel impersonal and you lose the connection. I don't think I'll ever have anything to say with enough public appeal that I'll find out what my max audience size is before I stop enjoying it.

I do wonder how many other people would actually enjoy public speaking if they tried it, but don't try it because they're scared beforehand and assume it will be just as miserable when it's happening.

My lightning talk was based on my haunted manuals blog post series, and I was surprised how much people seemed to enjoy it, even the Derrida jokes. I never did write that last post about new haunted manuals and hauntology, because I gave myself some more critical theory reading homework, which I have not yet completed. Considering how much the concepts resonated with people, maybe I should try writing what I can before I go and spend a few years reading more ponderous tomes first.

Recordings of all the talks, including lightning talks, will get posted in a few weeks. I'll post a link to my talk once it's up. It was so improvisational in the end, that I don't even know exactly what I said and I'm looking forward to finding out. Did I tell a bunch of technical writers that ontology is the study of onts? I hope so.

Resuming regularly scheduled programming #

So that's what I've been up to. Gardening, reading, public speaking, giving myself Derrida homework. I also have been doing my job, which, as I may have mentioned once or twice, involves quite a bit of writing and thinking.

However, life never really does get easier. Writing is simultaneously the hardest thing and the easiest thing for me to do. I never know which one it will be when I sit down. I never know how good the first draft will be, and I certainly don't know what people will like. They can't all be bangers, as the poet once said. So I'm taking the pressure off about any of that and reaffirming my commitment to just one rule: a new post every Friday.

A perennial garden post

2025-04-22T00:00:00Z

I spent most of this weekend in the garden. What I meant to do was to anchor some shelves to the walls so they don't fall down in case of an earthquake, and to do that I had to go to the local big box hardware store, which in these parts is Lowe's, to buy some specialty screws and attachmenty bits that you could stick in a wall and make it be more solid. So I did that, I mean, I took the bus down to Lowe's, but the bus drops you off right at this great garden store, Flowercraft. Of course I had to pop into Flowercraft and browse around.

But I'm not totally without sense. I took a mental note of what I wanted and then went across the street to Lowe's and bought my specialty screws. While I was there I also bought a replacement screen for a screen door and a thing that looks like a pizza cutter but is plastic to stick the replacement screen in. The guys in the door section assured me replacing a screen would be no big deal and that you could just look up how on YouTube. I also bought an adjustable window screen. Thus laden with a roll of replacement screen stuff and a window screen, I walked back across the street to Flowercraft and fantasized about all the things I might be able to plant and grow in my garden, were I the kind of person who takes care of a garden in a sensible, every day or at least every week way.

Then I looked in my heart and knew myself for the person that I am, and instead bought a bunch of drought resistant perennials, as well as a variety of lovely terracotta pots for succulents. And also some sugar pumpkin seeds because I live in hope. The real limiting factor, really, is that I can only carry so much stuff on the bus. Although, this being my third year working in the garden, I also have a somewhat realistic sense of how much I can plant in a single day, which, as luck would have it, is about the same as the amount I can uncomfortably carry on the bus.

When I got home, I thought I had better trim the grass first before I plant new things. So I got out the electric string trimmer, which my dad had helped me pick out and transport from that same Lowe's a few years ago, and I strimmed the crap out of that overgrown patch of lawn. I friggin love that machine. It's a little heavy but utterly satisfying to wield. As I cleared the grass, the overgrown sage bushes kept getting in my way, so I thought, I better trim those as well so I can strim the grass overgrowing the path. After I trimmed back the bushes, I realized the path was covered in fallen leaves, so I swept all of them up and also all the grass, and piled it all up on the compost, and at this point I had been at least two hours and my arms were kind of shaky, and I hadn't even planted anything!

I went inside, fortified myself with tea, and went right back out again. Suddenly it was two hours later, and my arms were trembling with exhaustion, but almost all the seedlings were planted and securely protected with mesh baskets that look like little trash bins.

And that is why I didn't write a blog post last weekend. That, and you know, the horrors, which seem to be making it hard for many creative people to write the kind of stuff they normally write. But for the sake of the argument, let's say it was because I was gardening. My arms were so tired I couldn't even hold up a phone to read it, so really, how could I write?

Fort McDowell on Angel Island

2025-04-13T00:00:00Z

The remnants of Angel Island's military base buildings have been partly preserved, and partly allowed to gracefully decay. Slowly, water and plants wear them down. Clearly, some kind of work is being put in to keep the structures from becoming so unsafe that they'd need to be completely fenced off. Last week I wrote about the acorn woodpeckers of Angel Island, and this week, I want to share some photos from my favorite ruins there, Fort McDowell East Garrison.

Weeds grow at the feet of the collonade. It's not exactly inviting, yet it draws me in.

Something about this rotting courtyard, and all these rusted and rotting and plant-choked buildings, reminds me of Canaan House in Gideon the Ninth. I get a creepy, uncanny feeling and as a result I want to look at it and photograph it.

The more you look, the more rot you see, like in this view up towards the rotting roof and dangerously rusting balconies.

There's even a monster under the stairs.

The stark patches sun make the dark pools of shadow feel deeper.

I think this might have been the mess hall, that is to say the place where the soldiers ate, based on the multiple vents in the roof.

An empty lamp still curves gracefully.

Each building is lovingly labelled with a sign about how unsafe it is. There are still a few that are maintained enough that you can go in, but none were open for visitors when I was there in late December.

The warning signs affixed to the various buildings around the Fort McDowell East Garrison are fresh and bright. To me they read as signs that someone cares.

Something about these late afternoon shadows draws me.

I suppose the sea air wears away the paint, leaving these beautiful textures. The stairs, disconnected and leading to nothing, remind me of the dangerous high places Gideon explored in Canaan House.

The glass is gone from the windows, and the metal frames that held it hang open.

A hawk perches on the corner.

This outbuilding was once used to stow ammunition, I think. It sill has a sign forbidding open flame. The road near it leads down to Quarry Beach.

The faded sign is nestled in sun-singed iceplant. Enough is left to warn anyone going to the beach that this one, like pretty much all beaches around San Francisco, has dangerous currents.

Written on the sand, "ALL EMPIRES END." I saw some people on the beach, all having fun in a group, and one of them wrote this in the sand with their toe. I'm sure the tide washed it away, not long after.

Acorn woodpeckers of Angel Island

2025-04-04T00:00:00Z

Angel Island is a park and nature sanctuary in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It used to be an immigration and quarantine station and a military base, and now it's a park with interesting historical features. You can only get there by ferry, and while you can camp there, the only people who live there are park personnel and I guess maybe some people at the coast guard station.

In recent years, I've tried to go there in late December, during the intercalary interstitial interregnum. That's when it's the quietest and everything is green from the winter rains.

It's a great place to see birds. The ecosystem is not that different from San Francisco, so I tend to see a lot of familiar friends, like this California scrub jay.

During my last visit in December 2024, I identified a new bird. I first heard some unusual cries and I used Merlin Bird Sound ID to identify the bird by sound. Then when I had an idea of what it might be, I started looking around.

Sound ID said these red-hat wearing cuties were acorn woodpeckers.

I could see and hear that these were woodpeckers. They were definitely pecking at the tree, and like a lot of woodpeckers, they liked dead trees. But why, I wondered, were they called acorn woodpeckers?

I thought it might have something to do with all the coastal live oaks on Angel Island. It's more dense with them than anywhere else I've seen and maybe there's something about about that habitat that these "acorn" woodpeckers like.

Maybe whoever named them saw these oak trees full of acorns and named the woodpeckers after them. Maybe they eat some kind of worms that only live in acorns?

I was thinking about this for maybe an hour as I hiked along the ring road. Then I came across some dead trees that were much closer to the path, and this time the light was at a better angle for me to see, and I finally realized why they're called acorn woodpeckers.

Acorn woodpecker is not some kind of fanciful name. No, these woodpeckers make holes in dead trees and stick acorns in them!

Then, as if to politely help confirm my identification, one of the acorn woodpeckers flew to a branch right next to the granary tree and let me photograph it.

How cool are these birds? While I didn't catch any of them in the act, the Wikipedia page has some great photos of acorn woodpeckers carrying acorns in their beaks. Maybe one day!

The best damn udon in San Francisco

2025-03-29T00:00:00Z

In 2020, I made a New Year's resolution to find the best udon in San Francisco. I thought it would be easy and fun. I planned to go to restaurants and order udon and decide if I liked it or not. Almost all the udon I've had in San Francisco has been disappointing, and a resolution to find the best would keep me going when I was tempted to give up.

Yeah, I bet you can see where this is going.

But first, what's udon? #

Udon (うどん)^[1] is a kind of thick wheat noodle, and as a shorthand also refers to the soups made with that kind of noodle. Udon originates from Japan. Udon noodles are white, have a pleasantly toothsome texture, and tend to be really quite thick--like 3 millimeters. For comparison, a pencil eraser tip is about 5 millimeters. While there are other varieties, including dried udon that is more flat, the kind of udon I'm interested in are fresh.

Especially in the US, you'll mostly find udon served as a hot soup, but like other noodles, it can also be served hot or cold, with thick sauces or gravies, with dipping sauce, fried, and probably many other ways.

Udon, interrupted #

In January 2020, I had a bowl of udon at the Japanese Tea Garden cafe in Golden Gate Park. It was as good as what I've been able to make at home from packaged udon and instant soup mix. Most of the udon I've had in San Francisco did not even clear this low bar, so I was relatively happy with it.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic started, and going out to eat at restaurants was first not possible, and then for a long time it seemed not advisable. Even buying packaged udon was difficult, and I wondered if udon might have been one of the strange shortages, like flour and quarters. I almost made udon from scratch, but I didn't want to waste precious flour on an experiment, so I found other hobbies like birdwatching and workaholism to get me through it.

Five years later #

This year, I visited Tokyo and had three servings of udon, two excellent and one OK. The OK udon was somewhat better than anything I'd had in San Francisco. It was at the airport. The excellent ones were in randomly chosen izakayas^[2] that didn't even specialize in udon.

Prepared for disappointment, I nonetheless felt motivated to resume Udon Quest. I knew where to start again.

In 2019 or early 2020, I told a friend about Udon Quest and that I'd been at the Stonestown mall and noticed that there was an udon restaurant there that seemed quite popular. I had a hunch it might be good and was going to save it for later in the quest. She was like, yeah, good idea because if you go there first the quest will be completed because it's probably the best.

In 2019, the Stonestown Galleria^[3] was a slightly sad mall that didn't know what it wanted to be. It had lost its anchor stores, Macys and Nordstrom. Like many malls, it seemed adrift. It did have a vending machine with Dippin' Dots, a cold confection which I can best describe as, well--imagine you turned icecream into bb-ball sized spheres, or maybe a pile of pastel styrofoam but it's a food. It is conceptually a very exciting dessert and I always get it when enough years have passed that I've forgotten that it's more conceptually than gustatorily enjoyable. Dippin' Dots were ahead of the spherification craze that brought us things like popping boba and somehow they manage to hit a spot where they are both nostalgic and futuristic.

Marugame Udon #

Since I restarted Udon Quest, now with the much higher bar of "as good as average in Tokyo" I figured, why dither? I went directly to the Stonetown mall and found the udon place that was already popular in 2019, Marugame Udon.

I stood in the line. I chose my noodles (large) and the toppings and style (Nikatuma). I tasted and I judged.

Their Nikutama udon was up to the Tokyo standard. It had broth with real umami depth, chewy udon, a perfect soft boiled egg, delicious sweet beef, and a generous scoop of scallions. The dining room was simple and unpretentious. It was a place to eat food not to dither. It was perfect.

My expectations were high, and it met them. Five years after it started, Udon Quest is complete.

You may wonder, besides the Japanese Tea Garden, have I tried other udon in San Francisco? Yes. Lots. Including in Japantown. It just feels unkind to list places that are only OK. Maybe I'm not giving them proper credit and they're doing something good in a style I don't like. Maybe they aren't any good, actually, but why pile on? I'm not a food critic. I just love noodles. I prefer to focus on the good and let the bad pass by in silence. I suppose I will keep trying udon at other places, especially if a new restaurant opens. But if I want guaranteed good udon, I'm going to take two buses across town and go to Stonestown and hit up Maragume.

The mall that got its mojo back #

After the satisfying udon excursion, I went to check out the mall. Multiple articles in the local paper over the last few years reported about how it's been undergoing a renewal with a new focus on food as the main draw rather than huge department stores.

The Dippin' Dots vending machine is still there. But the whole food court is now a destination. Even outside the food court, there are interesting places to eat, including a cool conveyer belt sushi restaurant that I definitely want to visit. There are lots of little stalls on the lower floor including a Quickly bubble tea, a vasos de frutas stand, a hot tea stand, and tons more. There are little vending machines and gashapon and other little things like that throughout. The mall was busy with lots of teenagers and families with kids. The mall did not feel bad! It didn't make me feel alienated. It made me feel like getting more snacks and maybe some consumer electronics. Stonestown had somehow passed through its time of decline and found a new life as a teenager-welcoming food haven where you can come for the snacks and stay for the shopping.

As I walked around, I kept thinking, where's your doom loop now, huh? Not here! I have some theories about why the Stonestown Galleria is so pleasant now, when the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco felt a bit off-putting even at its best. I think it has to do with ditching the fake upper-class aspirations, welcoming teenagers, and focusing on good food. But that, as I so often say, is a blog post for another time.

Just One Cookbook has a great introduction to udon with lots of pictures and a video in their recipe for making fresh udon from scratch. I have made udon from scratch exactly once about 25 years ago. Like other noodles it is theoretically easy but practically really time consuming. It's worth doing if you can't buy ready-made fresh noodles where you live, but honestly? I'd consider moving. I guess it depends how much udon proximity matters to your quality of life. ↩︎
"An izakaya (居酒屋) is a type of informal Japanese bar that serves alcoholic drinks and snacks." from the Wikipedia entry for Izakaya. In my experience, an izakaya is a lot more like an English pub than an American bar, in that you can go there just for food and the food is likely to be good as opposed to a snack to have as you drink. ↩︎
The mall is officially called the Stonestown Galleria. Most people call it the Stonestown mall or Stonestown. When I was a student as SFSU, everyone just called it Stonestown. It was an OK mall at the time, the time being the early 2000s. It had a movie theater and some shops, I guess. Then it went through a period of decline, possibly with the refurbished downtown Westfield Mall sucking some of its traffic away. ↩︎

Neither waffle nor a cold open

2025-03-22T00:00:00Z

It's hard to write a good first sentence these days. Apologetic preemptory waffle is the reflexive post-traumatic response to having said, or even witnessed someone else say, something on social media that got picked up by reply guys, well- and ill-meaning scolds, and people who missed the point or just want to blog in your mentions. Reading a sentence like that is like watching someone cringe in anticipation of a blow. It doesn't stop the dedicated mis-reader and it makes the friendly reader feel bad, or worse, bored.

I'm not just talking about other people. I write those sentences and paragraphs, too. I write them, and then I delete them, and try to write something better. Sometimes the best way to resist the impulse to over-explain is to give in. And then delete that crap.

Ideally, I like a funny hook that makes people go "huh?" but in a fun way so they read more^[1]. However, I can't always pull it off, and frankly, sometimes it makes me feel icky to try. So how do I start?

Now, put on this song in the background while you read the rest: So May We Start

The ancient art of the cold open #

The Odyssey starts in medias res, in the middle of the story, which the Roman poet and critic Horace thought was the best place to start a narrative to draw listeners in. It's the OG^[2] cold open. The cold open works well if your audience already knows the topic--I would bet most people listening to poets reciting The Odyssey not only knew who Zeus and Athena and Odysseus were, but also knew a lot of the stories. It also works when the audience has enough shared context to pick up the narrative.

But when it's not a narrative and I can't count on the audience to have shared context? Tricky, tricky. Still, I don't want to write four preliminary paragraphs about the Industrial Revolution to introduce the concept of train travel to tell people about how difficult it was to navigate the train station mall in Kyoto to find unagi ekiben. On the other hand, it might help to talk about what ekiben is^[3].

The cool open #

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, a radio show on BBC4, is my model for the ideal introduction to non-fiction topics. Here's an example intro from the March 12 show:

"Hello, Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), was born to greatness, with her parents ruling most of Spain and her siblings marrying into the great royal families of Europe." Catherine of Aragon, March 12, 2025

Melvyn Bragg doesn't bother to warm you up with a personal story or explain why he's going to talk about the topic he's going to talk about. He just gets on with it. Here's another:

"Hello, if you've ever seen a mysterious white or yellow blob on your garden compost heap or on a fallen tree in the local park, you'll have come across slime mould. It's a single-celled organism that scientists have struggled to categorize." Slime Moulds, January 1, 2025

No hook, no joke, no snark, just the abruptness of a cold open leavened with a little light context setting, and then he introduces his guests and they get into the topic. The other thing that's great about In Our Time is that it's unafraid to tackle intellectually challenging topics. Science, biography, philosophy, literature, history--whatever the topic, it gets the same brusque intro treatment:

"Hello, on the 4th of May 1886, at a worker's rally in Chicago, somebody threw a bomb that killed a policeman and the chaotic shooting that followed left more people dead and sent shockwaves across America and Europe. This was in Haymarket Square at a protest for an 8-hour working day following a call for a general strike. The bomber was never identified but two of the speakers at the rally, anarchists, and six of their supporters, were blamed as inciting murder and four of them were hanged. The May International Worker's Day was created in their memory." The Haymarket Affair, October 30, 2024

I can hear Melvyn Bragg's voice in my head as I write or rewrite my intros to be more direct and less apologetic. Listen, if you don't want to know about slime molds, he seems to imply, I'm not going to tell you that you should care. It's a liberating way to write. The people who want to read my literary analysis of Twilight or a history of zucchini bread are going to read it and everyone else can come back next week when I'm obsessed with something new.

Conclusion #

My producer is going to come in now to offer some tea or coffee^[4], so that's it for today's rather meta blog post. Oh, and there's a reading list to go with it.^[5]

I like how this one came out, for example, "Whoever is in charge of the opening hours at the De Young museum must hate sunsets." That's the opening line to Seeing the obvious in the Turrell skyspace. ↩︎
I always thought it stood for "original gangster," however according to the Merriam Webster dictionary OG is now simply "original" or "originator." It makes me feel more OK about using the term, but it also makes "OG CARROTS" on my grocery receipt less funny. ↩︎
You know what, I'm not going to tell you. This is not a post about ekiben (駅弁). You can look it up. ↩︎
That's how the podcast versions of In Our Time always end. ↩︎
No there isn't. That's a joke. But maybe I should start having reading lists. ↩︎

Breaking down Breaking Dawn

2025-03-14T00:00:00Z

Breaking Dawn, the last book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series about a teenage girl and her vampire boyfriend who wants to eat her but doesn't because that would be immoral, represents a structural and dramatic break from the previous three novels. Hello, I accidentally re-read all the Twilight novels after reading parts of the first one to get quotes for my post titled Bella and her truck

Taken purely on literary merit, Twilight is the best book of the series. It accurately shows the inner life of a teenager experiencing the intensity of obsessive, all consuming love, sometimes termed limerence. Not everyone experiences limerence, and I suspect that people, especially women, who have experienced it, find Bella's obsessive love and complete lack of inner life except for that obsession realistic and relatable, even if it is a bit extreme. On the other hand, people who have never felt such obsessive, other-idealizing, intrusive, and painful love naturally find her boring and implausible. I will spend no time talking about the metaphor of the vampire boyfriend's desire to eat his girlfriend and the moral imperative to resist the temptation as a metaphor for bone-headed ideas about how male sexual desire works. I'm pretty sure Contra Points covers all that in her video about Twilight^[1].

Structurally, Twilight is a classic romance, before romance novels got all sexy. It's all about the build-up of emotional and sexual tension. It even has a happy ending. The second novel, New Moon is about being sad and doing a bit of light self-harm with motorcycles, cliff-diving, and werewolves. It also follows a romance plot, though this is more the part where circumstances beyond their control force the lovers to be apart before they are re-united again, more passionately in love than ever. Eclipse starts getting a bit shaky plotwise, and has to awkwardly introduce a love triangle and even greater peril to make up for lack of emotional and erotic tension in the core relationship. All three books are written in first person from Bella's point of view^[2].

Traumatic birth to hero origin story #

And then we get Breaking Dawn which starts from Bella's point of view as usual and continues that way for about the first quarter of the novel. The section ends with Bella discovering that she is improbably pregnant after having sex with her vampire husband during their honeymoon. Then the story switches to Jacob's^[3] point of view to explore the horror of Bella's pregnancy with a half-vampire baby. Sometimes when you write about something horrific, you have to create a bit of distance for the reader for them to have the space to feel upset instead of numbed. Structurally, I think that's what's happening with choosing to tell the story of Bella's pregnancy through Jacob's eyes.

While she's too in love with the vampire baby that's sucking her dry from the inside to be a reliable witness about how gory it is, Jacob can see it, but at the same time is distanced enough from the experience that the body horror can be turned down a bit. Though, as a friend once pointed out, Meyer must have had some deep-seated feelings of horror about pregnancy for it to surface like this in the story. Finally Bella gives birth, nearly dies, and then gets vampirized at the last moment so that she can be reborn in undeath.

And be reborn as a narrator of a completely new kind of story! Being a vampire fucking rocks. There are literally no downsides. Unlike most new vamps, Bella has super self-control and totally doesn't kill any hikers or her dad, despite how delicious they smell. She just leaps across streams in a single bound, breaks rocks with her strength, and has the best sex ever with her vampire husband every night all night because they don't have to sleep.

When danger approaches, in the form of the Vamp Mafia who want to kill her half-vampire baby because it's an abomination, Bella discovers that her very boring power to shield her mind from mind-readers is way cooler than she suspected and can be extended to protect other people from all kinds of psychic damage. She has a training sequence and her powers grow, activated by the need to protect her ~~abomination~~ baby, who is very cute and just like everyone else, constantly tells Bella how much she loves her. Oh, and vampire Bella, unlike human Bella, is able to accept that everyone loves her and thinks she's awesome. Getting turned into an immortal blood-sucking monster cured not only her hemorrhaging to death but also her self-esteem and anxiety.

The second half of Breaking Dawn is a whole different genre. The first three books were romance with a touch of gothic. I don't know how to classify the first half of Breaking Dawn. But the second half is a super hero origin story and power fantasy. It's kind of amazing. Like, OK, it has to use all the excuses of Bella literally sacrificing herself to give birth to her monster baby and coming into her power to keep protecting that baby, but after all of the "she deserves it" boxes have been ticked, Balla gets to luxuriate in her enhanced vampire senses, her beauty, her physical strength, and her cool psychic powers. She flips over from being the brave victim to being the hero who saves the day, and then she gets to live happily ever after.

That is not how gothic romances normally end.

Breaking Dawn is probably the worst book in the series on its literary merits, but it might also be the best because it's so weird. Stephenie Meyer said she was influenced by Wuthering Heights and Bella is constantly reading that book within the story as well. When I read Wuthering Heights I kept thinking what the hell is even going on with this narrative structure? And also, I can't tell if I like this book or hate it. It should be bad but somehow it's good. What is this even. And so on.

I don't mean to suggest that Breaking Dawn is as good as Wuthering Heights. It's also not even as structurally weird. But I can see how a writer really into Wuthering Heights could learn the lesson: go ahead. Be weird. Be as weird as you want. Go for it. And you know what, I'm glad she did. I feel like I ate a whole bag of gummi bears, and then at the bottom it was all crunchy peanut brittle instead, and I regret nothing, and neither should Stephenie Meyer.

Photo credit #

The header image is a cropped version of one of the photos from the press kit issued with the Lego Group's January 16, 2025 press release, Relive the Romance with New Twilight-Inspired LEGO Ideas Set From the LEGO Group and Lionsgate. The publicity for the Lego Twilight set is what got me thinking about Twilight again in the first place. And it's a Lego set so you can literally build it and break it down, get it?

You can go watch the Contra Points video about Twilight after you read my post. It's good but it's like, 3 hours long. I'm not even exaggerating! ↩︎
During my re-read, I began to suspect that the reason why Bella is such a boring character while everyone around her inexplicably swoons over her and thinks she's amazing is that Bella is kind of an unreliable narrator of her own actions and possibly even inner states. She's self-conscious but not self-aware and has poor self-esteem. She doesn't think she's pretty or interesting and has a tendency to skip over details of long conversations and times hanging out with friends. Maybe Bella is in fact incredibly beautiful, kind, and a witty conversationalist who draws people out and we'll never know because she's so bad at self-awareness. ↩︎
Jacob is Bella's werewolf best friend and sad third wheel in the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle. ↩︎

Magic balls, psychic aliens, and part-time yokai

2025-03-07T00:00:00Z

This post contains full spoilers for season one of the anime series Dandadan, which originally aired from October 4 to December 20, 2024.

The residual effects of demon possession, a traumatic encounter with space aliens, and touching magic balls are some of the charming and unusual ways that characters in Dandadan (ダンダダン) get their magic powers. Dandadan is a delightfully bizarre anime series about, roughly speaking, two Japanese high school students who team up to fight the demonic unquiet dead and space aliens.

I've previously wished for stories where magical power derives from something more interesting than just saying or writing special magical words. Dandadan delivers that!

And now, reader, I will warn you again, that things are about to get spoilerific. The specifics of how each character gets and uses their powers are big spoilers. You'be been warned.

Trauma-activated #

As a girl, Momo Ayase cultivated magic powers through psychic protective practices taught to her by her grandmother. While we don't learn much about the practice in the anime, it looked like a pretty classic chi/lifeforce cultivation. Although she gave up the practice after being teased by schoolmates, it seemed to lay the foundation for her psychic powers.

Momo's powers become activated when psychic aliens abduct and try to attack her, trapping her with their psychic powers. In the physically dangerous and emotionally intense moment, Momo has to defend herself and her psychokinetic power activates. Initially, she's incredibly powerful, defeating multiple alien attackers, but when she uses her powers later, they are much weaker. Her powers seems to be limited by her own psychological blockers and to regain full use of them, the main thing she needs to do is learn how to relax that block. She also becomes more effective with practice and precision. In a way, her psychic power is like athletic talent. Early childhood practice helped her develop some skill and the right moment let her see what she was capable of, but after that initial success she "choked" and needed to find her way back to the power and to develop precision.

Yoakai residue #

Okarun, another high school student, develops his magical powers after being cursed and possessed by the yokai Trubo Granny. Turbo Granny herself was initially a combination of two spirits, an immensely powerful location-bound spirit and a spirit of a dead person who refused or could not pass on. In Dandadan, the yokai^[1] seem to be the spirits people who died in violent, sudden, or unnatural ways that then became twisted and confused after death. Their anger, confusion and sorrow empower the yokai and also drive them to mostly use their powers towards malicious ends.

Initially, Okarun's power is a curse, and when he transforms he is taken over by Turbo Granny. After a partial exorcism, Turbo Granny's consciousness leaves his body but her powers remain. When he uses his magic powers Okarum transforms into a being that looks a like a combination of Turbo Granny and a teen idol--and is incredibly depressed and somewhat rude. Using his powers tires him out terribly so to become more effective Okarun must train in physical endurance and strength. At first Okarun's powers activate only when he's in emotional distress and danger, but over time he seems to gain the ability to activate them at will.

Okarun's powers are basically a curse with some mitigating factors. Especially when you consider that when she first cursed him, Turbo Granny stole his genitalia and he spends the rest of the season trying to recover first his dick and then his balls. But more on that later.

Transactional and location-based #

Seiko Ayase, Momo's inexplicably youthful grandmother, is a spirit medium. When we first meet her as a character she is on a TV show seeming to get every single prediction wrong while doing a psychic reading for a teen idol.

Seiko's magical power comes from a combination of deals she made with local land spirits and her vast study and experience. She also uses blessing cards with magical spells/prayers written on them. I get the impression these blessing cards are meant to be pretty ordinary things, like the equivalent of a consecrated saint card. Seiko's power, really, is knowledge. She knows which rituals to perform, and no doubt she was able to enter into the relationship with the local spirits to get her power because she had the know-how.

In a way, Seiko is a bit like a location-bound-spirit herself. Her powers only work in the territory that belongs to the spirits whose powers she's borrowing.

Touching magic balls #

Aira Shiratori, yet another high school student, picks up a magical golden sphere which lets her see spirits. The golden sphere is actually one of Okarun's testicles which Turbo Granny stole when she cursed him, and which went flying at some point during her fight with Seiko and Momo or the exorcism. Turbo Granny, now trapped as a shit-talking animated maneki-neko, explains that testicles contain life force and that's why yokai want them. Why they turn into magic golden spheres in this case is not clearly explained.

Unfortunately for Aira, if you can see spirits, they can see you, and a yokai named Acrobatic Silky becomes obsessed with her, convinced that Aira is her daughter. In a fit of misunderstanding and grief, Acrobatic Silky kills Aira. Devastated at what she's done, the yokai offers to donate her own "aura" to bring Aira back to life--and thus finally ending her undeath and dissipating forever. Later on, it turns out that the aura didn't just revive Aira, but also imbued her with some of Silky's power. Similar to Okarun's inherited Turbo Granny power, it lets Aira transform.

Banana? #

We also have some psychic aliens who want to steal human genitalia. Maybe they want the life force, too? Perhaps we'll find out in season two.

Some very interesting themes start to emerge: life force, curse residue, and magic emerging under emotional duress. There are some magic words, Seiko's blessing cards, but they're one of many forms of magic. I enjoy the variety.

I'm only talking about yokai as depicted in Dandadan so far. I don't know enough about how yokai in folklore and reality work to say anything definitive. Certainly, there are many more kinds of yokai than just the angry spirits of the dead, though perhaps the angry dead are the most likely to cause problems. For a light intro, see the Wikipedia entry for yokai. ↩︎

Escape from the horrors

2025-02-28T00:00:00Z

I'm watching my cat sleep as I write this. She keeps shifting between various cute, curled up positions on her warming pad. My favorite is the slightly goofy one where she puts her head down sideways directly on the pad, which seems to be a new one she's invented recently. Her favorite, based on frequency, is Flat Circle Cat, where she bends her whole body into a kind of circle with her tail and all four paws tucked under her chin. Her name is Shinjuku, like the train station. Her previous people named her Shinjuku, and Paul and I kept the name when we adopted her.

Having now been to Shinjuku, and Shinjuku Station, and having seen the famous Shinjuku Cat video billboard, I'm pretty sure they named her that more after the famous cat than the train station. After consulting with Paul, I decided to rename her Shinjuku, after the train station instead of the billboard. Formally, you may consider her full name Shinjuku Eki, that is, Shinjuku Station. I'm incredibly pleased that I can now write Shinjuku in hiragana, just like a Japanese six year old, and I also know that Eki means train station. Of course on serious stuff, it's written in kanji and etymologically the name means New Post Town.

I know all this because I've been obsessively studying hiragana and also Japanese vocabulary. Last week, I wrote about learning hiragana and what motivated me to start. According to my time logged in Anki and Lingodeer, I've been putting in about an hour a day. That's not a lot compared to someone who is learning a language as a full-time student, but it's kind of a lot for a person with a full-time job.

What, you may as, is the secret of my dedication? Is it willpower? Is it passion? Do I love Japanese snacks that much? Passion and snacks are involved, but I've never been that good at keeping up a habit, even when it's something I want. Nah, the secret is that I'm using language learning to escape the horrors. When I open my phone to check what my internet friends are doing and instead my internet friends feed (even on Mastodon!) is full of not just the horrible facts about a wannabe king and his neo-Nazi pet billionaire^[1] dismantling everything useful and good in the United States for scrap to sell off, but also an ongoing stream of people deliberately dooming themselves and others up about it, I have to look away. And Anki is right there.

It's not the only thing I'm doing to escape and find some peace. There is the cat, of course. There are my plants. And oh, yeah, I'm rereading the entire Twilight series. I accidentally reread the first one when researching the post about Bella and her truck and now I'm reading the whole thing. It's silly but it has its moments, and I think it is my duty to keep my spirits up as much as I can, or at least, stay sane.

If you fuck a goat ironically, you're still a goat-fucker. Same with Nazi salutes. ↩︎

Learning hiragana

2025-02-21T00:00:00Z

Three days into my week in Tokyo I got tired of being illiterate. Four or five days into it, I figured out what to do about: I would reverse-engineer the accessible syllabic writing system from train station announcements. Despite my passion for decoding secret writing and dedication to sounding out train station names, it was not an efficient approach and I did not manage to learn how to read hiragana in the remaining three days.

I really thought I could learn hiragana in just a few days, and maybe I could have if that was all I did, but I was also pretty busy, ya know, exploring Tokyo as hard as I could, mostly by getting lost near train stations and eating snacks.

All my frustrating experiences in Tokyo were due to not being able to read signs or talk to people, and my favorite experiences included being able to decode meaning--be it artistic, social, or literal--or talk to people even if only in rudimentary ways. Despite Japanese not being related to other languages I know--so no free vocabulary to pick up like I can do with European languages--I managed to start picking up words and phrases within that week into my passive vocabulary just from hearing people say the same thing over over, and yes, from the station announcements. It was thrilling! Learning a new language in context feels like solving a puzzle and the more you solve it, the more puzzle becomes available to solve.

How hard can it be? #

So I came home with a violent desire to learn Japanese. How hard can it be? I mean, actually, that's one of the questions I wanted to answer: is Japanese all that hard or are monolingual English speakers wimps? I am still figuring that out but I'm starting to think it's the latter. Politeness level inflection and grammar changes probably seem scary if you've never had to deal with a highly inflected language with grammatical gender and a boatload of cases like Polish or Russian or Ancient Greek.

It's been about two weeks and I've mostly learned hiragana. I've been using Anki^[1] flashcards to help me memorize them. I can sound out words moderately reliably, if they're written just in hiragana, like they are in material written for kids. It's been fun looking at some photos I took in Japan and being able to read what the signs say now. I kept taking photos of signs and using machine translation to read them, so I have a lot of those things. One made me kind of sad though. It was a sign that said "yaki soba" and machine translation gave it as "fried noodles" which at the time I was like, yeah, but what kind? Could this be yaki soba? It was yaki soba, I now know, and I didn't eat it even though it was right there.

At the same time, I've started working on beginner vocabulary and grammar, using LingoDeer, a language learning app that's quite good. It teaches grammar along with words and phrases so you can actually understand the principles. So far, I haven't found anything in Japanese grammar that freaks me out. Subject object verb sentence structure feels fine, especially given the nifty particles you use to indicate which item is the subject. Pro-drop feels fine. And that thing where Japanese women seem to speak at a higher pitch than might be natural? So, I have a naturally very high-pitched speaking voice. I mostly speak at the bottom of my range and I still sound high-pitched to people. When I'm imitating the Japanese spoken phrases in pronunciation, I literally just relax into my natural range. Strangely, Japanese just feels very comfortable as a spoken language.

Food-motivated #

My goal and my motivation is simple. I loved Tokyo and I want to go again. I did not love feeling lost and isolated. By the next time I go, I want to be able to:

Read the signs on the street so I can find the good snacks
Understand the spoken transit announcements
Read and understand the safety and routing information
Find my way in a grocery store but also to the grocery store
Order food at a restaurant without an English menu or picture menu
Have the most basic polite small talk

It's likely that in the best case scenario, it'll be a year before I make it to Tokyo again. And I think in a year, I can get to that level of Japanese.

In the meantime, there are two other writing systems to learn. There's katakana, which is another syllabary that uses all the same syllables but different visual signs. And then there's kanji, which is logographic, and, you know, I'm not going to explain it because I don't understand how it works well enough to explain it. Let's just say kanji involves memorizing hundreds to thousands of unique visual signs, and that ordinary written Japanese uses all three writing systems in combination.

But I'm not going to worry too much about kanji yet. That's how you get hung up and freaked out and stop. Little Japanese kids can go out and run errands in the city before they've learned kanji, and that's the level I aspire. That, and navigating through a grocery store. How hard can it be?

Don't tell me. I'm going to keep assuming it's perfectly manageable until it's too late to stop learning because of all the sunk costs.

Anki is a digital flashcard system that makes it easy to use spaced repetition to memorize things. Anki is kind of annoying to set up and about as friendly as Linux, but damn it if hasn't made language learning and memorization easier. Getting into Anki is an occupational hazard of wanting to learn a new language, kind of like getting really into the details of masking tape varieties when you get into watercoloring. If you know, you know. ↩︎

Fushimi Inari Taisha

2025-02-14T00:00:00Z

I took one trip outside of Tokyo while I was in Japan, and that was to Kyoto to visit the famous Shinto shrine there, Fushimi Inari Taisha. It takes just a bit over two hours on the Tokaido Shinkansen line from Tokyo, plus you get to ride the Shinkansen and if the weather cooperates see Mt. Fuji from the train--which is frankly one of those perfect things. But enough about Tokyo things, this post is all about Kyoto's Inari shrine. Fushimi Inari-taisha is known for its hundreds of vermilion torii gates. There are so many they form tunnels.

The shrine (and shrines) cover a whole mountain, also called Inari. At the bottom of the mountain, the gates are big and densely placed, and the crowds are also dense. You don't have to go all that far before it gets more quiet. It's also a popular place for people to dress up in kimono and take photos. In the main city, you can even rent kimono. These two women in white kimono happened to be in front of us a bunch and were taking lots of photos of each other in various scenic locations. We kept running into them, as apparently our meandering pace and their meandering pace were quite similar.

Not far up from the beginning fo the walk, there is a little side shrine. And in the corner of the side shrine, someone had placed a little torii, like I'm talking maybe a foot tall at most, and these tiny foxes. Foxes are everywhere in the Inari shrine because Inari is the goddess of rice and foxes are her divine messengers. An explanation somewhere at the main shrine said it's because foxes would be spotted in rice fields, catching mice and other vermin that damaged the rice. Thus, people saw the foxes as protecting the rice fields.

As you climb further up the mountain, there are multiple shrine complexes, each with multiple little shrines with variations of torii, stone shrines, and stone foxes. Every single stone fox wears a red bib. In some of the more remote shrines, the bibs are so faded that they are almost white, but you can definitely tell they used to be red.

The huge red torii are the most photogenic and what most people think of when they remember the shrine in Kyoto. However, it's these multitudes of shrines with repeating but not exactly identical elements I love the most.

I visited Fushimi Inari Taisha in 2000 and I have remembered and thought about this multiplicity of stone altars and stone foxes and their little red bibs (though perhaps they are aprons) for over 20 years.

I kept thinking about them whenever I saw things that seem to multiply themselves.

Like, you would walk behind a shrine and find another shrine there with two foxes, and to the side of it another, smaller one, and next to that one, another, and so on, almost like they grew there.

In these little shrine complexes, you also get bigger altars like this one. Some are quite bright colored and laden with what appear to be votive offerings, in this case of miniature torii.

Sometimes the offerings represent incredible effort. The bright garlands on the right side are very small origami cranes. I'm pretty sure that there are 1,000 cranes on each hook. When I first visited this shrine, it was right around New Years, somewhere in the last days of 2000 and the first days of 2001. At that time, all the various offerings are taken down to be burned, and so a the bottom of the shrine, the main shrine plaza really, there were tons of these garlands of paper cranes as well as many other offerings that must have been left through the year and would be burned as part of New Year's ceremonies.

This was my favorite subshrine, very vertical and strangely out of the way even though it's on the main loop. The dappled light made it particularly beautiful.

I stood up here for a while absorbing the peaceful feeling. Just a little way down things would get busy again, but not yet.

A little off the main loop path, there were yet more little shrines. It was even quieter, and felt almost haunted but in a good way.

Before praying at a Shinto shrine, it is good manners to wash your hands and mouth. Every shrine has founts where you can perform the ablution, some quite large and fancy, for example made out of stone and with multiple spouts of constantly flowing water that can accommodate a dozen people at a time, and some quite simple with just a container of clean water and some dippers. In a shrine in Tokyo, there was a purification fount that activated when you stepped close to it, kind of the same principle as motion activated bathroom sinks but at a larger scale. I thought it was a nifty way to combine a traditional practice with the spirit of respecting nature by avoiding wasting water. This fount is on the simple side, and I like that, too.

We returned to a more well-travelled part of the shrine and found another tunnel of torii.

Many shrines have woven straw chains. This one was particularly large.

Near the end of the big loop path, you come to a bamboo forest on the edge of the shrine. In this section, we came across some animals.

There were quite a few crows on the Mount Inari. They were rather bold. Some people leave food offerings at the shrines and the crows try to eat them.

Several cats live on the grounds as well, according to an informative sign. You may pet them, but only if they're up for it. So, in practice, you generally may not pet them.

The frog shrine is kind of towards the back of the grounds as you walk down the mountain, so you'd likely see it on your way out if you took the full loop. It was surprising to see the frogs after hundreds of foxes. People appeared to have left bottles of water as offerings to at some of the frog statues. I haven't been able to verify this through official information at the shrine, but I think the frog is Kaeru. Kaeru is a pun on "to return" in Japanese, and so the frogs represent a safe return journey, that is, safe travels, among other things. If so, that's a good way to end a visit to the shrine.

Dispatch from Tokyo

2025-02-07T00:00:00Z

I landed in Tokyo around 6 a.m. on my birthday. I got to the hotel, took a shower, a short nap, stepped into the street, chose a ramen shop at random, and had the best ramen I had ever had in my life. It was not a fluke. I keep typing and deleting things to say about Tokyo, to try to summarize it or give you a way in, or something. I can't do it. It's been almost a week, and I've barely scratched the surface. All I can say is that I love it. And maybe tell you some stories.

I'm staying in Shibuya, which is a special ward, and you could think of it kind of like a borough of NYC or one of the sub-cities that make up Los Angeles, but it's not like that either. It's geographically smaller but has way more stuff. And there are multiple sort of units like this, some seemingly administrative while others are more vibe-based neighborhoods. Everything you find in Tokyo has another thing inside it, and that thing has another thing, and possibly a mall, and an underground and overground and park and another miniature city and a convenience store. Shibuya is kind of party central and would make me feel dreadfully old and unhip if I didn't feel like a completely outsider, so free of any belonging or not belonging, by so utterly not belonging anyway.

If you've ever played a video game where you start out in a zone and you think, wow, this is huge, and then you spend a ton of time exploring it, and then you realize it's the starting zone and you go into the main zone from it, and then realize that zone is just one of dozens on this continent, of which there are several, and also you can port to other planets? That's what every train station in Tokyo that I've been to is like. Granted, I think it's mostly been the big ones, like Shibuya Station, Shinjuku Station, and Tokyo Station. But I think Kichijoji Station isn't one of the major ones and it's also like that. It has at least two malls basically on top of it! I went to Kichijoji because it has a well-recommended capybara and cat cafe, which was wonderful and the animals seemed very well taken care of.

Claw machines take up most of one floor of a multi-floor game arcade off the side of a shopping arcade that's part of a series of little shopping streets in Kichijoji, which is considered one of the laid back and more residential neighborhoods of Tokyo.

Every time I've walked back from Shibuya Station to my hotel on my own, which is a 10 minute walk, I've ended up taking a different path and getting a little lost, on purpose or by accident, and discovering several completely new things. I can spend however long I want trying to orient myself in a part of the city during the day and then when night falls, it seems like they roll up the city and replace it with a whole new one, which is just as complex, where everything is different. If you know me, you know I get lost pretty easily so you might think nothing of this, but even Paul is getting lost. The layered geometry of Tokyo with its multiple levels, alleys, arcades, and secret ways through stores breaks even his excellent sense of direction. Meanwhile I do like I always do and try to orient based on memorable landmarks and go with the flow of the crowd. But everything is new and the crowd is ever-present. And I can't read the signs^[1].

There are hot and cold drink vending machines everywhere and I am obsessed with the way some of them have deals for ¥100, which you should think of as $1 in terms of how willing you should be to spend it, but at the current exchange rate it's about 64 cents. If I pass a street food, I feel compelled to try it if I haven't before, because why wouldn't you, right? I mean, maybe you wouldn't but I would. I regret I have only one stomach to give to Tokyo street food.

Meanwhile, Paul has been in some kind of mix of paradise/FOMO hell trolling the junk shops of Akihabara for old video games, cables, old iPods, and who knows what. I understand going through crates upon crates of vintage e-waste makes him feel the same way stationary stores and street food make me feel. I have been to a lot of stationary stores and while I never thought I'd say this, I think I've seen enough stationary.

A small side street in Shinjuku. This could be the impressive main street of any midsize city but it's just one of many commercial side-streets in one of the many sub-areas of Tokyo.

My biggest regret is that I didn't study up on any Japanese before coming here. I've managed to learn some basic politeness and commercial phrases in the last week, and as I've gotten more comfortable using them it's opened a world of incredible friendliness. People in Tokyo seem generally reserved, honestly not unlike London or even New York, but they are very willing to chat in appropriate situations if you put in the least effort. Google translate and automatic translation of photos helps find your way around and figure out important things like what's inside that tasty looking pastry, and how to ask for an ace bandage when you roll your ankle, but it's no substitute to being able to scan the street for signs, understand basic instructions, or ask for any kind of help.

Japanese phonemes are fairly easy to comprehend to an English-speaker's ear and simple to pronounce, particularly if you compare to other non-European languages. It's not like Hindi where there are versions of the "d" sound which I can't distinguish by ear, never mind say, or the tonal complexity of Mandarin, or harder, Cantonese! However, unlike European languages which all have cognates I can use to start picking up vocab for free and phonetic writing systems I already know^[2], or close enough, the only Japanese vocabulary I already had was food words. I started noticing repeat characters, especially in station names, which scroll by on train announcements in kanji (logographic characters), romaji (phoneticized as Latin alphabet letters), and hiragana (a phonetic syllabary). I didn't realize that the names were in two character systems, but once I did, and that one of them was phonetic, I started to decipher hiragana using the spoken announcements and romaji. It should be possible, I think, to learn to sound out hiragana in a week or two of practice, and once you had that you could start picking up tons of passive vocabulary by ear and from signs written to be accessible to all. That still leaves katakana, the other phonetic system, which I haven't tried working out but, and these may be famous last words, it's a phonetic writing system, how hard can it be to memorize? kanji are another matter entirely and I think overthinking how hard kanji are kept me from even trying to learn the phonetic systems.

And now it's late Friday night for me, so I will conclude without any conclusion this last post in my series from the road. Next week, it's back to the regular, which is to say irregular and whatever I feel like.

I mean literally, I cannot read the language. But also metaphorically, the symbolic semantics are not clear to me. Which fonts mean old or new? What colors mean food or electronics or cheap or fancy? What's racy? What's tame? What's a chain? ↩︎
The Latin alphabet, obviously, and I can also read Cyrillic and Greek, which I think covers all the European alphabets. There are variations in how Cyrillic is used, but it's easy enough to work out. ↩︎

Dispatch from Bengaluru

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

My week in Bengaluru (aka Bangalore) ends today. The second time visiting was easier, because even though the only things I remembered from the outside were that everything was a huge hassle and the food was delicious, as soon as I landed I recalled how to be here. I'm sure the experience is different depending on who you are and where you're coming from. How people treat you depends on who they think you are in their world, and what you find strange or difficult or different depends on what is usual in your world.

Even in just the five years since I've been here, Bengaluru has become, it seems, even more dusty, chaotic, built-up, technological, and dirty. I would swear there were more trees. Then again, last time I was in Koramangala and this time I stayed in a hotel walking distance from the office in HSR Layout which is off just the most nightmarish stroad you can imagine. Seriously, Outer Ring Road makes the worst stroads I drove on in Austin seem relaxed and lovely.

Well I just found some notes from five years ago giving me advice about where to stay when I visit the company office, presumably some copy-pasted Slack message. The notes, which reviewed my options for hotels, and suggested the Grand Mercure in Koramangala, said

[...]the DoubleTree, which is a little closer to the office is in a crappy location with nothing around it apart from apartments and tech parks

Yeah, guess where I was staying this time. On the one hand I could walk to the office. On the other hand, it is a crappy location, so dusty during the day that I took to wearing my KN95 mask outdoors to protect against the dust.

Everyone who lives here, or who used to live here and visits keeps telling me that it used to be greener and there were more lakes and they keep building office parks over the lakes.

Last time I was here, the office as in a different Indiqube, one that overlooked a lake, and even if that lake was rather polluted, it was something to look at that wasn't a huge road. It absolutely swarmed with kites, and I loved to see them. There were hardly any pigeons. This time, pigeons were everywhere and I felt lucky to spot just a few kites. I mentioned this to my coworkers, and they said that the pigeons love roosting in the new high-rises, while the kites need tall trees, and the tall trees keep being cut down. I remember back then staring out the window when the kites gathered in masses in the morning and afternoon.

Like I said earlier, the second time is easier. For example, I learned from the first time that you need an Indian phone number to use any of the myriad of delivery apps here, and that getting a local SIM card is quite difficult and heavily regulated, so while it seems like a huge hassle to get one at the airport when you arrive at the middle of the night, it's worth it. The supposedly 5-start hotel work put me up at had pretty uninspired and really expensive room service, while for the price of a 900INR local SIM the world of delivery apps was open to me. A feast can be had for 500INR through Zomato. A barely adequate snack might be possible through room service.

It's very late. I've been filling out my expense report and approving the other people's. I will end here with just a few more things. My advice to people from Silicon Valley and surrounds visiting Bengaluru is qualitatively a lot like the advice I used to give and get for Burning Man, which is to say a list of hints that won't make much sense until you come here, and that I myself will forget when I leave--anyway here goes:

Get a local SIM card at the airport, yes, even if it's 3 a.m.
People will offer you help. Take it.
Eat with your hand. But only your right hand.
Careful with the water and with anything that might have touched tap water. This is the key to avoiding intestinal distress, not, as locals are convinced, avoiding spicy food.
Brush your teeth with bottled or boiled water.
But do drink enough water.
Don't eat raw vegetables or fruit, but good news, most vegetables in Indian food are cooked.
If you're a woman you may be tempted to get and wear a salwar suit or kurta or even a sari. You can do that if you want but in a city you'll get way more unwanted attention in ethnic wear than in Western clothes. I wouldn't recommend it if your goal is to just hang out.
The head shake means yes, or maybe, or maybe even no. It'll make sense in context. Don't overthink it and don't be surprised if you pick it up yourself.
If you need to cross the street, wait for a big group and just attach yourself to them.
The sun is intense and heatstroke is a serious danger.
Have some idli.
Dosa are kind of like crepes and you'll probably like them. You should have some dosa, too.
Bring a face mask for the dust.

Tomorrow, I fly to Tokyo. It's going to be like a contrast bath of culture shocks.

Dispatch from the road

2025-01-24T00:00:00Z

Today, I'm flying to Bangalore. I'll be away from home for the following two Fridays as well. I thought about getting some blog posts prepared ahead of time, but despite my good intentions I did not do it. So today I'm back to the old school style of blogging, where I just wing it. I've been packing since last weekend. I get really stressed out about forgetting things when I travel, especially for a longer time, and especially to foreign countries. Apparently this kind of travel anxiety runs in my family. But, to be fair, my fear of forgetting things is well-founded. I have forgotten some pretty spectacular things. I don't even want to tell you but just think about what you need to cross borders or attend weddings and it's that kind of stuff. Weirdly, once I'm on the road, literally just through airport security, I get pretty calm. Like a switch goes off in my brain when I have done everything I can and now matters are beyond my control.

While matters are in my control though, I try to deal with my fallibility by overpreparing. I look up the weather where I'm going and write out my outfit for each day. I have a re-usable checklist of electronics and documents. I try to think about all the things I'm going to need to do on the trip and things that I liked or didn't like on previous trips and bring or not bring those things. I've been meaning to do post-trip retros of my packing lists about what I actually used and wore. I kind of did that with my last trip to the East Coast. Trips I take regularly get easier because I have a sense of what to expect and, if it hasn't been too long, some memories and notes about what I did to prepare before.

Bangalore is not on my frequently traveled to list. This is only my second time, and last time was 5 years ago. Since this part of my travels is a work trip, there was a lot of additional stuff to do, like getting a visa, to start with. As I walked around the house picking up and organizing things to take, checking and cross-checking lists, after a while I think I started to even stress out my cat. She kept coming into the room where I was packing to check on me. Sometimes she meowed, in a tone I recognize from when she comes in to my study when I'm working. Eventually she jumped on top of the back of the couch and observed me from a height while crouching awkwardly. Don't worry, I tried to tell her, I'll be back.

I'll try to post interesting things about what I see while I'm traveling. But if I can't do that, I'm just going to keep posting anyway.

Bella and her truck

2025-01-17T00:00:00Z

In the first chapter of Twilight, Bella Swan falls in love at first sight^[1]:

There, parked on the street in front of the house that never changed, was my new--well, new to me--truck. It was a faded red color, with big, rounded fenders and a bulbous cab. To my intense surprise, I loved it.

It struck me when I first read Twilight and has stuck with me since that whenever Bella thinks about her truck, her language is specific and sensual. For all that she claims not to be much of a car person when she worries about how she'll maintain an old truck to her dad, or discusses the truck with one of the other love interests, Jacob, she sure seems to notice a lot of pleasing details about the truck:

I couldn't pause and admire my truck again as I wanted; I was in a hurry to get out of the misty wet that swirled around my head and clung to my hair under my hood. Inside the truck, it was nice and dry. Either Billy or Charlie had obviously cleaned it up, but the tan upholstery seats still smelled faintly of tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint. The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume. Well, a truck this old was bound to have a flaw.

Damn, talk about masculine energy! I mean, leather, tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint sounds like a description of an ultra-masculine perfume^[2]. Like, dad energy but also hot. Reliable and a little spicy. Bella imagines just how tough and protective her truck could be:

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged--the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

OK, so maybe there's also a little touch of xenophobia there in the car-as-boyfriend-and-dad. I'm not going to keep quoting at length from Twilight but I'll just tell you that when I word searched "truck" in the ebook I borrowed from the library, I got 101 matches^[3]. That truck is important.

Like for most Americans, having her own vehicle is key to Bella's independence. It's not just symbolic. You can't get around a town like Forks without a car. For example, Bella drives herself to school and observes:

The school was, like most other things, just off the highway.^[4]

But the truck is also symbolic. When that no-good vampire boyfriend starts interfering with Bella's life, one of the first things he does is shit-talk her truck. Then, as he worms his way into her life, he slowly separates her from the truck, insisting first that he drive the truck, and then that she should go in his safer car, and then eventually he actually sabotages the truck.^[5] Whoa. So on one level, abusive boyfriend red flag. On another level, what an amazing symbolic depiction of stripping away of her autonomy by the predatory coven of vampires. We start the book with Bella's distant but healthy-ish relationship with her dad who gives her a truck as a kind of proxy for his protection which also grants her independence. As the book goes on, Bella drives her truck less and less, is literally carried around by the vampires, and the vampires drive her truck.

Anyway, I've always said forget Team Jacob or Team Edward, I'm Team Truck. So when it was pointed out to me that there's a new Lego Ideas set that's based on Twilight, I quipped (again) that Bella/Truck^[6] is the real romance. The truck is part of the set, and on first impression it looks like it's minifig scale, that is, big enough for the figurine to get inside of.

Get in your red truck, Lego Bella and drive away from those two weird dudes and their creepy cultish families!

Photo credit #

The header image is a cropped version of one of the photos from the press kit issued with the Lego Group's January 16, 2025 press release, Relive the Romance with New Twilight-Inspired LEGO Ideas Set From the LEGO Group and Lionsgate. If you're actually interested in the Lego Twilight set and not just my opinions about the symbolic weight of Bella's truck, you can see many more photos and details about the set.

"First Sight" is also the title of the chapter. I think it's deliberately multilayered. It's Bella's first sight of the truck, the high school student's first sight of Bella, and of course, Bella and Edward's first sight of each other. ↩︎
Specifically, it sounds like a Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab kind of perfume. For example Dracul sounds pretty similar to Bella's truck, "Black musk, tobacco, fir, balsam of peru, cumin, bitter clove, crushed mint, and orange blossom." ↩︎
Maybe 5 or 10 were false positives and matches on words like "struck," but the majority are times when the truck is important to the story. And yes, I did real research for this post. I borrowed and reread parts of the book, searched through AO3 for fanfiction, and figured out how to download a press kit. ↩︎
For the urbanists reading along, I don't think Bella's school is on a stroad. Forks is supposed to be pretty small, and the Olympic Peninsula is oddly remote, because of all the little curvy fjord like shapes I guess. ↩︎
The truck sabotage happens in a later book, Eclipse. ↩︎
I tried to find Bella/Truck fanfiction in Archive of Our Own and couldn't find anything. Maybe it's too niche. Maybe I'm bad at searching AO3. The closest thing was this nice little fluff piece where Bella has an epiphany that Edward is an abusive asshole who never truly loved her when he sabotages her truck. It's oddly satisfying: Small Victory by MelissaTreglia ↩︎

Secret vow or public proclamation

2025-01-10T00:00:00Z

Are you more likely to stick with your resolutions if keep them secret or if you tell everyone about them? Obviously people keep some resolutions to themselves because they're about private things, like sexuality, health, or religious beliefs. There might be other practical reasons to keep a resolution secret if it's about something subversive or dangerous, something that other people could interfere with if they knew. I'm not really talking about things like that.

I'm talking about the kind of resolutions that some people share and that aren't inherently private or dangerous, but that some people keep to themselves. Something like resolving to make art every week or give up coffee.

Personally, I tend to keep my resolutions private because I usually fail at them and then I feel sheepish if I've talked a big game about them. If the resolutions are audacious, I feel kind of embarrassed admitting that I'm going for them. I also think some resolutions are a bit nebulous and strange to talk about. Talking about the nebulous ones too much (or even at all) somehow takes the energy out of them by forcing them to become concrete too early. To borrow a metaphor from some Buddhist teaching, they're like bread that's still baking in the oven. If you take it out to check on it mid-process you ruin it. So some resolutions are self-secret like that. They're formed enough that I can decide to do them, but too unformed to show others.

A friend also told me to be careful about talking too much about a project in progress because it can give you a feeling of accomplishment and reduce your motivation to actually work. I think that does happen, certainly it happens to me, so it's another reason to stick to secret.

And yet there are whole traditions and business practices of publicly declaring your goals and being quite audacious about what you say you'll do. No, I'm not talking about OKRs again.

By Odin's beard! #

A long time ago, I went to an Asatru blot, a pre-Christian Norse religious ceremony, in Central Park^[1]. At first it was pretty typical for a neopagan ceremony. People stand in a circle, say things about the Gods they want to honor, drink and pour out libations. Like, sure, they use a hammer instead of an athame and they drink out of a big horn instead of a chalice, and drink mead instead of wine or water, but fundamentally it's not that different from the Wicca and Wicca-inspired neopaganism everyone knows^[2].

Then comes the boasting. After a few rounds of mead toasting the gods and mythic heroes, the participants can toast each other, or boast about things they've done, or brag about things they're going to do.

If I recall correctly, the future boasts are a mix of oath and prayer. By stating what they intended to do out loud in the presence of the assembly and the Gods, the participants commit to it and ask for divine help.

When you tell everyone in your tightly knit community that you're going to do some great deed, you had better do it if you don't want to lose your reputation. So if your reputation matters to you and you find the fear of shame motivating, a public oath might be just the ticket.

Of course, if you're just visiting a public blot in a city of 8 million people, and you'll never see them again, there's probably not much power in bragging.

Community accountability #

Maybe talking about your resolutions is helpful when you tell some people but not everyone. You want people who will remember your oath and help you keep it. You also want people who wish you well and won't try to undermine you. Social media (and even blogging) is weird because by default whatever you write is totally public. Even if only a very few people read what you write, the fact that millions could changes it somehow.

I started off writing about completely secret vs completely public resolutions, but those aren't the only options. There's secret, shared with a few, and public. And I'm still not sure which is better.

Photo credit #

The header photo is a cropped image from the National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. See the full photo "Getting em up" at U.S.Naval Training Camp, Seattle, Washington. Webster & Stevens. - NARA - 533698.

Central Park in New York City. You can be pretty weird in New York and no one bothers you, but actually this ceremony was deliberately held in the open so members of the public could join or watch. It's possible the mead was replaced by apple cider or something else non-alcoholic. I think the blot was part of a whole program of public neopagan rituals. The one I remember most is the May Day maypole dance with super long ribbons. ↩︎
Yes, I know. "It's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars." https://xkcd.com/2501/ ↩︎

The New Year's Eve walk

2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

Every year on New Year's Eve, Paul and I go for a walk that, generally, goes up a big hill, then down, and ends with sunset at the beach. This was his tradition before it was our tradition and it's shifted a bit over the years. Early on, I only joined him after he came down Twin Peaks and we took the N to Ocean Beach together. During the first two years of Covid, 2020 and 2021, we didn't take the train and just climbed Twin Peaks and watched the sunset from there. And in 2022 it was so horrible and rainy that we didn't climb anything and took the train to the beach (I insisted) and saw no sunset at all, and then were driven off within 10 minutes by horizontal rain. Last year, things finally got back to normal, with both the hill climb and ocean sunset.

This year, we decided to go to Tank Hill instead of Twin Peaks. The view is still spectacular and the climb is a lot less intense. The 33 drops you just a few minutes away.

There's a bench you can sit on and look out onto downtown San Francisco.

Walking down hill, we came across a bee with inspirational messages for the next year.

I didn't photograph the Muni train, though perhaps I should have. I did photograph Paul photographing the beach.

It seemed like more people came out than usual. To be fair, it was exceptionally beautiful.

These people were trying to catch crabs, which are in season right now. No luck that day, though. They said they wanted to try even though they didn't have the right clothes to go into the water since they had their license and were there. Pacifica Pier is a better place for crabs, they said.

Someone built this astounding drip-style sandcastle. Against the sunset sky, it looked like the mysterious crags and spires you might see on a 1980s fantasy novel cover.

I bet this fisherman was wearing proper waders.

The sky reached a peak of red glow before it began to fade. We were among many people who came out to watch the last sunlight of the year reflect and diffuse before the stars came out.

Ideas aren't easy

2024-12-28T00:00:00Z

John Doerr^[1] is probably the popularizer if not the originator of the chestnut that coming up with ideas is easy while putting them into action is difficult. In Measure What Matters, his book about goal setting for businesses, Doerr writes:

"So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything."

I find it pretty easy to generate ideas, so when I came across the notion that ideas are easy, long before I read Doerr, I believed it and internalized it. But when I started working in positions where ideas are actually valuable, I kept finding that most people can't come up with that many ideas or run out of them quickly.

I've been baffled, for example, by the notion of using LLMs to help you come up with lots^[2] of ideas quickly. How is that possibly useful, I wondered? I can just sit down and do that myself, and the ideas will be more diverse, plus, it's fun to do. I still remember when it hit home that my capacity to generate ideas might be unusual. I met with a coworker over lunch to discuss possible applications of a technology we were working on. No one had asked me for it, and I had just casually pulled together a list of about three pages worth of ideas, roughly organized by area of application. They weren't all good and some of them were repetitive. I knew that and was OK with it. I don't mind sharing rough work product, especially when it might help inspire more generative conversation. Her reaction on seeing my list was to ask if I'd used an LLM to help me generate them, with, I guess, the underlying assumption, that it would take a long time to get all this manually. Except for me, it didn't. It was a pleasant interstitial task.

If you're also a person who finds generating ideas relatively easy, you might have been similarly tricked into undervaluing your creative capacity by the do-ers of the world. And if you're not, then you might on the other hand thought that you're defective because ideas aren't easy for you. I've come to believe it's both a valuable ability, and one that you can develop or improve.

Do the pre-work #

But how did I come to have the capacity to generate ideas easily and quickly? How does anyone become creatively generative? Some part of it seems to be an ability or propensity to disinhibit, to turn off the inner filter and let ideas flow. Some part is the ability to draw connections between disparate spheres. Finally, you still need discernment to identify relevant ideas and then follow those tracks more, and also the ability to turn the discernment on and off depending on which phase of idea generation you're in.

The first one, the ability to let go of the filter, seems most likely to be inherent to some people's personality, but it can still be trained. Drawing connections between unlike things could also be a trait, but to have access to the background knowledge to draw connections requires long and wide-ranging study, reading and studying widely, crossing disciplines, and consolidating the knowledge in your mind using multiple frameworks of thought. Finally, the discernment comes from a mix of developing extensive domain-specific knowledge and wisdom that comes from life experience--or as a shortcut--from intensive humanistic study.

That's a lot of pre-work. In that light, Doerr's dictum that "Ideas are easy; execution is everything," seems like a business school truism designed to undervalue the work of human creativity. The work of coming up with ideas looks easy because by the time you're generating them you've done the pre-work of gaining enough background knowledge, developing a richness and ideally multiplicity of frameworks, exercising your mind, and loosening up your spirit.

Years of humanistic pre-work and spiritual development doesn't fit in a pithy business book and is not amenable to measuring as a quarterly OKR^[3]. The work is slippery and vague and requires time, years perhaps, in the morass of unknowing^[4].

But it feels easy #

The process of generating ideas must have an inherent sense of ease or flow to work. It's one of those paradoxical things like meditation^[5], where you must be in a state of lightness and ease, which you must get to on purpose yet somehow without actively trying. Nothing makes it harder to feel free and easy than trying to feel free and easy. If you clench up and focus hard, it falls apart. So, from the outside, it looks easy. And it looks easy because it only works when it is easy.

Execution, on the other hand, feels hard even when it works well. You may well have moments of flow and fun when you're getting stuff done. Sooner or later though, you're going to have to work on something that feels hard. You might need to do one revision after another, scrapping whole structures or fixing fiddly errors introduced in editing. You might need to debug your code, chasing down one annoying issue after another and then find you need to refactor it all anyway. You might need to make a freaking Gantt chart to plan your timeline and dependencies. You're going to have to follow up with people and follow up again. It will take effort. Always. At some point it will feel hard, and it won't be a sign that things are going wrong. It will just be hard.

Ideas require a feeling of ease. Execution requires application and effort. The effort of effort is easy to perceive. The effort of attaining ease is difficult to perceive, especially from the outside. It's not true that ideas are easy, but it's an easy mistake to make.

It's all dialetics, darling #

All that said, I think it's useful for some of us, at certain points, to be told that it's time to put some of these nice ideas into action and find out if they work. "Execution is everything" can be just the kick in the pants that some of us (me) need to stop writing pages of ideas and start getting shit done. When you've spent too long valorizing the genius of the idea-havers, it's healthy to balance it with the counter that the ideas were easy and now it's time for the hard work. Thesis needs antithesis to move to synthesis. Then you do that again and again. Or, put another way, it's a coaching cue, a hint to avoid a mistake. Once the mistake is corrected, holding onto it like it's a complete philosophy generates a new mistake in a different direction.

Talk about nominative determinism. I mean, John Do-er. John, a name so generic it's the first name of unknown persons (John Doe). A generic guy who does stuff. Is it any wonder he is oriented around the doing? ↩︎
Lots meaning dozens or scores, not like, two or three or even ten. ↩︎
OKRs are Objectives and Key Results, a nifty method of setting goals and measuring, somewhat objectively, if you've achieved them. It's the topic of Measure What Matters and the reason I read the book. I think OKRs are very useful in certain contexts, and I read the book so I could both learn how to use them better and to teach the people I work with about how to use them. ↩︎
One day I will write about the morass of unknowing. It's one of my key ideas about how we come to know things deeply and eventually develop clarity. Because humans are smart and a multitude, I'm sure someone has written about the same concept somewhere, probably with a different name, but I've never come across it articulated so I cannot link to some satisfying Wikipedia page or even reference a book. I think the name gives enough of a hint for now, and in the meantime I beg your indulgence, dear reader. ↩︎
Years of open-focus meditation are one of the forms the pre-work to loosen up your spirit for idea generation might take. Anyway, it's been helpful for me. ↩︎

Yule nap time

2024-12-20T00:00:00Z

I'm so tired. Are you tired? I think we were probably meant to hibernate or at least sleep a lot more this time of the year^[1]. I think it would be restful to neither read nor write any words for a little bit^[2], so I'll just share some photos of my Christmas tree. Or Yule tree, as you will.

I like decorating my tree with representations of forest things like mushrooms and pinecones and little forest animals like hedgehogs and the Pacific Northwest tree octopus.

When I first started decorating my own tree, I didn't have much budget for decorations so I made lots and lots of paper mushrooms. Over time, I've bought fancier mushrooms made of glass. I still like paper decorations though, so I've made some paper chains. Paper chains remind me of childhood Christmas in Poland.

This is my first Yule with a cat in the house, so I carefully didn't hang any paper chains or delicate babubles at her normal walking level.

So far, she hasn't shown any interest in the tree, except for a likely attempt to drink the Christmas tree water. I only infer she drank the tree water because the day after we put the tree up her, er, output was rather strange and kind of green and she seemed out of sorts. I taped up a plastic bag around the base of the tree the next day and she returned to her usual self.

Learn from this cat: take naps and don't drink the Christmas tree water.

Unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere in which case don't forget to wear sunscreen. ↩︎
If, on the other hand you're not that tired, actually, and would like to read something longer, might I suggest a post on a seasonal topic I wrote last year? Worship the sun It's traditional, it's natural, and it's reasonable ↩︎

What's a hero?

2024-12-13T00:00:00Z

In her introduction to the The Odyssey, translator Emily Wilson examines Odysseus' status as a hero. In the narrative, one of his interlocutors ask Odysseus if he's a pirate, which he denies although he doesn't deny the violent and treacherous acts attributed to him. What it meant to be a hero was rather different in Homer's Greece than in our time. Wilson writes:

"Being a "hero," heros which in archaic Greek does suggests a warrior and does not imply virtue--is different from being a "pirate" in that it is a much more positive term, which a man can apply to himself; nobody in Homer admits to being a pirate. Like pirates, warriors sack towns and and kill the inhabitants; the main difference is scale. Odysseus goes on to infiltrate the enemy's dwelling, maim him, and poach his beloved sheep, the wealth of his household--an act that is clearly analogous to the hero's previous triumph over the Trojans."^[1]

Not long after reading Wilson's introduction, I was listening to a podcast about the works of science fiction author Gene Wolfe where the hosts talked about how deeply flawed one of Wolfe's heroes was^[2], wandering around and getting lost at sea, cheating on his wife, starting wars, betraying people who depend on him, and not even getting that much done. He wasn't a classic hero like Odysseus and his dubious quest was no epic like the Odyssey, they said. Maybe they were making a subtle joke. Because if you want a hero who is Problematic and whose quest is more of a straggle home that mostly fails and gets everyone around him killed that is literally Odysseus.

Somehow two contradictory ideas are lodged in the popular imagination: that ancient epic heroes like Odysseus are epitomes of real heroes and that real heroes are not only brave and accomplished but also morally good. But if you read the ancient epic tales the heroes are pretty weird.

Good or good at #

The ancient heroes aren't good guys. They are guys who are good at doing things. There's another neat ancient Greek word for that, arete. Of course it means a lot of different things over time, and Aristotle, obnoxious moral philosopher that he is, even has a whole chart^[3] about it. It gets translated as "virtue" in some contexts. But arete is more like excellence, and anything or anyone can be excellent in its own way, or in a particular way, without being all around good. You might be an excellent archer or excellent poet or an excellent vase while still being a complete shitheel of a person in other ways. Well, not the vase. The vase probably did no wrong, even though it might depict something pretty violent and possibly quite wrong, like the vase I used as the header, which shows Achilles trampling a dude in battle and then getting off his horse to kill him once he's down.

It's satisfying watch competent people do what they're good at. At the same time, I think it's tempting to attribute other forms of goodness to the competent. If Achilles is such a great archer, surely he must also be brave, and maybe also kind, and honest, and patient.

Hero, protagonist, and anti-hero #

I don't know when a hero started having to be morally good. Certainly by the time Plato was writing, he objected to shady Odysseus and even decided to kick poets out of the Republic for, among other things, telling such immoral tales. The neoplatonist Porphyry tried to retcon some of the more sacrilegious Homeric tales by insisting they be interpreted metaphorically. However, the first place I've noticed the swing towards moral and moralizing heroes is Le Morte d'Arthur where about two thirds through the tales it's suddenly not OK to murder people in duels, seduce other guys' wives, or even just have sex at all.

Yet, people still want stories about heroes more like in Homer than in medieval morality tales. Morals change and anyway isn't it more fun to read or watch movies about people who do big, interesting things and are a little, or even a lot, bad? From the hero who is good and good at stuff, we move to complicated protagonists again and then even further, straight up anti-heroes, the literal villains from earlier stories brought back for their own main story line.

Personally, I haven't found the recent crop of villain stories all that compelling. For an anti-hero, which is basically a person whose story we follow while certain they are morally bad, to be interesting to me they must be extremely and fascinatingly competent. Instead, most modern villain retelling seem to focus on filling in the psychological backstory, like why did he get that way, why does she want to kill the puppies, what's wrong with them? Honestly? I don't care. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist.

I don't want a hero who is an anodyne copy of a memory of Odysseus money-laundered through Joseph Campbell's bullshit totalizing heroes's journey theory. And I don't want its antinomian inversion either. Both are boring. I want to watch a problematic person be excellent at something.

Tina Turner sings "We Don't Need Another Hero."

Emily Wilson's introduction to her 2018 translation of The Odyssey by Homer, page 20. ↩︎
The problematic hero was Horn, the book was On Blue's Waters and the podcast is Alzabo Soup. ↩︎
Yes, I do mean chart. Some people might call it a table, which it also is. I'm personally convinced that a chart is the top level category and a table is a kind of chart when said table is the visual representation of data. I have really gotten into this, especially with other technical writers, some of whom are adamant that a table is not a type of chart but a totally different thing. And like, look, a table, when we talk about in the sense of a way to store data, is not a type of chart. But when you create an image of the data in tabular form so people can look at it, then it's a kind of chart. Various dictionaries, including for example Britannica agree with me: "information in the form of a table, diagram, etc." Maybe the more important caveat is that Aristotle probably didn't actually draw the table, and rather other people draw it based on his writing. I don't know; I haven't read Aristotle in Ancient Greek. Or if I did, it would have been just little snippets in college and I did not retain much. My advice to you is don't take two foreign languages at once. There are only so many grammatical particles a person can cram into their head at once, even at age twenty. At least I can still read the alphabet. ↩︎

The state monopoly on violence

2024-12-06T00:00:00Z

If you enter into a contract with the Mob and fail to deliver the goods, they will send a representative around to break your knees. If you enter into a contract with an organization following the rule of law in a place where rule of law obtains and fail to deliver the goods, they will attempt to recover the money first with polite and then threatening letters, and eventually they may take you to court, and if things go very wrong for you, you might possibly end up in jail where the guards might break your knees on some pretext. But probably you'll just get sent to collections and pay up eventually, or go through bankruptcy to discharge the debt. A normal law-abiding person doesn't need to threaten you with breaking your knees because you both know that you are held and threatened by the ever-present, if generally somewhat distant, power of the state. In a state with a working legal system, there are many steps between going astray and violence, but the violence is always there, available as a last, and legitimate, recourse.

That, in a nutshell, is the state monopoly on violence. It is a system by which, under pervasively looming but distant threat of legitimate state violence, individuals give up the right to break anyone's knees at the first sign of contract violation, and instead outsource it, and at the same time (usually) give each other a bit more time between the contract violation and the violence.

If the advantage of breathing room between violation and violence is not immediately obvious, consider the more common example, though not more the more common case, murder and revenge. In a situation where everyone freelances their own violence, when a person you care about is murdered, you have basically two choices: let it go or go murder the murderer yourself. After you do that, their friends and family will have the same choice. There's a chance you'll get into a multi-generational nightmare of revenge killings that continue long after the original inciting incident. Now you've got a blood feud. If instead you agree to give up personal violence and treat the murder as a crime not just as against an individual but against the state (a violation of the monopoly), the state takes on the stain of the revenge killing^[1] and you can have revenge without vendetta.

Even assuming these are the two choices, mob or prison, vendetta or the death penalty--and they are not, there are other ways we might organize society than by coercive force--it's a fragile thing to maintain. The power shifts. It's not that a state has the monopoly on legitimate violence. It's that when an entity establishes itself as being the legitimate wielder of violence, it becomes a state. That's what makes it a state^[2].

In his novel The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines that in the wakes of various horrific climate disasters and mass casualty events, some groups arise that hold violence^[3], even up to murder, is justified if it will prevent further global warming and mass death. They do it because the legitimate avenues of state power are taking too long. And because things got bad enough for long enough, most people look on and don't mind.

Gaia's Shock Troops, Children of Kali, Defenders of Mother Earth, Earth First, and so on. People read about their violent acts and the frequent resulting deaths, and shrugged. What did people expect? Who owned private jets anymore? [...] Fools conspicuously burning carbon, killed from out of the sky somehow? So what. [...] People were angry, people were scared. People were not fastidious.

In The Ministry for the Future the sabotage and assassinations are effective in limiting carbon burning, because no one wants to fly in jets any more, never mind be the CEO of an oil company. It's too dangerous. In the novel, many more people are working to save the earth and humanity through non-violent means than through violence. It's not a dystopian novel, nor a utopian one, either.

The public reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson reminded me a bit of The Ministry for the Future. The way most people just don't care and instead recount the various ways the American health insurance industry has harmed them, and the way in which other health insurance companies seem to be taking notice seemed to echo the imaginary public reaction to eco-vigilantes.

Again, a quote from The Ministry for the Future:

The state monopoly on violence had probably been a good idea while it lasted, but no one could believe it would ever come back. Only in some better time.

I don't think the general lack of sympathy for the apparent assassination^[4] of a CEO of a particularly parasitic company is a sign that something is wrong with Americans' empathy. It's a sign of how bad the health insurance industry and as a result health care have become in the US, and how little faith people have that the supposedly legitimate avenues for redress will help them. The very systems of order and process and bureaucracy in general become instruments of murder when they delay lifesaving healthcare until someone dies. People feel that violence has been done to them and their loved ones, and they see no option for redress. The state monopoly on violence only works as long as the state holds up its end of the bargain. This week's reaction shows that it might be breaking down. If it does break down, I'd like to try for one of the non-coercive systems next, instead, one where the backing currency isn't the violence of the state, or any kind of violence.

Not all nation states practice state-sanctioned murder any more, so people living in those places don't get to have revenge killing, only revenge imprisoning. ↩︎
That's my best understanding of Max Weber's theory of the monopoly on violence. ↩︎
Actual violence, meaning acts that hurt living beings, not merely property destruction which can be vandalism or sabotage but is not violence despite what dudes on the news say when someone smashes a window. ↩︎
Whether or not it really was an assassination, that's how people seem to be reacting to it. ↩︎

It's peak Turrell skyspace viewing season

2024-11-29T00:00:00Z

Right now--the next two weeks--is the best time to go see The Three Gems, the James Turrell skyspace in San Francisco. The skyspace is like a little adobe house with a round hole in the roof through which you look at the sky. It's designed so that if you look at the sky as it's changing color and light, like at sunrise or sunset, you can experience some amazing visual effects. I wrote about it at length last year when I first learned how it worked, so if you want details go read Seeing the obvious in the Turrell skyspace.

The Three Gems is in the sculpture park in the De Young Museum. The De Young Museum closes at 5:15 pm and they usually start kicking people out 10 minutes before closing time. Thus, your opportunities to view The Three Gems at sunset are limited to the times when sunset is before 5:05 pm. The earliest sunsets in San Francisco, which are at 4:51 pm, give you the best chance to experience both sunset and a bit of the sky color transition.

The first 4:51 sunset is today, November 29. The last 4:51 sunset is December 12. By December 29, sunset is back to 5:00 pm. So go today. Or soon. Until and unless the De Young starts having special evening openings to view the skyspace, as they apparently once did, this is your best chance to see skyspace at sunset.

And, sadly, it's not possible to go see The Three Gems at sunrise, since the De Young opens at 9:30 am and sunrise is never that late in San Francisco.

How to get there #

It's late, I'm full of Thanksgiving carbs, so I'm just going to paste again what I wrote last time. The logistics remain the same:

The Turrell skyspace in San Francisco is located in the sculpture garden on the grounds of the De Young museum in Golden Gate Park. It doesn't cost anything to go into the sculpture garden, though you might have to go through the museum entrance and walk through the museum cafe and come out again. Sometimes you can just walk in by the cafe and other times you have to walk through the museum. Either way, it's free. The skyspace is a little hard to find, because it's all the way at the back of the garden and doesn't look like much from the outside. Look for signs along the path. Weekdays are especially nice if you can make it out, because it's quieter.

Have fun and bring warm clothes.

P.s. No, that's not a photo of or from the skyspace. It's a really cool sunset I saw this October when I went to the Ocean Beach because it was ridiculously hot. The pelicans symbolize getting yourself organized and taking a trip somewhere interesting, like the De Young sculpture garden.

Artificial wombs

2024-11-22T00:00:00Z

A conversation about uterine replicators in Lois McMaster Bujold's work made me curious about the history of the idea of artificial wombs. When do exo-wombs first appear in literature? And when do they first appear as a positive idea? I worked backwards from Bujold to the first mentions I could find.

1986: Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold #

Shards of Honor is the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga. In that book, and the series that follows, the uterine replicators are a common, and generally positively viewed technology. Most planetary societies that have their shit together technologically gestate children in uterine replicators instead of in a parental body because it's safer. In societies that have fallen behind technologically, like the long-isolated planet Barrayar, people gestate in their bodies and (mild spoiler) it causes problems.

In general, uterine replicators are seen as a matter-of-fact useful and normal tech in the Vorkosigan Saga universe. They lead to certain moral complexities, like any reproductive tech might, but no one blames the underlying technology of the uterine replicator for dastardly uses that someone might put it to.

1976: Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy #

I haven't actually read this one so I'm going by the Wikipedia summary and mentions in a 2003 academic paper, "In the Womb of Utopia: Feminist Science Fiction, Reproductive Technology, and the Future". Gestation outside of an individual's body is the norm and generally viewed as positive.

1970: The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone #

Firestone was only 25 when she published this amazing radical feminist book, and I still can't get over how brilliant she was, and how far-seeing her ideas were. Firestone's book is the first feminist text I've read that seriously proposes artificial wombs as a necessary and good technology. She discusses how difficult and painful pregnancy and childbirth are, and argues that cultural taboos are holding us back from working on artificial placentas.

1932: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley #

In Brave New World, artificial wombs are part of a mechanism of mass control of human life. Not only are children gestated in artificial wombs, they are also clones who are engineered for a particular role in society with a set intelligence, strength, and generally pre-determined status in society. Artificial wombs are definitely portrayed as a negative thing in Brave New World.

Scream into the lacuna, if it helps #

That's kind of a big gap between 1970 and 1932. I don't know who, if anyone was writing about artificial wombs in the gap. I've read a lot of science fiction, including a ton of New Wave where you might think to encounter weird feminist notions and I'm still coming up empty.

I'd love to hear about anything I might have missed. I'm particularly interested in finding any works written by women, and any works that take a positive, or even just neutral view of artificial wombs.

Later works #

I have encountered more artificial wombs in science fiction after Bujold, but not actually that often. For example, it's explicitly called out as an available tech in The Locked Tomb series (2019 onwards). In those books, not having artificial wombs is also taken as a sign of being rather technologically behind. It's one of the many ways we know that the Ninth House sucks. I think it's starting to become a background assumption science fiction tech, like faster than light travel, so it's less interesting to me in recent works unless it's an important feature.

Plein air in San Francisco

2024-11-15T00:00:00Z

It's been an exhausting week. I feel out of words because I've used up all my words doing my job which is a job about words. I'm also exhausted because I cope with anxiety about the state of the world by working extra hard. I'm pretty good at my job and generally it makes me feel in control--and even when I'm out of my depth at work it's nothing compared to --gestures vaguely at things. So no more words today. Just enough words for a little intro. Instead of words, I'm going to share with you some watercolor paintings I've done lately. I've continued to paint plein air, and starting to do more big scenes in addition to the closeups of plants that seem to be my comfort zone. Ever since I decided to not worry so much about things being strictly representative, I've had a lot more fun with big scenery. I've also decided not to worry if I'm painting obvious subjects that everyone else paints. Maybe everyone else also paints the sky and the ocean because they are fun to paint, and they're good subjects for the blobbiness of watercolor. My favorite thing remains trying to get the feeling of the colors just right.

Bernal Hill in San Francisco, August 5, 2024

View of the Marin Headlands from Ocean Beach in San Francisco, October 6, 2024

Dunes with iceplants at sunset, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, October 6, 2024

Detail of an eucalyptus tree on Billy Goat Hill, San Francisco, October 20, 2024

Dunes on a misty day, Ocean Beach, San Francisco, October 27, 2024

View of the Marin Headlands just after sunset from Lands End, San Francisco, November 2, 2024

Cormorants roost on a prominent rock. Low tide near Mile Rock Beach, San Francisco, November 2, 2024

The consolations of philosophy

2024-11-08T00:00:00Z

Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in 523 while in prison awaiting execution^[1]. In it, Philosophy, personified as a woman, visits him in his prison cell and talks him down from his despair. She explains where true happiness is to be found. Not with fickle Fortune, who has abandoned him, but with constant Philosophy and virtue, which no one can take from him. It's a wonderful book^[2], but I'm not mentioning to suggest this amazing work of early Christian Neoplatonism is the book for the moment. Nor do I mention it just because Boethius was an incredible badass who stuck to his principles, though he was!

I mention it because when I woke up on Wednesday and checked the news, I thought well, fuck, and what now? And very soon after that I also thought, how can I make sense of this? And how can I deal with what happens next? Then, very like Boethius, I took consolation in my philosophy, which is that knowledge is power. I always think, if only I knew a little bit more, I could surely figure this out. Or, if I could just understand it, maybe I could deal with it better. That kind of thinking can be a trap--it's how I get stuck reading low quality hot takes and other people's panic just to get some news. But there are some things I've read that helped, and so I'm going to suggest them.

Understand the Cake or Death theory of change #

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies. 2024.

Davies' book is a kind of light intro into management cybernetics, in as far as an intro into a theory of complex systems can be light. One of the big ideas of cybernetics is that a system only responds to the signals it is capable of receiving. If the system is not complex enough--not capable of receiving and responding to enough of a variety of signals to deal with the situations it encounters--it will eventually fail catastrophically. He uses voting, and specifically the Brexit vote as an example. People were not happy with the status quo but couldn't send a complex enough signal back up to the ruling powers and have it acted on. When the only signal people can send is a vote every few years for this thing or something else, if they think this thing is terrible, they will vote for something else just to shake things up even if that something else is also terrible and quite possibly even more terrible. It's like the old joke about Cake or Death, except the cake has all run out, or is totally rotten and will give you the runs, and everyone just mashed the NOT CAKE button as hard as they could, disregarding that NOT CAKE is the same as DEATH. It's not like there's a "neither, thanks" button. It's still horrible, of course, but somehow understanding it a bit helps.

The book explains a lot of other aspects of our multicrisis quite well, too, and I highly recommend it.

Prepare to resist lies and feel-bad stories #

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz. 2024.

By diving into the history of psychological warfare, Newitz provides a way to identify, understand, and resist psychological warfare. The goal of psychological warfare is to confuse and demoralize the enemy, and American political actors started to turn it on their own people. One quick way to identify a PsyOp is if the story makes you feel complete despair, like you might as well just give up and die. Another way is if the story seems at odds with reality or history as you know it and experienced it, and makes you feel more and more confused as you try to figure it out. Even if you try to unpick it and succeed, it just wastes your time, as a new lie clad in partial truths comes along from the PsyOp machine. My summary hardly gives it justice and I strongly suggest reading the book in the next three months. Stories are weapons, so arm yourself.

A better world is possible #

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. 1974.

Le Guin's science fiction novel imagines a society of anarcho-syndicalists living on Anarres, a moon to the planet Urras. It's not a perfect utopia by any means, and we see much of it in contrast to capitalist Urras where the main character travels. One of the most interesting things about Anarres is that it's not a post-scarcity society. In fact, survival on Anarres is difficult, and yet the people manage to live together without hoarding or domination. I found The Dispossessed both inspiring and hopeful. Hopelessness forecloses even imagining the possibility for change for the better. The Dispossessed widened my horizon of imagination and helps me escape that trap.

See On the Consolation of Philosophy in the Wikipedia. The college professor who taught the book also said that Boethius wrote in between bouts of being slowly tortured, showing even more how committed he was to philosophy and this work. I can't find anything to verify my professor's claim, and maybe it was just an embellishment. I can find confirmation that Boethius was tortured before he was executed, but it seems more like an all at once thing and part of the execution. ↩︎
I still have my marked up copy from college, full of notes and underlines and there are some zingers. Like "This very place which is banishment to you is home to those who live here." ↩︎

Yes on K

2024-11-01T00:00:00Z

I live in San Francisco and I am voting Yes on proposition K. Prop K would turn the Upper Great Highway into a permanent ocean-side park. The Great Highway is already closed to car traffic on weekends, which is how we know it's really lovely to have it as a park. The experiment started around the same time as many of San Francisco's Slow Streets, as a way to let people safely get outside and get exercise during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place period.

I'm not going to tell you all the good, sensible reasons to vote Yes on K. Just the reasons I'm voting for it.

Ocean Beach Park will be awesome #

First, it's awesome and we know it's awesome. When the Great Highway is closed to cars but open to pedestrians and bicycles, you can take the N, L, or 48 right to Ocean Beach and then just mosey right across to the sand. Or you can walk around on the highway for a bit if you don't want to get sand in your shoes. Also, while the ocean is loud and covers up most of the car noises, it's quite pleasant not to have the sound of a highway as you walk to the ocean. Whatever you do, it's low-stress, safe, and all around nice.

October 27, 2024 was the fourth annual Great Hauntway, the outdoor Halloween trick-or-treating party on the Great Highway.

The road is falling into the sea #

Second, the damn thing is falling into the sea anyway. Or maybe it's a bit more that the sea is rising up to meet it. The dunes creep onto the highway and cover it with sand rendering it impassible anyway quite often. Then the city spends a bunch of money clearing it. But you can't beat the sea and the sand always comes back. Chances are, we're going to have at least some sea level rise and the whole falling into the sea problem is not going to get better. The sensible site I linked above can tell you exactly how it's falling into the sea. Point is, it's not even practical to keep this thing as a road. I don't get why people like me who don't use personal cars should fund a futile fight against the sea just so car drivers can be mildly convenienced. On the other hand, people can walk and bike on slightly sandy roads just fine.

People like car-free spaces but have trouble imagining them #

Third, some people are going to bitch about how turning the Great Highway into an awesome park is a bad idea, but after it's done, they'll actually like it. I don't think we could have had the Slow Streets program if it hadn't been put in as an emergency measure during COVID-19 shelter-in-place. It would have been unthinkable to most people to just close roads to through traffic and let people walk in them. But the unusual situation let us try it out as a city and we discovered it was awesome. I lived off of Sanchez Street in 2020 and getting to walk down the middle of the street was the most amazing feeling, the one nice thing about an otherwise pretty shitty year. Slow Streets have transformed neightborhoods and brought people together. There are now more people using and hanging out on Sanchez Street than there ever were in the before times.

JFK Promenade is a similar situation. JFK drive in Golden Gate Park was closed to car traffic on Sundays for years and years. It was really nice! But then when people wanted to turn part of it into a permanent pedestrian and bike zone, it was a whole damn fight^[1]. Then it passed and JFK Promenade has been a thing for a few years. It went from being really quite nice to fucking awesome, as its permanently pedestrianized status has made it possible to add art, seating, pianos anyone can play, and ping-pong tables. Food and drink trucks ply their wares. Kids and adults bike and skate, and instead of the sound of car traffic, you hear people playing music and get to overhear the most wonderful conversations.

The momo truck plies its wares on JFK in front of the Conservatory of Flowers. I friggin' love this momo truck.

When I went there two weeks ago, I overheard two different conversations where one person explained to another how JFK Promenade came to be and how much they liked it. Paraphrasing, it went something like this.

"Let's go this way. There's more art." "This is awesome!" "Yes, it's permanently closed to cars now. But when they first tried to set it up, a lot of people were opposed to it and tried to stop it." "Why would anyone want to stop this?"

There was also a hilarious person on a rental bike doing a little video of himself, presumably talking to a friend.

"You should come visit me. It's literally always like this."

If we manage to pass K, I think it will end up being like JFK Promenade. People will love it and wonder why anyone would have opposed such a self-evidently great idea. It's going to be a neighborhood hangout and a destination.

A scene from the Great Hauntway on October 27, 2024. The entire stretch was jam packed with kids and adults in costumes enjoying trick-or-treating. San Franciscans were undeterred by the fog.

I love the little birds #

Ocean Beach has wonderful birds, including my two favorite shorebirds, sanderlings and snowy plovers. Snowy plovers are endangered and Ocean Beach is one of their breeding grounds. If we turn the Great Highway into a park, it will allow more dune restoration and reduce the noise and environmental pollution that harms the snowy plovers. While sanderlings aren't endangered, restoring the habitat will surely be good for them, too.

Ocean Beach Park #

Doesn't that sound nice? If my reasons for voting Yes on K aren't convincing but you're open to being convinced, check out https://www.oceanbeachpark.org/ They cover the boring stuff like budget, and how people who drive cars can still drive their cars to get places even if one of the hundreds of roads in San Francisco is no longer available to them. They also talk about the whole falling into the sea issue with more rigor than I've done here.

I cancelled my DeYoung Museum membership because their board fought and is still trying to fight JFK Promenade. Similarly, Peskin's opposition to JFK Promenade and to Prop K bumps him down on my list of mayoral candidates. ↩︎

Cosmic horror but make it funny

2024-10-25T00:00:00Z

Late October is that time when the mind, conditioned by years of half-assed NaNoWriMo attempts, turns to the thought of the fantasy of writing fantasy and science fiction, maybe whole novels of it. I used to think, I must write a novel or I'll be a failure. After years of not writing a novel, I wrote 50,000 words one November, but nothing came of it because it wasn't the kind of story I wanted to read, so I couldn't sit down and revise it. It was not fantasy or science fiction. It was a gritty and sexual roman à clef.

Then, I took up pretty serious mediation for a while and had the fantastic insight that I only wanted to write a novel for the sake of writing a novel, but I didn't have anything to say that was novel-shaped. I realized this while washing the dishes or maybe putting them away, and laughed and felt an immense lightness. It was that kind of realization, not crushing but funny. And the compulsion to write a novel or anything in particular just to prove I can dropped clean away. You'll notice I did not stop writing, however. It was one of those liberating insights that took away the weird pain of the should and must, while the creative urge and honestly even the idea of having some structure to nurture the creativity remained.

Time has passed, and I am starting to find that I might have something to say that is novel shaped. That is, I am starting to find that there is a limited amount of novels that have the particular elements that I most enjoy, and now I've read many of them multiple times and I think that if I want more of whatever that kind of thing is, I might have to write it. I'm most interested in a kind of mood or mode, something like planetary romance^[1] or technological sword and sorcery, or cosmic horror but make it funny, and well, I have kind of a list.

I like stories that make me feel a certain way. I like a lively plot even when there's more underneath. I like real stakes for the characters, even if the meaning of them shifts. I like quotable lines. I like grim humor and snark. I like references to the occult. I like weird plants and birds and animals.

I like magic to be real, but somehow horrible or difficult in an unexpected way. I like secret societies. I like being inside of any kind of secret.

I like meeting a character already in the shit. I like planetary romance. I like a mood that carries you along. I like allusions to myth and it doesn't have to be subtle at all.

I like discovering the world. I like it when it sneaks up on you. I like layers. I like different social systems^[2]. I like a character who is Just Doing A Job^[3]. But then they take their professional ethics perhaps a bit too seriously. I like doomed people who don't give up and sometimes win.

I like being in a fallen world, like Geralt of Rivia or Conan the Barbarian or Gideon the Ninth^[4]. I like it when the sacred turns out to be not just wrong but the manifestation of biological doom.

I like characters who don't quite get each other. I like people who are secretly on a mission. I like One Last Job. I like the wise advisor. I like a party scene. I like characters who fuck. I like characters who are prepared. I like characters who carry a secret joy, or a secret plan, or a secret grudge. I like it when characters have a secret.

I like it when they are hard on the outside but soft on the inside like a truffle with a gooey center. I like it when they have that one thing that makes them crazy but anything else rolls right off. I like it when they've been faking it for years and are terrified someone will find out. I like it when they suddenly develop a magical power, but not through birth or inheritance.

I like it when characters are working class, not born to rule or royal bastards^[5]. I like a reversal of fates. I don't mind a king who becomes a baker or a forest hermit.

In terms of setting, I require woods, seashores, and forbidding crags. I like ancient ruins of a technologically advanced race now millions of years gone. I like Fairy Rules^[6]. I like a bit of horror. I like the feeling that the good years are all gone, and I like for it to be false. I like irredeemable wrongs.

I like the Golden Age to turn out to have been a nightmare. No gods, no masters. I like animal companions. I like when poetry matters. I like court intrigue, but I don't think I could pull it off as a writer. I like fish out of water. I like relativity time dilation. I like a merciless cosmos but merciful people.

I like it when the clever survive. I like it when the powerful and haughty get their comeuppance. I like the revenge of the real.

I like that feeling when the Real tears the fabric of the symbolic order, that moment before a new symbolic order is established. I like romance, but more when it's doomed. I like above all the sense that all this is but a moment. I like hyperintellectual references. I don't mind if it's a little pretentious if it pulls it off.

The Wikipedia defines planetary romance as "a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy in which the bulk of the action consists of adventures on one or more exotic alien planets, characterized by distinctive physical and cultural backgrounds." It's also sometimes called "sword and planet" as a nod to sword and sorcery. ↩︎
For example, as in the way you slowly understand the rules of the wold and the society in Jack Vance's The Moon Moth . ↩︎
I wrote a lot more about the idea of fictional characters just doing a job rather then setting out to do something special in Sword and sorcery and the mid-career hero. ↩︎
I've come to like Gideon the Ninth more with each subsequent re-read. I reviewed it after I read it the first time in my post Cozy necromancy: If Found, Return to Hell, Legends & Lattes, and Gideon the Ninth. ↩︎
For example, in Le Morte d'Arthur everyone cool or brave or good who is a commoner turns out to be secretly a bastard of a king or noble. I hate that trope. ↩︎
I wrote about what it's like when you fall into fairy rules. ↩︎

Blow your cooldowns

2024-10-18T00:00:00Z

You're going to want to save the special stuff for the right moment. That's the instinct. That's my instinct anyway. Limited use items in D&D, special consumables in Final Fantasy X, and long-cooldown abilities in World of Warcraft--whatever it is, I want to hold on to it, to wait until I really need it. It was probably the wrong strategy in D&D and JRPGs and it's definitely wrong in WoW, where one of the best tips for improving your performance is A.B.C. Always Be Casting. But also, always be using your abilities on cooldown.

At this point your probably either nodding along and going, yeah, of course, but also no shit, or wondering what weird well of jargon you've fallen into.

So, quick explanation. World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online video game where you play a fantasy character. There are lots of kinds to choose from, and you choose both the kind of creature you play, say a troll or a little fox guy or a human, and the kind of powers and abilities you're going to have. The creature type (called "race") is mostly aesthetic, whereas the kind of powers your character has (called "class") is core to how you play the game. You're going to be playing quite differently if you're a mage or a warrior. But no matter if you're an ugly human mage or a cute lil' fox guy mage, your experience of playing the game, of getting shit done as your character, is going to be pretty similar.

No matter what class you play, you're going to have a bunch of attacks and abilities that you can basically use all the time, and a few that you can only use at set intervals, say every 30 seconds, or 3 minutes, or even 10 minutes. When you're waiting for your abilities to be available again, they're said to be on cooldown, as if your spell casting finger or sword got overheated and has to cool down a bit before you can use it again. Due to the wonders of metonymy, the term "cooldown" has come to mean not only the time you're waiting for your powerful ability to be available again, but also the powerful ability itself.

Unlearning hoarding over and over again #

I play a healer in World of Warcraft, a troll druid to be precise. Yep, that's me in the header image, or maybe more accurately the troll character I play. Somehow that feels less true than saying it's me.

As a healer, I have to keep the other characters alive. When we fight a monster together (aka, raid), I want to save my powerful healing spells, the cooldowns, for when they'll be most needed. I want to hold on to them just in case. Really what you want to do is learn the rhythm of the encounter (they are predictable to a large degree) and plan when you're going to use the cooldowns. But when I don't know the encounter well enough to do that, I hoard my cooldowns, which is actually not ideal.

I know it's not ideal because most raid groups that take their fun seriously, and mine is such a one, log the entire raid. Then you can look at how much healing or damage you did compared to other people in your raid, and to other people who play your class and specialization across the world. So when I look at the logs and see that I'm at say, at the 50th or 20th or 4th^[1] percentile of all players at my level for that encounter, I could be doing a lot better.

Part time moonkin #

When I'm not a troll that heals people, my druid switches specializations to a kind of spell casting giant owlbeast called a moonkin. If I could be better as a healer, it's fair to say I'm generally pretty bad as a moonkin. Recently, WoW introduced a new kind of single-player dungeon called a "delve." Each time you complete a delve, you have the chance to do the next one at a higher difficulty level in exchange for better rewards.

Druids shapeshift depending on what job they're doing. This is also me. Well, "me."

The selector thingy for choosing a delve's difficulty tells you the expected gear level you should have to deal with the enemies in the delve. And I found I was having a pretty hard time with delve difficulties that should have been fine for me. What gives?^[2]

As one does, I looked up a reference guide.^[3] The most important thing I learned was that I needed to be using my cooldowns whenever they came up. Once I changed that, delves went much better. I'd been holding the powerful attacks just in case something bad happened and I needed to quickly kill some enemies to get out of a pickle. Except that if I just used the cooldowns aggressively and consistently, I wouldn't get into any pickles.

Back to the raid, already in progress #

I tried a similar approach in the next raid, where I always play a healer. Powerful ability comes off cooldown? I use it. It worked. Well it mostly worked except for the times I died early and did almost no healing. So fine, OK. Step 1 is Always Be Casting. But step 0 is don't die.

When I'm in the single digits, it pretty much always means my character died in the encounter. Dying in a raid is almost always the dead player's fault. Death isn't permanent. But when you're lying on the ground waiting to get revived at the end of the encounter, it's rather hard to Always Be Casting. The number one hint for being an effective raider, even more than A.B.C. is don't die. ↩︎
Don't say moonkins are bad at delves, spec is broken for solo content blah blah blah. You go to the delve with the moonkin you you have not the moonkin you wish you had. Anyway, just blaming the class balance for your own inability to skill up is a petulant whiner's move. ↩︎
The Wowhead balance druid guide, of course. ↩︎

CAT FAQs

2024-10-11T00:00:00Z

If this blog had comments, people might have asked questions about my cat when I gave her her 90-day performance review evaluating how she's doing in her role as a senior cat. As it does not, I have instead had to do as countless FAQ writers have done before me, and have extrapolated from the few questions people did ask me to assume those questions represent some inquisitive silent majority.

Why is your cat named Shinjuku? #

That was the name she had when we adopted her, and we thought it as a great name so we kept it. Her previous family had traveled to Japan shortly before they adopted her as a kitten. Shinjuku is a special ward of Tokyo, which is kind of analogous to a borough in New York City. Addtionally, "Shinjuku" is also commonly used to refer to the entire area surrounding Shinjuku Station." ^[1] I'm not sure if they were thinking of the whole special ward or just the railway station. I like to pretend she's named after the railway station.

What would have happened if she failed her 90-day performance review? #

The performance review is a joke, and Shinjuku was never at any risk of losing her position as our pet cat. She is really a senior cat and is 11 years old. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of senior developers and how they are or aren't similar to senior cats. And, in a completely serious way, it is impossible for her to fail at her job of being a senior cat. She only has to be herself.

Her claws look a bit long? #

Yes, they are a bit long. Perviously she was an indoor-outdoor cat and apparently the outdoor adventures wore down her claws enough. Now she is an indoor only cat for her safety and that of the local wildlife. She has had no previous experience getting her claws trimmed, and I'm working on getting her used to having her paws touched before we move on to trimming. With patience and some training, we'll get there.

Wait, did you say clicker training for cats? #

Yes! You can train cats to do tricks and clicker training works very well. Apparently. There are some prerequisites, thought, like training the cat to associate the sound of the click with a reward. It helps if the cat is not scared of the click, so another prerequisite is getting the cat used to the sound of the click. The reward is usually food, so you have to find a treat that the cat finds rewarding. So another prerequisite is that your cat doesn't run away from the food you're trying to use as a treat. We just hit that milestone yesterday and I'm pretty excited.

I didn't believe cats could do tricks until a friend showed me some tricks she had trained her cats to do, and ever since I've been very interested in trying to teach a cat tricks. Within a couple of weeks of having a cat, I found videos of clicker training lessons from Cat School, which made it look pretty doable.

I have managed to train Shinjuku a little bit to follow my outstretched finger when I carry her food, so she follows a graceful curve instead of walking under my feet. As a senior cat, she does not always have the best appetite so we can only do this trick when she's actually food-motivated. The rest of the time I have to convince her to try to eat by talking to her gently.

What's her favorite toy? #

I would rank her favorite toys roughly in order like this:

An old toy mouse from Daiso that came with her and was declared as her favorite mouse. It doesn't have a tail. She likes to carry it in her mouth and yowl extravagantly.
Any crumpled ball of paper.
Any other Daiso mouse of the same kind as Favorite Mouse, but new.
Long pieces of dry grass.
Cardboard boxes.

She does not like any fancy toys we got her so far. At first I thought she didn't like to play because she's old, but we just had to discover the way she likes to play.

If Shinjuku reviewed you, what do you think she'd say? #

I wouldn't like to put words in her mouth like that. I think a cat's way of thinking about the world is very different than a human's. From the outside, it does seem like she feels safe and enjoys our company.

Is this a cat blog now? #

I will surely write more about my cat. But I will just as surely write more about other things, too.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Shinjuku. ↩︎

90-day performance review for a senior cat

2024-10-04T00:00:00Z

Good evening, Shinjuku. In a few days, you will reach your 3-month mark in this household, and so I would like to take this time to deliver your formal 90-day performance evaluation. As a cat, you may not be aware of the passage of time in terms of calendar days. You also don't know how to read, so I will provide this review to you verbally, and at the end of the session I will print a copy and crumple it into a ball so you can enjoy it later. Neither reading nor using a calendar are expected skills for your role, and I mention these things only by way of introduction and to set your expectations for the process that will follow.

The Senior Cat on a typical day at work.

Introduction #

Employee name: Shinjuku
Role: Senior Cat
Review period: July 7, 2024 to October 7, 2024

Performance summary #

You may have heard me say things such as "Who's a good cat? Who is the best cat? Who is the cutest, most beautiful kitty?" at various points while you were lounging in the sun and wondered, indeed, who might that be? It is you. In your first 90 days as Senior Cat, you've been absolutely amazing. I don't know how we ever lived without you.

I know the transition to a new house isn't easy for a Senior Cat, but even in those early difficult days you were putting in your best effort. Within a few days, you were sitting on my and Paul's laps, purring and accepting pets. Your love of snuggles and willingness to try snuggling with new people are your most outstanding qualities.

What went well #

Cuteness #

You deliver outstanding cuteness every day. Whether it's lounging in the sunny spot during the afternoon, or curling up in a tight circle on the bed, or yawning hugely between naps, you always exhibit outstanding elegance with a playful touch. Keep going. You're doing great.

An example of outstanding cuteness by the Senior Cat

Good judgement #

As one might expect of a Senior Cat, you exhibit good judgment and behave appropriately in challenging environments. A few concrete examples:

You immediately located and understood the function of the litter box and used it appropriately.
You knew not to jump on the oven or kitchen counters.
You only scratch the couch we don't like.
You only eat food from the cat bowl and never try to eat human food that might be bad for you.
When my study was a big mess with folders all over the floor, you only looked in and meowed at me, and after I cleaned it, you came in and hung out.

The wisdom you bring to the admittedly messy and no doubt occasionally confusing environment of this house does you credit.

Openness to experience #

You've been willing to try new kinds of cat food, and are happy to rotate through a variety of wet foods. You've tried out every new box that comes into the house. Most notably, you got along very well with the cat sitter when we were on vacation. She said you were the snuggliest cat she ever met.

What could have gone better #

There are some things that could have gone better. I note that these problems were most pronounced in the earlier parts of your tenure as Senior Cat with us, and I truly believe you're on the right path. That said there are a few things that could have gone better and I would like to see you work on.

Kneading with the claws out while sitting on laps #

You've eased up enough that we no longer need a doubled up thick blanket, and I hope as you relax with us more, you'll be able to transition to using "gentle paw" in all but the most exciting of situations.

The Senior Cat displays the safe "claws out air kneading" technique, an alternative she is encouraged to explore if she must have her claws out on laps.

Communicating your needs #

In the beginning, it was difficult to determine if you wanted food, company, or play. You've recently started to communicate more clearly when you need food or want to play by coming to your humans and meowing at us meaningfully. Keep doing that. We will feed you all the wet food you want to eat, but we don't want to leave it out on the dish smelling gross all afternoon. Likewise, if you want to play, it's much better for everyone if you ask for it while we are awake instead of hunting your toy mouse at 3 a.m. and yowling through the house because you didn't get enough play. Some of this is on us as we might have misunderstood your meows early on.

Goals for the next six months #

As you settle into your role as Senior Cat here, I'd like to set some goals for you to work on:

Start clicker training by overcoming your fear of the clicker noise
Stop running away from treats
Learn to be picked up
Go into the cat carrier

Stretch goal:

Learn to bring back the toy mice when we play throw and catch the mice

Conclusion #

You're the best, cutest, most perfect little kitty. Yes, you are. It's true. Yes.

Why does the mall feel so bad?

2024-09-27T00:00:00Z

Normally when a post has a question in the title, you might expect there will be an answer inside, so let me just manage your expectation right here in this first run on sentence (I think this is a run on sentence): there will be no answer. Or, if there is an answer, it will only happen by accident, thanks to the mercy of the muse.

Last week, in addition to visiting stunning sites of exotic New England beauty where they have the classic four seasons climate you may know from popular literature, I also visited my old hometown mall^[1]. The mall was newly built in the 90s, when I was a teen, and it was kind of a fancy place to go, thought I didn't like it very much then, either. I thought it was kind of fake and cheesy, and also the only interactions you could have were to buy stuff and I tended not to have spending money of my own. Also you could only get there by driving, which is still the case, so until I got my driver's license, while I could get dropped off at the mall if I could talk a parent into it, I was then effectively stuck there for the duration.

But now, the mall is even worse. Teenagers, as far as I could see, no longer get dropped off to loiter and possibly go make out behind the water tower^[2]. According to film, some teenagers had fun at the mall, even if I wasn't one of them. Certainly, teenagers at the mall gave the place some liveliness. Now, the old hometown mall is sort of sparse. I was there late on a Friday afternoon, which I think would be a time people who hang out at the mall would be hanging out at the mall. No one hangs out at the mall anymore.

The fonts on the main mall signs are outdated. Yes, I know, that's petty, but they are. Not retro. Just crap. And the stuff in the stores seems cheap. Kind of expensive but also kind of cheap. Like all these suits that you just know are going to give you neck gaps. All these things that are trying to be kind of, uh, nice, but they're just shitty imitations of something else. Which, really, describes a lot of New England built environment, too. It's trying to signal that it's something else, like maybe actual England, or old New England before it was trying so hard, only it kind of half-asses these attempts to copy^[3]. It's no travels in hyperreality. It's a knockoff. I recognized a lot of the brands, chain stuff, mediocre crap that costs more than it should for what it is. You know, teenage me was right. It is all fake and kind of cheesy, and I can't believe anyone was ever fooled. It's less real than real. It's hyporeality.

I deliberately went into a mostly-empty department store, one of the anchor stores of the mall, and wandered around looking at boring clothes and shoes, trying to intensify the feeling so I could figure it out. Was it ennui? Was it depression? I tried to imagine for whom these goods and these shopping experience were meant to be aspirational. Who might come to these racks of boring-ass clothes and say, oh yes, this. And it's not even that cheap! Is this a class thing? Am I feeling the unease of being the wrong class? When I was a teen, everything at the mall was too expensive for me, and generally for my family (and also I didn't like it anyway) so I couldn't buy it. Now, everything at the mall is in poor taste, so I wouldn't buy it. Am I a snob? I'm probably a snob. But also, if you live in Connecticut you could take a bus to New York City on a day trip and buy a lot of much nicer clothes somewhere in Queens or Brooklyn for less money. So who comes here? In truth, not that many people any more. Whatever it was that the mall used to be good for, dubious as it was, it sure doesn't seem like it anymore.

Mostly, the mall, just like the suburbs, make me want to leave. And I do.

I went to the mall because Paul wanted to buy or at least look at some old video games and some old Lego and the mall has stores that sell both of those things. ↩︎
This is the only distinctive memory I have of going to the mall that doesn't blur into all others. I don't even remember how I felt about doing it. Neutral? I think? It passed the time. Which is not a ringing endorsement of the kissing or the mall. ↩︎
The Copyworld sign in the header is not from the mall. It's a place in San Francisco that presumably will make you photocopies of stuff. However, it also feels like a metaphysical pronouncement about this being a copyworld. ↩︎

Plein air in New England

2024-09-20T00:00:00Z

I've been on a trip to New England and tried to do a bit of watercolor painting. I always try to do too much on trips, even more so when I'm visiting family, so what's also happening in each of these paintings is three other people patiently indulging me when I said I'd like to sit down and paint for a moment please, even though we have a busy itinerary, and in some cases an actual Gannt, which yes, I made for us in the dread fear of anyone being bored and not having a nice enough time. Anyway, here are some paintings from the moments I did actually pause.

A study of some apples at Buell's Orchard in Eastford, Connecticut.

These apples were such interesting colors and I wanted to try to get the feeling of the color.

Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine was pretty amazing, despite a lot of people saying that the fall colors hadn't come in yet and it would be much better. A four seasons climate has become kind of exotic to me after living in coastal California for 20 years, so I thought even just the beginning of the changing leaf colors was pretty interesting. Paul took this photo of me getting ready to paint.

I tried to do a very quick painting, just 15 minutes, and I am not particularly satisfied with it. It was too much detail to try for in a quick painting and I felt rushed. I didn't even take my usual palette plus scenery photo. The trees might have been a bad subject for a quick painting--at least at my current skill level.

For the second painting I chose a subject that I thought would work better for quick and kind of blobby and abstract painting. I also got over my initial reluctance to paint the coastal islands which I felt everyone paints and photograph. Paul took this photo of the view I was painting while I was painting it.

Normally I use more water even when I'm out and about, but I didn't want to spill anything in the park, so I tried to be a lot more restrained. Paul took this photo of me painting the second painting as well.

I deliberately used wet on wet techniques to make the paint feather and run, and tried to remember the advice I read in a watercoloring technique book that you should use the subject to create your watercolor painting instead of trying to use the watercolor painting to depict the subject.

I like how this one came out best of all. If I want realism, I'll take a photo.

Fancy Friday bread and cheese

2024-09-13T00:00:00Z

Every Friday^[1], Paul and I have bread and cheese for dinner. The tradition started when I used to go to pillow fort yoga^[2] after work on Fridays, and Paul would meet me on the way from yoga to pick up the bread and cheese from Whole Foods for an easy dinner together. We were doing it for a while when I learned this kind of thing is called a charcuterie board. The tradition has morphed over time. Pillow fort yoga is no more and we both work from home on Fridays. When we finish work, we walk together to a nearby corner grocery, wrapping up the workweek.

This was today's bread and cheese board. I don't like celery very much, but Paul is fond of it. I think it looks pretty. I enjoy cutting a wedge out of the wheel of brie to make it look like Pacman.

Cucumber is a pretty typical part of the board. I used to put the fresh vegetables in little bowls on the side, and still do if there are a lot or if they are messy. However, I started experimenting with pretty presentations.

A variation on the typical board, with the addition of some walnuts.

A very fancy charcuterie board with caviar. This only happens on special occasions. I'm certain there must have been cucumbers around because I'd never serve caviar without cucumber slices, so this must have been before I decided to pile them on the board.

Except for the rare occasions when we go out. It doesn't happen that much. ↩︎
Officially, it was called yin yoga. It uses all the props: bolsters, blocks, blankets, sandbags, straps, often multiples thereof. ↩︎

What counts as reading?

2024-09-06T00:00:00Z

I was forbidden to learn to read before I went to school, lest I get too bored in the initial years, become habituated to goofing off, and fail to develop good study habits. This, the family legend goes, was the fate of my uncle, who, being the youngest child, learned to read from his siblings and by the time he went to school, had nothing to learn, and became a poor student as a result. He got so bored he could never focus.

The forbidden art #

Solution: no reading for preschool AK! My parents refused to teach me. My grandparents were forbidden. Do not teach AK to read until it's time! It was OK to read to me, but no one was too teach me letters or what they meant. All around me, a forbidden world of meaning. I tried to trick people who didn't know about the edict to teach me to read and write, and an older friend taught me the letter A. I managed to pick up some other letters, or I guess, deduce them from context. I grew up in a country with alphabetic writing, so the set of letters was pretty small. Moreover, Polish is written in a mostly phonetic way, so it's somewhat easier to start guessing at the relationships between symbols and their sounds.

For a while, my grandfather stayed with us, and while he wouldn't teach me letters, I convinced him that it would not be a violation of the edict to keep me illiterate if we played a fun game where I wrote letters on a chalkboard and then he tried to say the words. What is this word? I'd say holding up a string of random letters, probably with lots of As in them. And he'd pretty much always say, that's not a word. And then I'd try to get him to say it out loud.

I'm pretty sure I doodled this while thinking about Of Grammatology.

Despite these attempts, I did not manage to learn to read before I started school. Annoyingly, when I did start school, I found it somewhat hard to learn to read and I remember sitting with my mom looking at words in a book and feeling very annoyed. Turns out, decoding one or two words in a row is a different skill than sitting still and reading multiple words in a row, row after row, and not losing your place or feeling your mind just slip away between black ink into aggressive boredom.^[1]

Eventually I overcame that initial hump, and started reading anything I could get my hands on. No books were forbidden to me in the house, and at a pretty young age I read my mom's college astronomy textbook, a reference guide to Ancient Greek gods and heroes, Sinuhe the Egyptian^[2], W pustyni i w puszczy, The Odyssey and probably some age-appropriate things, too.

I read the novels from beginning to end, but the text books and reference guide I read as I pleased. The mythology reference guide had an index, and I learned to use that and quite enjoyed it. I could skip around to the bits that interested me most. Was cruising through the index and reading little bits reading? It certainly wouldn't have counted in a reading contest.

Ruin reading with gamification #

There was a contest in second grade to see who could read the most books. I refused to change what I was reading, being at the time on a tear through various things related to Ancient Egypt. I don't know if I read Sinuhe the Egyptian because of the obsession or if it sparked it. In any case, I felt it would be stooping to something to put aside my doorstopers just for the sake of a contest. Nonetheless, I felt personally insulted by my poor showing in the reading contest compared to kids who were reading mere kids books^[3].

Just a bit over a year later, I had cause to once again be outraged by a book reading context. Now in the US, and in 3rd or maybe 4th grade, I participated in a somewhat more sensible reading context. Here, the prizes were awarded for the number of pages read. And I think there were real prizes. Things like stickers and bookmarks, plus the pride of coloring in your book reading meter. As the contest started, I was reading in both English and Polish, having had to learn English because of the whole moving to the US thing. I was reading my way through the entire Anne of Green Gables series, which my family happened to have in Polish. But oh no, I was told, possibly when I tried to add one of the book's translated Polish titles to the log, only books in English count for the reading contest!

Oh, so it's not a reading contest. It's a pedagogical English skills exercise, I thought, though not in those words, and this is bullshit, also definitely not in those words because it took me much longer to learn to swear than to develop basic English fluency because swearing is a pretty nuanced language skill that requires not only knowing words but navigating sensitive social situations appropriately. But damn it, I wanted those stickers, and the worm bookmark, and I wanted to fucking win. So I put aside Ania z Zielonego Wzgórza and read the entire Mary Poppins series instead during book contest month.

Allegories of reading contests #

Reading contests replace the intrinsic thrill of reading--the thrill of decoding secret messages laid down by people in the past, people who might even be dead but whose words and information are still available, of seeking the signifier behind every sign and forcing it to surface from the sea of signification, catching it and landing it, and gutting it and reading its entrails and taking strength from its flesh--and replaces it with quantifiable constrained achievements which you may trade for stickers to stick on your notebook and badges to paste in your feed. Because, why? Because reading is good for you? I mean, I guess. I suppose. Actually, I'm not sure I believe that anyway, not at all. Must we justify every pleasure by saying it's good for you? Or damn it by saying it's sinful? What a silly pattern.

This view of reading as some virtuous activity one must practice for one's health, like flossing or eating enough fiber, combined with the impulse to quantify and possibly gamify said virtuous activity, is, I think, the cause of many hangups people have about certain kinds of reading being fake reading. In a reading contest, you have to set some rules, and if you don't follow them you're cheating. If all reading activity is a competitive game, then anyone who doesn't play by whatever you internalized as the Official Rules of Reading is cheating. And cheating is wrong and bad and immoral, unlike real reading, which is healthy and moral and also somehow morally superior.

That's a pretty bad attitude to hold toward other people, but it's even worse if you've internalized it and it's ruined the enjoyment of reading for you because the way you like to read is fake. Which is silly and also sad.

Fake rules about real reading #

Being the moustache twirling cultural relativist that I am, I would like to tell you that what counts as real or fake reading is culturally determined and has changed over time. Here's a list of some of these fake rules:

You can only really read a text if someone else reads it out loud to you first.
It's only real reading if you speak the words out loud.
It's only real reading if you read the work multiple times.
It's only real reading if you read silently.
It's only real reading if you use your eyes to read the words.
It's only real reading if you read the whole book from start to finish.
It's only real reading if you read one book at a time.
It's only real reading if you read it within a set period of time, not picking it up bit by bit over the years.
It's only real reading if it's a paper book.
It's only real reading if it's a paper book you own.
It's only real reading if it's a novel.
It's only real reading if you mark up the book, take notes, analyze it, and can lead a seminar session about it.
It's only real reading if it's the first time you read the book.
It's only real reading if you fully understand and absorb the book the first time you read it, without needing to re-read parts, or pause to think about it.
It's only real reading if you read proper literature that you need to pause and think about, not trash like genre fiction.

And some recently invented ways of reading tend to get marked as fake:

Ebooks read using a dedicated ebook reader.
Ebooks read using a smartphone.
Audio books narrated by a human narrator.
Books read as text-to-speech.

I'm particularly amused by all the animus against consuming books as sound, since the very notion of silently reading a text to yourself is very modern. People used to sit around while one person read out loud to them. There is a whole history of moral panics about direct access to the text^[4], or of the very notion of written text signifying meaning directly instead of being the signifier of a sound that signifies meaning. It just shows how fake the idea of fake reading is.

The overflowing bedside table #

When I was a kid, my dad had to go to the hospital for a stomach ulcer. He didn't seem that sick but he was apparently pretty bored because he had to stay there and rest, and so he read a lot. When I came to visit him, I saw that he had a huge pile of books on his hospital bedside table. I asked which book he was reading, and he said he was reading all of them. He explained that he'd read a bit from one, and when he tired of it, he'd switch to another one. That struck me as a bit odd, but also, pretty clever.

I read like my dad did in the hospital, with multiple books in progress, dipping in and out of them as I please. If I ever feel I ought to finish a book, it's because I want to have learned what it has to say, not to check it off my list.^[5] It's all real reading. Unless you're in some kind of reading contest, though, if you're an adult, I wonder, why? Are the stickers that good?

If you're thinking that there might be some kind of pattern, some kind of heritable trait, that leads otherwise rather bright people to have difficulty focusing on boring tasks, I'm afraid I just couldn't comment. ↩︎
Sinuhe egyptiläinen by by Mika Waltari. The Polish translation, unlike the English one (titled just The Egyptian), is complete and not bowdlerized. So I learned a lot about the ancient world, and a bit about necrophilia. ↩︎
There's no snob quite like an 8 year old who learned a skill last year and is now better at it than all the other people she knows who also learned it last year. ↩︎
The Counter-Reformation comes to mind. There's more to the Protestant-Catholic beef than direct access to a book, but unmediated access to texts without an authority to read it out loud and explain it to you certainly seems part of it. ↩︎
Except for Gravity's Rainbow, which I did want to read to check it off my list, because so many people say it's impossible. I wanted to read it out of contrariness, and did. Also it's a pretty good book. ↩︎

Unscheduled maintenance

2024-08-30T00:00:00Z

I finished a big project at work and immediately came down with a cold. I overworked the last two weeks and I think I was more vulnerable to picking up an illness as a result. I haven't overworked to this level in years and had to relearn my lesson, I guess. Schedule time for maintenance or the machine will schedule it for you applies to our bodies.

You might have seen one of these warning signs, or at least a photo of them.

A warning sign from Creative Safety Supply.

I thought about buying one for myself to stick in my home office as a reminder for the next time something seems so damn important, and then I thought, well, wait, is "Warning" the right level here? Or, to use the official parlance, is "Warning" the right signal word?

See, there are standards ^[1] for when you use which signal word. I don't write hardware manuals or workplace safety manuals as part of my job, so I'm not fully aware of all the standards but I know they exist. What I see cited a lot is versions of the ANSI Z535 standard for safety labels. And it goes kind of like this^[2]:

Danger: Indicates a hazardous situation that, if not avoided, will result in death or serious injury. The signal word "DANGER" is to be limited to the most extreme situations.
Warning: Indicates a hazardous situation that, if not avoided, could result in death or serious injury.
Caution: Indicates a hazardous situation that, if not avoided, could result in minor or moderate injury.
Notice: Indicates information considered important but not hazard related.

According to this very helpful Choose the Right Header decision tree for ANSI Z535 headers, you would use "Notice" if the only likely problem was equipment damage. Danger, Warning, and Caution are only for when life or health are at risk.

However, I found another article, The Difference Between Life and Death: Choosing the Right Safety Signal Words that included property damage as a consideration even for danger!

All in all, I think the slightly joking maintenance sign for equipment should be at most a "Caution."

A caution sign I created. Sorry if it's not up to ANSI or OSHA standards.

However! If the sign were to be used metaphorically and actually be about health, then "Caution" is the right signal word. But then, is it appropriate to risk being metaphorical when health and safety are on the line? I think not. Metaphors might be misunderstood. Better to go with a more direct sign:

Finally, a standards compliant caution sign!

Actually there are several standards, and also the standards go through versions and revisions, and if I was writing hardware manuals and safety procedures for my job, I'm sure I'd know more about them. As it is, I just know they exist. ↩︎
When to Use Danger, Warning, Caution or Notice Labels, an article on the My Safety Labels web store. ↩︎

North Lake raccoons

2024-08-23T00:00:00Z

Isn't this where we saw a bunch of raccoons in 2020, one of those times it was really hot and we came to park? And there were way too many people who didn't get the concept of social distancing, which maybe didn't matter so much outdoors anyway but we didn't know that then, and the raccoons were also definitely way too bold and willing to get near people. Yeah. I remember that.

That was roughly the conversation but I don't remember which part of it was me or Paul as we walked along the side of North Lake, part of the Chain of Lakes in Golden Gate Park. As we rounded the bend I saw, guess what, a raccoon, walking along the path, and also a lady birdwatching, completely uninterested in the raccoon walking by her and then heading down slope through the underbrush, toward the lake. So yeah, that was definitely the spot.

We sat down on a bench to enjoy the lake, and, to my admittedly fairly mild surprise, saw several sorties of raccoon go forth and return.

First there was this one guy.

A raccoon emerges from the underbrush.

A raccoon crosses the paved path.

Then, an adult and two kits, presumably a mom and her young, emerged from the thicket by the lake, went across, and returned. I was too slow grabbing my camera and only have photos of the return journey.

The kits wait for the adult raccoon to rejoin them.

The raccoons return to the thicket by the lake.

The raccoons turn away, showing their glorious striped tails.

Can you see the last tail as the raccoon disappear down into a tunnel of grass?

While it's surprising to see them out during the day and so bold, there's nothing strange about raccoons living in Golden Gate Park. It's their home. They eat grubs and insects and sometimes small mammals. In turn, they are prey to coyotes, and sometimes great horned owls. I know. Can you imagine it? The owls only prey on young raccoons but still! It's also not necessarily a sign that something is wrong if raccoons forage during the day, especially when they have young and might want to take extra opportunities to forage food for them.

Unfortunately, it's also possible that urban raccoon get used to humans and human food, which makes them a little more bold than they should be. Most people know better than to feed wild animals, but even when people don't feed animals on purpose, we effectively feed them by accident by dropping food or leaving garbage. Human food isn't healthy for them, and if they get too used to humans they might start getting aggressive. That's not good for us or for them. Though sadly, it's usually worse for them.

Keeping the Wild in Wildlife: It's NOT just a few peanuts #

Now that I've veered towards a slightly nagging public service announcement, I'm going to drop a real PSA about not feeding wildlife. I know some people will see this post and decide to go see the cute racoons. You totally should! But please keep your distance and don't feed them--on purpose or by accident.

"Keeping the Wild in Wildlife: It's NOT just a few peanuts" is an absolutely adorable stop motion animation about why feeding animals is harmful to them, and how you might be accidentally feeding wildlife even if you don't mean to.

Seeking the Big Otter

2024-08-16T00:00:00Z

One thing I've missed since I moved from Twitter to Mastodon is a certain strain of hyperintellectual shitposting. And, it's not like I could go back to Twitter and read it. Most of those people aren't posting anymore^[1]. There are plenty of very sincere Marxists on Mastodon, and many lovely anarchists, but people who were brain-poisoned in graduate school into finding critical theory hilarious seemed to be rare. I mean, they're always rare, but I could usually find them. Then one person I follow posted this incredible joke:

columbo is the lacanian Big Other which is why he is so psychically effective against criminals^[2]

And I felt like the post was speaking directly to me and my current mix of very specific special interests. It touched my heart and my brain and my funny bone. Like the best kinds of shitposts, it's both hilarious and actually completely true.

To be honest, I mostly know about the Lacanian concept of the Big Other second hand, through Zizek lectures, which I listened to obsessively in the 2010s. I also read a tiny bit of Lacan in graduate school, and I enjoyed the heady feeling of being on the brink of some great understanding, yet the understanding never came and I sometimes wonder if there really is something to understand, or just the alluring feeling. (In the Red Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson at one point describes the feeling of being on the brink of brilliant insight but never getting there as a kind of symptom of organic brain breakdown in one of the characters, like some kind of extreme dementia brought on by their excessive longevity. I think about that a lot because I often think I'm about to have a brilliant insight but when I attempt to concretize it, it turns out to be trite. What if "insight" is a feeling and no more important than say, being itchy or having premenstrual anxiety?)

But I digress.

Mastodon, you may have heard, has no algorithm. That's not true, because it shows you posts in reverse chronological order, which is certainly an algorithm^[3]. What Mastodon lacks is a mechanism for programmatically suggesting posts to you based on who you follow, which, turns out, was a pretty nice feature of Twitter sometimes. If you want to find suggestions for who to follow on Mastodon, you have to ask. Mastodon stans will tell you this is awesome and the best thing, but I disagree, because sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it. For example, if someone asks me what kind of dessert I want, I might say pistachio ice cream. It would not have occurred to me to say I want gulab jamun or creme brule if I had not had them before. And it would not have, to extend this pained metaphor but also include a little slice of life, thought that I want gulab jamun this afternoon had I not walked by the Indian grocery and remembered they have it.

In this way, the beautiful joke about Columbo reminded me that I could try asking. So I posted this request:

I would like to follow more people who shitpost about critical theory and continental philosophy generally. I need more jokes and sly allusions to Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, etc. But not just those. I know it’s niche, but it’s a big fediverse. Please help me find them/you!

The post got over 100 boosts and lots of people replying that they aren't that clever, or don't only post jokes, but they're into this kind of thing. Thus I found lots of new people to follow and made a list, which I have named Big Otter in honor of the legendary Tumblr Discourse on the Otter. Big Otter isn't the same vibe as my old Twitter list, and it never will be. Mediums shape the message, even if they seem similar.

No person enters the same Tumblr stream twice, as Heraclitus said.

There is still A Literal Banana who was always my favorite because of her mix of subtle shitposting, intellectual rigor, and beautiful knitting. Though I think she now goes by Science Banana and focuses on extremely hostile readings of scientific research, which is very interesting though obviously takes her more time to read and then post about than the sillier shitposting. All the other people I had on my list (named banananana in her honor) hardly post any more, or have left, or just aren't as funny any more. ↩︎
The Birdbassador, August 5, 2024. ↩︎
What you can find quite easily on Mastodon is pedantry about technical topics. And, as they say, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the suspension, and I most certainly am one of those pedants sometimes. Sorry? ↩︎

Women's weightlifting at the Paris Olympics

2024-08-09T00:00:00Z

Spoiler warning: This post has spoilers for the women's weightlifting 49kg weight class at the 2024 summer Olympics.

I love women's weightlifting at the Olympics. In a few seconds of incredible intensity, a human being does something that might be impossible. Because she's pushing the limits of what she can do, the athlete herself often doesn't know if it'll happen and I get to participate in that vicarious thrill of one person's struggle against the iron weight, against her own physical and psychological limits. When they succeed it's glorious. When they fail, and there are so many ways to fail, it's fascinating to see how they handle it, how they handle safely bailing out, or dropping the weight, or accepting the red light from the judges. How they hold it together, or don't.

I also love it because it's the sport I understand the most, so I get how difficult it is. Not just like in a theoretically impressed way, but like, holy shit, I can't believe she did that because I can imagine that weight on me way. I used to lift weights, though I did powerlifting. Olympic lifting has two events, the snatch and the clean and jerk. In both of those events, you pick up a barbell from the ground and lift it over your head, ending in a position where you stand with your arms extended up and the barbell over your head. The lifts are done quickly, and require strength, flexibility, and speed. They are very technically difficult to perform and you pretty much need a a coach to learn them.

Powerlfting, on the other hand, is composed of three lifts, the bench press, the squat, and the deadlift. I don't imagine I need to describe the bench press. It's the quintessential gymbro move (and incidentally was my worst lift, not only in terms of the absolute weight but how much progress I made). In powerflifting, the squat is performed by putting the barbell, which is loaded on a rack at about chest chest height, on your back, squatting down, and then standing back up again. The back squat is probably the technically hardest powerlifting move. And yet, it's easy compared to the front squat or overhead squat that's just a part of the snatch or the clean and jerk. The deadlift starts with the loaded barbell on the floor. Then you bend over and pick it up, ending up in a sompletely standing position with your arms hanging down. The deadlift is the lift where most people can lift the most weight, because it uses your biggest muscles and you move the weight a short distance. I loved the deadlift. I was a weakling in the bench press, and my poor flexiblity and proportions (short torso, long legs) made the squat very hard for me to do in good form, but the deadlift was the perfect lift for my body shape. If I recall correctly my best ever deadlift was either just under or exactly at 200 pounds. At the time I weighed probably 145 or 150 pounds. In kilograms that would be lifting about 90 kilogram while weighing about 68 kilograms. These are honestly not very impressive numbers for powerlifting, but they made me very happy and scared the crap out of people who don't understand what the body is capable of. (Not the people at the gym and definitely not the people at San Francisco's World Gym who were extremely chill and very welcoming of anyone who came to the squat racks and did their thing.)

I mention these numbers to give you a little perspective, which I keep with me every time I watch Olympic weightlifting. So for comparison, me, at my fittest, weighing 68kg and deadlifiting 90kg, about 10 years ago.

Now let's time travel to Wednesday, August 7, 2024, when I watched the women's 49kg weight class weightlifting. A weight class is the maximum weight you can be, so any one competing in 49k weighs 49 kg or less. The woman who had the highest snatch result lifted 93kg. The woman who had the highest clean and jerk lifted 117kg.

For the imperial weight measurement folks at home that's women who weigh under 108 pounds and are lifting 205 pounds in the snatch and 258 pounds in the clean and jerk. Like, holy shit. The body mass to power ratio of these athletes blows my mind when I think about it. Just, damn, picking up more than twice your body weight in iron and sticking it above your head.

You know what's also hard? Simply literally doing an overhead squat with any object above you. I can't do it with a freaking broom handle. Correction: I couldn't do it with a freaking broom handle when I was at my fittest. Oh, and the Olympic weightlifters tend to go much deeper than powerlifters, because there isn't someone checking if their squat is parallel. No, they're fighting the motherfucking forces of gravity, and the deeper and more flexible they can be in that squat when they need to, the more weight they can hoist above their heads. Which is to say, there is an intense incentive built right into the mechanics of the lift that rewards a deep squat, or at the very least, the ability to take that squat as deep as you need to to catch the snatch on the way up and limit how high you have to get it up with your arms and shoulders, which are, of course, always much weaker than than the powerful muscles of your posterior chain.

I love the different ways that athletes deal with the psychology of lifting. Several of the athletes yell before they start, seeming to yell at the bar. Some athletes stand there for a moment, composing themselves. The Thai Olympian, Surodchana Khambao, squatted down by the bar and stayed down for about 15 seconds of the 30 seconds she had to start each lift. I couldn't tell if she was meditating or listening to coaching cues from her coach off to the side. During most of her attempts, the Romanian competitor, Mihaela Valentina Cambei, on the other hand, walked up to the bar, waited for the judges signal, and immediately lifted in a very straightforward way. She saved all her emotions for after the lift was completed, yelling exuberantly after a particularly impressive lift. I love all the yelling. But I also love the stone-cold calm, the laughing, the polite bows to the audience, everything.

I love the personal style touches that the athletes bring to the games, too. Hou Zhihui of China, who won the gold and was one of the competitors who yelled before each lift and sported a very utilitarian hairstyle, wrapped herself in a fuzzy blanket with pink hearts between attempts. The other athletes had plain blankets, as far as I could see, so it must have been a choice. Mirabai Chanu Saikhom of India had a series of colorful rubber bands in her pulled back bangs, possibly in the Olympic colors, and bowed with her palms together after lifts. Mihaela Valentina Cambei wore intense eyeshadow bedazzled with a row of gems on either side. She looked like a video game barbarian lady, at once intensely femme and completely no-nonsense when it came to lifting the weights and glorying in success.

I love that despite the fundamental simplicity of weightlifting--a human being lifts the iron above her head--there are so many ways to be a weightlifter.

Self expression in painting

2024-08-02T00:00:00Z

Last week, I wrote about my long-held aesthetic philosophy that it is not necessary to explicitly talk about your feelings or yourself to achieve self-expression in poetry. In fact, in my poetry I take it rather far and focus almost exclusively on tangible sensations and external objects, trusting that if there is emotion, it will become apparent. For example, I wrote about nearly unbearable sexual yearning in the poem Fire Danger: High without ever saying anything about the feeling directly. I don't know if the poem actually makes people feel it. I hope it does. I would not find it interesting to explain the feeling, not in poem form anyway.

I take poetry rather seriously. I write poems to evoke subtle gestalt sensations in people who read them, what Eugene Gendlin called "felt sense" in his book Focusing. It's similar, I think, to what Zen people call suchness. I called it "the taste" in my last post because that's what I named it as a child, but I also sometimes call it "the thingness of things." It's nearly impossible to talk about directly without sounding borderline incoherent. It's probably impossible to evoke the thingness of things reliably and and impossible to know if you've succeeded, but it's also the only artistic goal that seriously interests me. I mean, for me, and for poetry. In other media and in other people's work, there's a whole lot of other stuff that interests me.

Unlike when I write poetry, when I draw or paint, I don't care all that much about the outcome or the effect of the work on others. I enjoy the process and sometimes I enjoy the outcome. It's possible I can be so free and easy about it because I'm not very skilled, so I can't actually control the outcome anyway.

Nonetheless, when I started watercoloring this summer, I brought to it my deep-rooted aesthetic of depicting the world to express myself.

A realistic painting #

One of the nice things about watercolor is that it encourages spontaneity and expressiveness. However, I noticed that when I tried to paint objects from abstraction or modeled on other depictions, I tended to revert to pretty boring color combinations and rather flat color, sort of stereotyped. That is, when I tried to paint based on purely mental objects, the expressiveness was missing.

Strawberries painted from my imagination, rather flat and the little green bits look wrong.

On the other hand, if I tried to paint things from life, even very close up or very abstracted, the shapes and colors I painted were much more interesting. The paintings were better. I would have to pay very close attention to the things I was looking at, especially their colors, and as I did that I invariably noticed how there was so much more detail in reality than I could paint, and of course it changed so quickly that there was no way for me to get it in time.

Even when I try to paint reality, my little closeup pleinair exercises, it's obvious how much interpretation there is. It's unavoidable.

In the few minutes I spent painting these clouds, the colors and shapes changed so much that the painting became more of an abstract compression of all the versions I saw.

Basic human emotions like ecstasy and doom #

Nonetheless it's very alluring to try to paint feelings. Something about the flow of the watercolor paint, the sense of movement and spontaneity, seems to promise that you could do it if you just tried. Maybe you could even make other people feel them. I keep thinking of Mark Rothko paintings of abstract color blocks, which I found surprisingly fascinating in person.

I gazed intently at each of the Rothko paintings during a visit to the MOCA in 2018.

Rothko certainly intended to make people feel things, not just see colors:

Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears. 'I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,' he declared. 'And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….If you…are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point." Karen Kedmey via MoMa website

Following my dreams to more expressive watercolors #

Despite the allure of pure, expressive color, I kept painting my rather doggedly realistic, or realstic-ish, to to the best of my ability, studies. Then, one night, I had a dream that inspired me to try something different.

I dreamed I was in an English class. It was a college class, or maybe even graduate school, because my anxiety dreams have moved on from high school math class to more sophisticated terrors. The professor instructed us to use watercolor pencils to paint one of the emotions written on the blackboard. The emotions were written out as phrases. The exercise was meant to be fun, a nice break, but I spent the whole class trying to read the board and find materials to draw with, and by the time the class ended I had nothing.

When I awoke, I realized I hadn't done much watercoloring for a while because I've been so busy with my new cat. The following day I took my watercolor kit and went for a hike. I found a hillside with grass that struck me as a good subject and started to paint. At the same time, I was feeling a sense of impending doom, some kind of inexplicable anxiety. I thought it was probably about work but I couldn't really place it.

So, I decided to follow my dream and instead of painting what I saw completely realistically, I added colors from my emotions. I literally let my emotions color the scene.

The grass bends in the wind of impending doom.

After all this time of being devoted to expressing what I see, what I perceive, it's been interesting to try the approach of deliberately blending my inner state into the thing I'm making. I don't know how effective it is artistically, but that's OK. I paint mostly for the pleasure of of the process, as an exercise, and as an excuse, aha, to observe the world with great attention.

Find yourself by looking outside #

Have you ever noticed how the world seems to look different depending on your mood? When I was completely depressed, I felt as though the world was distant from me and covered in a horrible film which I could not pierce. When I was falling in love, everything seemed to be filled with a glowing light. And when I have been anxious, everyone seemed rude and mean.

To find out how you are feeling, you don't have to actively introspect^[1]. Instead, carefully attend to the world outside. Attending to the world is attention to your own self, because out there is in in here.

You could just spend hours observing the world with your senses. There are many forms of meditation that involve turning your attention outward by looking, listening, paying attention to sensations as you move, in a variety of combinations. I practice some of them. However, my patience to be still and look or listen is limited. I want to get up and move and do something. Or, my attention gets lazy and diffuse, not really looking but drifting dreamily. Watercolor painting gives me the something to do so I stay with the looking, and the discipline of painting keeps me alert, because I must look carefully to get the shapes and colors.

And so I come back to this: I create poetry art for others, but I paint for myself, to enjoy the process and as a form of meditation.

I think it might even be counterproductive, like trying to find out what your face look like with a magnifying mirror and then finding gross imperfections that are only there because you've started to pick at the distorted closeup of your skin. ↩︎

Self expression in poetry

2024-07-26T00:00:00Z

You don't need to talk about your feelings or yourself to express yourself through art and creativity. You can make art about the world, make it as realistic as you'd like, and it is still self-expression. Anything you might create about the world outside yourself is also about you. Because you always observe the world, your point of view changes the world you see and is always present in your depictions of it. Further, what you think of as the world outside is a model in your mind made of your assembled sense-impressions. The thing you normally think of "the world" is you.

Before I get into philosophy, let me give some practical examples.

Eff the ineffable with sensory detail #

When I was a teen, I was fascinated by books that made me feel a certain ineffable thing that I called "the taste." (No, I can't describe it. It's ineffable.) I tried to figure out how they did it. It had nothing to do with plot, or character, or genre, and a book that was otherwise not particularly good would have a part that made the ineffable feeling happen. It was a great mystery. I started reading more closely to spot these elusive passages. Ray Bradbury stories tended to cause the feeling particularly often, and I found my first definitive example in one of his. I think it might have been "The Veldt." It had something about a wall, or maybe wallpaper, and perhaps someone touching it. I started to get that it had to do with sensory detail, but I wasn't quite sure how to work it myself.

Then, when I was 14 an older student came to my English class to talk about poetry, and I learned the trick. She had taken a poetry class with a locally famous poet, Hugh Ogden, and he had taught them all one simple thing. He taught them that every poem must include each of the senses: vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste. (Yes, I listed them here deliberately in the order it's most difficult to do so.) She then read us a poem she had written following this rule. It was very moving and I was impressed.

That's when I made the connection about the writing I found most compelling. The Ray Bradbury stories that made me feel most intensely didn't describe feelings, but rather described the sensory detail of things, and that then evoked the feelings, including the most ineffable one, the taste. I felt like I had been handed the key to a great mystery.

Soon after that, I started studying with Hugh Ogden myself, and learned most of the things that made me a skilled poet from him in a few years. For a long time, I wrote all my poetry following that rule, though, if you read the things I've posted here, you'll see that I have broken out of complete adherence to it.

The key isn't just that describing the sensory detail evokes feelings, but rather that the feelings are evoked by the world and images of the world. Thus, by conjuring an image of the world, you conjure the feelings. Including the five senses in every poem is a useful technique for doing that, but it isn't the only way.

The observer is always included in the observation #

Early in my training as a poet, a poet I knew described a poem she's written and shared with her teacher. The poem, if I recall her description of it, was mostly about looking around at a room, maybe with an open door. After she read it, her teacher knew that the poem was about having been raped. She never mentioned it in the poem. She only described with exquisite detail what the room looked like to her. Simply by attending to the detail, and which detail she attended to, she expressed a profoundly emotional and difficult event about her life.

The example convinced me that attending to the world and just showing it was an effective approach to writing expressive poetry.

It's not a view everyone shares, of course. I've received workshop feedback about some of my poems criticizing them for being too cold or not having self-expression, of being just descriptions of things, like a page in a nature guidebook. I'm willing to accept the poems aren't moving for them, and maybe aren't effective poems, but I disagree with the aesthetic stance. Behind everything I might describe is an I who has seen it. Simply by choosing to write at length about a Steller's jay as opposed to just any blue jay or blue bird, or no bird at all, I made an expressive choice. If I wanted to write my intellectual opinion, I would write an essay instead (as indeed I am doing). And feelings, well, whatever man, everyone has feelings and I don't think coarse feelings are all that interesting, as an aesthetic subject.

Even somebody who just takes photos of skyscrapers is practicing self-expression. They have chosen to take photos. They have chosen what to take photos of, and when. They have chosen the angle and the light and the post processing. Every choice is a choice of their self, a choice of self-expression.

The world within us #

But it goes further. It is not merely the case that in any observation of a world, be it a poem, a photo, or a painting or anything else, there is an observer. In fact, the world is within the observer. To observe the world is to observe your own self, or rather, this thing you think of as you is like a little partition you have made, splitting yourself into the observer and the outside objects.

Anything you observe is already within the field of your own mind. Kant got at this with the idea of noumena and phenomena. Phenomena are what we observe through our senses. Noumena are the reality that underlies the phenomena, and can't be accessed directly. We have the evidence of our senses, and we interpret it to mean things about what happened and presume a physical reality exists beyond^[1].

Buddhist masters, especially the Dzogchen ones, speak about this as well. The out there you perceive is in here. That is, everything that you perceive is indirect, it is data that comes in through your sense organs and then is assembled into a world in your mind^[2]. Your sense of your own body is as much a construct as your abstract verbal self or the things you see. It's not that there isn't a physical world out there, a real world of noumena, but you never interact with it unmediated. It's always a version that arises from your senses. It is, in fact, an expression of you.

That's why even if all you write about is the world outside of yourself, what you produce is always already self-expression.

Next time, painting #

Next time, I'm going to talk about expressing feelings with watercolor paintings, Rothko, and the way the world looks different when you're depressed or in love.

Some schools of thought hold there is no physical reality, only phenomena. I'm pretty convinced there is a reality out there, just not directly accessible. But like, I don't think it's a totally unreasonable conclusion. ↩︎
I'm using mind in the colloquial Western sense and not the technical Dzogchen sense here. ↩︎

The internet of cat slop

2024-07-19T00:00:00Z

I got a cat recently and I'm still figuring out how it works. So, I've been doing a lot of internet searches for things like:

Why does cat meow
Cat meows loud at night
Cat vocalization meanings
Cat makes a sound that sounds like hello
Cat needs nightlight

Because my cat, she makes some weird sounds. Lots of people have cats. The parts of the internet that aren't porn are cat pictures, right? There's even a Nebula and Hugo-winning short story about it, "Cat Pictures Please".

But instead of finding some lovingly obsessive blog post or scientific paper about cat vocalizations and their meaning, I got basically the same generic article over and over that starts feeling like it's going to get to a point but it never does. It just waffles about what the sounds are and then lists them all, usually in the same order, and ends with a disclaimer that it depends on context and you should take your cat to the vet to be sure. They even have reasonable seeming URLs that might have been someone's cat blog at some point. I learn nothing, but whoever owns the websites sure gets to serve me some ads for cat food while they waste my goddamn time. And after reading a few of these articles it became clear this wasn't even the merely shitty "content" that so much of the internet is stuffed with.

And "content" is bad enough. I worked for an internet media company in 2000 that was all about "content" and I used to make fun of it with my friends back then. Like, "content" just sounds like filler, and that's what internet companies think written material is, just filler to stick between ads and calls to action to sign up for spam. The sad reality is, the internet has been going to shit in this way for a long time. Probably much longer than I've noticed. I just haven't used the internet to search for popular topics lately.

Now that I'm looking up cat stuff, I'm running straight into a steaming pile of not merely "content" which some benighted copywriter wrote for barely any money at all and exists mostly to waste your time but is somewhat limited by the fact that someone has to pay someone some money to write it, but "slop" which is "unwanted AI-generated content." Like cat food that's been left in the dish all day because your new cat was too busy sitting in the dustiest possible crevasse in your house instead of eating it^[1], slop has an unmistakable smell. Or, at least, it's unmistakable to me. I have the uncanny ability to recognize almost anyone by their writing style^[2], in ways I can't even describe, and slop has a feeling, a vibe, a freaking smell. (I'm not sure I can tell ChatGPT slop from Gemini slop, but I haven't tested myself.)

Eventually I founds some YouTube videos from an influencer vet that included recordings of the weird cat noises along with legit explanations about what they normally are. But I didn't know, still don't really know, if the person was authoritative or just good at gaming the algorithm.

Lots of the things I normally want to learn about on the internet are too arcane go get much info about. You basically either get nothing, or you get something that immediately dumps you into super expert mode. Try reading through the Wikipedia pages about any mathematical topic (assuming you're not a mathematician) and you'll soon see what I mean. But popular things aren't good either, not anymore, because the web is flooded with "content" and "slop" while forums have been subsumed by Reddit, where the popular topics have rules so intense and constricting, presumably because so many people come to ask the same question, that they're just as waffly and useless as the content farm sites.

The only thing left is to ask your friends or go to the library.

When I was in middle school and high school, I used to have a notebook where I would write down things I wanted to know more about. It would be things like "Egypt" and "the Celts" and "herbs" and "Leonard Cohen," but also just anything at all I thought I could look up. Then, every Friday, my mom drove me to the library and I would go to the card catalogue, which at first was in little long boxes sorted alphabetically, but soon was on a computer which was a lot more convenient to search. The computer wasn't connected to the internet, not because the library didn't want you to be on the internet, but because it didn't have internet. It just had a computerized card catalogue. Anyway, I'd look up the stuff from my notebook and then go into the stack and get all the books that seemed vaguely related. Then I'd also pick ups some fiction from the science fiction section. I think there was a max of 10 books at a time, but it may have been higher, and I usually hit that. It's not that I read all the nonfiction books I took out cover to cover. I was looking for specific information and I knew that it was unlikely any single book would have it or have all of it. Long before I got trained how to do it formally in college, I knew how to just read the parts of the books that seemed useful and ignore the rest.

Then at some point, for a while, somewhere I guess between 1997 and maybe 2010, though I'm not sure really when, the internet had enough stuff, but not enough "content" and Google was actually good, and I would think back to that notebook with my topics of interest and how cool it was that I could find out whatever I wanted anytime, now. (Except, still, of course, the more arcane or old stuff, or hands on physical stuff, or skills which you still are better off learning from another person over time. OK so maybe not anything but truly a lot of things. Things you could learn about rather than learn how, in particular.)

I thought that was how it was going to be forever. That we would have the world of knowledge on the internet before us that anyone could access without having to get some additional meta-knowledge about what forum to ask, or what specialist database to search.

But that's gone now, isn't it. The SEO slickers and content farmers had mostly ruined it and now slop is the final thick layer of sludge, jamming up the open internet. If you want to learn about why your cat meows at night^[3], better write it down in your notebook and look it up when you go to the library.

Shinjuku no longer does this. She has become comfortable in the house and also with the idea that about 30 seconds after I come down and pour the coffee she should start demanding food. Only after she eats the food does she go inspect the quality of our cleaning and/or cardboard boxes we have ordered for her pleasure. ↩︎
This sucks for anyone who tries to leave me anonymous feedback. And actually, one reasonably good use-case for LLMs is rephrasing stuff to obfuscate your personal style on anonymous feedback things at work. ↩︎
I've been testing things out empirically with our cat, and I think most of it comes down to her feeling a bit wary in a completely new house with new people, and needing to have a bit of a yell at night to assert her territory. She's doing it less and less as she gets more comfortable. ↩︎

A cat enters the scene

2024-07-11T00:00:00Z

We adopted a cat this week, somewhat impulsively. While Paul and I were strolling in the neighborhood on Thursday, I spotted a sign with a photo of a cute tabby cat. I paused and read the sign, which was not the usual Lost Cat poster:

Rehoming our cat

We are moving and Shinjuku is in need of a new home. Our amazing 11 year old old lady loves snuggles.

It had a number to call if you were interested. I took a photo and a day later, after thinking how awkward it would feel to actually call a stranger, I texted instead. To my surprise, the cat had not yet found a home, and Paul and I arranged to meet her on Sunday morning. The people who were giving her away lived a short walk from us. She seemed healthy, and very sweet, and on our walk home we immediately decided to adopt her. However, we waited a few hours to text back to help the other people feel that we weren't just agreeing because we felt pressured or something.

While Paul and I had been idly talking about adopting a cat ever since we moved into our house, we never quite got organized to actually do it. It seemed like there was so much homework and prerequisites and frankly, an unstated assumption in most cat adoption processes that you have a car and will use it to pick up the cat. Here was a cat, right in the neighborhood, cute as heck, and it needed a home just like ours. So yeah, of course, we said yes.

Getting comfortable #

Shinjuku was pretty shy when we met her, though she did let me pet her just once. Her people warned us multiple times that she was shy, and it might take a while for her to warm up, like maybe weeks, and if it really didn't work out the original shelter (which is no-kill) would be willing to take her back and so forth. So we expect she might be hiding under things for several weeks, and who knew how much longer before she'd sit on a lap or allow a pet. We were ready for an aloof cat roommate who might eventually warm up to us, given time, patience, and lots of bribes.

She spent the first afternoon and evening in the cat carrier she traveled in. Overnight, she found a new place to hide and spent all day there. Throughout the day, I came by and said hello. I started to cook dinner and put on the book I was reading on text-to-speech, which seemed to arouse her curiosity enough to stick her head out a little bit.

Shinjuku begins her campaign of finding the most embarrassingly dusty corners of our house and wedging herself in them.

In the evening, I got her to come out with the lure of some food and a big paper bag. One of her first actions was to head-butt my hand repeatedly and seemingly demand pets. So I did that. She didn't stay out for long, but after that she began making little forays, retreating into her wedge hiding place any time something startled her.

As the evening wore on, she started going out further until finally she came out to the living room and walked by the couch a few times.

Shinjuku emerges from her hiding place for the first time.

Finally, she hopped onto the couch, and then onto my lap, where she walked in circles a bit and then proceeded to lovingly knead my legs with her unsheathed claws until I was sufficiently tenderized, when she finally sat down. I didn't want to break up the magical moment of developing trust and held in my gasps of pain. Paul, learning from my mistake, got a thick blanket and invited the cat to his lap, and that was more comfortable for everyone.

Just over 24 hours since we first got her, and she was already a lap cat. A lap cat that needs to get her nails properly trimmed and maybe some kind of training about keeping her claws in while on the human, if that's a thing you can train cats to do.

Life with cat #

I've never had my own cat so I suppose I was expecting the level of aloofness you get when you visit a friend's cat. That, and the warnings about how extra shy this cat was had me ready for weeks of slow acclimation. Instead, I'm diving directly into cat owner life.

Shinjuku is still getting comfortable and spends a lot of time hiding in her favorite dusty gap, as well as under several other objects she's discovered. I suppose I'll have to get serious about dusting, or she'll do it for me with her body. She's been coming out every evening to hang out and explore, and every morning there are signs she's been active: toys and objects moved about, food eaten, litter box in need of changing. She already jumped onto the highest possible shelf and then cried about it when she neither had the courage to get off nor the willingness to be picked up and taken down. She wants to hang out with people even if she doesn't want anything specific. She meows at us when something is wrong, like that we want to go to sleep before she does or there are coyotes yipping outside. She's an indoor cat mostly because we want to protect birds from her, but also because we want to protect her. But I don't think she understands the coyotes she hears from far off can't come in.

We're figuring it all out, both the humans and the cat. Having a pet cat is wonderful, and I'm glad I decided to text that number.

A cat is the perfect accessory to an overflowing bookshelf.

Kombucha experiment

2024-07-05T00:00:00Z

Why would I want to drink rotten tea? Is what I thought, and possibly also said, the first time I heard of kombucha. Even though I happily ate and made many other fermented foods and drinks, kombucha seemed weird and gross. Honestly, I think it had a lot to do with the culture. I mean, actually, both the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts and the culture of the people who made and drank kombucha. It seemed like a lot of hippies, or maybe hipters, with a disquietingly easy-going attitude to food safety loved to brew this stuff and also wanted to get you to drink some as a kind of dare. These felt like the same kind of people who would fail to pasteurize jam or drink shots of Fernet. These same people would then delightedly tell you how they got a slimy mat of mysterious symbiotes from some dude^[1] on Craigslist and how it was alive and kind of gross but awesome and it's in the fridge do you want to see it, because it's actually thick enough you could have a layer and make your own, would you like one?

What the hell? No, I don't want one. And no I don't want to drink any, thanks.

Years passed and kombucha became more popular and eventually my curiosity got the better of me. While on vacation, I saw some ginger kombucha at a nice cafe. It came in a can in a fridge and seemed sanitary. I was driving and couldn't have beer but wanted sort of the feeling of drinking beer, which I thought it might give me. It was, in fact, very tasty. I've been drinking it since then, though I haven't tried making my own.

Homebrew #

Until last week, that is, when work had a kombucha-making workshop as a team-bonding activity. Everyone got a kit with the basics to make kombucha and the facilitator^[2] talked us through it. Like a lot of hands-on activities, making kombucha is a lot easier to learn in person. On the one hand, it's very easy to make kombucha. On the other hand, there's a lot of little things that sound very complicated when you read about them.

A jar of primary fermentation kombucha and two bottles with flavored secondary fermentations. Don't worry, the kombucha is only on the sunny deck for this photo. It went safely indoors right after I took it.

At the end of the workshop, I had my first kombucha brew started. I carefully carried a jar of sweet tea with my own SCOBY (Symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) on BART. I felt like I was carrying around a science experiment. When I got home, I settled it on the counter to wait.

After seven days, I tasted it, decided it was sour enough, and split it into two bottles with different flavors for secondary fermentation. That's how you get the fizz and optionally add more flavors. Meanwhile, I started a new batch of primary fermentation with the original SCOBY plus the new layer.

It's alive!!! #

Now that I have my own kombucha, I get why the people were so excited about their gross microbial mat. When I look at these jars with amber liquid and floating bits of stuff, I feel a bit like a mad scientist or creepy witch living in a bog. And I kind of like it.

The "mother" SCOBY and the layer from the previous fermentation float together, and look a bit like an open mouth or sea creature

You can see how this might become an obsession, with jars full of murky floating bits taking over your kitchen and life. In The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Elix Katz quotes Elizabeth Hopkins who found herself a bit overwhelmed:

"At one point, I got to feeling that my fermentations were my pets, and then they were kind of taking over my life!" writes Elizabeth Hopkins, who tried maintaining eight different "kitchen pets" simultaneously before realizing that less can be more and scaling down.

Yeah, sounds like good advice. I've been reading the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft and this recurring bit of advice from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward could apply to kombucha:

"I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you."^[3]

Pet, food, or cloth? #

In addition to fermenting tea into kombucha, the SCOBY itself can be eaten, molded into objects, or even turned into a kind of cloth. It's a cellulose-based biofilm and people have experimented with making it into all kinds of materials. I can imagine a future where most of the plastic we use is bioflim grown by microbes like the kombucha SCOBY. The SCOBY is a kind of primordial substance and the more you brew with it, the more you get.

Symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast or nameless horror from the vasty deeps?

So, you know, a shoggoth, basically:

"Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things?"^[4]

You can also compost it. I'm assured it's perfectly safe.

Late 20th century California meaning of "some dude," which could indicate a person of any gender, and implied more about their unverified reliability and perhaps a tendency to come to the door in a dirty or no shirt. ↩︎
The kombucha workshop was led by Lila Volkas, who also provided all the supplies, written instructions, and some cute kombucha art. I love crafty activities as team bonding because doing an activity together is what work is, ultimately, so it's a comfortable way to be with coworkers. However, the crafty activity is usually something everyone in the group is doing for the first time, so the normal barriers of expertise and power are easily put aside. The kombucha making workshop was exactly what I'd want from a crafty team activity. ↩︎
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. Full text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73547/pg73547-images.html ↩︎
At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Full text at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70652/pg70652-images.html ↩︎

Photos of the 2024 SF Succulent Expo

2024-06-28T00:00:00Z

June 11, 2025 Update: Did you find my post because you're looking for the 2025 Succulent Expo? This year's SF Succulent Expo is June 13-15, 2025. But you should really just go check out the offical page 2025 San Francisco Succulent Expo. I bet it's going to be wonderful.

The San Francisco Succulent & Cactus Society held their annual plant show and sale on the weekend of June 14-16. Since I joined the SFSCS last August, having just missed that year's show, this was my first time attending. It was amazing, and frankly a bit overwhelming.

In honor of the SFSCS's 40th anniversary, this year's event was named the "SF Succulent Expo" rather than the more prosaic Plant Show and Sale. It was split into a show room and a sale room.

Succulents from the show #

In the show, SFSCS members displayed their prize succulents and cacti and competed for the "Nicely Grown!" award in several categories. I took most photos in the show room, because the plants on display were particularly unusual and beautiful. I thought I had a sense of just how varied and strange succulents could be, but at the show I learned how much more there is still to explore. Also, now that I've been growing succulents for a few years, I can appreciate how difficult it is to get a succulent to achieve the perfect coloring, shape, or just live long enough to get a slow-growing plant to get spectacularly large. Most of my photos are more like notes to self, because I wanted to include both the plant and its label. I've found it difficult to learn even the common succulent names and my priority when photographing was to develop a personal library that will help me remember identifying features. Some of the photos also came out nice, so I hope you enjoy them.

Ariocarpus #

Various species of Ariocarpus on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Ariocarpus "Aoi Taren" on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Ariocarpus (whose species name I didn't catch) display at the SF Succulent Expo. I love the way this one looks like an alien.

Echeveria #

Echeveria agavoides "ebony" on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Echeveria monroe on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Haworthia #

Haworthia "Jim Smith hybrid" on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Various Haworthia hybrids grown by Jim Smith on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Yet more Haworthia on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Lithops and other round boys #

Multiple Lithops schwantesii tightly packed in a single pot on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Sphaeroid Institute or sort of round boys on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Snakes?? #

Avonia quinaria on display at the SF Succulent Expo.

Succulents from the sale room #

I didn't take nearly as many nice photos in the sale room. I mostly took reference photos, happy I could get plants and their labels together. It was also a bit more crowded than the show room, even on Sunday afternoon, which is supposed to be the quietest time.

Sedum, crassula, and other succulents for sale at the SF Succulent Expo.

A collection of very reasonably priced echeverias for sale at the SF Succulent Expo

My succulent purchases #

I pre-decided to spend no more than $50 at the Expo, and it was actually pretty easy to stick to that. The small plants which I'm most interested in were affordable. Some of the littlest ones in the nursery pots were a downright steal, I thought. $2.50 for a perfect little echeveria in a tight rosette? I'll take it. The most expensive thing I bought was the Agave parryi and even that was only $10. I know it will take a while for it to reach its full size, but I don't mind. I've got time.

A smallish agave, several echeverias, and a pleasantly funky haworthia are safely protected by my scarf for the trip home.

Tea and cake in Bridgerton

2024-06-21T00:00:00Z

I've recently caught up on Season 2 and 3 of Bridgerton and I could not help but notice that there was a lot, and I mean truly a generous quantity, not to mention a vast variety, of prominently displayed delicious cake. There was also lots and lots of tea drunk out of various pretty teacups held in matching saucers. I have to assume that the specifics of the cakes and snacks were as historically accurate as the dresses, which have progressively gotten weirder as the show seemed to lean into the fantasy vibe.

But I don't mind. The snacks looked delicious and best of all, the characters didn't just sit around looking at them and having uptight conversations. A jeweler forcefully bumbles his way through awkward family situations just so he can get a piece of cake from the nob's tea cart. A couple of lovers have cream tea on the floor at the foot of their bed and inexplicably eat their scones like sandwiches. A young woman's loss of emotional self possession is telegraphed when, instead of taking a sip of tea to cover her feelings which you might expect, she instead can't stop her hands shaking and rattles her tea cup loudly against the saucer. A beautiful but distraught lady eats a tiny cake at a hot air baloon festival and she is so alluring in her sad cake eating that a man buys the same exact kind of cake and eats it while thinking of her. (Though, this last part may just be my interpretation of the event.) Chocolate petits fours are piled on plates. A rainbow's worth of macarons are stacked in towers. Wallflowers hide out by the snacks on the edges of the ball. Siblings fight over their favorite flavor of macarons.

And everywhere maids fuss over the carts of tea and cake, serving it to welcome guests and stall unexpected visitors. Tea is for friends. Tea is for foes. Tea is for people who have the bad grace to come visit one before one has had a chance to dress. A constant stream of tea and tiny cakes is my kind of fantasy world. (Though maybe less of the economic dependence on marriage, and really, all the things but the hot and cold running cakes and tea.)

There was so much tea and cake that I started doodling slices of cake and cups of tea as I watched, just filling up the page with one after another. I liked how they came out, and wanted to get the feeling of endless spreads of cake and cups of tea, so I made a cleaner version on watercolor paper and then filled in the color after the ink dried. Painting cakes isn't that much less work than baking them, but at least it's less messy.

Tea and cake and tea and cake and tea and cake and strawberries. Ink and watercolor on paper. Own work, 2024

Sigmoid curve

2024-06-14T00:00:00Z

What does a sudden outbreak of superheroes, the growth of a new technology, and the spread of a pandemic through the population have in common? The sigmoid curve! If you're a statistician or biologist or any number of -ists, you probably already knew about sigmoid curves. I just learned about it them this week.

A sigmoid curve looks kind of like a squashed S, like this:

A simple drawing of a sigmoid curve representing growth over time, with neither the units of time or growth specified. Image from Brain of the Firm.

Stafford Beer explains that it is "the typical growth curve which is found in nature."^[1] There are specific types of sigmoid curves, which you can learn all about if you want to go down the merciless mathematical Wikipedia rabbit hole. For example, there are the confusingly-named logistic curve and the Gompertz curve, which is used in pandemic modelling.

One of the interesting things about a sigmoid curve, is that when you're in that middle bit where it's taking off, you can't tell if you're on an exponential or on a sigmoid that will tail off. I was re-reading The Annihilation Score, a Laundry files novel about an outbreak of superhero powers, and the notion came up several times as the characters tried to figure out how big of a problem it would be.

"Oh dear. It's your classic growth curve, starting low and staying low until about three months ago. Then it begins to double. And double again, raising fast, until it hits the dateline. Either the first quartile of a sigmoid curve, or--don't go there--an exponential." The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross, p58

That first mention just sort of blew by me, and it was only later in the book (and sorry, slight spoiler for The Annihilation Score here) that I wondered if it was a wacky idea Stross came up with or another one of those cases were he used a real mathematical or computer science concept and took it in a weird direction:

"As you can see, it seems to be a classic sigmoid curve--suddenly goes from a horizontal line to near-vertical increase, then just as suddenly tails off and goes flat again, albeit at a higher level. We're still working on the confidence limits here, and there's some scope for updating the curve as more low-grade incidents work their way through our reporting system, but it looks, for now, as if we have dodged the bullet. There is no superhero singularity looming in the near future. Just a regular elevated rate at which ordinary people will suddenly acquire enhanced capabilities." The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross, p260

At that point I looked it up and found out that, indeed, a sigmoid curve is a real thing and a type of sigmoid curve, the Gompertz function, is used to model the spread of epidemics. So it was quite appropriate to an outbreak of problematic superhero powers.

I've also been reading Brain of the Firm, one of the foundational books about management cybernetics. In the first chapter, Beer presents several intriguing diagrams about the rate of technological change, to illustrate how alarmingly fast it seems to have been going. He uses the example of human beings top speed of travel:

A diagram showing humans capacity to travel at speed dramatically increasing in the last 100 years. Image from Brain of the Firm

Then he explains:

"In the case of the curves we have been considering, we should note that they are envelope curves composed of smaller curves dealing with technological epochs -- which themselves tail off. Now this tailing off is typical of growth processes in nature. Their curves tend to be S-shaped, or sigmoid; mathematicians call them 'logistics'."

Kind of like the fictional analyst in The Annihilation Score, people living through the near-vertical part of the sigmoid curve of a technological epoch might think they are in an exponential. While some exponential scare the crap out of people--like the prospect of exponential population explosion or pandemic deaths--other exponential seem cool and good, like the growth of a technology off of which one is personally making money. So cool and good in fact that it's tempting to give in to the illusion that it will just keep going like this forever.

Beer proposes that you might be able to sustain growth past the tailing off by stringing together novel growth opportunities. Figuring out how to do that seems to be a big point of his book. But, he is quick to add, even this strung together growth of one novel enterprise after another might itself be part of a larger sigmoid curve that will also eventually tail off.

I wonder which technologies are reaching the tailing off point of their natural growth curve after seeming to be on an exponential path forever? I think it will only be possible to really know in retrospect.

Beer, Stafford. Brain of the Firm. Second edition. Wiley, 1981. ↩︎

Watercolor interlude

2024-06-07T00:00:00Z

Somewhat on a whim, I bought a little watercolor set in late April. I actually just meant to get some new coloring pencils. I like to color and doodle and do some abstract pen and ink stuff to relax. All of the weird glyphs and ink drawings that decorate this blog are my work. I'm not fantastic at representational art. But like, it's OK. Visual art is just for fun, not much ego in it for me, unlike words. Watercolor seemed like it would be fun.

And you know what, watercolor is incredibly fun! It turns out that watercolor is a great medium for capturing the feeling of a scene, if not the details. The set I bought is a portable palette with a self-watering brush, so it's very suited for taking with you and painting outdoors. The fancy term for that is plein-air or en plein air which is just French for "outdoors."

Representational painting is a whole skill, which I haven't trained in. On top of that I have very poor visual imagination. It's not exactly aphantasia, but let's just say that if my mind's eye were to go to the optometrist, the prescription would be worse than -5.00. However, I've spent a lot of my life just looking at things carefully and if the item I'm trying to paint is right in front of me and I attempt to paint what it really looks like, it comes out pretty OK. Also, it's fun and rather satisfying.

Just like dudes go fishing as an excuse to quietly enjoy solitude in nature, I paint plein air watercolors to sit and look at a dandelion for an hour without getting distracted and checking my phone. With that, here's most of what I've painted in the last month as I played around with my new, relaxing hobby.

Watercolor experiments #

Sky and ocean #

A view from the piers at Fort Mason in San Francisco

Ink glyphs against a blue wash #

Watercolor ink wash painted over waterproof ink

Lemons #

A close-up of two lemons on my neighbors lemon tree, painted near sunset

California poppies against a field of grass #

The California poppies in my backyard started blooming

California poppy #

A close-up study of just one California poppy blossom, an attempt to capture the many shades of orange

Blue orb #

Some kind of allum in the Botanical Garden with nearly perfectly spherical flower clusters

Rosemary dripping down the wall #

A woody rosemary bush appears to drip down a stone wall

Dandelion fuzzballs #

A dandelion gone to seed in Golden Gate Park, an experiment with abstracting the grass background while maintaining the feeling.

A review of H Mart in San Francisco

2024-05-31T00:00:00Z

Sometimes, when I see something beautiful, I want to stare at it forever. I want to consider it from all angles and let its beauty pour into me and flood my senses. I feel a warmth in my chest, a radiant, glowing sensation a lot like falling in love.

That is how I felt at H Mart. I wandered through the aisles clutching my shopping list like a talisman against the near-overwhelming desire to buy more than I could possibly carry home. I probably looked confused, and I was a little confused, but more than anything I was overwhelmed with joy.

What's H Mart? #

H Mart is a chain of grocery stores in the United States that sells Korean food, along with some other Asian food like Chinese and Japanese. The focus is Korean food, and it has a larger variety of Korean groceries and deli food than I have seen anywhere else in the US. It's known for having a huge variety of snacks, ramen, and ready-made food.

Drive my cart #

The H Mart in San Francisco is laid out like a suburban grocery store. The aisles are wide and the store is huge. They don't even have shopping baskets; you must take a huge shopping cart. It feels spacious, and is well lit and clean. You might think that being clean is a given for a grocery store, and you would be wrong. I'm not even talking about corner stores with dusty mac and cheese boxes. There are some Safeways in San Francisco that are downright dingy. Even so there's clean like, hey, it's clean, and clean like, holy moly it's shiny clean. H Mart is shiny clean.

Once you get your oversized shopping cart, you can cruise along the aisles and pick up the things you want to buy. Or, and I was not the only one who opted for this approach, you can leave your shopping cart and wander off, then find it again and deposit your loot, I mean groceries, as you go. My shopping cart didn't drive very smoothly so it added some literal friction to my experience.

Some snapshots from my travels #

I want to give you a sense of what it's like to shop in H Mart--that is what it feels like rather than giving an inventory of H Mart or a guide to how to shop there. The best way to do that is with some pictures.

Ramen overflow #

This isn't even the main ramen aisle. It's overflow ramen stacked on a display cabinet for cold goods.

Korean pickled food #

This section is separate from the large fridges of kimichi and other prepared banchan.

Pickled radish #

Pickled radish deserves its own subsection next to pickled food.

Salted seaweed #

A vast array of salted seaweed, between pickled radish and Korean pickled food.

Frozen seafood #

A close-up of just a bit of the frozen seafood. There is also fresh seafood and dried seafood. You want five kinds of flavored dried squid? H Mart has you covered.

Sweet snacks #

This was one of the hardest aisles to walk by without loading up. I kept having to say to myself "We have cake at home."

My haul #

Though iron self-control, and the sure knowledge I would have to carry it all to the bus and then ride the bus for 45 minutes, I limited myself to just a few things.

I cooked dinner with the firm tofu yesterday and it was very fresh and delicious. I'm looking forward to trying out the tofu soup kit. I love tofu soup but have been too daunted to try making it myself.

How to get there #

The San Francisco H Mart is at 3995 Alemany Boulevard, which is right on the border with Daly City. Spiritually, and practically, it's much closer to Daly City than the center of San Francisco. If you have a car, it seems pretty convenient, with a big parking lot, just like any suburban grocery store.

The nearest transit stop is the Daly City BART station, and it's a 12 minute walk through an area which has sidewalks but doesn't feel pedestrian-friendly. Several Muni buses stop there, including the 14R. As I learned the hard way, the 14R doesn't stop in the same place as the other Muni buses, but instead stops at the SamTrans bus shelter. The only mark is yellow paint on the roadway, which is, come on, I mean, come on! It's a station with multiple agencies and modes of transit and the least you could do is make it clear which buses stop where. I've been at worse Muni stops, but I expect better for a stop that's the terminus of a major line and a connection to other agencies.

The transit connection is crappy enough that I think it will keep me from vising H Mart too often in the future, and from buying too much when I get there. Maybe that's for the best. I will probably only go back when I need Korean specialties.

The California origin of "A to Z Bread"

2024-05-24T00:00:00Z

The post you are about to read is not a prelude to a recipe. This is not a recipe blog^[1], and this is not a recipe blog post. This is a tale of mild obsession (mine) to find the origin of a recipe, and to correctly credit the creator.

I was baking A to Z bread for years before I thought to figure out where it came from. You can find recipes for "A to Z Bread" all over the web. Before the internet recipes were consolidated into rent-seeking advertising farms and you could find recipes for pretty much anything, you could already find recipes for "A to Z Bread" all over people's weird personal sites. And before that, it kept getting collected in family recipe folders and reprinted in coil-bound lay-flat recipe books with names like Sharing Our Best by assorted charities. If you're a certain age you know the kind! And even if you aren't a certain age, you've probably seen photos of them or seen them in thrift stores.

You would be forgiven if you thought that A to Z bread is just one of those American standards like banana bread or blueberry muffins, or heck, apple pie, and that it's been passed down since ye olden days from grandmother to granddaughter, homey and ancient. My hunch was that it was probably developed in the Midwest, or maybe New England.

Well, you'd be wrong! And I was wrong! But let me take a moment to pause and explain, especially for the non-Americans.

What is A to Z bread? #

A to Z bread is a sweet, rich bread leavened with baking soda and baking powder. It contains eggs and a great deal of oil, making it very moist. The titular "A to Z" are the fillings which are stirred into the bread, a long list of things from applesauce to zucchini. You don't put all of them in, rather you choose any that you like. If you have had banana bread, then you've essentially had A to Z bread. That's the texture and general flavor.

A to Z bread is very forgiving to variations, and is indeed designed for them. You can mix everything in one big bowl, and the standard recipe gives two big loaves. If you take a loaf to a potluck, you can still have a loaf for yourself for later.

Local hero invents delicious bread #

The hint that "A to Z Bread" recipes all come from a single origin is the A to Z list itself. It's quite long and rather strange, and almost all the recipes have the same A to Z options. It's like reading the Child Ballads and tracing the connections through unusual repeated features.

The other hint, and this is admittedly a big one, is that some recipes do cite a specific person and time:

"The A to Z Bread, the inspiration of Hazel Gentry of Walnut Creek was the grand prize winner in the Contra Costa Times Favorite Recipes Contest in 1976. It is a recipe for a basic quick bread with enough variations to delight bread enthusiasts for years to come!" ^[2]

So, not ancient, just from the 70s, and not from the Midwest or New England, but designed in California. That is, assuming the internet isn't lying. And you can't just assume that.

Hazel Gentry and the original "A to Z Bread" #

Having kept you in suspense so long, almost like a recipe blog, I will do so no longer: Yes, it's true, Hazel Gentry created the original "A to Z Bread" recipe. While I couldn't find a digitized copy of the Contra Costa Times from June 1, 1977 where the recipe was originally printed, I did find a reference in the same publication from 2000, "This recipe Hazel Gentry's A to Z Bread ran in the paper years ago. Can you make it more healthful?"^[3]

Even more informative was an article from the San Antonio Express-News in 2010, which referenced the last time they reprinted the recipe and had a quote from Hazel Gentry:

'In response to the original 2001 request, we heard from former San Antonian Hazel Lawson Gentry, who lived in Walnut Creek, Calif., where she was owner of Food With Love catering company and whose sister, San Antonian Tommie Lawson Plageman, had passed on a copy of our column to her. She told us that in 1976, "I entered the Contra Costa Times Recipe Contest and was the Grand Prize Winner with my A to Z Bread - a quick bread that works with anything from apples to zucchini with many other in between." Gentry noted that the recipe was "the most requested recipe in the history of this contest" and was being used in area school lunch programs."' ^[4]

Given that, and other references I found to Food With Love catering and Hazel Gentry, I feel confident that she is the originator of the "A to Z Bread" recipe. Maybe one day I'll take a field trip to one of the local libraries that has the June 1, 1977 Contra Costa Times in its collection.

Finally, though it is difficult to verify if this is the real Hazel Gentry, there is a comment at Bellyfull A to Z Quick Bread left by Hazel Lawson Gentry in 2018:

So glad you are enjoying this recipe…have a little fun look up the original A to Z recipe in the Contra Costa Times Grand Prize Winner 1976. See its evolution. Have fun.

I hope that really was her, because I like to imagine her enjoying the vast proliferation of her original recipe.

Statement accurate at time of publication. Who knows what I will do with this blog in years to come? ↩︎
Simply Best Recipes via Web Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20121102183326/http://www.simply-best-recipes.com/recipes-a-z-bread.html ↩︎
Magee, Elaine. "A TO Z BREAD LOSES F-A-T, C-A-L-O-R-I-E-S." Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA), May 31, 2000: G07. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current. (San Francisco Public Library members can access the archive at https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=news/1064A3CFD63CD127.) ↩︎
Haram, Karen. "Recipe Find; A to Z Bread utilizes fruits or vegetables." San Antonio Express-News (TX), February 14, 2010: 02J. NewsBank: America's News – Historical and Current. (San Francisco Public Library members can access the archive at https://infoweb-newsbank-com.ezproxy.sfpl.org/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNEWS&docref=news/12DF2861F1C852E0.) ↩︎

The paradox of the handoff document

2024-05-17T00:00:00Z

In theory, a handoff document is a collection of everything the person taking over your project (or job) needs to know. Of course, that's impossible to write down. So, in reality, it's a series of hints and links and people to talk to that you hope will help the person to avoid the worst disasters. Even if your literal job is to literally write technical documentation (hi, hello) a handoff document is one of the most difficult things to write.

Writing a handoff document confronts you with "the paradoxical nature of knowledge."^[1] You might think that what you know about a project can be stored and passed on, or at the very least that you know what you know, but as you try to write it down, the impossibility of the task becomes more and more evident. In his 2002 paper, "Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness," Dave Snowden argues for thinking of knowledge as a flow, and not just a static thing. He quotes an earlier work by Ralph D. Stacey:

"Knowledge is not a "thing", or a system, but an ephemeral, active process of relating. If one takes this view then no one, let alone a corporation, can own knowledge. Knowledge itself cannot be stored, nor can intellectual capital be measured, and certainly neither of them can be managed."^[2]

Snowden doesn't think it's completely hopeless, and then gives three heuristics for thinking about knowledge management in the model of knowledge as flow. The third heuristic explains why it's so hard to bring to mind all the things you should put into a handoff document:

We only know what we know when we need to know it.^[3]

While you might easily remember all the contextual details and procedures when a colleague shows you their screen and asks "What does this thing do?" trying to remember it all cold is another matter. You might not even remember to add the topic to the document. And even if you do remember, Snowden's second heuristic comes to mock you:

We can always know more than we can tell, and we will always tell more than we can write down.^[4]

Even if you remember to write a particular thing in the handoff document, it's impossible to get all the knowledge down. There's only so much time, and even if you had the time, there are always questions of context and depth--that is how much context do you need to give and how deep should you go? Whatever you choose, it will be less than you actually know. And when you read over it, you will know that it's incomplete.

Given all that, it's no wonder that writing a handoff document feels so daunting. I don't want to imply it's pointless to try. It is both kind and useful to leave some hints for the next custodians of the work, even if it's never enough.

"Complex Acts of Knowing: Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness" by Dave Snowden in Journal of Knowledge Management, v. 6, no2 (May 2002), p. 100-111 ↩︎
Complex Responsive Processes in Organizations: Learning and Knowledge Creation (2001) by Ralph D Stacey, as quoted in "Complex Acts of Knowing." ↩︎
Snowden, "Complex Acts of Knowing." ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎

Crush, the triumph of the simulacra

2024-05-10T00:00:00Z

Apple’s "Crush!" commercial nakedly reveals how reality has been replaced by simulacra by uncomfortably laying bare the logic of commodity fetishism. That’s why we^[1] hate it, and what makes all the other little hateable things in it feel worse than they should. First, a recap, in case you’re a person from the future, or a person who had better things to do than read internet news last week.

In the iPad "Crush!" video^[2], objects used for artistic creation are crushed by a hydraulic press, along with books, records, video games, and toys. The last item to be crushed is a yellow ball with a face. Its eyes tragicomically bulge before popping out along with a splurt of paint as the hydraulic press closes. The press lifts again and reveals an iPad, with no sign of the crushed objects remaining.

A lot of people hated the commercial, hated it so much that Apple apologized for the video within a few days and decided not to run it as a commercial^[3]. As one of the haters, I was surprised by how visceral my feelings were, so I started thinking about it, and then, like any normal person, I picked up my collection of books on semiotics to try to make sense of it all.

There is a lot to hate, on reflection, so let me take you on a journey of those things, starting with the most straightforward and emotional and progressing through the increasingly more abstract and conceptual.

Turns out, lamp has feelings #

You might remember the famous Ikea commercial from 2002, Lamp has no feelings^[4]. It plays with the tendency that people have to project human emotions onto inanimate objects, leading us to imagine that a discarded lamp feels as sad as the person who is throwing it out would feel in its place. The first part of the commercial has moody lighting and sad music, and plays up the tragic arc of the discarded lamp, which is left out in the rain. Then, in a comic twist, a man walks into frame, and chides the viewers for feeling bad for the old lamp, which, he reminds us, "has no feelings."

Yeah, OK, maybe lamp has no feelings, but people have feelings, and anthropomorphizing objects is a real feeling. We especially tend to anthropomorphize objects with faces on them. All it takes is some googly eyes and a Roomba seems to have a personality. I think the tendency is stronger for some people than for others, and I’m pretty sure I’m on the far end. I get kind of upset when people attach stuffed animals to the outside of their cars because I feel it’s "mean" to the stuffie. Heck, I have trouble eating animal crackers if the animals look too life-like.

When the rubber emoji ball is crushed in the hydraulic press, I feel sorry for it, just because it has a face. It feels like the moment is supposed to be funny, and that only makes me upset. They’re being cruel to the little emoji face guy for laughs!

It’s not just things with faces. People get attached to their tools, and especially the tools they use for creative expression. "Crush!" smooshes a wide variety of things, so if you make any kind of art or music, you probably saw something you use crushed. The guitar hit me the hardest because it looked similar to the first guitar I ever owned, which I bought for $20 or so from a guy selling used guitars by the side of the road when I was 15. A few months later I brought the guitar back to him and bought a new old guitar from him for like $50 with the trade-in. I still have the second guitar! That first guitar taught me that I like to play music, and its relative crappiness and thus cheapness is what made it possible for me to try it out.

It does not make me feel happy to see an image of my childhood guitar crushed.

Some people project emotions less onto the world around them and might not have been upset by the things-with-faces or musical instruments. And people who watch a lot of hydraulic press videos (which is apparently a thing) might have become too desensitized to crushing objects for fun to see anything wrong with smooshing and crushing things per se.

Sensible googly-eyed Roomba non-anthropomorphizers and hydraulic press video enjoyers may be unmoved, and perhaps the people who created and signed off on this video were in that category. Alas, this is only the beginning.

Shameful waste #

A room full of seemingly perfectly functional stuff is destroyed to make the video: a metronome, a guitar, paints, an arcade cabinet, buckets of paint, camera lenses, a record player–it goes on and I don’t have the energy to watch again and list it all. All these things which could have been used to make art are instead destroyed to make a commercial. Creative destruction can be a form of art, and a commercial is a kind of art, but still, it feels like a shameful, extravagant waste.

If we knew a little bit more about the creative process and crushed objects, it might not feel so bad. What if they weren’t even real objects? Reuters coverage of the Ad Age apology referred to the commercial as "an animation of musical instruments and other symbols of creativity being crushed." It looked real to me, but I had to follow up. Reuters stories get syndicated and reported on everywhere so the internet is already full of other articles repeating the same statement. I went back to the Ad Age article to find out what it said^[5].

The apology article did not mention anything about how the video was made, nor that it was an animation. But the May 7 article, "Apple flattens a room with an industrial crusher for iPad Pro ad" gave more detail about the production:

"Each shot was practically captured in-camera."

That sounds like they crushed real objects. If the objects were real, knowing where they came from might make it all feel a lot less wasteful, if only Apple bothered to say anything.

For example, the artist Cornelia Parker squashed 54 brass band instruments in a steam press and then she then hung from wires to create "Breathless." At the time the piece was commissioned, there was some controversy about destroying the instruments, implying they could have been used again–but Cornelia Parker specifically purchased a set of instruments that were already slated for disposal. It changes the feeling of the artwork to know the provenance of the flattened instruments.

The official collection listing for "Breathless" at the V&A (where you can still see the piece) explains:

"It is made of 54 defunct brass band instruments which have been squashed flat and hung from wires." (emphasis mine)

However even if the objects in "Crush!" were rescued from the landfill, or Cornelia Parker’s instruments weren’t, there would still be a difference in the symbolic meaning. The flattened instruments are transformed but remain recognizable for what they once were. They become a work of art. The crushed objects in the iPad commercial disappear without a trace.

Now we’re starting to get a bit more symbolic.

Turning art into AI grey goo #

Creative people have been feeling particularly fucked over by the generative AI craze, not just because companies that produce generative AI models have been scooping up visual art and writing to train their models without permission, attribution, or payment and then selling access to models that extrude a uniform paste of artisticness, but also because the artists and writers bosses can’t wait to replace workers with AI artsiness paste.

"Crush" is an entirely too on-the-nose visual metaphor for the process of grinding down human creativity into a product you can sell. And the timing is perfectly terrible. Several responses across the tech press have made the point well, so rather than repeating it all, I’ll just quote a bit from Engadget

A decade ago, this ad likely wouldn’t have been a big deal. But Apple’s marketers completely whiffed on the context of the moment. [...] Its ad serves as a pitch-perfect metaphor for generative AI’s potential to crush human creation, turning us all into "prompt artists" who type words into text boxes to replace their years of training and experience.

In other words, the anger and fear creative people feel about losing their livelihoods because big tech companies appropriated their creative work to train AI is directed at the ad and at Apple.

The shiny simulacrum #

The objects in "Crush" represent both the instruments of artistic production and the means of consuming the arts as mass commodities–for example both a guitar and a record player. We start already at the point Guy Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle, with the arts and artistic production commodified, and consumed passively as mass market items.

Still, at least the guitar (to keep going with the example) is both a real object and represents an authentic human experience, creating music. It’s one removed from the experience of playing music. The record doesn’t represent playing music, it represents a separate experience which to some extent has replaced it. However, both the guitar and the record player are present–it’s not, at that point, a complete replacement. I’m not going to do a close symbolic reading of every object, because I think just these two will do to get the point across.

When the guitar and record (and everything else) are crushed, nothing of them remains, not even dust. In their place, we see the clean, mass-produced manufactured item, glowing alluringly. The intended obvious commercial meaning is that all the creative power and consumer enjoyment available in the previous objects has been crammed into this beautiful device. But the meaning that is also all too legible now, and it is a meaning which is intrinsically there in the commodification that has to take place to sell you an iPad, is that the iPad has completely replaced the previous means to create and to enjoy artistic works. The originals and even their residue have been destroyed. The iPad doesn’t represent those things, and the things they symbolized. Rather, it is a commodity object that promises a new simulated experience of artisticness, disconnected from history (which has been symbolically smooshed to nothing in the hydraulic press), not relying on relationships with other people, and available in object form, for money.

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real." Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

The iPad is a simulacrum, a copy of something that no longer has an original.

This is thing that is happening, this commercial operation where an object takes on the value of a human relation that was destroyed to enable its production and is sold back to us to fill the void, is not new. Simulacra and Simulation was published in 1981, The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. It’s been happening for quite some time.

It’s just that "Crush" is a very good piece of art that makes a difficult concept viscerally obvious. That’s why it’s so unsettling.

About the header image #

I created the header image by taking a still from Apple's Crush ad, and then manipulated to appear photocopied and then colorized CYMK and RBG using photo editing software. It's a deliberate reference to Andy Warhol's image grids, which are often used to illustrate concepts of simulacra and simulation.

Footnotes #

Me and a lot of opinion-havers on the internet, and maybe you as well. ↩︎
Watch the Apple "Crush" video on YouTube. ↩︎
Apple apologizes for iPad Pro ad that 'missed the mark' by Tim Nudd. Published in Ad Age on May 09, 2024. (Requires a subscription) ↩︎
In 2018, the story of the lamp continued in a follow-up video where the discarded lamp found a new home, like some kind of rescue dog picked up off the street. ↩︎
Which took some doing because Ad Age requires a subscription. I was able to get a limited trial account and read the two articles I needed. ↩︎

Walpurgisnacht raccoon

2024-05-03T00:00:00Z

I heard a strange noise, like a grunt, kind of like a mix between a snore and someone straining with effort, but weirder. Animal, definitely animal. Then it happened again. It was about an hour after midnight, and I groped for my glasses on the bedside table.

I went to the window to look.

A raccoon stared back at me, its snoot in the crack of the open casement window, its front paws on the window frame. Only the window screen separated us. The raccoon was alarmingly not alarmed to see me and so I started to yell at it to make it get away. Only I still had my overnight retainer on, and my own animal grunts were pretty weak. Nonetheless, I did manage to scare the crap out of Paul who also got out of bed, and wanted to know why I was yelling at an owl.

By then the raccoon had unhanded the window and got out of sight, and I explained that I had not been yelling at an owl. The raccoon had just walked over a couple of yards to the edge of our roof, and we wondered what it was trying to do and where it might go next, and, rather importantly, how did it get there?

A respectful distance #

It took me a while to get back to sleep after seeing the raccoon. Our bedroom is on the second floor, so the only animals I expect to see directly out my window are birds. We get a lot of crows, especially in the morning when they do dives from the neighbor’s taller roof and down to ours. Sometimes we get a hawk, usually being chased by said crows. At night, we sometimes hear owls hooting, and have seen an owl perched on the same neighbor's roof where crows congregate in the daytime.

Sometimes, coyote yips and howls carry from nearby hills at night. I love to hear them and it’s one of the pleasures of living in this house to actually hear our urban coyotes. I can get a bit “The children of the night, what sweet music they make” and stand at the window listening to the coyotes or lay in bed happily listening to them as I drift off.

Because, you know, coyotes do not climb up to your window.

Raccoons, well, I knew they can climb very well^[1]. I’ve seen them walking around in tree-tops at Lands End in the evening. And I know they live in the city and are not particularly wary of people, having seen them around in doorways and on streets at night. But to actually confront the evidence of a raccoon having climbed onto the roof and sticking its snoot into my bedroom window screen is another thing.

It took me a while to get back to sleep. It did feel appropriate that a strange visitor should come by after midnight on May Eve.

Visual evidence #

My only regret is that I didn’t pause to grab my phone and take a photo. The image of the raccoon standing on its hind legs and leaning against the window is stuck in my mind, but I’m not good enough at drawing to get it onto paper.

I tried to use generative AI to make an illustration, like a kind of robot-aided forensic sketch. But it kept generating images of a raccoon inside a house looking out. Even when I added a specific instruction that the raccoon is outside, it still gave me pictures from outside a house with the raccoon inside. That, my dear bot, is exactly the situation I was trying to avoid! It got a little better when I included the human observer in the description, but nonetheless, it wasn’t getting the feeling I wanted.

So, instead I found a photo someone else took of a different raccoon, also on a roof and used it as the header image^[2]. It isn’t my raccoon visitor, but at least it’s a real raccoon, and it is outside. Where it should stay.

I hope the raccoon doesn't come up to the window again, but also, I kind of hope it does. Maybe just not a night where I have to go to work the next day.

They can also use their sensitive and nimble little hands to open a lot of things people think animals would not be able to open. One of the names for raccoon alludes to their proclivity to touch everything with their hands, "In Spanish, the raccoon is called mapache, derived from the Nahuatl mapachtli of the Aztecs, meaning '[the] one who takes everything in its hands.'" From "Raccoon" in the Wikipedia ↩︎
Photo credit: The header image is a cropped version of a photo by Carsten Volkwein, Ein Waschbär am frühen Morgen auf dem Dach eines Wohnhauses. (English: A raccoon in the early morning on the roof of an apartment house.) CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia. ↩︎

Snufkin, wholesome anarchist role model

2024-04-26T00:00:00Z

It's a lovely morning in Moominvalley, and you are a horrible Snufkin. Except you're not really horrible, are you? And Moominvalley seems to be a bit less lovely than you had been expecting. What's going on?

What? #

If you don't know who Snufkin is or what the Moominvalley is, you're probably an American. In which case, the best explanation I can offer is by analogy to the comic strip series, Calvin and Hobbes. The feelings you have about Calvin and Hobbes, the way it captures the whimsy, melancholy, and unruly joy of childhood, the way it contains deep wisdom about the world that makes sense when you read it as a kid and then makes even more sense when you're an adult, the pure love and nostalgia you feel for it–that's how Europeans feel about the Tove Jansson's Moomintroll stories. I mean, I assume that it's the same. I actually don't have particularly strong feelings about Calvin and Hobbes and have been puzzled by how much adult Americans appear to love the comic strip for children which used to be published in newspapers, but just based on how they all act, I assume it is like the feelings I, and other people who grew up in Europe, feel about the Moomins.

Oh, did you think I was going to give you the full Moomintroll backstory. What? No. Why would I do that? You can still get the books out of the library. Or watch the adorable cartoons. Or not. I'm not your dad, or even your uncle. And maybe this only works if you are exposed to them at some formative age, like a little baby duck that imprints on the first thing it sees and follows it around^[1], or like a boy who reads Calvin and Hobbes at the right age.

But the point is, for those of us who grew up with Moomins, "They made a video game where you play as Snufkin" is enough of a reason to check out the game. The vibe is right, which for me, was the most important thing. You don't actually need to know anything about Moomins to enjoy the game. However, without knowing what the entire, you know, thing, mood, gestalt, well, vibe is, you might not be as immediately drawn to it.

So while I'm not going to give you the Moomin backstory, I'll try to convey the vibe.

The setup #

In the videogame Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, you play the role of Snufkin, returning from his winter wanders^[2] to rejoin his friends in Moominvalley for the summer. You walk through a beautiful forest rendered in the style of children's book drawings while atmospheric music plays. On your way to meet up with your best friend, Moomintroll, you start to notice signs that something is amiss in the valley. For one thing, there are all these signs all over the place!

Snufkin sees a sign forbidding pipe smoking. He is outraged that a sign should be placed in a wild place. This screenshot is from the Polish localization of the game. It's localized in multiple languages and I played it in both English and Polish.

It's a bad sign #

Snufkin is outraged, because–as you already know if you are familiar with Moomin stories, or as you quickly learn if you aren't–Snufkin hates rules. When you get close to the sign, an action button appears which lets you rip up the sign. Ripping up annoying signs becomes one of the major gameplay elements for the rest of the game, and it's incredibly satisfying. Destroying the signs with the rules written on them also destroys the power structure of laws and rules, which is a lovely wish-fulfillment fantasy. Rip up the signs, and the cops go away without a fight. Oh, and also the entire fenced and overly landscaped garden gets replaced with a wild meadow in a delightful victory sequence.

Snufkin rages while ripping up signs in the park. "Rules? Signs? This makes me so mad!"

All Conifers Are Beautiful #

As much as Snufkin hates rules, he loves nature and all wild things. He wants to be free and wild, and he wants other beings to be free and have a chance to be wild–whether those beings are animals or children who have been raised in an overly stifling atmosphere.

As Snufkin, you spend much of your time exploring beautiful natural environments–coniferous highlands, flowering valleys, mysterious caves, and the sort-of-tropical Hattifatteners' Island. Where these environments have been despoiled (and sorry, mild spoilers, they have been despoiled) through ill-considered development and attempts to bring order, you work to restore them. Along the way you help various people and creatures, including ones who might seem monstrous, and they help you.

Snufkin confronts some park police, with the fearsome Groke behind him.

Snufkin is willing to fuck shit up, and he enjoys a bit of chaos, but–at least as he is portrayed in the game–he is primarily motivated by his love of nature and his friends. He does not cause chaos for the pure unmitigated love of it. If Snufkin's vibe is ACAB, it's more like All Conifers Are Beautiful than All Cops Are Bastards.

That brings me to the other game whose protagonist is a freedom-loving individual driven to destroy the stifling constraints of bourgeois society. I kept thinking of that other game the whole time I played Snufkin, and of the ways the two of them represent different kinds of anarchist role models, or at least icons. Unlike Snufkin, that individual is driven by pure love of chaos with perhaps a touch of sheer malice. I speak of course of the goose from Untitled Goose Game^[3].

And you are a terrible goose #

As the goose in Untitled Goose Game, you start out in a twee village full of boring, orderly people going about their day. An orderly village like that is perhaps what the Park Keeper attempting to gentrify Moominvalley wants to create instead of the half-wild Moominvalley with its eccentric and unruly inhabitants. In Moominvalley, the distinction between people and animals is blurry, whereas in Untitled Goose Game, it is clear. The goose is not really an outsider to the village, but it's definitely excluded from participating in public life. Peace, as Goose Game memes informed us, is not an option for the goose.

Playing the goose, you get to experience the joy of causing chaos for the sheer hell of it. The goose is a cypher with no dialogue and no discernable motivation other than just to destroy. And that's really fun! It also resonates with the impulse, or perhaps more accurately fantasy, to literally destroy an unjust world system, with no thought about what comes next.

The goose as an anarchist icon is most beautifully captured in a piece of fan art by Sarah Becan, where the anarchist slogan "No Gods, No Masters" frames a goose setting on fire a bunch of signs that ban geese. (Getting people to put up a sign like this is a reward for completing your quests in the Goose Game. You can also steal the signs.)

Goose fan art by Sarah Becan expresses the burn-it-all-down spirit many people feel the goose embodies. Prints and t-shirts are available on Sarah Becan's Threadless page.

Mutualist Snufkin, Egoist Goose #

Snufkin and the goose represent two different flavors of anarchism^[4]. Snufkin seems very close to Kropotkin, valuing mutual aid, independence and interdependence, and a close connection between different species.

For example, when the cops guarding a park refuse to help him look for Moomintroll (because they are much more invested in guarding the commons they have appropriated as private property), Snufkin resolves to find Moomintroll himself. He looks for help from other people and creatures in the valley, and helps them out in turn, rather than relying on hierarchical authority. In the end, Snufkin brings all the people and creatures of Moominvalley together to restore Moominvalley and defeat the Park Keeper and his force of gentrifying goons. And he does so peacefully, using trickery, mild property destruction, and art. It's a kid's story version of mutual aid, which doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just a lot more simple and hopeful than these things usually turn out. Snufkin is a wholesome mutualist anarchist who loves nature, and a little mischief is (mostly) a means to an end.

Snufkin believes no one should be in a cage, and helps them escape.

The goose, on the other hand, is a straight-up egoist anarchist along the lines of Max Stirner's philosophical polemic, The Unique and Its Property (also known as The Ego and Its Own). The goose uses the power it has to secure the freedom it desires, defying social norms and honking contemptuously at bourgeoisie society. The goose doesn't get help from anyone and helps no one in return, terrorizing both adults and children with equal zeal. If the goose could speak, it would not surprise me if it quoted Max Stirner:

"You long for freedom? You fools! If you took power, then freedom would come of itself. See, one who has power stands above the law."

The goose shows no mercy to the weak. Screenshot from Untitled Goose Game courtesy of the official House House press kit.

But the goose can't speak and is not listened to, and being excluded, can only rebel. The goose is not nice. The goose is not a model, but a warning. Also, obviously, a fun power fantasy, as long as you can get a hang of the game controls.

Incongruity between form and content #

As a game, Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, had some flaws that detract a bit from it. The first half or so of the game felt a lot more polished than the later portions. There were some glitches and performance issues when I played it on the Switch. There has been at least one patch since, so it's possible the glitches are fixed.

The biggest flaw, in my opinion, is the incongruity between the narrative message and the form of the game, especially, again, towards the end. The story is about restoring wildness and freedom from excessive order, but the form of the game is linear and structured. As Snufkin, you are led through a narrative about being unruly and free, but the narrative constrains what you can do and where you can go. That makes sense to me during the introductory sections which serve as a tutorial, but it's a little disappointing later on. You can't actually experience being unruly, except in specific narrative-driven ways. The constraints probably make the game easier to play. It's a relatively easy game, very forgiving with strong hints about what to do. It feels like something kids could play on their own, and that's good.

In the final chapter of the game, the puzzles become even simpler, and, due to a narrative event I don't wish to give away, you can no longer even use the sneaking and mischief-making abilities you've been practicing all along. The denouement of the game is a bit of a letdown, compared to the rest of it. It feels rushed, and I can't tell if that's because the development was actually rushed, or if the developers wanted to make sure that young players would not get stuck at the end. The player actions in the final section are very constrained, involve little skill, and don't feel like choices. The game really, really wants to make sure you see the amazing cutscene at the end, and it doesn't let you screw that up by making some wrong choices.

The conflict between guiding players through a specific narrative and giving players a sense of agency in the game is by no means unique to Snufkin, or even to video games^[5]. However, because Snufkin's narrative is so strongly grounded in themes of freedom and agency, the irony sticks out. I think this conflict between form and content might hint at some ambivalence on the part of the designers towards Snufkin's anarchism. They show it, and they show it as a wholesome thing, but they aren't quite committed enough to it to figure out the daunting design challenges that they'd have to overcome to let you experience it as a player.

Conclusion #

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley is a fucking absolute delight, and I would strongly recommend playing it. It is also (unlike my review) completely appropriate for children. If you're looking for a more traditional review that focuses on the gameplay, check out the Polygon review by Nicole Carpenter Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley highlights Moomin's anti-authoritarian streak.

I don't think this is how ducklings, or any other birds, actually work. But songbirds do have only a certain window to learn the songs they will sing from adult birds, and if they don't, they never learn them. It seems that humans might work similarly when it comes to language acquisition. In any case, just take it as a half-baked analogy and not scientific fact, please. ↩︎
In the Polish translation, Snufkin's name is "Wloczykij" which means "wanderer." ↩︎
Untitled Goose Game by House House was released in 2019. See the Untitled Goose Game official website. ↩︎
There are of course many more than two kinds of anarchism, and perhaps there are as many kinds of anarchism as there are anarchists. ↩︎
Anyone who has ever attempted to DM a tabletop role-playing game has experienced the conflict between the illusion of choice players need to have fun and the narrative rails they need to stay on if they're to actually experience the cool campaign and dungeon map you've lovingly prepared for them ahead of time. ↩︎

Birds being cute

2024-04-19T00:00:00Z

It started out sort of joking about 10 years ago, but now I am definitely and unironically into birds. While I enjoy spotting a new bird, I also like observing common birds. If you pay attention they do some pretty neat things! So this week, I'd like to share some of my collection of photos of birds being cute.

I can't tell if this sparrow was spreading out on the sidewalk to stay warm or to cool off, but the way it looked at my camera felt like side-eye.

This pigeon walked by the BART fare gates in the 24th Street and Mission Station as though it intended to pay the fare and take the train. In the end, it did not, but I have also seen some pigeons inside the paid area, including pacing the platform just like an anxious commuter.

Sanderlings are some of my favorite birds, and I especially love seeing their vast flocks run back and forth along the waves at Ocean Beach. When I take pictures, however, I always think you can't tell how cute and little they are. Helpfully, a seagull stood next to them so now you can see how small they are.

When the waves go out, the sanderlings follow them and look for food in the wet sand. Sometimes all you see is a bunch of butts.

When the waves come back in, they run up the shore in a group, and all you see are these intense faces, beaks foreshortened by perspective.

Finally, here's my cover bird. Dark-eyed juncos are pretty common in San Francisco so you can observe them in all sorts of places. This little guy chose to judge me silently from among a field of daisies.

Solar eclipse in Hill Country

2024-04-12T00:00:00Z

About ten minutes before totality, a patch of sky began to clear just around the sun. I laid on the ground and looked up through the eclipse glasses. The crescent sun became a sliver, became a glint--the diamond ring effect--and then, totality! Glasses off. I cried out, something involuntary, I think "AHHHH"--like the cry of pleasure at orgasm.

Getting there #

On the morning of April 8, I was road dad^[1], making Paul get up at 5 a.m. We planned to watch from Arkansas Bend Park on Lake Travis in Lago Vista, Texas. It had a longer totality than Austin, and you could book a day use reservation for the eclipse.

But hardly anyone was on the road, and we stopped for coffee at 6:30 and waited until a bit after 7. to get into the park. Like Travis County, which had even declared a state of emergency so they could access additional resources to deal with crowds, we were over-prepared. It might easily have gone otherwise if the weather was better. In the days leading up to the eclipse, the weather predictions were unsettled. Thunderstorms loomed in the forecast, and so did heavy clouds. I think that dissuaded a lot of people who might have driven to Travis County.

We were the second car in the park, and extremely over-prepared park rangers guided us to a designated parking spot.

Birds birds birds #

The first thing I did was get out my bird-o-scope and figure out what cute lil' bugger was yelling at the morning. Wait, no, the actual first thing I did was put on bug spray. Then I went about investigating the local birds. The birds were excellent, and completely different than what I'm used to either in San Francisco or New England. Different biome means different birds, naturally, and I think I didn't fully grasp how different the Texas Hill Country is than the dry parts of inland California.

I got a handful of new lifers^[2], including the spectacular Scissor-tailed Flycatcher and utterly charming Vermilion Flycatcher. The Scissor-tailed Flycatchers like to yell at each other a lot and do daring fly-bys, so I managed to get some cool photos.

These two Scissor-tailed Flycatchers sat and yelled at each other for a while before doing a series of swoops.

Thus we spent the next five hours loitering pleasantly in the park, examining the wildlife, talking to rangers, eating snacks, and so on. It probably sounds like it would be boring, but it wasn't at all.

We return to your eclipse, already in progress #

Even as we waited for the eclipse, the clouds shifted in the sky. At times, they broke up leaving mostly blue sky, only to gather again. I kept hoping the eclipse effect^[3] would work in our favor to thin the clouds. From first contact--when smallest sliver of the sun is blocked from view--to totality took over an hour. For a long time, it wasn't obvious if the eclipse would be visible when it reached totality. Clouds came and went, at times completely obscuring the partial eclipse.

Looking up at the sun through eclipse glasses during the partial phase. My festive No Gods No Masters Untitled Goose Game shirt is obscured by my equally festive orange scarf.

When the clouds cleared in time for totality, it felt like a gift. I laid down on the dry and dusty ground so I could look up better. I got dust on my clothes and burrs in my hair like a naughty dog, but I did not care. I looked away only briefly to try to take an iPhone photo, which came out terrible and the only thing I regret is taking that time to look away. Even so, three and a half minutes felt like an eternity compared to 2017's two minutes in Madras, Oregon. Totality went on and on, but also, it was only a moment.

It was three and a half minutes of the most exquisite beauty, like looking directly at the face of God.

The people in the park all around me also cried out in joy and wonder. Some people cheered. Some sighed. I could hear people far away on boats on Lake Travis also crying out and cheering. It was like this in 2017, too. Not everyone is moved to make a sound, but many people are. And it is no wonder. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I want to spend the rest of my life seeing as many total solar eclipses as I possibly can.

Convincing people #

In the week leading up to eclipse, I tried to convince everyone I could to travel into the path of totality if they were at all near. Talking about what it's like to see a total solar eclipse to someone who has never seen it is somewhat futile. Too many celestial phenomena have been hyped up which are not particularly interesting. Supermoon? Pffah. You're unlikely to even notice. Lunar eclipse? Cool, but everyone overcooks their photos to make it look a lot more red than it is. Seeing the rings of Saturn or Jupiter's moons? OK, it's genuinely cool but fundamentally a solitary experience. But because of all this crap, when you tell people that totality is singular and absolutely not like anything else, they might disbelieve.

At work, I spoke to a person who was planning on leaving a city in the path of totality just so she could avoid the crowds. I tried to talk her into staying the extra few days. I don't know if she did.

I'm most happy I convinced my parents. They're the kind of people who do cross-country driving trips on a whim, so driving half a day to be in the path of totality wasn't really a big deal, if only I could convince them that totality was worth it. I did, and they had perfect viewing conditions in Vermont.

Vivid perception #

Somehow, this eclipse feels more vivid. Not just because it's more recent, I think. Maybe because I knew roughly what to expect and didn't spend any time being surprised, I was completely absorbed in perceiving what I saw. The sun was a lot more active than in 2017 so the corona was magnificent, and I saw a protuberance around 5 o'clock on the face of the occluded sun. I wondered if it was a solar flare, but it was not. It was a prominence, which is a related phenomenon. It's like a bit of the sun kind of started to ooze out, like for a flare, but it stayed attached to the photosphere instead of streaming out from the sun.

Last time, I spent the half hour before totality in meditation. This time, I did nothing special at all, which seemed to better prepare me to see, to perceive. No meaning put on to it, just perception of what is. And then on reflection, or maybe combined with perception, scientifically informed understanding of what happened physically, materially, orbitally. Dry understanding rather than fanciful double-rainbow-what-does-it-mean shit. Direct perception, or direct as possible, is better to access the beauty than any attempt to see it as spiritual or emotionally meaningful. Simply to perceive with no thoughts, no expectations, spontaneously.

Now that sounds like Dzogchen or Zen again. And maybe it is.

The photo used in the header image and the photo of me watching the eclipse were taken by Paul Mison on April 8, 2024. Used with permission.

I don't know if anyone else uses the term "road dad" the way I have come to. I'm thinking of a Bill Hicks bit where he talks about the dad making the whole family get up really early and drive all day. I wish I could remember enough to have a quote for you. ↩︎
Lifer, meaning a bird on your life list, meaning a bird you've personally seen and identified for the first time in your life. ↩︎
Clouds dissipate quickly during solar eclipses as the land surface cools. Nature. 12 February 2024. ↩︎

Chasing totality

2024-04-05T00:00:00Z

It's late, and I'm too tired from travel and brain gerbils keeping me up the day before travel to write much. I'm in Austin for the solar eclipse, which will be on Monday, April 8, 2024. Austin, TX is along the path of totality, that is, the path along which you will be able to see the total eclipse of the sun.

The thing about totality is that it's totally different than a partial eclipse. I have spent the last week trying to convince various people who are within short driving distance of the path of totality that they should go see it. I know I sound like I'm recruiting for a cult. How cool can it be? Lots of people see partial eclipses or lunar eclipses, which are, let's face it, underwhelming. The photos look better than the real thing, and are often manipulated.

A total solar eclipse is the opposite. You might look at this photo from the NASA archives for example:

A view of the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse from Madras, Oregon. Credit: NASA/Gopalswamy

And you might think, yeah, well, that's a cool photography effect.

I mean it is, yes, a very cool photo. Except it also really looks like this. Only better. Oh, and the next one easily visible from the continental USA will be in 2045.

Talking about it and doing it in Liberté

2024-03-29T00:00:00Z

This is the last post in the sex in art series. It builds on points I've made before. If you haven't read the other posts in the series yet, you might want to start with Sex in art needs no excuses.

I find it almost impossible to write about Liberté (2019). When I review any work of art, I try to do so from the inside. That is, I try to understand the intent of the work, the from it fits into or creates, and the tradition it fits into or departs from. To put it simply, I try to evaluate how well the art accomplishes what it sets out to do within its context. When a film is so far outside familiar contexts, like Albert Serra's 2019 film, Liberté, I have no easy ways to even talk about it, because there is no obvious critical frames, no obvious checklist of things it did right or wrong.

It would be easy to write a dismissive review about all the things the film doesn't do that you'd normally expect a film to do. It would be particularly easy to use its almost exclusive focus on sex as an excuse to throw it in the bin of unwatchable trash with no artistic merit^[1].

As a film, I think it creates a new category and to evaluate it, and possibly even to enjoy it, you have to discover it by experience^[2]. Let me start then, with the obvious.

Liberté, on the surface #

A group of dudes in pre-revolutionary France have been kicked out of the French royal court for being unmitigated pervs. They travel to a forest where they meet up with a German noble who is a fellow libertine and try to convince him to help them out or join them in their forest frolic. I think there are four nobles and their four valets, but with the wigs, it's a little hard to follow.

The entire movie takes place in the forest over the course of a single night.

Marc Susini in Liberté (2019) by director Albert Serra. Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.

The libertines talk at length about their sexual fantasies with each other. Then they attempt to arrange to make their fantasies happen, and to some extent they succeed. They arrange to have some women brought to the forest and they also talk to the women at length about what they want and try to get the women to open up about their fantasies. The film is very slow-paced. The kinds of discussion, planning, and awkward pauses that must be edited out of ordinary pornographic films trying to portray enacting sexual fantasy as seamless are instead all retained.

In terms of what the fantasies are, well, imagine what if 120 Days of Sodom but consensual? Since a lot of what's so upsetting about 120 Days of Sodom is the rape, murder, and all around lack of consent, it's a rather different mood, though.

As the film progresses there is less and less talking and more--not actually fucking--enacting of highly specific fantasies. Considering how outrageous some of the fantasies are, the film is strangely tender. It reminded me a bit of Samuel R. Delany's erotic novel, The Mad Man, which also depicts a lot of fringe sex acts in a tender way.

A bit dazed, but somehow satisfied #

After I first watched Liberté, I felt at a loss for what to make for it, but I knew I enjoyed it. I wasn't even entirely sure what happened on the surface level. Did people die or did I just imagine that? Where did the women come from? Where they actually nuns the male libertines kidnapped or just noble women who had been stashed away in a nunnery for safekeeping who escaped? How many libertines were there in the end? Parts were very funny, and other parts were beautiful, and all of it was mesmerizingly strange yet, somehow familiar.

I don't mind not being able to make literal sense out of a film or other work of art. Not everything needs to make sense that way. But I did want to make sense of my own feelings about it.

That feeling of being somewhat dazed, somewhat confused about what to make of it all, turns out to have been part of the director's intent. In an interview in the film's press kit^[3] Albert Serra articulates some of his artistic vision:

"This is what I was aiming for, that the film would physically impact the viewer and produce the type of stunned state you can be in when you walk out of a nightclub in the early hours of the morning. A mental film, where you can no longer distinguish what you’ve seen from what you’ve heard or what you’ve imagined."

The gap between desire and its embodiment #

To me, the most real and poignant thing about Liberté is the way it shows the gap between sexual fantasy and sexual reality. The libertines are driven by a double desire to imagine the most outrageous sexual pleasures, and then to try to enact them. When they try to explain what they want to each other, the conversation is sometimes comical. Then again, daring to speak one's desire, especially when it's non-standard, is more than most people can do.

When the libertines do manage to arrange the scenes they had described to happen in reality, things are awkward, messy, and rely on improvisational tactics to get the feeling they were going for. For example, if I recall correctly, there is a scene where they were trying to have some kind of extreme bukake, but finding they run out of emissions, use buckets of milk. It's hard to say if that's silly, gross, or actually hot to the characters in the scene.

The situation in the film is extreme, but it portrays something that I think happens in more usual sexual intimacy. When we speak about desires frankly, they are bound to sound a little silly. And the physical reality of sexual intimacy is always messier, sillier, and more improvisational than fantasy. There is always the gap. Which, I suppose, can also serve as a metaphor for sexual intimacy itself, where we try to be as close as possible to another person, but never can unite entirely.

In the film, talking about sex is an also erotic act. The act of speaking becomes an attempt to bridge that chasm between the imagined fantasy and the awkward forest orgy:

"Let me describe a scene that would be most pleasurable for me [...] Can you imagine the scene?" - Liberté

Despite the impossibility of achieving their perfect libertinage, the characters in Liberté keep trying. Words, which are never quite enough, that dangerous supplement, attempt to connect one person's imagination and desire to another's, or at least they try.

That dangerous supplement #

I don't claim that this is what Liberté is all about or is really about. I just hope that by walking through and unpicking some of my impressions and ideas as a result of this movie, which really is a slow-paced weird orgy in a forest, I've demonstrated something of the unique value of works of art that focus on sex and sexuality.

And with this weirdest of the three films I originally set to out to discuss in just one post, I conclude this series. I'm sure I'll write about weird art and weird sex and weird sex art again, but I'll probably take a break and write about some other things next week.

It is also too weird and slow-paced to serve as pornography in the usual sense. Considering how long I've spent thinking about it, I suppose it could be accused of inducing mental masturbation, at least in my case. ↩︎
Which is kind of like your own sexuality, which you also can only discover through experience. ↩︎
The press kit is available from Cinema Guild. ↩︎

My pocket computer reads me books

2024-03-22T00:00:00Z

I broke my third Kindle Keyboard last weekend^[1]. It was my text-to-speech book reading device and I was bummed, but also, it provoked me into checking if I could use my iPhone's accessibility features to read out loud to me. My past experience with screen readers was not great. They would read every single thing on the page including UI text, and they would just read that page. Not ideal when you're trying to cut some onions while listening to a book!

It turns out, time has passed and the assistive options are way better now. I'm still sorry my Kindle broke, but I am very glad it motivated me to investigate.

Assistive text-to-speech got good #

Last time I checked, which, granted, might be long enough ago that a child born in that moment might be attending school today, the only option was voice over. That's still there, for people who need it.

There's now a new option, "Spoken Content." It comes with an option to put a little controller on your screen that you can activate to start or stop speaking. If you use it in the Kindle or Books app, it turns the pages. It stops when it gets to the end of a chapter. That's nice, actually. It was sometimes disorienting when the Kindle Keyboard text-to-speech just started the next chapter without taking a pause.

It can read PDFs, which the Kindle couldn't. I've only tested reading PDFs in Books, but it's entirely possible it'll work in other apps, too.

Spoken Content assistance is available in multiple languages, though I've only tested English so far. Some of the more popular languages (like English, Spanish, Chinese) have multiple voices available. I've been using it for about a week and so far the voice quality is quite good. It actually pauses for punctuation! I haven't heard a single "hm" pronounced as "hectometers" or "sun" as "Sunday."

How to get your iPhone to read to you #

Apple's official documentation explains how to turn on "Spoken Content" along with all its options. So if you want the official version, go to Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback.

If you just want to have your iPhone to read you books, you can start with my setup^[2].

Turn on the Spoken Content option

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
Turn the Speak Screen slider on.
Go to Speech Controller and turn the slider on.

Now you'll have a little translucent pointer thingie loitering in the corner of your screen at all times. When you tap it, it starts reading whatever is on the screen.

Use Spoken Content to read books

Open a book, or anything, in the Books or Kindle app.
Tap the triangular Spoken Content controller to expand it.
Press the play button to start.

That's it! It's pretty easy to set up and works well. You absofuckinglutely do not need to pay additional money for some fancy "AI-powered" read out loud app. You've already bought an iPhone^[3], treat yo' self to its excellent text-to-speech.

It's an old model but the last one that comes with a microphone, a headphone jack, and text-to-speech. ↩︎
I'm on iOS 17.3.1. If you're reading this years later and we're now on iOS 35, probably go with the official docs instead. ↩︎
If you accidentally bought an Android phone, the official Play Books app has a similar feature, Read Aloud. I don't like it as much, because it's not as easy to turn on and off. Then again, I only ever use an Android phone for testing, so maybe it's good if you take the time to configure the options. ↩︎

Repression and blasphemy in The Devils

2024-03-15T00:00:00Z

It's back to sex talk on the blog. I mean art sex talk. This week, I'm going to talk about another film that takes sex as its subject. This post is the third in the series.

My overarching point, which I will remind you of in case it's been a while, or in case you're reading this post first, is that sexuality itself is a legitimate subject of art. In that same post I argued that the usual standards by which we judge the merit of works of art is likely to be ineffective for evaluating art that is about sex.

Last week, I wrote about the sexual joie de vivre of Poor Things. Despite being something like one third sex scenes by weight (according to my highly scientific measurement of guesstimation and vibes), Poor Things was pretty easy to acknowledge as a film and thus art. It had plot, character development, badass costumes and all that. It even won some Oscars!

It also had, as I kind of make obvious in the title of my post, a really joyful vision of sex. The film I discuss this week is rather more troubled and troubling.

The Devils, based on a true story! #

In Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) bottled up sexual obsession erupts as demonic possession of a group of cloistered nuns in 17th century France. A repressed^[1] nun develops a sexual obsession with an extremely not repressed priest and soon everyone is running naked and screaming while doing very naughty things with crucifixes. It does not go well for anyone, and the story ends in ashes and tears. The story is based on historical events, the Loudun possessions, and some of the weirdest and saddest shit depicted in the film actually happened.

Vanessa Redgrave in Ken Russell's The Devils

Because Russel dared to mix religious imagery and themes with extreme sexual acts, the film was very controversial, at times banned, censored, and in fact it's still very difficult to get a hold of even in its edited form. (It's on Criterion through the end of March though.) You can get a supposedly restored version through the naughty-net, but don't--not because it's wrong to steal but because it's basically just a fan edit putting back in the removed "Rape of Christ" scene by taking the bits of it that you can see briefly in the documentary, Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils (2002) ^[2]. Ken Russell's intended cut of The Devils still exists in Warner's vaults, but they refuse to release it, the cowards!

While there is some loving, fun sex in The Devils it's almost all humiliating, sad, and occasionally horribly violent. Because it's so violently suppressed, when it finally erupts, it's twisted and intense. I think that's what's so interesting about it as a vision of human sexuality. And it's a vivid contrast with Poor Things where there is almost no inhibition and the sexuality flows joyfully.

The heavy philosophy and extremely stylized sets (the walls are so obviously fake and no one cares!) definitely push The Devils into art film territory. Aha, but there is that word! I think that the controversial portrayal of Christian religious figures and iconography are exactly what makes it easier for critics to accept The Devils as legitimate art, even if it's too controversial to be popularly accepted.

The Devils is only partly about sex. It really is more about the abuse of power and the role of clergy in government and justice, and also, oddly, about what genuine religious devotion is and isn't. As a film it depicts blasphemy, but it's not itself blasphemous (a priest agrees with me ^[3]) which is a pretty subtle artistic and philosophical point to make.

And yet, for sex haters, all the artistic and philosophical merit of the film is destroyed by a nun fucking a partly-incinerated bone.^[4] So, to return to my point, even though the The Devils has plenty of qualities that should make it legitimate art and redeem its many sexual scenes, they don't need redeeming, and asking that they should be is a trap. The sexuality is as much a legitimate subject of art as any of the rest of its themes.

Next time #

Oh no, I can't believe I'm not done yet. Yes, next time I will finally talk about Liberté which is like, what if 120 Days of Sodom but consensual? At this rate I'm going to have to rewatch it just so I'm not making things up when I write about it. You're welcome and/or I'm sorry.

About the header art: The image is a fragment from photo of a mural I took in New York City in September 2023, near the Hudson Yards. The mural was signed by Dominica Harris.

You would think all nuns would be repressed, but first no, and second this nun is repressed extra hard. And if you want not-repressed nuns check out The Little Hours (2017). It has Aubrey Plaza being absolutely fucking hilarious. ↩︎
You can also see Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils on Criterion, and I suggest that you watch it either right before or right after The Devils for some cool history, discussion, and surprisingly positive takes on the film from some Catholic priests. ↩︎
See footnote 2. ↩︎
90% sure that happened. Because I've been writing this series for so long my memory is getting a little vague. Maybe she only looks at the bone lovingly and it's implied she fucks it later. ↩︎

The joie de vivre of Poor Things

2024-03-08T00:00:00Z

In last week's episode, I made the aesthetic-ethical claim that sexuality itself is a legitimate subject of art. I want to pick up where I left off, with the example of three films that take sex and sexuality as their subject, though to very different degrees: Poor Things, The Devils, and Liberté. I'll take the films in order from most approachable and easiest to justify as art to the most challenging.

Poor Things #

Yorgos Lanthimos' 2023 film is a kind of sexy-gross Bildungsroman about a girl in a dead woman's reanimated corpse speedrunning becoming a woman. Bella, whose development we follow in the film, embraces life in every way. Her mad scientist father-creator does not teach her shame or fear and encourages her curiosity. Naturally, this leads to a very different experience of the world than most children have, in addition to the whole, you know, starting out with an adult body thing.

One of the things Poor Things explores, and at considerable length, is what would it look like for a girl-young woman-woman to learn about sex without the shadow of fear or shame. So, when Bella discovers the pleasure of masturbation, her father doesn't shame her about it (though her other caretakers aren't thrilled) and she joyfully shares her amazing discovery with everyone who will talk to her. Even as she later learns to be a bit more private about masturbation, Bella never stops thinking of self-pleasure as an unmitigated good. Next, she is seduced by a rake, whom she matches and exceeds in joy and vigour and desire for variety. The sex scenes are lengthy, athletic, and somehow fun, funny, and sexy all at once.

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things (2023) by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Image courtesy of Disney.

Later, having outgrown the rake in every capacity, Bella spends some time working in a brothel. She has a great deal of very silly sex with people whose tastes vary wildly. My favorite was the guy who wanted to pretend he was a crab. Even the bad sex is joyous because of Bella's attitude of curiosity, openness, and acceptance. Her adventures show that even the most casual and transactional sex can be beautiful.

All of this is, no shit, quite unrealistic. Despite all the risks, she's never in danger and no one harms her. Her feelings are never seriously hurt. She never gets pregnant or worries about it (though maybe as a reanimated corpse she can't). She never catches an STD, although she does discuss it as a concern. The sexual joy without danger is as much part of the fantasy as reanimating a corpse or making weird monster hybrid farm animals.

The sex Bella has onscreen expresses her development as a character and as such could be justified as not gratuitous because it's in service of character. Even so, if you judge the sex in Poor Things as being in service of plot or character, it might be easy to find it excessive or unrealistic. But, I think a big part of what Poor Things is about is sex itself, showing how central it is to our being, and imagining how sex could be in a different, fantastical world. The sex doesn't need to be justified. The sex is its own end, artistically.

Next time #

I was going to write about all three movies but I got caught up in weird sexy details of Poor Things so, The Devils and Liberté will have to wait. Psychosexual religious fervor and fake walls! Libertines in a forest talking about pee! And so much more.

Sex in art needs no excuses

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z

The very phrase "gratuitous sex" implies the idea that depictions of sex must somehow be earned. Your film or book or whatever work of art may only have sex in it if it's in service of something else, like plot, or character development, or important philosophical questions--and even then it must have an appropriate amount of sex. Otherwise the work is cheapened by it, or, worse, gets booted from the category of "art" and get relegated to "pornography."

Usually arguments in favor of works of art with sex that's been deemed excessive or unearned focus on proving that it was in fact appropriate and necessary. But I reject the frame.

I reject completely the notion that sex in art must be in service of some other artistic goal. Sexuality itself is a legitimate subject for artistic exploration. Any aspect of human experience is a legitimate subject for art. Sex, which is a major part of human experience, certainly qualifies. It needs no further excuses.

The artistic merit trap #

I further posit that whether or not the art is any good or not has no bearing to its standing as art. In fact, when a work of art focuses primarily or entirely on sexuality, it might be difficult to evaluate based on standards we've developed for other topics or genres. If you've ever read reviews of science fiction movies by someone who is completely unfamiliar with the genre you might have a taste of that kind of confused aesthetic misapprehensions. It could be even worse, though. Imagine asking what's the plot of the haiku or complaining that a symphony lacks any catchy lyrics. That's what it would be like to complain that, say, Liberté (2019) doesn't a plot.

Moral judgement about sex can interfere with aesthetic judgment. So if you set up the premise that art about sex must attain a certain quality to count as art, and you come from a culture or background that has negative moral judgments about certain kinds of sex or even the idea of showing sex, your moral judgement might kick in and consider the work in poor taste, leading you to conflate the moral poor taste with aesthetic poor taste. And thus you can create a situation where no work of art about sex is of high enough quality to merit being called a work of art.

For those two reasons at least--lack of frame of reference and moral judgment interfering with aesthetic judgement--I hold that artistic merit of works of art about sex can't be used to determine their standing as works of art. (I believe this about all art, but I think it's particularly salient in art that is about sex.) What I mean is, that the very idea of marking (and thus often banning) something as mere pornography because it lacks artistic merit is tautological. If you have a moral hangup about depictions of sex in art and a culturally impoverished lack of reference points for judging art about sex, you're going to automatically judge any art with a lot of sex as lacking artistic merit just because of its contents.

More sex, please #

I think sex is not only a legitimate subject for art, it deserves more serious attention as a subject of art. Yeah, I know there's tons of commercial pornography but in my (admittedly limited) experience, it's not very good. (Still art, just not good!) If art about sex is relegated to pornography, few dedicated artists will make an effort to make it, and that, I think, is a loss.

I happened to watch three films in February that spend a major portion of their running time exploring sex and sexuality, and each of them was excellent in its own way: Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things (2023), Russell's The Devils (1971), and Albert Serra's Liberté (2019). Sex plays a crucial part in Poor Things, is so central to The Devils that it couldn't exists without it, and is the entire subject of Liberté.

I have more thoughts (as always) but I do not have more time. I'm sure I'll come back to this topic, because I can't stop thinking about it. I particularly want to come back to Liberté, because it's so challenging and strange. It had so much weird sex but also so much just being in the forest at night. And so with that thought and that image, I conclude for today.

Marc Susini in Liberté (2019) by director Albert Serra. Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.

Review: The Left Hand of Dog by Si Clarke

2024-02-23T00:00:00Z

I read a lot of heavy shit, recreationally and professionally, so I'm also always on the lookout for its opposite, the snarfable science fiction comfort read that's like climbing into a warm bath, only not really, because baths are kind of boring what with all the waiting around for them to fill up. No, what I look for is more like a bubble tea with little crunchy bits of grass jelly that are kind of spicy, you know, no, these metaphors are getting away from me.

The point is, I like to read some fun science fiction but a lof of recent "cozy" fantasy stories have not done it for me. I need a little spice in my solace, or maybe a lot, anyway it needs to be the right amount and no, I can't explain it. And this book was just the right flavor and texture and mix of things.

When the cover of The Left Hand of Dog by Si Clarke got reposted into my Mastodon feed, I wanted it immediately. I mean, look at it:

First, the title, immediately evoking and lovingly taking the piss out of Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Second the giant, glowing teapot, which the book blurb quickly tells you, is a spaceship, an obvious and hilarious allusion to Russell's teapot.

And that's pretty much the vibe of the entire novella. Our hero, or point of view character anyway, is a pretty normal human named Lem. While enjoying a vacation in lovely Canadian wilderness with her dog, Spock, Lem gets abducted by aliens, yes along with her dog. The aliens travel in a spaceship that looks like a huge, pink teapot. I don't want to give too much away, but hijinks ensue. We get scifi classics like universal translators, and learn about their pitfalls like the false familiarity of Figurative mode and get the running gag of them saying "No frame of reference" when things don't have an equivalent--which is fairly often.

Given the title, you'd think that Spock is pretty important to the story, and she is. A lot of the heart of the story come from the relationship between Lem and Spock, and a lot of the hilarity comes from non-human aliens constantly being confused about who is the pet in the relationship. The confusion is not at all aided by Lem just saying over and over "She's my dog" as though that explained everything. In the end, it kind of does. Spock gets her own universal translator, and I think it's not a spoiler to say that it turns out she's just as much of a good dog as Lem thought she was.

Finally, after reading this novella before bed I had a long dream about a very nice dog that wanted to cuddle with me. In my dream the dog was a black lab, unlike Spock, who is a German shepherd, but clearly the dog in my dream was based on Spock. That's the kind of book it is.

Where to get it #

You can buy The Left Hand of Dog directly from the author's website, White Hart Fiction. As I publish this post, the ebook version of the novella is on sale for 99 cents. When you buy it, you get an email in a few minutes with directions to download it, and (this is important) you can read it on any ebook reader.

Happy blogoversary

2024-02-16T00:00:00Z

It has now been one year since I've restarted my blog and started posting every Friday. The actual anniversary was February 10, but that wasn't a Friday so instead I'm celebrating today, with this, the 53rd blog post since the reset. I'm pretty good at starting things but not always so good at keeping them going, so I feel pretty proud of this streak. Not only did I manage to maintain the streak, I also set myself a realistic goal.

It all started with Ignore previous instructions and resume shitposting and a promise to myself to be less serious and less precious and just write, goddamnit. As it turned out, I wrote a fair amount of pretty serious things anyway, but I mostly did it in an unserious way.

Having the blog inspired me to actually scan my weird drawings which I use to create headers or illustrate posts. All the strange symbols that you see decorating posts that look like a secret language are my drawings. I've been an avid doodler all my life and at some point the doodles started coming out as a kind of visual glossalia. They look like they should mean something, but I promise you they don't, other than whatever abstract art ever means. Sharing my drawings has been an unexpected pleasure of blogging.

So what's this blog about? #

I don't have a single topic that I blog about because I'm interested in a lot of different things. However some themes have emerged.

I have written nine book reviews or at least things that seemed a lot like book reviews. I also wrote about about an art installation in Seeing the obvious in the Turrell skyspace, a film in The inner life manifest as supernatural in The Shining, and a theater performance in Hair metal fantasy Cymbeline in McLaren Park.

I've written five posts that are about, or at least kind of about, technical writing. I've also posted five posts about, or at least kind of about, Derrida. There is some overlap between the Derrida posts and both the technical writing posts. I've posted four poems.

Given these trends, I think you could say that writing itself--whether as creative writing, technical writing, or philosophy about language and writing--is my major theme. Even when I'm writing about technology, I'm writing about code for the purpose of tracking books or about the weird booklists of famous venture capitalists or about why LLMs are bad at sestinas.

My favorite posts of this year #

Not every post can be a banger, as my spouse pointed out, but also not only that, the posts that end up getting read and shared the most are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. Although, there is some overlap! Here are my top three favorite posts (though I'm cheating a little because I'm including series).

Sword and sorcery and the mid-career hero

Why I like it: I manage to unpick something about the nature of my favorite sword and sorcery heroes, and based on reader's responses, it seems like the idea connected.

The Grammatology series containing (so far) Review: Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida, Dangerous texts: Vajrayana practice texts, technical manuals, and your annual review, and Logocentrism again?

Why I like it: I manage to talk about some of the most annoyingly impenetrable writing about writing ever and make it kind of funny. I also got some cool ideas and smooshed them into each other and made them kiss.

Haunted manuals, also a series

Why I like it: Even though like the Derrida series this one also isn't finished yet, I came up with a new weird idea and made it kiss with another weird idea from Derrida. It was also an excuse to scan in and share absolutely amazing diagrams from an 1950s manual. Something for everyone, if everyone is both vintage circuit diagram fans and Derrida fans.

TRAIN WON'T STOP #

It's been good to write something every week and it's been good to set the intention that quality is not the most important thing. Doing it is more the important thing. And after a time, you've got some quantity, some of which may have some quality. And as someone (though probably not Stalin) said, "Quantity has a quality all its own." I feel I've delivered both on my promise to post every week and my threat of postmodernism, so I will continue to post every Friday, and I will raise the threat level to include not only postmodernism but post-structuralism as well. See if you like that! (I hope you like it, actually.)

Want to know when I post something new? #

First of all, yes, it's every Friday. Usually morning California time, but sometime at lunch and sometimes really rather late. But maybe you'd like more of a reminder? I post on all the social thingies I can think of, but always Mastodon.

You can also sign up for my newsletter and I'll send you an email every time there's a blog post. That's all the newsletter is for. There is no secret stuff in the newsletter except I guess sometimes I write a cheekier intro because the newsletter has like 16 subscribers and I know most of them personally so I write with them in mind.

Finally, this blog has an RSS feed. I am the kind of nerd who added an RSS feed and a cute little icon to the bottom of every page so if you're the kind of nerd who uses an RSS reader, you can do that with my blog.

Thanks for reading, and until next week, see you on the internet!

Inflatable rock

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

I've been sitting on this invention since 2018. Only sitting metaphorically alas, because I have not had the time and capital to bring it to market. It's too good an idea to keep to myself any longer so today I'm sharing my draft patent with the world, in the hopes that someone else will pick up the inflatable rock and run with it. I've come to the conclusion that the hardest part isn't the invention but the practicalities of manufacturing and distribution, so I'm giving the idea away for free. (Although I have to admit a comprehensive search of prior art on the topic of rocks was quite daunting as well. As you can imagine, there have been a lot of uses of rocks in human history.)

Because it's small and light when stored, but large and heavy when deployed an inflatable rock would be incredibly useful in all sorts of circumstances when you want something big and heavy, but find it inconvenient or even impossible to bring that thing with you.

I didn't put it in the draft patent, but obviously one of the areas where the inflatable rock might be useful would be for bicyclists and pedestrians. A large inflatable rock with a quick-release pull-tab to inflate it could be used to deploy enough mass to counter cars and trucks and protect the pedestrian or bicyclist from injury or death.

INFLATABLE ROCK #

Field of invention #

This invention relates to portable rocks that can be expanded to provide mass and protection as needed while being convenient to carry.

Background of the invention #

Since the dawn of time, humans have used rocks of all sizes to improve our lives. Small rocks have been thrown at animals for defense or hunting, or utilized in primitive warfare. Medium rocks have been used as building materials, to weigh things down so they don't blow away, to stabilize other objects, and for a myriad of other household and industrial uses. Finally large rocks can be used to protect oneself against oncoming traffic, to shield oneself from the wind, and as art.

While it is easy for people to carry small rocks and use them as needed, medium and large rocks present logistical challenges. For example, you might want a medium rock to weigh a tripod in windy conditions, but find it impractical to carry it to the location where you intend to take photos. The problem is even more difficult with large rocks. For example, if you want a large rock to decorate your yard, you have to hire heavy equipment to place it. If you change your mind about where the rock should be situated, you must do so again.

This invention expands the field of possibilities for the everyday utilization of medium and large rocks. By deflating and then folding up the rock, it becomes compact and light. Even menhirs of dimensions similar to the standing stones used in Stonehenge can be conveniently folded up to be no larger than a rolled-up sleeping bag. More modestly large rocks, like the well-known large boulder the size of a small boulder can be made compact and light enough to comfortably fit in a ladies' jeans pocket.

Summary of the invention #

A thin sheet of silicon is shaped to form a hollow spheroid with a single aperture. (Figure 1) The aperture is sealed with a removable plug, attached by a tether of the same material (Figure 1a). The aperture has a one-way release valve that when pressed allows for the rock to be deflated when not in use.(Figure 1b) Delicate creases along the spheroid aid folding, allowing reuse, as users can refold the rock back into its compact shape. (Figure 2)

The rock is inflated by blowing into the aperture, similar to a beach ball. The aperture is also designed to accommodate standard bicycle pumps, both manual and mechanical. (Figure 3)

When fully inflated, the silicon sheet interacts with the oxygen inside the enclosed space and instantly expands its mass, filling the rock with fine-grained quartz.

Art and so on #

I'm afraid I never quite finished the drawing the figures for this invention, but if anyone is serious about making it, I can try to find them and scan them for you. I also have a lot of photos of rocks if you think that'll help. I realize my description in the patent is a little sketchy but I think given how obvious the inflatable rock is once you think about it, the real value lies in getting the idea out there, which I have now done.

How to have a happy birthday

2024-02-02T00:00:00Z

In The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey declares that one's own birthday is the highest holiday in the Satanic religion. As such, one should celebrate the crap out of it. The Satanic Bible is like a second-rate fusion cuisine dish combining Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Crowley^[1], and a big helping of homey self-help style all served in restaurant with a confused heavy-metal/goth aesthetic.^[2] Which is to say, it's kind of funny and it's got some good ideas among all the weird shit. The bit about birthdays is particularly good:

The Satanist feels: “Why not really be honest and if you are going to create a god in your image, why not create that god as yourself.” Every man is a god if he chooses to recognize himself as one. So, the Satanist celebrates his own birthday as the most important holiday of the year. After all, aren't you happier about the fact that you were born than you are about the birth of someone you have never even met? Or for that matter, aside from religious holidays, why pay higher tribute to the birthday of a president or to a date in history than we do to the day we were brought into this greatest of all worlds?^[3]

I dig the straight-up egoism. Maybe LaVey was influenced by Max Stirner, too. And I appreciate this passage's wonderful, life-affirming joy about life and existence, and specifically your own life. Too many people take their birthdays as an opportunity to ruminate on what they've failed to accomplish so far in life or on getting old. Even if you're old and a fuck-up though, simply being alive is wonderful. It's worth celebrating. Celebrating your birthday the Satanic way is celebrating the fact of your own existence, not any particular thing about yourself. Like the therapy chestnut goes, you're a human being, not a human doing.

Alright, so how does LaVey think you should celebrate this most important of Satanic holidays?

Despite the fact that some of us may not have been wanted, or at least were not particularly planned, we’re glad, even if no one else is, that we’re here! You should give yourself a pat on the back, buy yourself whatever you want, treat yourself like the king (or god) that you are, and generally celebrate your birthday with as much pomp and ceremony as possible.^[4]

That just sounds like Treat Yo Self in Parks and Recreation^[5] with a lot of extra words and not funny. Maybe he's better at principles than examples, or maybe he ran out of steam.

My birthday, my rules #

I'm by no means a devout LaVeyan Satanist^[6] but I do make a special point of celebrating my birthday, and I have developed some rules to avoid duds.

Do whatever you want. It's your birthday.
If you're not sure what you want, go outside and start walking.
If you start doing something you wanted, and you don't like it anymore, stop and do something else.
If you want other people to do something for your birthday, you have to tell them that you want it. If they don't want to do it, then deal with it. You can't make other people do stuff or depend on other people guessing what you want for your happiness.
Wear something festive that pleases you.
Go outside and have a little adventure. Or a big adventure. See art or nature.
If you want a party, throw it yourself. The party can go however you want it.

Following these rules has worked out pretty well for me. When in doubt, remember rule 1.

And yes, today is my birthday. I'm going to do whatever I want and celebrate being alive.

I'm not making this up. Check out the Wikipedia on The Satanic Bible. ↩︎
To be fair, goth^[7] wasn't invented until the 80s and heavy-metal aesthetic probably owes more to LaVey than vice versa, so it probably wasn't confused at the time but it feels very confused now. ↩︎
LaVey, Anton, The Satanic Bible, 1969, page 106. ↩︎
ibid ↩︎
Parks and Recreation, Season 4, Episode 4 "Pawnee Rangers." ↩︎
That is definitionally not possible anyway. It would be like being a devout atheist. ↩︎
Not to be confused with Gothic which was invented earlier, or Goths, which were invented in olden long-ago times, to paraphrase the scholar Philomena Cunk. ↩︎

Workers in California, ask about your pay scale!

2024-01-26T00:00:00Z

Tell me if you've heard this one before: You're having the annual review conversation with your boss. Your boss reviews your accomplishments and congratulates you. You've done really well! You have a bright future ahead at Company. Keep going! Then you get to the compensation part of the conversation. Company rewards hard work and your boss would love to give you more of a raise but alas, you are near the top of your band and they just can't do that. It doesn't leave much room for discussion, never mind negotiation.

But, is that true? Are you near the top of the salary band for your current role? How could you possibly know? In the past (and in most US states, in the present) you couldn't possibly know. But now, if you live in California, you can find out! Since January 1, 2023, employers must provide employees in California with their pay scale upon request.

Pay transparency is not just for job listings #

Check out FAQ number 28 about the California Equal Pay Act:

28. Is an employer required to provide the pay scale to an employee for their current position?
Upon request, an employer shall provide an employee with the pay scale for their current position.

Most of the conversation about pay transparency focus on the salary range in job listings. It makes sense. That's where the traditional information asymmetry between workers and bosses has the highest stakes. Instead of being able to ask you about your salary history and refusing to tell you the salary range, employers in California (and several other states) must now disclose the salary range and can't ask you about your salary history. Let me tell you, as a person who was severely underpaid for the first oh, 12 years of my career, being able to start the conversation without that baggage was a huge fairness reset.

You usually have less leverage to negotiate salary once you're at a company. One of the reasons you have less leverage is that the employer already knows you're willing to do your job at your current salary, so they are unlikely to offer you a substantial increase. They might suspect that if they underpay you too much you'll go elsewhere, but you'd have to know you're being underpaid. At the same time, you don't know how much they might be willing to pay for the work. Where does your salary fall in the range? Has it changed since you were hired?

Some employers in states that require putting salaries on job listings weasel out of the requirement by giving really huge ranges, stuff like "50,000 to 300,000 a year, depending on experience and location." These laws are pretty new so it's not clear how that will go for them if they get sued about it.

FAQ number 31 about the California Equal Pay Act says:

31. How is "pay scale" defined?
Section 432.3, as amended, defines "pay scale" to mean the salary or hourly wage range the employer reasonably expects to pay for a position. An employer who intends to pay a set hourly amount or a set piece rate amount, and not a pay range, may provide that set hourly rate or set piece rate.

When I see "reasonably expects to pay for a position" I think those huge bands are not in the spirit of the law. But, you know, we won't really know until someone fights about it.

However, in the meantime, employers are in a little bit of a double bind. If they say the salary is (to keep using my silly example) "50,000 to 300,000 a year" on the job listing, it makes it harder for them to also use "but you're at the top of the band" as a negotiation tactic with current employees who are not at 300,000 a year. So, I think that by having both requirements, to disclose salary on listings and to current employees, it incentives honesty about salary ranges^[1] simply out of self-serving necessity.

Knowledge changes the balance of power #

California employers don't have to volunteer to tell current employees their pay scale. And many California^[2] workers, I suspect, still don't realize they have a right to an answer. When more workers know their right and make use of it, the labor market has a shot at becoming a bit more fair.

Addendum #

It has come to my attention that the obvious (to me) pun in the header image is not obvious, especially on a small screen. Like I said in the alt text, it's a photo of three gulls standing on top of mussel-encrusted rocks on a beach partly shrouded in fog. Mussels are similar to, and thus allude to, clams, which is a slang term for money. The three seagulls in a sense stand on a pile of metaphorical money, all while shrouded in a fog of unknowing. Not only that, the seagulls are each at a different height, alluding to pay bands. Also, obviously, birds are cool.

Not all employers have formal salary bands, but everyone has some kind of ballpark idea about how much they'd pay for a job to be done at their business. If they really don't, I imagine they either find out or don't have a business for much longer with that kind of poor planning. ↩︎
Nevada, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have similar laws but I don't have good references for them. If you're in one of those states, check your local resources. ↩︎

Hawkstravaganza

2024-01-19T00:00:00Z

On three consecutive days I visited Angel Island, Twin Peaks, and Bernal Hill and managed to spot and photograph some hawks in each location. Hawks look most magnificent in flight, but alas, that's also when they are hardest to photograph, because they are either very far away or flying by very quickly. It's good the look pretty cool perching as well, and often stay put for quite a while.

I'm not great at telling apart red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks. It doesn't help that their plumage varies so much by individual and varies even more for juveniles. Nonetheless I'm pretty sure all of these are either red-shoulder or red-tailed hawks. If you can tell which is which from the photos, let me know and I'll add better captions.

Angel Island #

I took these photos on December 30, 2023.

A hawk perched on a dead tree looks over its shoulder.

This is kind of a goofy expression on this lovely hawk, and I can't tell why it's holding its wings in such a floppy position, but look at that magnificent breast plumage.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is probably a red-tailed hawk. I mean, look at that red tail!

Twin Peaks #

I took these photos on December 31, 2023.

Look how majestic and beautiful I am! So important that someone put rings on me.

Do I even deign to look at you, mere mortals?

Lol, just kidding, I am a big goofball getting ready to do a big swoop.

Soon after I took this photo the hawk flew directly into the hillside, presumably trying to catch some kind of small ground animal. Except the way these guys hunt looks like they're awkwardly crashing into the chaparral. The hawk was so into tracking its prey it didn't even notice a dog (luckily on leash) coming up the hillside. The dog was pretty startled and so was the hawk, which then flew off to another perch like nothing had happened.

This hawks is very different from the other one that day. I could only get it from an awkward angle, so you can't quite see the details of the feet, but they're noticeably more delicate. The bill also looks more skinny and pointy. And finally, it's a rather different color and rather fluffy. I wonder if it might be a juvenile.

Bernal Hill flyby #

These photos are from January 1, 2024.

It's hard to photograph hawks in flight, but Paul managed to get this photo on our walk around Bernal Hill on January 1st.

Damn, this hawk is a chunk. In its defense, it was a chilly day so maybe it was fluffing itself up like smaller birds do. Paul also took this photo.

Bonus coyote, Angel Island again #

Look, a coyote! I said as Paul tried to photograph a bird with my zoomy camera. He then took this excellent photo of a coyote.

Undocumented killer feature

2024-01-12T00:00:00Z

On January 5, 2024 the door plug of a Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplane blew out during flight. Nobody died. The flight crew got the plane back down and made an emergency landing. The cabin crew kept the passengers relatively calm. That's the gist of it. In all the discussion that's followed a little tidbit caught my attention:

"No one amongst the flight crew knew that the cockpit door was designed to open in case of a rapid decompression, Boeing is going to make changes to the manuals." The Aviation Herald via Charlie Stross on Mastodon

Now that's interesting. No one knew the door was designed to do that^[1]. Boeing will update the manuals ^[2]. 737 Max, haven't I heard that name before and didn't that also turn out to have involved manuals? Yes, and how!

In 2018 a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliner crashed killing all passengers and crew. An undocumented feature, the MCAS flight-control system, malfunctioned. The pilots couldn't figure out how to correct the malfunction, because they didn't even know the feature existed. I'm skipping over a lot of stuff here, a lot of painful background and coverups and stuff because I just want to focus on one tiny bit of the story:

"The New York Times reported that before the first 737 Max crashed, the pilot handed control over to the co-pilot. He then spent his final minutes, before he began to pray for his life, paging through the pilot manual, trying to determine what was going wrong. This was futile; any mention of MCAS had been removed." There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer, 2023 via Shauna GM on Mastodon

Excluding mention of the MCAS flight-control system was not an oversight. It was not a technical writing oopsie. It was a deliberate decision by Boeing, approved by the FAA. When the crashes were investigated and pilots found out about the omission, they were understandably furious.

One of the things the FAA required to certify the 737 MAX 8 airworthy again was an update to the manual.

Danger Warning Caution Notice #

When I started pulling together the research for this post, I thought I could write something with a bit of dry humour about the different stakes when you're writing technical documentation for software as a service products, like I mostly do, and when you're writing for aircraft. Like I have a cute speech I give people about the Danger > Warning > Caution > Notice hierarchy in software tech docs and how no one's going to die even if they have catastrophic data loss so let's never ever use Danger. And I thought maybe something here I could dig into with the fact that MCAS was a piece of software and perhaps the less stringent standards of software documentation affected how it was documented. Only no, that's not what happened. Based on everything I read, MCAS had at first been included in the manual and then deliberately removed.

The more I read about the 737 MAX 8 crashes and circumstances that led to it, the less funny it got. There were multiple whistleblowers along the way, and they were ignored and often fired^[3]. The lack of good documentation was an outcome at the tail of a long and broken process of questionable ethics and missing accountability. This is not a problem that better documentation would have solved, or perhaps, to have the better documentation that could have solved even part of the problem, bigger upstream problems would have to have been solved first. I hate it when it turns out like this.

Note #

The 737 MAX in the January 5, 2024 incident was a 737 MAX 9. This is not like software where the 9 comes after the 8. They're different variants of a base model. This article has a pretty good explanation Boeing's 737 Max 9 aircraft: Here's what to know

Bibliography #

I read or skimmed a bunch of articles while writing this post. I haven't quoted or linked all of them directly. Since I skipped over so much (so much) possible detail in the interest of focusing on the manuals, I'm including my reading list for those who want to go deeper.

The Aviation Herald, January 9, 2024

Boeing 737 MAX: Wikipedia

Report on 737 Max 8 crash blames Boeing design, Lion Air staff, October 25, 2019

Shauna GM's Mastodon thread about There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer, April 12, 2023

Charlie Stross' Mastodon post about cockpit door opening during rapid decompression, January 9, 2024

2 years after being grounded, the Boeing 737 Max is flying again, June 19, 2021

U.S. pilots flying 737 MAX weren’t told about new automatic systems change linked to Lion Air crash November 12, 2018

What is the Boeing 737 Max Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System?, November 13, 2018

Automatically opening the cockpit door in the event of decompression sounds weird, but it's a good thing, as Charlie Stross explains in the Mastodon post. Basically, it makes it possible for someone from the cabin to enter the cockpit if the pilots have become incapacitated and the plane is out of control, potentially preventing a crash. ↩︎
I couldn't figure out if the manual was missing the information or if it was communicated in a way that didn't make enough of an impression for the crew to remember it. ↩︎
"Further investigations also revealed that the FAA and Boeing had colluded on recertification test flights, attempted to cover up important information and that the FAA had retaliated against whistleblowers." Boeing 737 MAX Wikipedia article ↩︎

Book scraper yak shave

2024-01-05T00:00:00Z

Goodreads has over a decade of my book data and I wanted to get it out. I've wanted to get it out for a while, but I particularly wanted to get it out in December because the people who run my Mastodon instance started a Bookwyrm instance, and I wanted to get my books into it. Bookwyrm is is to Goodreads what Mastodon is to Twitter. That's a series of statements that probably makes sense to few of my readers, I realize as I write it out. The important thing here is I wanted to export all the information I had put into Goodreads through years of data entry and writing and store it in some way that I could use it anywhere else I pleased.

Goodreads has an export function, but, as I quickly discovered, it doesn't export all the data you might want, and some of it is formatted in annoying ways. No problem, I though, I'll open it in a spreadsheet (the export is a CSV) and clean it up. I'm trying to learn Python and cleaning up a bunch of data sounds exactly like an Automate the Boring Stuff with Python kind of problem. But I have so many books and the data was so messy. I might need to grab it myself to create a cleaner output.

How hard can it be? #

No problem, I'd use the Goodreads API. Oh no, the Goodreads API stopped issuing keys on December 8, 2020 and plans to retire the API.

No problem, I'll use a web scraper. Simon Willison always writes about scraping websites using Python so it must not only be possible but probably a good idea. And surely, scraping Goodreads to extract your book data must a thing a lot of people want to do so I'll just find a script someone else wrote.

After some admittedly not very thorough searching, I discovered no one was exporting all the data I wanted, probably because it's relatively easy to scrape all the stuff that's on one page, and more difficult to scrape things that require traversing multiple pages and are inconsistent, like the data started reading and the annotations.

Fine, very well, no problem, I'll just follow one of the existing scraping tutorials to learn the basic principles of writing a scraper and once I get that to run, I'll build my own. Oh. The tutorial code doesn't work? Oh no. Well, I guess I'll debug it and make it work as the tutorial claimed it would.

But even though it works, it's kind of bad, isn't it? A rather clunky solution. I bet I could refactor it and make it better. Oh, oh no, now it's a whole thing. Now I'm refactoring someone else's weird half-assed tutorial just out of, I don't know, spite?

Fine, pretty hard, I guess #

I'm not even done, because right after I refactored that first chunk about figuring out how many pages, I talked about it with someone who actually knows Python^[1] and realized there's a better way to handle pagination. So I'm going to have to do that next and just take out that whole weird counting chunk I spent an hour on.

And since I'm going to all this trouble, I might as well write up a tutorial that works, so that's on the to-do list, too. I mean, it's cool, I'm learning a lot about Python and when to use ChatGPT for code questions versus when to ask an actual human expert, and how you can't trust other people's code unless you run it (I kind of knew that but now I know it harder), and that maybe I can trust my intuition when other people's code seems off to me.

Eventually, I am going to scrape my Goodreads record and get it into Bookwyrm and 2024 shall be the year of owning my book data. In the meantime, I'm working in the open and documenting the whole weird journey in a braindump file in my book scraper project on GitHub. I think by writing so it's pretty stream of consciousness, but it's not like it takes me any extra effort to write it. When I've shared these sort of working notes with people at work, they've tended to like them and find them kind of useful (to my surprise) so it's possible that some of you people on the internet might be interested in following my adventure.

I hope that in the end I can write a Goodreads scraper that gets out all the data, including all the started reading and intermediate reading progress data, and the notes and quotations, and I hope I can package it up so that anyone who is willing to use a command line can use it to get their Goodreads data even if they don't know how to code. Because if 2024 is the year of owning our own book data, the book nerds who aren't programmers will need some help from the book nerds who can at least pretend to be programmers until someone catches us and discovers we^[2] were three racoons in a trench coat all along.

That person is my spouse. A very conveniently located Python expert, except when he shoulder surfs my code and asks a seemingly innocent question like "What are you trying to accomplish with that bit?" This is probably what it feels like to be an intern to a senior dev. ↩︎
Me. It's me. I'm three racoons in a trench coat holding a torn piece of newspaper with a copy-pasted regex written in crayon in one of my mouths. ↩︎

Intercalary interstitial interregnum

2023-12-29T00:00:00Z

I love the quiet. The Christmas obligations have been dispensed with. Either I have fulfilled them or I have failed to fulfill them, but in any case they are moot now. New Year's Day will bring the fresh start feelings with perhaps a sense of obligation to make plans for self-improvement and maybe even act on them. But not yet. We are still in the lull. Days off for many people. I am one of those lucky ones, though even when I did work on these days it's been quiet.

Happy code freeze to all those who celebrate.

It's such a relief. No work, but also nothing important to do. No more gifts to buy, no fancy meals to cook, no opposing requirements from family members to balance. I just rest, which for me doesn't mean nothing, only nothing in particular. I gently bop between tea and poking at hobby code and little walks in the neighborhood and bigger walks in the city.

Everybody is doing nothing as hard as they can #

It's not just me and that somehow makes it better. The cafe on Thursday morning was full of irregulars--and in truth I was one of them since I normally only go on Saturdays. Ocean Beach, misty and cool at low tide, was busy with people walking along the tide line. I've been there on ordinary weekdays and it's not like this. I imagined maybe they also all came back from wherever it was they went and collectively decided to go to the beach. It felt like locals because of how they were dressed: appropriately for the weather.

I photographed birds. I went to Europa Express and bought hot smoked mackerel and Delicije. Today I'm drinking cup after cup of puerh, and I plan to stop only when I begin to vibrate.

Thinkin' about stuff, but not too hard #

I like to do a gentle year in review. Just, you know, what happened and would I like more or less of that kind of thing? Last year I printed out the Year Compass booklet and used that to guide the reflection. It has enough structure that if you tend to get off track or ruminate, it'll keep you focused. When I'm happy, I get off track. When I'm not happy, I get off track and ruminate. Lately, and by lately I mean for the last 10 years, I've been happy.

The rain has started again and I can't tell if the hill is misty or just obscured by rain. Getting off-track again. I'm not even going to edit this out.

Five days without pants #

This thing, by the way, this in-between time, it seems to be a thing humans like to do. Ancient Egyptians had it, and it's called (retroactively) the intercalary month or epagomenal days and it was a period of rest. The French Revolutionary Calendar had it too, and called it Sansculottides, which I kid you not, were the days without pants. OK, I kid slightly. They were named after the sans-culottes, meaning "without breeches" a shorthand for the common people who were revolutionaries. Christians of course had the 12 Days of Christmas, starting on December 25 and ending on January 5 (or 26-6, depending). I wish Christmas was still celebrated that way, instead of extending the before time further and further into the frantic shopping and cleaning, putting all the energy into getting ready and then throwing out the Christmas tree on the 26th. By front-loading Christmas you get all the intensity of preparation and give up the gentle slide into the New Year.

Despite the drive to expand the frantic season, the Undays (as explained and possibly coined by @debcha) wiggle their ways back into the calendar. We all need a little bit of nothing, now and again.

Good morning, Boston

2023-12-22T00:00:00Z

This is going to be one of those stream of consciousness posts. If you've come to enjoy my more philosophical or practical posts, I'm afraid I'm about to disappoint you. Actually, I think I'm not even supposed to apologize for what I'm about to write; that's definitely a rule. So I'm sorry for breaking that rule, as well. I guess every style of writing has its formal pro-forma introduction. In ye olden times it was a poem invoking the muse. In the blog post it's an apology. So there we are. The introduction is dispensed with and I can proceed to the main meander.

There is no convenient way to fly from San Francisco to the East Coast. You can fly out at a reasonable time in the morning, and because of the time difference, arrive late in the evening, having wasted the whole day. You can fly out unreasonably early in the morning, arrive inconveniently late in the day, and also, have wasted the whole day. Or, finally, you can fly out late in the evening and arrive in the morning. You don't waste the whole day but you arrive having at best napped a little bit on the airplane. You get to have the day, but it's kind of a crappy day. The last is the option I go for.

Some small pleasures compensate for the generally crappiness of the SFO --> BOS red-eye flight. You fly over Boston Harbor just as golden hour illuminates the islands and boats. The terminal, while crowded with holiday travelers, is similar lit by the morning sun. Before leaving the airport there is the, now traditional for me, Dunkin' Donuts donut and coffee. Theoretically they've expanded to the West Coast now, but for a long time it was a East Coast only treat and the ritual remains. And finally there's the ride out of Boston on the airport shuttle bus, seeing East Coast architecture again (so much brick!) in the morning light.

And that's it. The rest is just sleep deprivation and jet lag and trying to grind through until the next day by which point I hope to have brute force reset my sleep schedule to East Coast.

Text-to-speech is not just screen readers

2023-12-15T00:00:00Z

I often use text-to-speech to read. I get the sense that it's an unusual habit for a fully sighted person. Since I've mentioned it occasionally when I write about books, I thought I'd say a bit more about my reading method.

The tools I use for text-to-speech #

I use a third generation Kindle, the Kindle Keyboard, which comes with a text-to-speech option. It's an old model from 2010, but you can still get them used. I know, because I'm on my third one. I broke the first one and lost the second one. Some newer Kindles have something called "VoiceView" which apparently pairs with assistive technology, but they don't have their own speakers and I also don't know how well they actually work. The Kindle Keyboard has a headphone jack, so I can stick a pair of headphones into it and put it in my purse when I go for a walk or in the pocket of my apron when I cook, and move around when I read. I like to move around. But more on that later. Some books come with DRM that doesn't allow text-to-speech. You can check that when you're buying them and only buy books that allow it (which is most of them) or find your own workarounds.

I use the Instapaper app on my iPhone to read articles from the internet. Instapaper has a text-to-speech option. You can control how fast it goes. Depending on my mood, I choose anywhere from 1x to 2x speed. 1.5x is my default. Instapaper works very well for things that take 10 minutes to read, and occasionally seizes up for longer pieces. I don't think it works very well for anything that takes longer than 30 minutes.

Finally, I sometimes use the system speech utility on my Mac. It's nice when something is so long that it's not practical for Instapaper, but not easy to import into a Kindle. I paste stuff I want to read into either Text Edit and then go to Edit > Speech > Start Speaking. It also works on Notes but I don't tend to use Notes like that, just because for me, Notes is for notes, not copy-pasted fanfiction. And more on that later as well.

Why I use text-to-speech #

While I don't have any significant vision impairment or learning disability that make reading difficult, I don't like to do just one thing at a time. Before I had books on text-to-speech, I was that person walking down the street reading a paperback. If there is a life activity during which you may imagine a person reading, I have done so, or attempted to do so.

You may wonder, why not audio books? First, I also listened to audio books, but I ran out. Audio books are just as small subset of books, and what's more they are very expensive. And some things just aren't available as narrated works at all, like weird blog posts and fanfiction.

Fanfiction is how I started. As best as I can reconstruct it from the extant evidence^[1], I started using text-to-speech in the summer of 2007. Two things came together. The final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was published on July 21, 2007, and I read it immediately. At the same time, I was really into knitting, and often stayed up way too late doing it. After I read Deathly Hallows I felt very sad and dissatisfied with the Severus Snape storyline^[2], and decided to find some fanfiction. By early August I was emailing myself lists of fics to read. I could not get enough Severus Snape fanfiction.

But I had a problem: I also wanted to knit. A lot. I could not get enough knitting and I could not get enough Severus Snape. When, a couple years earlier, I had experimented with speech to text (the experiment failed) I also discovered that my early model Mac laptop could do text-to-speech. It was pretty robotic and I didn't find much use for it. Until suddenly I very much did have a use for it. I would paste chapters of fanfic into Text Edit and make the robot voice read them to me while I knitted. It didn't take long to get used to the robotic voice. In the summer of 2008 I started playing World of Warcraft, and then I had the computer read me fanfiction while I played the game. Like I said, I hate to do just one thing at a time.

It must have been around 2012 when a friend offered to give me his used Kindle Keyboard. I hadn't been very interested in e-readers, but he said I could load fanfiction onto it and it would do text-to-speech. That was true, and it also opened the possibility of reading any book as text-to-speech. And it was easy to switch between audio and visual so I could read however I wanted.

Ever since then, I've used text-to-speech to read at least parts of every ebook I've read. I can read while getting dressed, while cooking, while cleaning, while knitting and crocheting, while drawing and doing calligraphy, and while riding in a car where I would get carsick reading, and while walking and walking and walking. Certain books become associated with particular craft projects. Passages get attached to particular scenery I saw on a walk.

Text-to-speech lets me do boring things by adding books to it, and it also lets me read difficult books by attaching physical activity. I don't think I could have finished Of Grammatology or Seeing Like a State if I couldn't read parts of them while baking or playing World of Warcraft.

Preempting some objections #

I don't want to be some kind of of text-to-speech evangelist, but I think text-to-speech is pretty neat, especially if you're the kind of person who, like me, doesn't like to do just one thing at a time. I hear variations on these objections whenever I talk about text-to-speech, so I might as well preempt them.

Text-to-speech voices are flat and robotic #

Yes, a lot of text-to-speech lacks the inflection of a human narrator, and it has some quirks. For example, my Kindle always reads people going "hm" as "hectometers." Not great. It also doesn't properly pause for punctuation, which can make it harder to follow. However, I found that I got used to it and now mostly tune out the style of the reading. I can't read anything with meter using text-to-speech. So no poetry, and no authors with a particularly rhythmic prose style.

That said, the voices are getting better on modern devices.

It's harder to follow and absorb audio than visual text #

First, following text that you listen to is a skill you can develop and improve. I had to learn it in poetry workshops. Second, yes, it's true! I sometimes listen to sections more than once if I missed something because, for example, I had to run the water, or I just got distracted. But I, at least, get distracted when I'm reading things with my eyes and have to read them again, so it doesn't seem much of a loss.

It's not real reading #

I guess if you're reading for some kind of merit badge or sport where you have to only use certain equipment, like you know, raw powerlifting vs equipped powerlifting, and your particular reading sport division does not allow listening to books, then this objections might make some sense. I mean, some people think that ebooks don't count as reading because you aren't using the traditional equipment. How far do you want to take this argument? It's not real reading when you have to use reading glasses? It's not real reading when you're not reading it off an ancient scroll? I think it's silly. I also don't think there is anything inherently virtuous about reading, and definitely not anything special about one form of reading over another. Unless what you specifically want out of the act of reading is practice reading with your eyes, I don't think it matters at all how you read. Even then, it's not fake to listen to a story. If anything, it is the written text is fake. But I will not get into Derrida again at this late hour, tempted as I may be to do so.

Email responses to my LiveJournal posts about Snape/Hermione fanfiction I was reading. ↩︎
It was a more innocent time, when one could be disappointed in the storyline instead of the author. Alas. ↩︎

Worship the sun

2023-12-08T00:00:00Z

If you're going to worship something, the sun is a reasonable choice, and quite possibly the most reasonable choice. From the perspective of a person living on earth, the sun possesses all the important qualities of a god. Ancient people thought so, and some religions still hold the sun sacred. Modern scientific understanding of the sun only makes its god-like qualities more apparent.

Let me explain. But first, let me disclaim.

Assumptions:

I assume a polytheistic view of godhood, so I will not attempt to defend that the sun has the qualities of an abstract monotheistic god.

Out of scope:

Do gods exists as actual beings outside of human minds that conceive of them?
Are any other natural forces worthy or unworthy of worship?

The god-like qualities of the sun #

With that out of the way, let's get into some specifics about the sun.

The sun is the source of all life on earth.

Almost the energy on the earth comes from the sun.
The sun makes it warm enough for life to exist on earth.
All the food we eat comes from an ecosystem that is based on photosynthesis which is powered by solar energy.

The sun is the parent of the material of the earth.

The substance of the earth formed from the same accretion disk that formed the sun and the solar system so in a way the substance of the earth itself is a gift of the sun. In as far as we may think of the earth as metaphorically our mother, we must acknowledge the sun as the parent of the earth.

The sun brings order to our world.

The sun’s gravity rules the movement of the earth and other planets, ordering the entire system, so the sun is the ruler of our system.
The light of the sun determines days and seasons, ordering the daily and yearly rhythm of living beings.

The sun's power is so vastly beyond us it may as well be all-powerful.

The sun is too powerful to approach or even view directly. If we got too close physically its gravity would draw us in and crush us, but first its heat would incinerate us. Even from earth, its light is so strong that if we look at it directly it blinds us. We can only endure to see a tiny portion of its light, such as during a solar eclipse.

The sun is incomprehensible to mere mortals.

The process of fusion that powers the sun is difficult to apprehend and requires deep knowledge of physics and math, and is beyond understanding for most people. It is so vast, massive, and ancient compared to our lifespans that people can't really comprehend it without recourse to abstractions.

The sun's longevity so far exceeds ours that it may as well be immortal.

The sun is mindbogglingly ancient and will outlive not only our species but also our planet.

The sun can destroy us all.

One day the sun will destroy the earth and there is nothing we can do about that. The sun regularly throws off solar flares that disrupt radio and electronics, just to remind us that it can. One day it could produce a flare powerful enough to destroy all our electronics and bring our whole civilization down a notch. And on an individual scale, its life giving rays can also kill us by giving us cancer if we over-indulge.

Give me that old time religion #

The sun is the source of great and necessary goodness, giving life, substance and order. At the same time it is also (in comparison to humans) all-powerful, immortal, and incomprehensible. While it is the source of so much goodness, it also can, and eventually will, destroy us, and we know it. Beautiful and terrible, life-giving and incomprehensible--if that's not a god, I don't know what is.

As to how you worship the sun, I think I'd prefer to leave that to the individual conscience. I do like those black mirrors people have been sticking on their roofs to bring the blessing and power of the sun into their lives. Or you could just take a hint from cats, ancient in their wisdom, and bask appreciatively in a warm patch, thinking thankful thoughts.

An excellent view of solar flare Sun taken by Skylab III ATM Apollo Telescope Mount. Photo taken on December 19, 1973. NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Some excerpts from The Unique and Its Property by Max Stirner

2023-12-01T00:00:00Z

I recently finished The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod, two science fiction novels that are full of direct references to all kinds of socialist, communist, and anarchist ideas. As in, not only are people living, for example, in some kind of anarchist society as in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed or Iain Banks' Culture novels, but they directly discuss specific schools of thought and thinkers. One of the thinkers directly alluded to was Max Stirner and his ideas of egoist anarchism.

I had heard of Max Stirner, and of his book, variously translated as The Ego and His Own, The Ego and Its Own, and most recently, The Unique and Its Property, mostly from assholes. Since most of the people who were really into him seemed like jerks and the earliest title made me roll my eyes a bit, I hadn't bothered. But seeing egoist anarchism discussed more in The Stone Canal raised my curiosity. This isn't the first time reading science fiction led me to investigate some weirdo philosophers. Dhalgren and Too Like the Lightning got me to read De Sade. The Thing Itself led me to Kant (I'm still working my way through The Critique of Pure Reason).

So I got my hands on a 2017 translation by Apio Ludd and have been reading it. I'm about a third of the way through and don't have much to say about it yet, however, I would like to share some passages I particularly liked.

On the police and what they do for the bourgeois vs the workers:

The state pays well so that its “good bourgeois citizens,” the possessors, can pay badly without danger; through good pay, it secures for itself its servants, from which it forms a protecting power, a “police” (to the police belong soldiers, officials of all kinds, i.e., of justice, education, etc.—in short, the whole “machinery of state”) for the “good bourgeois citizens,” and the “good bourgeois citizens” gladly pay high taxes to it in order to pay so much lower wages to their workers.

But the class of workers, because they are unprotected in what they essentially are (since they don’t enjoy state protection as workers, but as subjects of the state they have a share in the enjoyment of the police, a so-called legal protection), remains a hostile power against this state, this state of possessors, this “bourgeois monarchy.” Its principle, work, is not recognized according to its value; it is exploited, a spoil of war[130] of the possessors, the enemy. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.1 Political Liberalism

On the relationship between workers' power and the nation state:

The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there.

The state is founded on the—slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.1 Political Liberalism

On the role of chance in supposedly merit-based success:

Competition, in which bourgeois or political life solely operates, is a game of chance through and through, from stock market speculation all the way down to applications for official positions, the hunt for customers, the job search, the pursuit of promotions and decorations, the rummaging of the haggling junkman, etc. If one succeeds in pushing out and outbidding his rivals, then the “lucky throw” is made; because it must already be taken as a stroke of luck that the winner feels himself gifted with an ability, even if cultivated with the most careful diligence, against which the others don’t know how to rise, so that—none more gifted are found. And now those who pursue their daily lives in the midst of these changing fortunes without doing badly from it are seized with the most moral indignation when their own principle appears in its most naked form and “wreaks misfortune” as—a game of chance. The game of chance is just too clear, too unveiled a competition, and, like any definite nakedness, offends the honorable sense of shame. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.2 Social Liberalism

On the progressive nature of liberation (this one feels like it might be a direct allusion to Hegel?):

The people of the future will yet win many freedoms that we don’t even miss. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.3 Humane Liberalism

On what it means to be unique:

Now I don’t think of myself as anything special, but as unique. Without a doubt, I am similar to others; however, this holds good only for comparison or reflection; in fact, I am incomparable, unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind. If you bring them under the generalities “flesh, mind,” those are your thoughts, which have nothing to do with my flesh, my mind, and can least of all put out a “call” to what is mine. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.3 Humane Liberalism

On continuous self-creation:

I do not assume myself, because in each moment I am really setting up or creating myself for the first time, and am only I, not by being assumed, but by being set up, and again set up only in the moment when I set myself up; i.e., I am creator and creature in one. -- The Unique and Its Property, 1.3.4. Postscript

On the relationship between being free and having power:

My freedom becomes complete only when it is my—power; but by this I cease to be merely a free person and become an own person. [...] You long for freedom? You fools! If you took power, then freedom would come of itself. See, one who has power stands above the law. How does this view taste to you, you “law-abiding” people? But you have no taste!" The Unique and Its Property, 2.1 Ownness

I'm sure I'll have more to say when I finish the book.

Pie season

2023-11-24T00:00:00Z

At some point in the summer, I wrote PIE SEASON on the wall calendar next to October 16th. In case you’re wondering where this season and its official start date come from, I made it up. It was too hot to make pies when I got a nice new baking dish and pie bird, so I declared pie season for when I estimated it would be cooler. And when I say pie season, I mostly mean savory pies.

Why meat pie #

I have not grown up with savory pies, so for me they are a series of tasty experiments. However, my spouse is English and grew up eating them. So as an additional constraint, I’m choosing traditional pies and sticking to the recipes to create a homey feeling.

Meat pies are quite time consuming. On the other hand, you can make stuff ahead, and also you can make a whole lot and eat reheated pie for a few days.

Pie season has been going for a bit over a month, and I wanted to compile the scattered posts I've made about pies into one place.

Cottage pie #

My first pie of pie season was cottage pie. I started off easy without the pressure of a crust.

I followed the recipe for cottage pie from BBC Good Food. I made a third of the recipe and it was still a ridiculous amount of food. I don't know who writes these recipes, but it seems like they assume you are feeding a very hungry family of 10.

I did not get any photos of the cottage pie. Honestly it's not that photogenic. It's a pile of mashed potatoes on top of a layer of ground beef. The effort-to-deliciousness ratio of this recipe is excellent.

Steak and onion pie #

My second pie was steak and onion. It upped the challenge level as steak and onion pie requires a pastry top, however not yet a pastry bottom.

I followed the recipe for steak pie from BBC Food.

The second pie of pie season was a lot more labor-intensive, not just because of the crust but also because cooking the beef and onion filling took several hours. In retrospect, I should have browned the meat and then shoved the lot into a slow cooker. The pie bird does worked well at keeping the crust from getting soggy.

The effort-to-tastiness ratio was also very good. Of all the pies I've made so far, I think this was the most delicious. I'll almost certainly make it again.

Chicken pie #

As the third pie, I made a chicken pie, this time with both a top and bottom crust. The recipe says it feeds 8, and indeed, there was pie for days.

I followed the recipe for traditional chicken pie from BBC Food.

Despite an initial conversion error the chicken pie was a success. The recipe said to bake at 220C for 45 minutes and after 45 minutes at 330F I wondered why the top still looked raw. When I realized my error, I turned the heat to 425 and baked for another half hour. I had taken a friend's advice and put the pie dish on a metal baking sheet, which I think helped to keep the bottom crust from getting soggy and the pie bird kept the top from getting soggy, despite the accidentally extended bake time. The main consequence was that by the time the pie was ready, everyone was very hungry.

The effort-to-tastiness was not quite worth it. The crust was great, but I found the chicken filling was a lot of work to make and chicken just isn't as rich as beef so the flavor seemed a little weak to me. I would probably make a pie kind of like this again if I have leftovers. I will almost certainly make a pie like this with my turkey leftovers.

Pumpkin pie #

In honor of the American Thanksgiving holiday, I made a pumpkin pie. I've made pumpkin pie before, but this time I tried out a new technique, pre-baking--also known as "blind baking"--the pie crust. Because pumpkin pie is basically a rich custard and is both very moist and requires a short bake time, the crust needs to be pre-baked if you want it to be crispy.

When you pre-bake a pie crust without the filling, you have to put in something to weigh down the pie crust. None of the instructions I hastily skimmed on Thanksgiving morning mentioned why. I skimmed and then half-assedly followed all of the instructions for blind baking in these three articles

Since I don't have dedicated pie weights, I lined the pie with aluminum foil and weighed that down with sugar, per The Kitchn's instructions, kind of. I realize I mixed things up. I put it in for 15 minutes at 350F and then took out the sugar and put the pie back in, unweighted, to get it crispier. When I took out the weights, the pie bottom seemed kind of wet, like it was partly getting steamed rather than baked, which I didn't like. Then when I put it in with out weights, as some of the Kitchn's procedures suggested to get the final crispiness, it started puffing out!

That's why you need the weights, it turns out! The pie will puff out and if you try to smoosh it back down, it can crack. You definitely need pie weights.

In retrospect, I think I should have read about blind baking ahead of time, and also followed the instructions from the pastry chef. Everything else in those extremely hardcore instructions matched what I've learned from Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery actually working in a bakery for a while (though that was a very long time ago).

I followed the Simple Pumpkin Pie recipe from Allrecipes for the filling. I made a double portion because my pie dish is huge.

Because the pie was huge, I was extra worried it would crack. Every pumpkin and sweet potato pie I have ever made cracked. How to keep pumpkin pie from cracking saved my pie. My intuition had been that pie cracks because of a sudden change in temperature, so you should keep it in the oven with the heat turned off and let it cool very, very slowly. Turns out, no! You have to take it out while the middle still seems almost wiggly, and then just let it sit on the counter for hours. The link explains why that works. For the first time, I managed to bake a pumpkin pie that didn't crack.

Despite the bottom crust not working out quite as I hoped, the pie as a whole was good. I brought it to Thanksgiving and people seemed to enjoy it. The effort-to-enjoyment was reasonable. It would have been better if I had proper pie weights. I still have half a huge pie, which is too much pie. Luckily, I have a Friendsgiving tomorrow, and I can bring it there.

What's next? #

The next pie I make will almost certainly be leftover turkey pie. There's a whole backstory about last year's leftover turkey pie and how I learned that ChatGPT is kind of bad at math. But that's a story for another time.

References #

This is not a recipe blog, and this has not been a long introduction behind which I am hiding a recipe. Nonetheless, if you thought that's what it was and were scrolling to the bottom to find the recipes, here you go. I even put them in alphabetical order for you.

Recipes #

Techniques #

Seeing the obvious in the Turrell skyspace

2023-11-17T00:00:00Z

Whoever is in charge of the opening hours at the De Young museum must hate sunsets. The observation tower, with views of Golden Gate Park and parts of San Francisco, closes at 4:30, for example, and the earliest sunset ever gets is 4:50. I was up in the tower with my friend M- a bit after 4:30 on a cloudy day, feeling particularly unmoved by the view, when she said, "Let's go to the sculpture garden."

Decisively, she led us to the Turell Skyspace^[1] which looks like a dome of grass from the outside and a cathedral dome with a hole in it from the inside. It has wonderful acoustic qualities too, amplifying every sound and sometimes people sing in it. There's a bench all around the edge of the inside, and you can look up at the hole and see the sky framed in its circle. I'm very fond of the skyspace, which is one of many that Turrell has built, though I have never seen any others.

Isn't it obvious? #

"We're here at the perfect time," said M- and we looked up at the sky for a bit. Then she said "Do you know what this piece is about?" I felt like someone had asked me what coffee is about. Isn't it obvious?

"Um, it's about the sky," I said. About looking at a cut-out piece of the sky, about taking the ordinary beauty of the sky and framing a little bit of it so you see just sky and can appreciate it in a new way, and about the way the sky looks different depending on what's happening. I particularly like how the skyspace frames the fast moving fog on days when the marine layer flows by. And it's a bit about the sound in the space, too, the way it seem to be enclosed and amplified. So it's about the sky and a little bit about the sound.

We sat there quietly for a while and then she said "Do you want to know what it's really about?" And I said yes, and she explained how it works and holy shit I mean I've been coming to this place for literal years and I never knew and there's no signs of anything that gives you a clue. Most people who come here also probably never realize it either because for most of the year, you can't go at the right time, because the right time to go is sunset.

The Three Gems #

When you stare at a patch of a certain color and then move your eyes away from it to a blank space, you see a negative of that color. In the skyspace, the white inner dome that frames the sky window is illuminated by colored light that shifts through a slow gradient of colors. Because the shift is so gradual, and because most of what you see is the color-illuminated inside, your mind tends to adjust its "white balance" and the sky appears to change color. At the same time, as your eyes flicker from the lit edge of the space to the sky, the negative color effect is projected to the sky. At least, that's what I think is happening.

The subjective experiences is that as you look at the sky as it gets darker and the colors shift inside the space, the sky appears to change color, and the round sky portal which at first seems flat begins to take a convex shape, like a bezel. Although it was cloudy, and even rained, the sky above me appeared to turn deep blue, and sometimes bits of green flickered across it.

Other Turrell skyspaces work this way as well. M- learned about it when she visited one in Japan, where they had a whole evening program of it, and even gave you blankets so you could stay comfortable as it got dark. She said towards the end, the sky appeared to turn red. The Three Gems wasn't that dramatic when we saw it, though we didn't stay until full dark.

It's the gloomiest time of the year #

And that's the trick of it. To see the color change, you have to be there as the sky dims. However, the De Young museum closes at 5:15 p.m., and for most the year, sunset is much later than that, so you don't have the chance. You have to come during the period when sunset is before 5:15 p.m., roughly speaking, mid-November to mid January.

Viewing notes for the myopic #

For some reason, the effect doesn't work as well if your vision is blurry. I wouldn't expect color vision, especially of a big blob of sky, to be affected by visual acuity, but it is. When I wore my distance glasses, the colors were spectacular. When I wore my everyday indoor glasses, it was just OK. So if you're nearsighted, wear your glasses. And if you're not seeing anything interesting at all, maybe get your eyes checked for distance vision.

My best guess is that something about it depends on a the sharp break between the two fields of color. Some photos of Turrell skyspaces look like flashing color Tattwa cards. Tattwa cards juxtapose distinct geometric shapes in a bright color on a field of a contrasting color, which, when you stare at them, creates a sense that they are flashing, moving, or changing. It only works if you get the colors just right and if the shapes are neat and clean. When I made a set of Tattwa cards in the OSOGD we did it as a big group craft project and used carefully selected colored paper to cut out the shapes. I saw some people's painted Tattwa cards and they didn't seem to have the effect because most people can't manage those clear lines.

If the skyspace works in a similar way to flashing color Tattwa cards, a neat demarcation between color fields is necessary for the full effect.

How to get there #

The Turrell skyspace in San Francisco is located in the sculpture garden on the grounds of the De Young museum in Golden Gate Park. It doesn't cost anything to go into the sculpture garden, though you might have to go through the museum entrance and walk through the museum cafe and come out again. Sometimes you can just walk in by the cafe and other times you have to walk through the museum. Either way, it's free. The skyspace is a little hard to find, because it's all the way at the back of the garden and doesn't look like much from the outside. Look for signs along the path. Weekdays are especially nice if you can make it out, because it's quieter.

And obviously, go now^[2], while it gets dark so early. Don't let rain deter you. The bench inside stays dry and the effect seems to work fine when it's raining.

Coda #

I still think it's about seeing the sky. Just, not the usual sky.

I keep thinking it's Tyrell, but that's the fictional android manufacturing company, while the artist who makes the skyspaces is James Turrel. ↩︎
Or, if you're reading this a long time after I posted it, go between mid-November and mid-January. ↩︎

Books I should be reading but am not

2023-11-10T00:00:00Z

A book is not a pizza. It will not go off if you take a long time to read it all, and nothing is wasted if you read only a portion. Also, unlike pizza, you can get books out of the library or buy them in electronic form, so none to very little waste is produced as a result of you not finishing the book. There are plenty of books I start, decide I'm not into them, and don't finish. I don't consider it virtuous to finish books nor sinful to abandon them. Non-fiction and poetry books are often perfectly enjoyable or useful if you read only a portion.

However, there are some books that I think I should read, not out of some kind of moral obligation to the book itself, but for other reasons that are important to my life projects. Nonetheless, I am not reading them.

Gender Trouble #

The book: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler

Why I should be reading it: Some ideas soak into your life second- and third-hand. I keep thinking about gender and performativity all the time and I'm sure I'm rethinking some ideas Judith Butler has already thought. I could probably save a lot of time thinking if I read her thoughts first. Also, I really enjoyed Judith Butler's introduction to Of Grammatology and every long interview I've ever read with her. I find her a very engaging thinker.

Why I am not: I've brought this book with me on two, and perhaps three vacations already. I have carried it in my backpack on the way to and from work. And I have read, I think, just the first 10 pages, if that. Like, the introduction or the introduction to the introduction. I keep pausing to think about what she has said and then I put the book back down and do not pick it up. Also, I think I need to take notes in it as I read it, but I only want to do that in pencil and I don't always have a pencil handy.

Women's Work #

The book: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Why I should be reading it: Every time I read a little bit of this book, I'm blown away and inspired. Not only does it have so much to say about the history of textiles and how they were made, but also illuminates the historiography of textiles and women's work. Just the bit of it that I have read has inspired me deeply. And it's on the bottom shelf of my coffee table where I sometimes touch it with my foot when I put my laptop on top of it and shove it gently. I have not forgotten this book exists. I just don't touch it with my hands that often.

Why I am not: It's a really heavy book, I mean, physically. And my coffee table is near the TV, where one may screen, for example, Columbo or any number of science fiction films.

Mother Nature #

The book: Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Why I should be reading it: Sarah Hrdy revolutionized how we think about primate motherhood and especially female primate infanticide. Her findings were so taboo-breaking that other scientists were too scandalized to absorb them at first. There is so much good and mind-blowing stuff in the little bit of the book I have read so far, like how the hyena's birth canal passes through its elongated clitoris, and how painful and dangerous their births are. As with Women's Work even a little bit of this book fills me with inspiration and ideas.

Why I am not: It is also extremely heavy. I cannot take it in my purse and read it on the bus.

Wolf Hall #

The book: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Why I should be reading it: It's genuinely incredible piece of literary historical fiction with fascinating characters and beautiful writing. I'm at least two thirds into it. And it's my friend D-'s favorite book. If I finished it, I could talk to her about it at length and everyone knows that talking about books is one of the best things in life.

Why I am not: I kind of know how it ends, being that it's historical fiction and all. I know, that doesn't stop me with other books, and I even read spoilers on purpose sometimes so it should be an advantage. It's not science fiction.

Critique of Pure Reason #

The book: Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Why I should be reading it: It's a foundational text of Western philosophy. Chances are most of the philosophers I've read have read it and are in conversation with it somehow. There seems to be a kind of accepted way of interpreting Kant, and to me that's always a good sign to go back to the primary text. I read a part of it last year in the intercalary-feeling period between Christmas and New Year, and quite liked it. I think it might help me solve my triangle problem. I even got an ebook version of a recent translation so I don't have an excuse about physical weight and I could listen to it as text-to-speech.

Why I am not: It's so long, and really boring at times. The secondary texts are actually much worse and are no help at all. I keep telling myself I should read Gender Trouble first, anyway.

What I have been reading instead #

The entire Gideon the Ninth series (so far) by Tamsyn Muir, twice in a row
The first five Witcher series books by Andrzej Sapkowski, that is the two short story collections and the first three novels
Translation State by Ann Leckie
The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod
The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod

Afterword #

Perhaps I should also read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, which I added to my Goodreads Want to Read list in 2018, but evidently I am quite capable of talking about books I haven't read already. That said, I limited this list to books I own and actually intend to read as part of my current life project(s). For example, while I own and eventually intend to finish reading Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault, it's not urgent. I also have plenty of books in mind that I think would be nice to read and want to but feel no real urgency about, for example, all Nebula winners in the novel category, and knowing how I tend to inhale speculative fiction novels to the harm of my sleep cycle and all other reading and life activities, I only buy or get them from the library as needed.

I have learned one thing from this list, which I sort of knew, and it's that I am much more likely to finish books if they are in ebook format. One day, I should write about my text-to-speech reading habits, because for a fully sighted person, I suspect I do an unusual amount of reading by robot voice.

Sex magic for the masses

2023-11-03T00:00:00Z

Content warning: Frank discussion of sex, masturbation, and bodily fluids. Possibly something of an info hazard. No graphic images.

With the start of November, I want to touch on a seasonal topic. No, not NaNoWriMo, Movember, or International Men's Day^[1]. I want to talk about a much sillier seasonal topic, No Nut November. No Nut November is a joke holiday that became a real holiday--though maybe holiday isn't quite the right word--wherein during the month of November men voluntarily abstain from ejaculating. Why the hell would anyone do that? What is it supposed to accomplish? Two words: sex magic.

I'm serious. No Nut November is just half-cocked sex magic.

Our precious bodily fluids #

If you read the accounts of people who seriously undertake, or purport to seriously undertake, No Nut November (NNN), you'll find recurring themes of becoming more powerful, not just physically stronger, but interpersonally magnetic, not simply developing a stronger will, but actually developing the ability to enact one's will at a distance simply by willing things, to think and grow rich, or whatever else you may wish, by the power of thought and will alone. Unless you've spent a lot of time investigating the history sex magic, you might wonder how the hell that's supposed to work.

The putative mechanism of action is based on old-timey ideas about the magical force in semen. The idea is that semen contains life force and/or magical power, and that when one ejaculates, one gives up a portion of that vital power. And so, it naturally follows, that if one never ejaculates one stores up the magical power and can use it to accomplish magical feats. I can see how a person might come to the conclusion that that's how sex works. It's even in Dr. Strangelove:

Gen. Ripper: I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence. - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) (Quote edited lightly for brevity)

Since I first gave thought to NNN, people seem to have become less uncomfortable about admitting straight up that they practice sex magic instead of dancing around it by making up pseudo-scientific explanations. If you want an uncritical insider view of the theory of semen retention and its history, read the article The Power of Semen Retention: Napoleon Hill’s Secret to Tapping into Your Inner Genius.^[2] Interestingly it calls out Think and Grow Rich, a weird-ass self-help book from 1937 which self-improvement types rediscover periodically. It's in the same vein as others of the genre, mixing basic-baby good advice and some over-the-top claims about how you can get everything you ever wanted if you only follow its advice. And then at some point after you've gotten comfortable with this How to Win Friends and Influence People imitator, the sex magic starts.

I say you and here I do mean you. I specifically read Think and Grow Rich it because someone told me it had weird sex magic. The sex magic was not that weird, actually, but it was weird that it was in the middle of an otherwise quotidian book about trying to make money and using the power of positive thinking.

The homunculi in spermatozoa #

I think the theory that ejaculation saps your magical power is also related to the ancient model of spermatozoon as homunculus. That is, that every sperm is actually a tiny human, and upon fertilization, the womb only receives it, like soil a seed. Following this model, all the living vitality of the fetus comes from the sperm/homunculus. The womb, and the woman (because in this model of the world there is a total equivalence between having a womb and being a woman) are completely passive.

The persistent idea that every sperm is a tiny human is why Aleister Crowley talked about masturbating during magical rituals as "human sacrifice." I don't know what was more scandalous to people: that he talked about human sacrifice or that he was (fairly) open about masturbating. I suspect O. A. Spare's method of empowering magical sigils by masturbating is along the same lines but more about the vital living energy than sacrificing tiny people.

Free your libidinal inhibitions, free orgone #

Spare's library of sticky sigils and cum jars naturally leads one (OK, leads me) to think about Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). TOPY's central magical practice was similar to Spare's but rather than directing the magical energy of orgasm and its effluvia onto some non-sex goal, it was all about freeing yourself of your sexual inhibitions to develop your full power. This is too gross and funny not to describe, so here's how it was supposed to work. Members were to think about their most intense and taboo sexual desires and write them down. Then, they were to masturbate to orgasm while thinking about it and smear their sexual fluid (called "ov" in TOPY lingo) on the paper and stick three public hairs to the paper with the "ov." Finally, they were to mail the paper with their sexual fantasy and the "ov" and the three public hairs to TOPY headquarters. I know you might think I'm making this up. I am not making it up. (I wonder if the mailing gross stuff idea was related to the mail art movement.)

Think what you will about mailing sticky letters to your favorite musicians^[3] ("no thanks"), you'll notice it's a very different approach to sex and sex magic than everything I've discussed so far. First, "ov" is gender neutral. Whatever fluid comes out of your body around the time when you have an orgasm, that's the magical fluid as far as TOPY was concerned. Even more interesting is the idea that breaking down sexual inhibitions and having orgasms will release the barriers on your natural libidinal life force and increase your power and vitality.

Because of that, TOPY's central practice and its underlying theory feels more connected to Wilhelm Reich's ideas about orgone energy than the traditions of cultivating magical power through abstinence. In brief, Reich was an early 20th century psychoanalyst who developed the theory that there was a tangible life energy, which he called orgone, and it was connected strongly to libido and orgasm. Orgone theory is too complicated and weird for me to get into, but it's enough to say that in Reich's view, removing sexual inhibitions and having regular orgasms was crucial to having plenty of orgone, and thus plenty of vital life energy that would keep you emotionally and physically healthy (and perhaps much more).

In both TOPY's and Reich's approaches, notions of scarcity and retention aren't important, and instead the key idea is that by unblocking sexual inhibitions we access immense creative power.

Two views of vitality #

So we have two modes of magico-sexual vitality. One posits vitality as a scarce resource that needs to be preserved and accumulated. The other that sexual vitality is blocked by inhibitions and traumas, which when resolved open a field of immense abundance, bringing both sexual joy and magical power.

I'm much more sympathetic to the abundant cornucopia view of sexual vitality.^[4] I think it's more of a flow than something you can hoard.

If you want my opinion, I think that if you want to increase your magical sexual vitality, No Nut November could work, but so might the TOPY method of exploring your real desires in fantasy and breaking the barriers of shame and inhibition that hold back your abundant vital force. Whatever you choose, I would suggest against sending sticky letters through the post.

International Men's Day is on November 19 and is "a global awareness day for many issues that men face, including parental alienation, abuse, homelessness, suicide, and violence." Wikipedia: International Men's Day ↩︎
I swear I've read it previously as a Medium article by a different author, but it's gone now and Medium's weird login wall has prevented it from being archived by the Internet Wayback machine. ↩︎
Maybe not your favorite musicians, but members of Coil belonged to TOPY and Coil was one of my favorite bands of all time. They were quite creative so maybe the magic worked. ↩︎
It doesn't hurt the argument that Reich was an anti-fascist and TOPY were a bunch of sex and gender rebels, whereas the modern NNN practices tend to be embraced by right-wing weirdos who like fascist aesthetics. ↩︎

Sword and sorcery and the mid-career hero

2023-10-27T00:00:00Z

For a long time, I've been thinking about why I love some kinds of fantasy, even though it's not that good by my usual standards, while at the same time I can't get into other kinds of pretty OK fantasy that everyone else likes. Like, why do I love the Witcher short stories and TV show, but find Wheel of Time just OK as a show and impenetrable as a novel series? (And why are the Witcher novels so meh?) Why did I inhale every Andre Norton novel that came my way but could barely get through The Lord of the Rings? Why is Luke Skywalker so boring and Conan the Barbarian so awesome? Also, why does Columbo feel like it belongs in this list even though it's not fantasy?

These weren't burning questions, exactly, just things burbling away at the back of my mind as I tried to figure out what I wanted to read or watch next. I mean, yes, I could tell these things are largely sword and sorcery, or low fantasy, but why was that so enjoyable? What makes these stories tick?

When I started daydreaming about what kind of thing I might want to write for NaNoWriMo, I wanted a story that's like those stories I like best, even when they don't have cough high literary merit. Not so much because I don't trust myself to produce fiction of high literary merit (though I don't; fiction is not my strong point) but because I'd prefer to write the kind of thing I want to read. Now it's the last weekend before NaNoWriMo, and lots of people are trying to figure out what kind of story they want to write, so it feels like a good time to share my theory about sword and sorcery. Even if I don't finish a sword and sorcery story, maybe you will, and then I can read it.

Sword and sorcery's distinct structure is both about the character's relationship to the world and when the story takes place in the character's life. Let me explain.

The hero's relationship to the world #

In epic fantasy, the fate of the world rests on the hero's actions. In sword and sorcery, people are counting on the hero, and lives might well be at stake, but it's not the literal end of the world if the hero fails. The epic hero is fighting a great evil, and even the small every-day creeps are signs of an encroaching darkness that the hero must vanquish. In sword and sorcery, the hero just wants to get paid, or get through the day. The sword and sorcery hero might be trying to do the right thing in the immediate situation, but frankly they might be a bit selfish. The creeps and assholes are just creeps and assholes, and the cursed tomb is just a particularly challenging place to plunder.

Because of this smaller scale, you can also start writing a good sword and sorcery story without a lot of preliminary world-building to make sure it all fits into the grand narrative. As a writer, you can explore the world with your character. Incidentally, I think this explains why the Witcher short stories are so good and the novels are so so-so. Sapkowski started with the short stories in sword and sorcery mode, with just enough back story to give the tales texture, but when he pivoted to novels, he started including epic world-is-at-stake themes and needed to fill in the background, and try to make it plausible that it had world-changing stakes. Then, to make it all seem serious, he also turned up the grimdark slider.

The divine right of kings and scoundrels #

In an epic, the world must be restored to its rightful place. The king must return. Kings are good, and when kings are bad they are corrupted or usurpers, and must be replaced with the rightful king. The hero might even be destined to be king or be a king in exile, and they are quite likely to have an official relationship with the king. By no means would the idea of kingship be abolished in an epic.

In the noble epic fantasy, if the king is absent, or corrupt, or a usurper, you know that part of the thing that has to happen is restoring the rightful king to the throne. If, on the other hand, your epic's grimdark slider is set to grimdarker, the king might be cruel, selfish, or even evil, but incredibly powerful and impossible to unseat except perhaps by another even worse king. No matter if you're ripping off the Arthurian tales or George R.R. Martin, your epic fantasy is basically politically regressive.

In sword and sorcery, you may well have kings, but they tend to be background figures, and they certainly aren't divinely preordained. The Witcher's attitude of basically, I came here to slay some monsters and I don't give a shit who is the king, except in so far as it affects what kind of coin I'll be paid in, is pretty typical. There might not be kings at all, because sword and sorcery thrives in an interregnum, or they might be very weak and clearly failing as an institution, not because of the shortcomings of a particular king, but because the institution is inherently unstable. Samuel R. Delany's Neveryóna series, much as it tweaks sword and sorcery expectations, actually embodies that uneasy attitude towards hierarchical power that, I posit, is typical of the (sub)genre.

Sword and sorcery is not inherently politically anything in particular, but it has a lot more room to maneuver because the rightness of hierarchy and order aren't built into its foundations. (You can probably subvert epic fantasy structures, too, but you'll have to fight against the shape the stories will want to spring back into when you let go, and if you really succeed, maybe you won't have an epic anymore.)

In an epic, a king might be hiding as a scoundrel among a band of basically good-hearted thieves. In sword and sorcery, the scoundrel is just a working class scoundrel who perhaps switched careers from swineherd to something a little more lucrative when she figured out she was good with a stick.

I'm just doing a job #

The epic hero is doing something outside of their normal life. In fact, their whole life is probably interrupted by the events of the story, and they are driven to do the thing that they do for a higher cause, often reluctantly. They just want to return to their life of being a gentleman farmer in the Shire, and in as far as they aren't able to do that, it's a tragedy.

The sword and sorcery hero is here to do a job. Whether they chose it thoughtfully or kind of fell into it, adventuring is their normal life now. They might feel a great deal of professional pride in what they do and not be motivated solely by money, but it is a job. Or at least a way of life. They're pretty unlikely to be whiny about it, because, again, they've chosen to be here. They aren't just waiting to return to their normal life. This is their normal life. The sword and sorcery hero is working class.

The mid-career hero and the tyranny of the hero's journey #

An epic fantasy story is about the most important thing that has ever happened to the character and also the most important thing that has happened in the world.

Usually we join the epic hero pretty early on in their hero-ing, when they are still learning. It doesn't have to be that way, and isn't that way in older epics (like, you know, the Iliad), but contemporary epic fantasy is a sucker for the origin story. It's probably because of the narrative tyranny of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" idea introduced in his 1948 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. So many storytellers since 1948 have taken Campbell's description and theory as a prescription of how a story has to be, that now it's the dominant form of story in the West. It dictates a bunch of story patterns, which you can read about anywhere where people tell you what you ought to be writing, but one of the big ones is that the hero has to start out kind of wimpy and then come into his power over the course of the story. And, yeah, that's a deliberate "he" there. Don't get me started.

So epic is about the hero doing the most important thing they'll ever do, and optionally, also about them coming into their full power. How do we know they'll succeed? I mean, we don't, but we do, because in some way or another, they are the chosen one.

Sword and sorcery, on the other hand, is a day in the life of a swashbuckling professional or sorcerer or what-have-you. We meet the hero mid-career. He's swashed a lot of buckles. She's cast a lot of fireballs. To the people she meets along the way, she's the most exciting thing that's ever happened. To her, it's just Tuesday. Assuming days of the week have been invented in your fantasy world.

A sword and sorcery hero can be ridiculously competent. How do we know the sword and sorcery hero will survive this scrape, aside from that their picture is on the cover of the book? Because look at them! They're so good at what they do! They just totally vanquished goopy swamp monster or stole that priceless jewel right from the cursed tomb. They're a pro at this shit! A complete badass. Then something happens that's hard even for them, and the real fun begins.

You could also have a bumbling sword and sorcery hero, I suppose. I like the competent ones, like Columbo and Murderbot.

Sword and sorcery can include an origin story, but it's just the start of the story, and often, a backstory that's written after the mid-career stories. Because the sword and sorcery hero isn't saving the whole world every time, you don't get into a game of impossible escalation of greater and greater threats to the whole entire world ever. The only real threat to the sword and sorcery hero's career is retirement from the adventuring life.

I say, if you want to write a sword and sorcery story, and here I'm giving advice to myself, too, start in the middle. No need to have the whole thing about the hero leaving home reluctantly for some important reason. Don't worry about a call to adventure. Just have the adventure. You can save backstory for cryptic comments they share over ale after they pull off the first heist in chapter one. If you start writing origin story, it's all too easy to get pulled into the shape of the epic.

Disclaimers and so forth #

I'm not a narratologist or even a storylologist, and I'm just making this up. My only qualification is that I've read a lot of fantasy and a lot of other stories, too. If you've got a different idea about the line between sword and sorcery and other types of fantasy, I don't want to fight you about it. But I would be curious to learn where you draw it.

pmarca's reading list

2023-10-20T00:00:00Z

Earlier this week, internet rich guy pmarca posted a manifesto on his pal Musk's web forum, which he then reposted on his personal web log. I enjoy manifestos as a genre, so I immediately downloaded "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto" onto my phone and then used text-to-speech to read it to me at 2X speed while I stuck cling-stick monster decals to my front windows.

As a manifesto, it's just OK. The opening lacks the punch of classics like "A spectre is haunting Europe" or "'Life' in this 'society' being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of 'society' being at all relevant to women" or even "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Nonetheless, I read it all even though nobody threatened to send a bomb if I didn't.

Why read it at all? #

It's useful to read primary sources. When everyone is yelling about a thing, I want to read the thing instead of just second hand accounts to better understand its influence. Like I said a while ago about reading Derrida:

"I think it's important to read books whose influence has permeated your discipline so that you know where the ideas came from."

And when a powerful and influential person publishes a thing like this, it's also useful to know what ideas they are pushing so that I can see how their influence filters through. However, when you read a manifesto it's important not to take its meaning at face value, or even to respond to the arguments it purports to be making, but to instead examine its rhetorical structure and see what it says about its meaning. What do the inherent contradictions in the structure of the text reveal about its meaning? A manifesto is a modernist form, like collage or the city plan of Brasilia, and so it is particularly generative to apply an early postmodern form of reading to it, that is, deconstruction.

In that spirit, I didn't find much to engage with in the body of the manifesto. It's straight up California Ideology and there is little danger that even a naive reader will pick up any new ideas I need to bother refuting. It's neither uniquely terrible nor uniquely brilliant. Other people have dealt with it better than I can, nearly 30 years ago.

The reading list or whatever it is #

However, what struck me as interesting was the list of names at the end. pmarca introduces it like this

Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism

In lieu of detailed endnotes and citations, read the work of these people, and you too will become a Techno-Optimist.

A list of 56 names in alphabetical order by first names follows.

Like a lot of the manifesto this statement has some weird rhetorical slippage. Is this a syllabus or a list of saints? Which of their works are you supposed to read? What does it mean to "read" somebody like Warhol whose output was mostly visual arts and hosting parties? What does it mean to "read" Von Neumann, whose mathematical proofs and scientific papers most people wouldn't understand without years of preliminary education?

Is this really a list for reading or is it a list for signaling allegiance like those tedious reading lists that hustle culture grift entrepreneurs and MBA bros post on their dating profiles to show they are srz bznz?

What is that first name alphabetization supposed to mean? Is it some kind of shitposter signal that you just put the names into Word and hit "alphabetize"? Is this part of thumbing your nose at academia? Surely a grown-up man knows it's usual to alphabetize names by last name and it means something, right?

Also, that's a lot of patron saints for an area of endeavor. Normally you get one, and you often have to share them with other professions. For example, St. Lucy is the patron saint of the blind and eye problems, and of authors, cutlers, glaziers, stained glass workers, laborers, peasants, and salespeople. (I always thought she was the patron saint of ophthalmologists, too, but maybe that falls under eye problems).

Even popular and old professions like shepherds or sailors get a dozen patron saints, max.

At 56, this isn't a list of patron saints, it's enough saints to populate a calendar. Are we starting a religion here or what? The body of the manifesto tries to signal its rationality with dryness, but the fact that we have 56 saints at the end indicates a certain rapture of the nerds vibe.

Baffle 'em with bullshit #

There is also a rhetorical technique to giving an overwhelmingly long and incoherent "reading list" to your ideological enemies. It's a great way to waste people's time or discredit their counterarguments. Any time they disagree, you can say, "oh well, if you only read all the works of all 56 of these people, you'd agree with me so come back when you have if you want a good faith argument."

Back in the 2000s, when I was at the tail end of my decade of arguing intensely with people on the internet, there was this guy on a mailing list I was on who would say the most preposterous things. He would be willing to go a round or two, but when his arguments started to buckle, he would resort to this one ploy over and over. It went kind of like this "Oh, well, you see it's just that you don't understand esoteric concept X because you haven't read doorstoper volume by famously impenetrable author yet so come back to me when you have." And while I was too impatient to go read the books this dude suggested--which were mostly out of print, too heavy to carry on the bus, and frankly really boring--I naively assumed that he had read the books he was recommending. I mean, he was an educated guy, and over 10 years older than me, and he sounded pretty authoritative, even if half of his attitude was puffery, he must have at least read the books himself, right?

Right?

RIGHT?

Eventually I got some hints he had not read all of the things he insisted other people must read before they were qualified to argue with him. You would think I would have figured it out sooner. I'd gone to grad school by that point and was well aware of the practice of reading just enough of the thing to discuss it in a seminar, but nope, I assumed everyone else actually did all the reading and I was just the one baddie faking my way through critical theory.

Anyway, my forum nemesis was way more eloquent than pmarca and definitely better read, so if I apply my lesson from arguing about the Church Universal And Triumphant with internet occultists, I am inclined to doubt that he or most of his followers have actually read the works of the people on the saints/syllabus list.

Syllabus/saints #

Unfortunately for me, I've got a bit of a Columbo-like tenacity about just checking up on a few background details so uh, I looked up every one of those names, and I made a table. So you don't have to. You're welcome and/or I'm sorry.

Around "John Von Neumann" I ran out of energy to give color commentary, because the list is so long and there were just so many Austrian and Chicago school economists which, like the SCUM manifesto says is "at best, an utter bore." Thus I leave further interpretation of this handy table as an exercise for the reader.

Name	Description	Gender
@BasedBeffJezos	Anonymous twitter shitposter; accelerationist	Dude?
@bayeslord	Anonymous twitter shitposter; accelerationist; probably "Less Wrong" rationalist	Dude?
@PessimistsArc	Project/alt of @louisanslow	Dude
Ada Lovelace	19th century. Theorized the use of a universal computational machine, but it's not clear if anyone actually reads anything she wrote or do they just list her because she's a lady programmer? Also, only legitimate child of Lord Byron so that's cool.	Lady
Adam Smith	18th century philosopher interested in ethics and economy. Known for The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). Do people actually read The Theory of Moral Sentiments?	Dude
Andy Warhol	20th century multimedia artist, founding figure of pop art movement AFAIK he didn't write things as such so it's not that meaningful to say "read" Warhol. When I think of Warhol and writing the main thing that comes to mind is the SCUM manifesto by his would-be assassin	Dude
Bertrand Russell	20th century philosopher and mathematician A founder of analytic philosophy (which sucks except for Wittgenstein) Wrote Principia Mathematica together with Whitehead I bet people mostly know him for the teapot Have these losers actually read him? He seems hard.	Dude
Brad DeLong	Late 20th/Early 21st century economist Started out neoliberal but now regrets his life choices "The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years."	Dude
Buckminster Fuller	20th century. Geodesic dome mystic, kind of cool	Dude
Calestous Juma	20th century scientist and economist	Dude
Clayton Christensen	20th century business mormon, part of the MBA grift	Dude
Dambisa Moyo	20/21st century, inspirational speaker about being rich	Lady
David Deutsch	20/21st century computer scientist, actually a scientist	Dude
David Friedman	20/21st century anarcho-capitalist writer, economist, and medieval reenactor	Dude
David Ricardo	18/19th century economist	Dude
Deirdre McCloskey	20/21st century economist	Lady
Doug Engelbart	20/21st centory computer scientist, invented the mouse	Dude
Elting Morison	20th century historian of technology	Dude
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti	19/20 century artist and poet Writer of Futurist Manifesto and one of the founders of Futurism, which is cool Also co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, so that's not great	Dude
Frederic Bastiat	19th century economist, developed the idea of opportunity cost	Dude
Frederick Jackson Turner	19/20th century American historian Known for "frontier thesis" so that's probably as bad as it sounds	Dude
Friedrich Hayek	20th century political economist Founder of Austrian School of economics Big fan of Thatcher???	Dude
Friedrich Nietzsche	19th century German philosopher One of the founders of existentialism I honestly doubt these losers understand him Big into misogyny Not actually a Nazi at all, that's all posthumous work by his sister so maybe he had a point with the misogyny	Dude
George Gilder	Speechwriter for Nixon and other weirdos Big booster of the internet in the 90s Funded and prolifically contributed to an anti-evolution "intelligent design" thinktank	Dude
Isabel Paterson	20th century writer and critic Founder of American Libertarianism Influenced Ayn Rand but they unfriended each over because of differences about theism Did actually write novels that one might read	Lady
Israel Kirzner	20/21st century economist, Austrian School	Dude
James Burnham	20th century American philosopher Started out as a Trotskyist Got recruited by a precursor of the CIA and became a kind of spook Oddly enough turned super right wing after that I'm not saying he was faking being a Communist at the start but the about face sure shows a certain moral flexibility	Dude
James Carse	20th century writer Known for Finite and Infinite Games Which is pretty good actually, and a very good description of why Dungeons and Dragons is so fun	Dude
Joel Mokyr	20th/21st century economic historian Big fan of forever growth	Dude
Johan Norberg	20th/21st century thunk leader, Cato Institute	Dude
John Galt	This is a fictional character from an Ayn Rand novel As if this list wasn't so much of a sausage party already he had to add a fictional sausage	Dude
John Von Neumann	20th century mathematician and computer scientist A real scientist and a hardocre mathematician whose accomplishments I can barely comprehend But what exactly are you supposed to read "by" him?	Dude
Joseph Schumpeter	20th century economist; Austrian school	Dude
Julian Simon	20th century economist; Chicago school	Dude
Kevin Kelly	20/21st century, founding editor of Wired magazine	Dude
Louis Rossetto	20/21st century, founder of Wired	Dude
Ludwig von Mises	20th century economist, Austrian school	Dude
Marian Tupy	21st century Cato Institute thunk leader; apparently not notable enough for a Wikipedia page	Dude
Martin Gurri	21st century, former CIA analyst, blogger	Dude
Matt Ridley	20/21st century member of hereditary British aristocarcy, banker, pro-brexit, hobby economist	Dude
Milton Friedman	20/21st century economist, Chicago school	Dude
Neven Sesardic	20/21st century, Croatian scientist trying to rehabilitate scientific racism	Dude
Nick Land	21st century philosopher, "Dark enlightenment," basically a neonazi	Dude
Paul Collier	20/21st century economist	Dude
Paul Johnson	No idea which dude he means	Dude
Paul Romer	20/21st century economist,	Dude
Ray Kurzweil	20/21st century computer scientist	Dude
Richard Feynman	20th century physicist	Dude
Rose Wilder Lane	20th century writer, libertarian	Lady
Stephen Wolfram	20/21st century computer scientist	Dude
Stewart Brand	20/21st century, editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, founding member fo the WELL	Dude
Thomas Sowell	20/21st century economist	Dude
Vilfredo Pareto	19th/20th century economist, free market, Mussolini fan	Dude
Virginia Postrel	20/21st century writer, libertarian	Lady
William Lewis	Unclear which one	Dude
William Nordhaus	20/21st century economist	Dude

This is the worst syllabus I have ever read.

Is Batman a furry?

2023-10-13T00:00:00Z

Yes, Batman is a furry. Consider the pro and anti arguments.

Pro-furry arguments:

Wears an anthropomorphic animal costume for personal reasons
Feels a strong emotional connection to the animal, including using that animal’s iconography as a kind of identifying marker
Wearing the suit allows him to express a true aspect of his personality that is otherwise hidden, which matches my understanding of fursonas
Spares no expense on the costume
Longest romantic relationship is with another anthropomorphic animal costume wearer (Catwoman)
Involved in an ongoing internecine conflict with another passionate animal costumer (Penguin)

Anti-furry arguments:

Costume not actually furry, even though bats have fur
No evidence of commissioned furry art in the Batcave
Possible that he wears the costume for professional reasons, like a cop, and the apparent personality differences are just what you expect from someone given power to do violence

The anti arguments are weaker and I can think of plausible refutations for each one.

Possible refutations for anti-furry arguments:

Furry costumes are stylized and rarely depict the animal in anatomical detail. Furry is not a literal term and the animal need not actually be covered in fur.
Arguably the whole Batcave, Batmobile, and various Bat-accoutrements are commissioned furry art. Batman might just prefer his art as three dimensional sculptures or craft objects rather than drawings or paintings.
The bat costume is not a typical law enforcement attire and has many non-practical aspects (nipples, ears, cape) that go beyond professional requirements for cops.

So on the whole, yes, Batman is a furry, romantically involved with other furries, and fully participating in furry drama.

This persuasive essay was originally posted in its current form on an alt Tumblr I made, persuasive-posts, where I thought I would write persuasive essays about unimportant things. But I can't keep a gimmick going so it became just another Tumblr in the world with only one post. That seems sad, and a waste of a perfectly good haha-only-serious persuasive essay so I have moved it here. And before Tumblr it was a forum post in a members-only forum.

Shaky Saturn, you're my guy

2023-10-06T00:00:00Z

It's too hot to think and all the smart things I was going to say leaked out of my brain at about 5 p.m. After staring at the internet for an hour instead of writing, I stepped onto my deck to try to cool off and saw a kind of yellowish-orange blob in the Eastish. I'm due for a new pair of glasses and nighttime really brings out my astigmatism for some reason, but my color vision is rather good just the same. Maybe it's Mars, I thought, and brought out my sky app to identify it. The sky app, as usual popped up some weird ads and notifications but they were too small to read, because, as I said, I'm definitely due for a new pair of glasses.

Saturn, not Mars, says the app. So I had the bright idea to look at it with my bird-o-scope (or spotting scope for bird watching, if you want to be boring about it). Maybe I could resolve some detail, get that sense of a sickle shape, which, perhaps, exceptionally bright-eyed ancients dimly perceived and thus attributed the sickle to Saturn.

It took a good while to find the right zoom, and then to find Saturn in the sky tracing lines of nearby buildings along and up. Then I had it. A slightly clearer yellowish blob of Saturn, swimming wildly about in my sights, kind of like a pinprick of light from a burning brand or a far off glow stick in a vigorous dance. If you've ever looked through a telescope or a strong pair of binoculars, you probably know what I mean. Even the very small motions of your body are enough to make objects seen at close magnification appear to swim about in your vision, and if those objects emit light, they leave light trails, too.

After trying various things--first free standing, then placing the scope on the deck rail, then bracing my elbows on the deck rail--I finally found a way to get the shaking to stop for a moment. Bracing one elbow while I covered my free eye with my hand, I held my breath and I saw it, that squashed shape, a kind of sideways angle of rings, just barely there and you had to know what you're looking for to see, just for a moment. "Oh shit!" I said probably rather loudly in my wonder and immediately lost it.

That trick of holding your breath to stabilize a magnified object in a viewfinder? I picked it up from playing Metal Gear Solid II. Video games teach you lots of practical things.

Of course I couldn't get it again because I'd been holding my arm up for too long and now the muscles were shaking. And I had to see it again, to make sure I really saw. I mean, had I seen it, or was I just hoping so much to see the rings that I made myself believe that a sideways shake was actually the outline of the rings?

After a rest, and a lot more struggle, I got it one more time, my squashed oblong friend on the plane of the ecliptic.

And still I didn't know if I should believe what I saw. Could I really see the rings with just my bird-o-scope? Sky and Telescope says "The rings of Saturn should be visible in even the smallest telescope at 25x." And, yes, my bird-o-scope says 27x on the side, so yes, I could after all, believe my eyes.

I went to see it one more time, now that I wrote all this. It's moved along the plane of the ecliptic in the last hour, so it's at a more convenient angle. I can't seem to get enough of proving to myself that it's still real, still there, and seeing it for myself. It's not enough to see it and it's not enough to know it, I must repeat the experiment and cross-check my observation, and only then can I claim my delight as real. And once it's real, it doesn't diminish with repetition.

I did not choose the succulent life; the succulent life chose me

2023-09-29T00:00:00Z

The first succulents I remember distinctly were a pair of cacti that my grandmother had in a sunny little back room that I had to pass through on the way to the outhouse. The cacti were rather small, and they lived in different places depending on the season. I mostly don't care for cacti, because I think they are out to get you, but I liked^[1] my grandmother intensely and so I liked everything about her, including the cacti^[2].

After that, I didn't think about succulents much for decades, despite spending the last two of those decades in San Francisco, where succulents grow spectacularly well, and so the sidewalks are planted with wonderful succulent gardens. OK, I am exaggerating a little bit. I did think about how pretty other people's succulent gardens were, and I took pictures of them sometimes, but I thought of them very much like other people's dogs or other people's Victorian houses with perfect paint jobs: Like very nice things to be admired but as something I would ever get involved with.

The first succulent that snuck its way into my house was a plumeria I bought in Hawaii in 2016. I didn't even know until this year that plumerias are succulents. The plumeria is pretty easy to care for and I have managed to not kill it for a long time. I even got it to bloom.

Then, the pandemic started, and with it, for some reason, succulents began to enter my life and my house at an accelerated pace. First, my spouse got a mixed arrangement of pretty succulents in a big spherical pot as a thank you gift from work. Then, I got a tiny gift succulent as a favor at a friend's (outdoor) birthday party. Finally, I got a zebra plant (Haworthia attenuata) in a glued-in box that came in the mail as a work holiday gift. The Haworthia was so mysterious and slow growing that I speculated with my coworkers if it was really alive. I took pictures of it over time to prove to myself that it's alive.

The Haworthia is definitely alive, by the way. It needs to recover from its years glued-in though.

Most of the succulents in the pretty arrangement failed, because I didn't know how to care for them properly. The party favor plant also didn't survive. Well, sort of didn't, but also sort of did. Because I learned you could propagate succulents from leaves and other kinds of cuttings, and early last year I really got into that. You're telling me a single succulent leaf can sprout a whole mini-succulent plant with roots and you can just grow that? Sign me up!

I also started looking for broken off bits of succulents lying on the sidewalk and just started picking them up and sticking them in my pockets. Then I laid them down on some dirt to see if they'd grow. Most of them just shriveled up and died. But some of them flourished.

Then invariably, when I started trying to be nice to them by paying attention to them, they would begin to wilt. I couldn't figure it out. (It wasn't just over-watering, believe it or not.) I tried to read about succulents online, watched videos, and even joined the succulents Reddit, but I couldn't figure it out.

Finally, in early August, I signed up for an in-person terrarium-making class at Succulence. In that 2-hour class I learned more about caring for succulents than I had figured out from years of trial and error and reading the internet. Turns out, some things are really better learned in person.

In fact, I was so completely convinced that in-person is the way to learn about growing succulents, that I immediately looked for some kind of club or society to join. And thus the day after I took the class, I joined the San Francisco Succulent & Cactus Society. Two days later, I attended the society's September meeting, where I learned even more, picked up a bunch of cuttings from the free cuttings table, and also quickly realized that I have to start learning the names of succulents if I want to grow them. Because, surprise surprise, not all succulents want the same thing, nor are they necessarily easy to grow, and the only way to figure out what your succulent wants and get advice from other people is to know what the darn thing is called.

So I went to the library and checked out a couple books about succulents, which is how I learned that plumerias are a succulent. There's so much to learn and I feel like I'm unlocking a key to a part of the world that was hidden in plain sight before.

At the October meeting of the San Francisco Succulent & Cactus Society I picked up even more free cuttings. This picture is just the babies. The big succulents get watered separately. I'm running out of both dirt and pots. I have ordered a literal bag of rocks which is meant to arrive this weekend, along with more succulent potting soil and a bunch of perlite.

I don't know what I'll run out of first, sunny spaces in my house or enthusiasm for succulents. I know me, so I know these obsessions don't last for ever, but succulent growing is so full of satisfying variety, and so forgiving of the occasional weeks of neglect, that it might be a hobby that sticks.

Footnotes #

I also loved my grandmother, but it's all too common to love relatives without necessarily liking them, and so I think it's much more remarkable to say I liked my grandmother. ↩︎
But wait, you might be thinking, I thought this was going to be about succulents, not cactuses?! Well, actually, cacti are succulents, though not all succulents are cacti. It's a bit of a rectangle-square situation. ↩︎

El Camino Del Mar at Dusk

2023-09-23T00:00:00Z

Happy Autumnal Equinox to all in the Northern Hemisphere! There is a certain peculiar feeling I get at the autumnal turn. It's a gestalt, a felt sense, some kind of suchness or maybe haecceity of this change, like I can feel the shift of the entire world though the complete combination of all the little shifts all together. Actually, to call it a feeling would imply it's an emotion only and that's entirely too single-dimensional a sense of the thing. It is both stronger and more subtle than that. Because of this ineffable but recurrent sense of this moment, I have written multiple poems trying to eff it, as it were. The poem I'm sharing today is part of that spontaneously-arising series (so is The Photograph We Didn't Take at Baker Beach).

"El Camino Del Mar at Dusk" was first published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue.

El Camino Del Mar at Dusk #

The sun has just set and a lavender haze
             glows behind the darkening silhouettes
                          of cypresses that lean away from the shore.

Seagulls’ cries cut through
              the far-below breakers,
                            and sparrows spill from bush to bush,
                                          chirping the ingathering call of evening.

At the Land’s End labyrinth families
            are still trying to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge.
                          The startled moon has been tossed into the sky,
                                       and I think it will light my way,
                                                     but redwoods and bushes and blackberry brambles
                                                                   form a dim tunnel where raccoons rustle.

Darkness gathers at the feet of giant fennel
              and danger smells like black licorice.

At last, I emerge at the trailhead where the Legion of Honor
              columns are all lit up for the evening,
                            and a fountain out front conceals
                                         the sound of the ocean,

and the gray path snakes downhill
              to the city made of beaded lights.

Thinking about thinking about the Roman Empire

2023-09-22T00:00:00Z

This Monday morning, my spouse and I are sitting in bed drinking coffee, reading the internet on our respective handheld computers.

Spouse: How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

Me: About once a week.

Spouse: Did you know that’s a meme?

Me: No.

Half an hour later after reading a few think pieces on men thinking about the Roman Empire

Me: Wait, did you mean Rome in general or just the Empire? I’m not sure how much I’m thinking about the Republic vs the Empire. It might be a different amount.

I love trash #

Now it has been almost a week and I bet a lot more people have been thinking about the Roman Empire, or maybe Ancient Rome in general, more than they usually do. I've read a lot of trash articles and OK thinkpieces, and I guess I'm just adding to it here. Well, sorry. I could have written about Ed Ruscha or weird mushrooms, or the succulent society, or even picked up haunted manuals again (I do have an outline), but no, instead I am compelled to eat from the trash can and write trash. As my two favorite philosophers, Slavoj Žižek and Oscar the Grouch have opined

"I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating." The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)

and

"I love trash." Sesame Street (1969)

And I'm always a little fascinated by these women are like this, and men are like that trends. Because, if you know me, you'll know that my spouse is a man. And I am, well, I am not a man. It's not the first time where I found myself in the neither this nor that of gender categories, though it may be one of the sillier times. Because on the one hand I'm saying, yes, I think about Ancient Rome at the frequency of a man, apparently, but based on my research ^[1], I think about different things about Ancient Rome than manly Rome-fantasizing men think about.

What I think about when I think about Ancient Rome #

When I think about Ancient Rome I think a lot about the stuff that Ancient Romans ate. Like garum the stinky fermented fish sauce they apparently put on everything, or about Roman bread which was round and looked like it had big pizza slices, or about the fact that most Romans probably didn't cook at home and just got cooked food out from vendors. I especially think about edible dormice, which are yes, a kind of tiny rodent, and which were a delicacy in Ancient Rome. Rich people would breed them in special jars called glirarium so the dormice would be extra fresh. And like, I know how weird this sounds. The first few times I read about Romans eating little stuffed rodents as decadent snacks, I thought I was probably misreading or misunderstanding. Nope, they absolutely ate mice^[2].

I think a lot about Pompeii, because I was obsessed with volcanos as a kid, in exactly the same way as some kids get obsessed with dinosaurs. Also because I saw Last Supper in Pompeii: From the Table to the Grave at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2021 and it was so astounding, I made an important change in my life. That exhibition had a lot of day-to-day stuff from people's lives. Previously, I found a lot of stuff about Rome pretty tedious because it tended to focus on marble busts of boring looking dudes with names that all ended in "us" and their military exploits. You may take it as read I am making the jerking off motion in the direction of a phalanx. I mean OK, a phalanx is cool once. A jar full of holes that people bred dormice in on the other hand? That's cool at least a dozen times.

Speaking of jerking off motions, I also love the way Romans had just, a very different attitude towards phalluses than modern Americans and Europeans do. They liked to decorate things with them, for luck. Not for the Romans a mere phallic symbol. No, they would stick penises with wings all over their wind chimes. And some of those penises with wings had their own penises. Or they would place life-sized ithyphallic deities with larger than life penises in their gardens. Again, for luck, and possibility agrarian fecundity. As a modern person brought up in American and European cultures, I find that shit hilarious.

Genius and Lares #

The other thing I think about a lot is how in addition to all the official big-name Gods, the Romans had all these hyper-local Gods. Every mildly important place had its own God, a genius loci. We now think of that meaning metaphorically, the spirit of a place, but it was a real God, a real spirit. Wherever you went, you had to make sure not to offend the genius loci, and you'd probably make some prayers and offerings to it if you were about to do something important.

Your house had its own guardian divinity, a Lares, and houses had a domestic shrine, called a lararium where you would make sacrifices both to your house guardian spirit, but also to your own personal guardian spirit. For men, this personal divinity is called a Genius, and for women, a Juno. And like, this is not your own soul, but it's also kind of personal. I think the Guardian Angel ideal is kind of similar, though I don't think Christians make food offerings to their Guardian Angels, nor are Guardian Angels generally supposed to have some personality traits similar to the person they guard, whereas the Genius or Juno might. Also the lararium often had a picture of a snake, often accepting offerings. I've seen the snake referred to as the agathadaimon and I can't quite figure out if the "good spirit" snake and the Lares are the same or if they just go together. I also got the impression that maybe some households had actual pet/sacred snakes.

At the time I went to see the Pompeii exhibition, I was exploring getting involved with a religion that has a lot of similar ideas of genius loci and a world full of invisible beings and your personal divinity. A lot of it was cool, but I also felt like there were some things that I found weird in a not cool way, however I felt like I had to just put up with them for the parts I liked, because where else would I find this kind of richness and good weirdness? Anyway I was ambivalent, maybe even conflicted. And then I saw all this stuff about Ancient Rome and the the domestic shrines of Pompeii, and weird as that felt over the distance of time, it also felt a lot more comfortable. Like, I could have this richness connected to the culture that I was already connected to, rather than either trying to acculturate to something foreign or getting involved in some cultural appropriation nonsense. Neither of those paths sounded cool. Painting a giant snake shrine and making sacrifices of incense to local spirits and my personal Juno/Genius, or at least thinking about what it might be like to live my life that way sounded cool.

So, because of the Lares and the agathodaimon I got uninvolved with the fascinating but occasionally uncomfortable foreign religious group with a lot less regret and ambivalence than I would have otherwise. The lararia of Pompeii reminded me many of the things I was hoping to get from it were already part of the lineage I had connected with, and a culture I was far more familiar with. Maybe this is is similar to what Rome-pondering dudes get out of thinking about Ancient Rome, too, a sense of connection to something that seems missing in modern life but which they can point to as being part of their heritage.

All the other stuff #

There's a lot more to think about Ancient Rome besides food and household shrines. But honestly, I think the thnkpieces have it mostly covered. Most of it just boring dude stuff, and the parts that aren't I'm too tired to think about to write about clearly (like the whole patermailias gig and the patriarchy and the corrosiveness of slavery, and the broken fantasies of masculinity).

My only regret is I didn't talk about augury. Because prophetic chickens, oh man. Someday I'm going to have to write about augury vs haruspicy and we'll talk about prophetic chickens then. In the meantime, if you're thinking about the Roman Empire, maybe try thinking about the Roman Republic a little bit, too.

Photo credit #

The header photo is a a cropped version of Photograph of a first-century Roman Lararium from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii by Patricio Lorente. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. As such, my header image, is shared under the same license.

Reading at least 2 articles and skimming several headlines. ↩︎
Technically dormice aren't mice, but they are basically mice with furry tails. ↩︎

The Gate of Pinecones

2023-09-15T00:00:00Z

This poem was first published in The Coachella Review in the Winter 2018 issue, along with another poem of mine, "El Camino Del Mar at Dusk."

I've found it challenging to place poems with nature imagery that's explicitly West Coast or even more, specifically Californian. In grad school, my advisor called it the four seasons bias. If it's a nature poem, it better follow the four seasons climate or good luck to you getting published. So when I'm browsing Duotrope for likely journals, I look for names that hint they might be open to West Coast imagery. "Coachella" was a big hint, making me think of the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm at the Coachella Valley entrance (and not the festival, because I am a big nerd). I was really happy that both of these poems found a home, and I appreciate the journal's openness to this kind of imagery.

The Coachella Review is online, and you can read the entire Winter 2018 Issue. They also accept submissions, though you should check when the submission period is open.

The Gate of Pinecones #

Will you come through the gate of pinecones
where Baker Beach breakers bite the shoreline
and flights of bent-necked pelicans
hover in the winds against the serpentine cliffs
that winter rains weaken and ruin

where the falcon stands still in the coastal thermals
and I say in a hundred round about ways
as we kiss in the bunker’s cement pillbox
and observe the coastal fog float on the inversion layer
that I have already fallen, that I am already falling
that I am already ruined, that I am falling
into the ocean, that I have already jumped
that I am dissolved that I am a landslide
that the land has slid out from under me

And the force of this is, yes, like high tide
like undertow that pulls you deeper if you fight
but I, like a surfer, like a fool,
went in willingly.

Hair metal fantasy Cymbeline in McLaren Park

2023-09-07T00:00:00Z

Did you know that Cymbeline is not a girl’s name? Yeah, its a guy’s name, as I found out while reading the Wikipedia entry for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in the cab on the way to McLaren Park on Labor Day to see the free performance. I mention this not to educate you about old-timey names or my ignorance thereof, but to illustrate how much I knew about Cymbeline going into the performance.

Which is to say, I knew it was a Shakespeare play, and not one of the super-famous ones, and I knew that the posters for it looked like a hair metal fantasy movie from the 80s, and that it was free. I’d seen that poster every time I went to get burritos at my local taqueria, and I thought, whatever this is, it’s gonna be weird.

That is not my normal experience with Shakespeare performances, and I bet it’s not most people’s, either. Not most people who make a habit of seeing Shakespeare plays, anyway. When I see a film adaptation or go to a live performance, it’s usually a play I already know. Things like following the plot or knowing who the characters are is not normally an issue when it’s say, Macbeth or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I had no idea what I was in for with Cymbeline, and as the play started with a long(ish) prologue, I was a little worried I might not be able to follow the action, never mind appreciate the poetry. So for the first time, I got to experience what it must be like for people who aren’t familiar with the plays to see them. And you know what? It made sense and I could keep track of the people and what they were scheming about even when the same actor played multiple roles.

Shakespeare singalong #

I love Shakespeare in the Park as a thing in general. You can eat snacks, bring your dog, zone out, lie in the grass, and let yourself pay as much or as little attention as you want, all while feeling fancy as heck, thinking this is probably how audiences in Shakespeare’s time experienced it. Honestly, I have no idea if they really did, but it’s fun to imagine it was so.

I like the rowdiness that Shakespeare in the Park brings out. In a theater, people are often kind of reserved like it’s a church, especially if it’s one of the tragedies (even though one of the funniest dirty bits of comedy is in Macbeth).

SF Shakes (aka the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival) tapped into that rowdy-loopy potential energy of an outdoor crowd by inviting us to sing along, right at the beginning. We’re the chorus to the Greek chorus and we sing out

“Woe, woe, woooooooe”

while the electric keyboard plays a piece that feels like it could be right out of Willow or Highlander II. I felt a little weird about it at first, but it had the cool effect of loosening up the audience. We cheered when things went well for the characters. Booed when they did something stupid or mean. Talked back to them on stage. It’s not Rocky Horror level talk-back, nor is the singalong sea shanty level singalong, but that’s the vibe.

This is probably a good time to mention that Eiko Yamamoto (Musician #2, Mother, Arviragus) and Brian Herndon (Musician #1) who did most (maybe all?) of the musical numbers were particularly good. I wan’t expecting so much music and definitely not so much electric keyboard, but I’m really happy it happened.

A little bit about the story #

Cymbeline is the king and the titular character, but the story is much more about his kids than about him. Centrally, we have the love story between his daughter Imogen and her beloved, Posthumus Leonatus (As an aside, what the hell kind of name is Posthumus? I thought for a moment it was going to be some kind of ghost story.) There are also her two brothers, whose names I kept forgetting because they were kidnapped as children and raised under different names, which is what they are referred to as through most of the play. And there’s an oddly important subplot about paying taxes (tribute) to the Roman emperor.

The story starts with beats you’d recognize from a tragedy: Imogen and Posthumus secretly married, Posthumus exiled, evil stepmother/queen procuring poison, Posthumus hatching an idiotic plan to prove his love’s faithfulness by having his friend go and try to seduce her, then asking his servant to murder her(!) when his friend (more like frenemy) produces evidence he did seduce her (even though he totally didn’t because we saw his knavish trickery right there on stage).

But then it goes off the rails. There’s a duel that ends with a beheading played for laughs. There’s a war with Rome that the Britons unexpectedly win. And then there’s the dream sequence with rock and roll Jupiter and a squawking eagle.

When I say rock and roll Jupiter, I mean the actor playing the god Jupiter is holding an electric guitar (or perhaps bass) which I think he strums. Look, it’s a dream sequence, so it can be weird, and it probably should be weird, but even in this rather daring production, it was a surprise. The actors were all 100% committed to it, which is important when shit gets this bizarre. As I understood the dream sequence, and I admit I did lose the plot a bit here, Posthumus’ dead parents appeared in his dream while he was in prison, sang an extremely heartfelt prayer to the god Jupiter who sent an eagle and gave some blessings, and so next thing you know, orders come freeing Posthumus from prison. Later, all the blessings that Jupiter gave out come to be and we get a happy ending. Is this a Deus ex Machina? It was still somehow quite satisfying nonetheless.

Not to sound like a philistine who only likes the popular stuff, but I think Cymbeline is not that good as Shakespeare’s plays go. There are good reasons it doesn’t get performed as much as say, The Tempest. And, not to like, criticize the Bard, but it should have been called Imogen and Posthumus, though then Posthumus would have needed a better name and it’s historical, so you know, never mind, I can see why it’s called Cymbeline.

Queer subtext, queer text #

The program says that this version of Cymbeline depicts Posthumus as a trans man who recently came out. I don’t think I would have picked up on that if I hadn’t read it in the program. Like, I’m really happy to go with it, but if it was important to the way this performance told the story, it should have been somehow made more obvious. There is already so much cross-dressing, dissembling and role-swapping in Shakespeare that queer subtext is spilling out all over the place. What would it take to raise it to the level of text? I don’t know, but this performance didn’t quite.

When and where to see it and some practicalities #

The next two performances are in San Francisco at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park this weekend, Saturday, September 9 and Sunday, September 10, both at 2 pm. See details about these and other performances, the venue and transportation on the SF Shakes website. Also in case the name Free Shakespeare in the Park doesn't give it away, it's free.

The sound is amplified and it’s really loud. If you wear earplugs in movie theaters, you’re going to want to wear them to this performance. On the other hand if you have difficulty hearing the mumbly dialogue in a lot of movies, you’ll probably be fine here.

Parking is limited (a nice way of saying parking sucks) so take the bus or a cab if you at all can. There was plenty of disabled parking, though, so if you need that and have a placard you can park easily. The seating in the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater is on wood benches with backs, so you don’t necessarily need to bring a blanket or chair to sit on.

About the images #

The images in this post and their descriptions are courtesy of the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival.

The header image shows the performers, left to right, Eiko Yamamoto as Musician #2, Catherine Luedtke* as the Queen, Nathaniel Andalis* as Cloten, Ron Chapman* as Cymbeline, Brian Herndon* as Musician #1, and Mayou Roffé as Caius Lucius in San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s 2023 Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline. (*Member Actors’ Equity Association / Photo: Neal Ormond)

The middle image shows William Rogue as Jupiter in San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s 2023 Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline. (Photo: Neal Ormond)

The inner life manifest as supernatural in The Shining

2023-09-01T00:00:00Z

I rewatched Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) this week as homework. I've been writing so much about metaphorical haunted houses and I thought the metaphor was getting a little thin. I wanted to ground it in a real haunted house. Or at least a real fictional haunted house story. I thought the movie was even better than I remembered it, more beautiful, much scarier, and much richer in meaning. However, it's not so much of a clear-cut haunted house story. My spouse, who watched it for the first time with me, found the ambiguity annoying. Are we supposed to think the ghosts are literally real? Are the characters hallucinating them? Are they a metaphor? What really happened?

Here’s how I read it, and this struck me as immediately obvious when I saw the film this time, so obvious I’m almost embarrassed to write about it. That’s why I wrote this whole intro that honestly, you could skip over and just go straight to my assertion, except I’m worried people will stay that’s basic baby stuff, everybody who knows anything about gothic will be like, no shit, of course. Anyway, here we go.

The Shining takes the inner psychological reality of the dynamics of domestic abuse and makes it visible on the outside as ghosts, visions, and supernatural powers. It doesn’t particularly heighten and certainly doesn’t exaggerate the objective reality of abuse and intimate partner violence. The inner reality of the violence is visible along with its usual outer manifestation.

Because of this double vision, it’s not exactly a fable or allegory. Nor, in my opinion, is anyone inside the story hallucinating. In as far as some characters see things that others don’t, they are merely more preceptive about the forces around them. For example, the psychically gifted child, Danny, sees the ghosts and hallways of blood before anyone else does, sensing the danger inherent in his parents violent relationship. Eventually, Wendy, the mother, sees them, too, but just as it takes much longer for her to accept the reality of the danger she’s in from her husband, so it it takes her longer to perceive the ghosts and ghastly visions.

I don’t want to analyze every supernatural event in the film, but let me give a few examples.

The child who knows more than he should #

Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony, appears after his father injures him in a drunken rage–injures him badly enough that he has to be taken out of school. Tony seems older than Danny, warns Danny of danger that Danny could not perceive by normal means, and takes over Danny’s entire personality when things are too scary for Danny to deal with.

Children in abusive families often become hypervigilant as a survival mechanism. They are more attuned to the subtle undercurrents between family members than normal, and might seem older than they are because, frankly, they have seen some shit. Sometimes they withdraw emotionally, or even disassociate. Danny’s psychic powers are a literalization of that hypervigilance, and the somewhat ominous Tony is a supernatural literalization of both the adultificaiton and dissociation.

As an aside, it’s a classic tenet of poltergeist studies (if one may call it that) that poltergeists are often the manifestation of the uncontrolled psychic abilities of children going through a traumatic period in their lives, often puberty. So there’s a real resonance with the abused Danny developing his own psychic frenemy.

The woman who doubts her own sanity #

Feeling like you’re going crazy–and specifically being made to feel like you’re going crazy by another person–is a common inner experience of abuse victims. Throughout the film, Wendy puts up with Jack’s mercurial moods and bizarre “rules” for her, which is just the normal abusive stuff. You might almost miss it, or just wonder why Wendy’s such a pushover if you aren't’ tuned in to abuse dynamics.

In the latter half of The Shining, when the ghosts have really started acting up, an incident draws that gaslit feeling to the fore. Wendy sees marks on Danny’s neck where someone has attempted to strangle him. First, she blames Jack, who has after all severely injured Danny before. Then, Danny tells her that a mysterious woman in room 237 attacked him, and she returns to Jack for help.

Jack, who has at this point be getting drunk with a malevolent ghost bartender, goes to the room, and finds the mysterious woman. At first she is beautiful and seductive, and he begins to kiss her. Then he sees her in a mirror and she is both old and literally rotting, and so, horrified he runs away. But when he returns to Wendy, he denies having seen the woman who attacked Danny, denies having attacked Danny himself, and then literally gaslights her by saying Danny must have done it himself. As viewers, we get the double disorienting irony: Wendy was wrong about Jack hurting Danny this time, but was right to fear that he’ll hurt her and Danny again, and was right in thinking that Jack was lying to her. The confusion that the ghosts introduce to our experience as viewers gives a taste of the feeling of being gaslit.

Also, way that Wendy is sort of hapless and annoyingly floppy is the way a lot of domestic abuse victims feel from the outside. Why don't you just leave? Why do you doubt yourself? This guy is clearly going to kill you, oh my god just grab your kid and run. But she doesn't. She goes to a fucking isolated mountainside hotel on an Indian burial ground. Because she has been ground down in an abusive relationship and no longer believes herself.

The man possessed by a hidden evil #

Abusers often seem to flip back and forth between two selves, one sweet and kind, the other temperamental, cruel and violent. It is as though they were possessed. “I was not myself,” they say in defensive apology, or “I was drunk, and so I was not myself.”

Except, of course, a person cannot be anything other than who they are when they act, as it is our actions that constitute who we are. There is no hidden core of self, untouched by what we do, so that we can stand aside from what we have done and disavow it. But anyway, enough existentialism.

The Shining gives that that defensive fake apology double vision with ghosts and alcohol. Jack chooses to drink alcohol again and embrace the worst part of himself–so far so normal. Except in this case, the alcohol is served to him by a malevolent ghost, who encourages Jack’s misogynistic thinking. The ghosts exploit Jack’s existing flaws, bringing him back to alcoholism, encouraging his existing violent tendencies, and drawing his (perhaps societally normal) misogyny to its extreme logic where he must “correct” his wife and child by murdering them.

Instead of being possessed by the demon drink to acts of violence, it’s literal evil ghosts–though things get complicated here because do they possess him? Or do they just persuade him? Or are the ghosts just a manifestation of the hidden evil already within him? This, I think, is the most ambiguous of the ghostly manifestations, on purpose, because it leaves some room for moral choice. Still, by the end of the film, he does seem if not a man possessed, at least like a man possessed.

And, the inner life of abusers aside, from the outside if you only knew their nice self, when they turn it certainly looks and feels like they are possessed.

Real ghosts? Real how? #

So, to answer the question, are the ghosts and other supernatural events real? They are real to the characters in the story. But as viewers, I think we should take them as a dream like visualization of the dynamics of domestic abuse, intimate partner violence, and finally, family annihilation.

Thus, I’m not too worried about questions like what really happened in the Overlook hotel in the past, or how Jack ended up in the picture, or what Tony really is. It’s not that important that all those questions are answered completely, with every lose end tied up. It would be like asking a dream to make logical sense. It only has to make emotional and thematic sense.

Coda #

There’s a lot more I haven’t touched, like the Indian burial ground thing, and the racial dynamics, and America’s original sin, but I’m pretty sure someone else has written that, definitely. Take it as read I’m aware that a movie like The Shining has a lot of layers of possible interpretation and I’m just focusing on one here not because it’s the only right one, but because it’s the one that struck me particularly.

A taxonomy of old haunted manuals

2023-08-25T00:00:00Z

Haunted manuals are a lot like haunted houses. Some of them are old and got that way because something horrible happened in the past and it’s marked them. Some got that way because something wonderful happened there and they have been neglected. Some are abandoned. Some still have people living in them. And some were born haunted.

Did I lose you? If so, I might suggest going back to part 1, where I introduced the idea of haunted manuals and promised examples. This is the post with the examples. I spent too long defining the curse of knowledge and hauntology last time to get to them. I should add that pretty much all of my examples are online documentation. It’s what I’ve known. I kind of suspect that print manuals are less likely to become haunted in many of the ways I’ve outlined, but then again, maybe only the unhaunted manuals survive to be sold in ephemera shops to weirdo collectors.

I’m going to be like Kant here, or maybe de Sade, and organize the types of haunted manuals into categories and subcategories, even though I’m making it all up, so it seems very rational.

Old haunted manuals #

I think it's more intuitive to imagine that old things become haunted with time, so I'll start my taxonomy here. Further, they can be divided into abandoned and inhabited.

Abandoned old haunted manuals #

Once they were loved, alive, maintained. Now, bitrot has taken hold: dead links and broken images. Or, the product is gone but someone is still paying the web hosting bill, and you can download a PDF. It looks nice, but the product has gone on an incredible journey into the sunset. It's dead, and yet it lingers.

Or it could be a README for a long-abandoned GitHub, project, instructing you to set up dependencies years out of date themselves. Hell, whole repos could be haunted, accumulating progressively more desultory bug reports and ignored pull requests.

Sometimes, in the early stages, these don't feel that different from a maintained (but haunted) manual. I think readers can sense it, though. It makes them worried about the project or product if the docs start drifting into bitrot. They feel the ghostly tendrils in the broken links.

Inhabited old haunted manuals #

If you are working on any kind of online manual that's been around for more than say, 5 years, it's almost guaranteed to be haunted. At the very least, it has haunted parts.

That's right, I'm saying you probably live in a haunted manual. (If "you" are a tech writer and if "live" means work on.) It might be just a little bit haunted, or you might be living in the documentation equivalent of Grey Gardens (1975), ignoring whole sections of weird old stuff that rots about you, half-abandoned. You mean well and you're trying your best, but now there's just the two of you left where there used to be a whole staff, and the racoons, of course.

Just to give some more examples, of this, probably most common type of haunted manual, it might be

haunted by now-resolved long running bugs
haunted by previous versions of the manual
haunted by a previous style guide
haunted by a previous version of the software
haunted by laid off coworkers
haunted by by CMS migrations

Internal documentation is, in my experience, even more prone to going Grey Gardens on you, because no one ever quite has the time to clean it up. It's not embarrassing you to clients and you can just tell new hires about the outdated parts. Right? Except what about when everyone who knew which parts were still good leaves, and some new person discovers the strange old relic with no one to warn them and they bring down production because the docs didn't specify you had to warm the cache and how to do that? (Perhaps at this point we enter the realm of haunted and cursed.)

Even when you try to exorcise the ghosts of the past, the absences leave a kind of scar that a sensitive reader will spot. Even when you throw it all out and write something new, thinking you'll have a fresh start, you can't escape it. In fact, that's the next section.

Next time: new haunted manuals #

This is where hauntology comes in. Once again, it is past 11, which is past my bedtime, and so I leave you here, dear reader, with promises of the hauntology of manuals to come.

The haunted manuals series #

About the images #

The header image is a close crop of an ink on paper drawing of an angular tree-like diagram branching out from a central circle that I drew it in 2020.

I made the spooky papercraft house as a Halloween decoration many, many years ago. Then I didn't take it down for months until the construction paper faded to a ghost of its former color. The only picture of it I could find is the one I uploaded to be my GitHub profile, so that's what I've used here. My GitHub repo is definitely haunted.

Elegant diagrams (not haunted)

2023-08-18T00:00:00Z

Last week, I wrote about haunted manuals, and used the Operator's Instructions for Caterpillar Diesel D318 Engine and Electric Set (Serial numbers 5V5001 - Up, 3V5001 - Up) as a counterexample of a haunted manual. I had initially expected that it would be haunted, that is, that ghosts of previous versions and disagreements, and fears, and editorial battles, and lawyer's interventions, and perhaps workarounds would show themselves in hedges and lacunas and cautions. But no! The D318 manual is self-consistent, confident, and full of beautiful illustrations and diagrams. I particularly like the circuit diagram in the Electric Set section of the manual.

So, I scanned a bunch of them to share. The yellowing and stains lend them a certain charm, I think. I don't know how to interpret circuit diagrams. Nonetheless, I can appreciate the clear lettering that remains perfectly legible even though age and staining and the distinctive line drawings. Maybe someone who can read circuit diagrams can tell me what you think of them from a technical point of view.

Exciter Field Rheostat. Diagram "C". Connections for a exciter field rheostat for controlling voltage manually. (Page 70)

"Single-phase connections are given in Diagram 'B'" (Page 70)

Diagram "D". Control cabinet connections when generator is connected for three phase or four phase wire output. (Page 71)

Connect synchronizer or synchronizing lamp as shown in diagram "K" or "L" with number 14 wire covered with 600 volt insulation.

Diagram "K". Synchronizing connections when ungrounded system is used.

Diagram "L". Synchronizing connections when neutral is grounded. (Page 76)

Exciter connections. Diagram "M". Exciter connection for "N" series generators. (Page 77)

"Proper field excitation" sounds like something you might hear about in the context of magical ritual or an obscure artistic process. Presumably, here it means something physical and measurable.

Undercut mica for dusty condition operation. Undercut mica for ordinary condition operation. Commutator mica properly undercut.(Page 86.)

This one isn't a circuit diagram but a schematic drawing. I don't know what a commutator is and I can't quite figure it out from context. I like how it looks like two stone arches or some kind of rainbow with teeth. The section directly preceding talks about the colors it might safely turn (copper, chocolate, black) and the colors you should worry about (green, blue, blotchy).

400 watt. 24 volt generator and 24 volt starter for diesel. (Page 97.)

Label on the side: Safety alarm circuit with shunt trip coil for breaking oil or air type circuit breaker. (Page 101.)

The haunted manuals series #

Haunted manuals

2023-08-11T00:00:00Z

The cover is marked and stained and the pages smell faintly of motor oil. Page 90 (Battery Care) and page 91 (Voltage Regulator) were stuck together at the corners with something that left white residue in the center and yellow staining at the edges. I'm a romantic so want to believe it's old battery acid. Despite that, I don't think that my copy of the Operator's Instructions for Caterpillar Diesel D318 Engine and Electric Set (Serial numbers 5V5001 - Up, 3V5001 - Up) is haunted. Best as I can tell, it was printed in the 50s or 60s. It doesn't have a date anywhere, thought I found a reference in the San Joaquin County Historical Society and Museum's online Guide to the Agricultural Technology Manuals Collection that gives the date as 1950. It's Manual No. 234 in the collection if you're ever passing through Lodi and want to check one out. Old machine aficionado forums speak of the engine it describes warmly, as a "runs forever" machine.

It's an old manual, but it's not haunted. At least, not the way I mean.

The curse of knowledge #

I say in the subtitle that you've heard of the curse of knowledge, but when I described the post to my live-in beta reader, it turned out he hadn't heard of the curse of knowledge. Which is pretty ironic. So let me define my terms a little bit. The curse of knowledge is the tendency of people who know a lot about a subject to overestimate how much other people know about it. Worse, whole groups of people who work in a field and are all familiar with it tend to imagine that people outside their field know a lot more than they do. If all your friends are data scientists, asking them if they think the average person knows what "cardinality" means will probably not get you a good answer. Even when knowledgeable people try to compensate, they still overestimate how much a non-expert knows. There's a good XKCD comic about the curse of knowledge.

Technical writers can try to compensate for the curse of knowledge by never getting too good at anything and switching projects as soon as we stop feeling like a complete stupid baby in the field we are writing about. Unfortunately, even if you try really hard and believe in yourself, you are bound to retain some information, and the job market is not always such that you can job hop frequently enough to retain the innocence of a tiny child with regards to technical topics. In those situations, we are forced to rely on user feedback, essentially finding volunteers who will feel like stupid babies because the documentation makes too many assumptions, and then tell us about their feelings, and ideally, also the specific part of the manual that caused them. Do this enough, and you can break the curse of knowledge and exorcise your documentation. If you think that sounds hard for everyone involved, it is. Sadly, much of the world's technical documentation remains cursed.

However, cursed is not the same thing as haunted.

Damn, I'm channeling Derrida again with all this elliptical way of getting at what the thing is by examples of what it's not. Speaking of Derrida, there's another term I have to define.

Hauntology #

Hauntology started as a stupid pun that Derrida made up to express the way that Marxism persisted and recurred in discourse after and about "the fall of communism." (I put that in quotes not because Derrida said that, but because the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union wasn't even the end of state communism, and yet at the time, it seemed like it was to Europeans and Euro-Americans at least.)

The stupid pun mixes and matches bits of philosophy. In the Communist Manifesto Marx writes "a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism" so there's your ghost/spectre. Ontology is the study of onts. No, sorry, ontology is actually the philosophical field of inquiry into how stuff is. (Ontology in information science is the study of how stuff is categorized, which is subtly different and actually much easier to talk about.) That gives you -tology. Because spectrology sounds too much like actual ghost hunting (I confess, I am speculating), Derrida went with "haunt" for the first part and so that gives us hauntology.

The way I think of hauntology is that it's examining how elements of the past which are supposedly gone somehow persist in the present. Hauntology is when a new thing is haunted with an idea from the past, as though the new thing was an old thing with actual scars or marks of the past. Hauntology is when things, even though they are absent, somehow still exert a visible influence on the present.

Hauntology is also one of those pretty loose terms that everyone uses a little differently, so don't take my definition as final.

But do take my definition as the starting point for what I mean by some manuals are haunted.

A spectre is haunting documentation #

When I say some manuals are haunted, I'm not talking about an instance of a particular manual like the Diesel D318 that has been touched and used and marked up and perhaps even bled on. I am talking about the content of the manual. A GitHub README can be haunted. A Word document left behind by a former coworker on their last day can be haunted. An instructions tab in a spreadsheet can be haunted. (A spreadsheet can be haunted, but maybe that's another topic.)

In a previous post about Derrida and logocentrism, I talked about manuals haunted by a nonexistent past:

It’s like even some of the manuals that aren’t supplemental training materials have a ghost of an in-person training lurking in their imagined origins. (Dangerous texts)

A manual can be born haunted in this hauntological sense, born already haunted by an absent presence, as of an imagined original function or an absent creator. But a manual can also become haunted over time, through revisions, or through neglect and bitrot.

I have more examples but I don't have time to develop them tonight. It got late because I spent a lot of time defining terms and reading tractor fancier forums to find the provenance of my example print manual, so I'm very sorry to say, there will have to be a part 2. I already have notes for it, so it will happen, later. In the meantime, please don't be too haunted by its absent presence.

The haunted manuals series #

The header image is my scan of a wiring diagram from the Operator's Instructions for Caterpillar Diesel D318 Engine and Electric Set (Serial numbers 5V5001 - Up, 3V5001 - Up), page 96.

Fiber art camp

2023-08-04T00:00:00Z

#FiberArtCamp is a fiber art prompt challenge hosted by @madgeface@mastodon.art on Mastodon from July 31 to August 6. I’ve had a fun time so far and decided to compile my prompt responses here so they don’t just slip into the void the way all social media eventually do.

Meet me Monday #

These days I mostly knit and crochet, but I have also done a bit of hand spinning and embroidery, as well as some small experiments with cutwork lace. I enjoy learning challenging techniques more than finishing projects.

My first fiber art was crochet. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to crochet. I remember making countless little doilies that didn’t lie flat and I then turned into tiny pouches to carry my kid treasures.

My beloved godmother tried to teach me to knit when I was between six and nine. It didn’t stick. Then my mom taught me again when I was in my early teens. That kind of stuck but I didn’t develop proper skills until my 20s, when I got swept up into the Stitch & Bitch movement and for my first project decided to knit a sweater even though everyone suggested I start smaller.

I finished it — and knit it all with twisted stitches for reasons I only understood much later.

Tool Tuesday #

I had a hard time deciding on my favorite tool for #ToolTuesday. My Addi circulars? My favorite tiny scissors? The clear plastic bins that let me see all my yarn while protecting it from moths? Or perhaps the rubbery stitch markers without which I’d lose my mind?

It could be any of those. But lately, I’m feeling most grateful for my big project basket. I can carry my work in progress from room to room, have all my tools and notes together, and clean up instantly by shoving everything inside.

WIP Wednesday #

Day 3 of #FiberArtCamp is #WIPWednesday and boy do I have a lot of works in progress. I’m only including ones I’ve actively worked on this year.

My most active WIP, Zigzag from Knitty.com. I started working on it in 2010 or 2009 then put it aside for over a decade. Now it’s back in action.

Raglan sweater designed to measure for my spouse. I put it aside in January because I ran out of yarn and I don’t think this yarn is manufactured anymore. I plan to take it to the LYS to try to get a texture match. It’s a raglan so the sleeves need not match. I originally bought the yarn I’m using in 2005 or so.

Mostly a design still. I took a photo I like of Angel Island and abstracted it into color blocks. I want to use freeform crochet to create an impressionistic tapestry, and use up my stash oddments.

Shawl just started last night with yarn I bought on vacation. I had to take a break from the blue sweater because I don’t have the right needles.

Throwback Thursday #

For #ThrowbackThursday we are meant to share our favorite projects from the past. I don’t really have one favorite, so instead I’ll share with you the first sweater I ever knit. I finished it some time in 2005 and I’ve been happily wearing it since.

It’s “To Dye For” from Stitch n’ Bitch, except I used a smooth black wool instead. I also knit it all with twisted stitches, partly due to inexperience, but partly due to having learned my knitting muscle memory from a craftway that uses a different style of purl and knits to compensate for it. But when I re-learned from books, I combined the two styles awkwardly, and knit in the front leg of the stitch while plucking the purl (when I should have knit in the back leg if I plucked my purls)

Actually it made for a lovely dense texture in the finished sweater, but it was harder to knit than it should have been.

Fiber Friday #

Rather than choosing a specific fiber, I’m going with a fiber type as my favorite for #FiberFriday. Wool, all the way, wool. It’s just so nice to touch. Wool has a lovely springiness that makes it a pleasure to knit with, beating out any other fiber types I’ve touched. Wool roving is the nicest to spin too, with a fuzzy texture and long, kinky staples that make it forgiving. The texture isn’t as important while making crochet, but the finished pieces feel wonderful. Even bits of wool picked up from where sheep have shed it while grazing feel wonderful. So thank you, sheep!

User stories for legible knitting patterns

2023-07-28T00:00:00Z

Knitting patterns are code #

Knitting patterns are written like minified code. Take this example from a sweater I've been working on for the last 10 years:


Next row: *Place marker (pm), k2tog, work across 88[98, 108, 118, 128, 138] sts 
in patt as set, ssk, rep from * one time more. 180[200, 220, 240, 260, 280] sts
Cont in patt as set until work measures 14[14.5, 15, 15.5, 16, 16.5] inches, 
ending on an odd-numbered row and stopping 5[6, 5, 6, 5, 6] sts before beg of 
round.

I don't think I need to make the case that knitting patterns are code, or at the very least pseudocode, but just in case you doubt me, look at the way the bit between asterisks is a simple function. It tells you what to do and then how many times to repeat it. The numbers in brackets work like parameters. Earlier in the pattern, the different possible sizes are defined, like this

XS [S, M, L, XL, XXL]

Then, every time a set of measurements is given in that format, they indicate the action you need to take for that particular size. There's more, but I think that's enough. I assume someone else has written some careful argument about how knitting is code, however, I couldn't find one online to link to.

My struggle sweater #

People don't normally read code when it's minified, but we knitters have to follow these compact patterns. While stitch counters and stitch markers help keep count of repetitions, that's not enough. I'm not sure what other people do, but I tend to print my patterns and scrawl notes all over them.

I still make tons of mistakes, and have to go back and unknit and knit again, like some Penelope. As a result, knitting goes very slowly for me. I've found this pattern particularly difficult, because it combines complex shaping with lace and cabling.

After struggling with the back top of the sweater for a month or so, I came to the instructions for the front which just said:

Work as for back to row 25 of Chart B.

Oh no. So, I decided to expand the instructions. I pulled out just the part that applied to the size I'm knitting to remove clutter and then put each row on its own line. I unminified the knitting pattern:

It was easier to read and it let me check off each row as I finished it. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get patterns already formatted like that with nice, meaningful white space?

Knitting patterns are squishy for a reason #

Knitting pattern conventions developed for the constraints of print. If the way you distribute your pattern is in a print magazine or a handout from the knitting store, you want to fit as much information as possible in a small space. And knitting does tend to be repetitive, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to write out every single row.

As difficult as modern patterns can be to read, they've got nothing on the previous centuries' patterns which are a downright eyebleeding nightmare. Maybe paper was more expensive.

Many patterns are still distributed in print, nonetheless, I think knitting patterns could be a lot more legible and thus knitting a lot more pleasant, if we took advantage of the affordances of digital distribution. Why should an online magazine follow the same rules as a print magazine?

Knitter user stories #

In addition to meaningful whitespace, online knitting patterns could also do with a selector so that you could select your size and see the pattern just for your size. A step by step unminifier thingie could be another option on the selector.

I also prefer patterns given as diagrams and charts and then measurements to check as you go. I realize that's probably not suitable for many beginners, however for advanced patterns I think it would be preferable. Even though not all knitting patterns follow the same exact abbreviations, they always define them, so I think it should be possible to create code that takes in a pattern in words and produces a diagram.

And I've just written a spec for a knitting software and or standard that I'd like, so I might as well go all the way and write some user stories:

As a knitter, I'd like to have more clear whitespace between instructions in my patterns so I can more easily see when one step ends and another starts.
As a knitter, I'd like to have the option to see instructions just for the size or variations I'm working on.
As a knitter, I'd like to be able to unminify compact patterns so I can see each row individually and count or check it off to avoid mistakes in complex patterns.
As a knitter, I'd like to translate pseudocode instructions into charts, so I can follow the knit visually.

I'm aware of some sweater design programs that fulfill some of these user stories. You give them a set of measurements and they spit out instructions for a sweater in just your size. I haven't seen anything like what I describe here.

If I could have just one of these stories fulfilled, it would be more and more meaningful whitespace in patterns.

The struggle sweater lives on #

In the meantime, I have a bit of sweater to unknit. It turns out I misread Chart B and put extra stitches in between the yarnover Vs, when they were only supposed to be at the edges.

It's a pain, but I know I can do it. Because you see the edge of that doily? I knitted that thing on double zero circulars using fine cotton yarn and following some weird German charted pattern. That thing was so stupidly complex you couldn't even use a safety line. I have no idea how I did it. I've lost the pattern (though not the needles), and frankly after I did it I felt satisfied that I could and didn't make another. Nonetheless, it's evidence that my stubbornness is powerful.

Dream resume

2023-07-21T00:00:00Z

I'm on vacation so I'm emptying my drawers a bit on you all. I found this experimental thing in my rejection files next to the poem I reposted last week. All those tears over rejections and half the places where my work got accepted are defunct now. I'm just gonna post it!

I wrote this dream resume in response to an exercise for a 2018 class, Experiments in Fiction and Poetry. I think you had to write it based on your real dreams. Then again, a lot of the class encouraged us to approach fiction as fibbing, a very freeing approach.

Anyway, I have weird dreams and excellent dream recall, so the main fib in this dream resume is like in normal resumes, where you leave out the embarrassing stuff and focus the interesting parts.

Also, like most resumes, my dream resume is out of date.

Statement of purpose #

A versatile and powerful dreamer specializing in flight, sex, and nightmares, seeks lucid dreaming situations.

Education #

2005 - 2010 Adept of Ceremonial Magic, Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn
2008 - 2018 Restoration Druid, World of Warcraft
2016 - 2018 Mindfulness Meditation

Maintaining ongoing certification through continuing education in birds, skiing, sex, and horror films.

Languages #

Freud, Jung, Polish, English, German, Russian, JavaScript, Alchemical Symbolism, Folk Tales, Enochian

Experience #

1985-1988 Basic Nightmares & Hypnagogia

My mother is on the toilet but she has no head.
he white lumpy rocks have black hair.
The black lumpy rocks have white hair.
I destroy both sorts of rocks with rainbow arrows.
Fully symmetrical scintillating Persian rugs made of clear light colors appear before my eyes.
The power sockets have eyes made of fire and they sound like a TV turning off.
I am picking mushrooms with my mother and the forest is full of boletes, one after another after another, each tree, each hummock, each bush reveals a perfect, delicious bolete.

1989 – 1994 Extreme Longing & Painful Awakenings

I am back in Poland again, behind our house, where my favorite elderflower bush grows, but it is a dream and I am not there, it is a dream, it is not true.
I have found a yellow quartz belemnite fossil and I hold it in my hand. Another and another appears, and another, but no! Yellow quartz belemnite fossils are only in Poland and I am in the New England suburbs, and this is a dream, only a dream, and I can never go back.
I am at the lake again, and I fly over it, then I walk on the water to the shoreline. The snail who has shed its shell is on the reed in the muddy shoreline, what an extraordinary thing, a snail who has no shell, but that was years ago, that already happened, and this shoreline isn’t right, it’s only a dream, I am not really here, I can never go back.

1995 – 1997 Sex & Murder

I accidentally have sex with my brother and turn into a pair of scissors.
I travel through a portal into a totalitarian state where a man who looks exactly like my boyfriend is dressed entirely in black leather and attempt to shoot him with a ray-gun which only shoots a red plastic rod which sags. He orders robots to clean up homeless people from the streets. The robots process the homeless people who are tortured all day but escape and return to the streets again where they are picked up by the robots again. The man in black leather is evil and therefore magnetically charming. I have sex with him. When I awake I find my boyfriend is no longer interesting to me.
I accidentally commit murder and attempt to hide the body in a wheat field. My brother tries to help me.

1997 - 2001 Zombies and Tsunamis

I barely outrun zombies.
I barely outrun tsunamis.
I do not outrun zombies. When the zombies catch up to me I switch to another point of view, and watch them devour the body that is no longer me.
I take a bus to outrun tsunamis.
I turn into a bird and fly through a forest in a graveyard, weaving among the branches.

2002 – 2005 Sex Again

I have sex with my graduate school professors, my housemates, the man I am obsessed with who doesn’t wish to have sex with me again, the man who is obsessed with me but whom I find repulsive, my best friend, zombies, and a Tantric master who feeds me poison which I transmute into nectar.

2005 – 2015 Magic and Advanced Hypnagogia

I travel through a tunnel in the ground near the seashore and when I emerge there are multiple suns in the sky, some undergoing an eclipse.
I walk a few inches above the water on the marshes that border the San Francisco Bay.
Elevators move entirely too fast and never stop on my floor.
I turn into a bird and fly.
I do not turn into a bird and fly.
I fly. Finally, I am flying for real, it’s not a dream, for once, finally I have the knack.
Multidimensional symmetrical mandalas scintillate before my eyes in colors of clear light with violets beyond human vision and coordinated symphonies my mind spontaneously generates but which I can never remember.

2016 – 2018 After A Friend Tells Me Lucid Dreaming is Possible

While I wait at Van Ness and California for the cable car, I realize that the people standing with me do not have object permanence, but come in and out of existence when I turn my attention away from them. “You do not have object permanence and this is a dream, therefore you are only my own projected aspects of myself,” I tell them. They object but I fly away to an island I immediately manifest.
The tree and the fountain are poisoned, and I realize it is my dream, so I dip my finger in the water, purifying it and healing the tree. A thousand years later I attend the potluck of the church that worships the fountain, and notice their egg salad contains pickled beets but the beats have not stained the eggs, which is how I know I am still in a dream.
As I climb a narrow cliffside path overlooking the ocean, gingerly grabbing precarious handholds the growing dread awakens me: this is a dream, and I don’t have to be here. Immediately I teleport to a cabin where I say to the handsome man waiting for me, “I know you are only me, but I need comfort,” and he hugs me.
The herbalists offer me a pair of scissors which look exactly like the scissors my dad keeps giving me. I sense the quality of my consciousness is a dream, but recall how much I upset the people at the cable car, so I sneak off and fly across the fields of roses to the sea wall. I stand in the ocean and expand my size until I am so large that my head sticks out of the atmosphere and I can see the stars.

Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

2023-07-14T00:00:00Z

I created this poem using cut-up technique, combining bits of my poetry with the poetic excerpt from Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (page F-13). By volume, it has much more of my poetry about wolves and coyotes than warnings about nuclear waste, but a little nuclear waste goes a long way, as we all know. I'm pretty sure that getting cute with the markers to deter inadvertend human intrusion had not yet become trendy when I wrote it in 2018. But maybe I was just part of a craze for appropriating nuclear warnings.

This poem was first published in Rigglewelter #14 on October 2018. Rigglewelter does not appear to be active any more, and you can't see the full issue, but the covers are available for now. It was the first poetry acceptance I got as an adult and I was so happy I spontaneusly burst into tears.

Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant #

The wolf in the clearing clears the space
or worse, deliberate incest-paved path.
Danger is an emanation of energy
and growls and bites. The revelations 
of meditations on the wood substantially disturb this place.

Metal and dripping death.
The palms of the lupines do not grasp or gesture.
The danger unleashed is of a riparian nature.

The danger is in a particular location.
The fear erases the fear,
hot fur, in the dregs of nightmare and the coyotes howl.
The lunula does not shine.
The second coyote walked the next howl
physically. This place is best
that will not shut, that will--
the wolf does not wolf.
In a circle of pines, a circle of lupines of a particular size and shape.

The center of danger is here
at dusk.
The danger is still present and below us.

The morning tangles moonlight in a circle of wolves
in your time, as it was in ours.
I looked hard into the fear of falling:
soporific, needle claws,
and a tether to outer space, red-eyed.
It increases toward the center.
The danger is to the body: the red patch of wolf-mark on the face.

To cast aside words, nothing remains but waiting in the daylight forest.

Injecting taboo desire, needles 
shunned and left uninhabited, HOLLYWOOD sign,
fear of water to the edge.

Waiting, we empty ourselves--
drugged, doped, and rabid
         for death in the clearing --
This place is not a place of honor.
Wait in perfect fear
        the form of the edge of the door
with needle teeth, the intruder
wolf circle to encircle
        at once sleeping
fingernail and finger-flesh
was all chaparral, slavering mouths,
the sound of no sound.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us:
palmate meaning their leaves like hands,
soil, blue and lavender,
and part of a system of messages about danger.
Smell, approaching boldly, on the border of a powerful culture
who -- clearings belongs to wolves--
utter another word, Wild lupine. The howl 
is silent, to point. Rabid. They are real piss.

This message is a warning: write about coyotes.
This places is a message:
the pale-yellow sun, the wolf across the Iron Curtain,
a bulldog made of raised scruff, slavering,
reach to wolves, and utter no word.
Hypodermic needles, lupus, lupo, lupine, lunula.
The mind eats the mind. The howl is not in the howling.

We drove through dusk,
                          and it can kill
not-real wolves, the miniature moon,
temptation to never filter the sun.

Expert Judgement,
like a dog after the howl to the lupines,
snuffles in the needle teeth dripping
who whimpers
the pines all night.

Cozy necromancy

2023-07-07T00:00:00Z

Happy start of the third fiscal quarter (Q3) to all who celebrate! Like a lot of people, I cope with the pressures of work with necromancy and cozy novels, so I snarfed up three novels in quick succession in the last two weeks.

If Found, Return to Hell by Em X. Liu #

I picked up this novella because I saw someone post something like "If you like cozy reads like Murderbot, you'll love If Found, Return to Hell." Which, OK, I don't think Murderbot is cozy although it is my comfort read, but OK. Furthermore, what a fucking fantastic title. Thirdmore, I noticed this was Em X. Liu's first novella-length work, and I love to read authors who are just bursting onto the scene.

If Found, Return to Hell is a fantasy science setting, that is, instead of taking science as its conceit and then using it like magic, it takes magic and treats it like science. Specifically, it sets up a world where magic is kind of like medicine in the US, not just the science but also the dreadful soul-crushing bureaucracy of it. Oh, and the titular Hell, in this setting, is also the bureaucratic Chinese afterworld rather than the Christian-inspired hells I'm more used to. Everything about the setting and the setup is great.

However, most of the novella feels like it's spent having cozy times with our protagonist and her prince of hell roommate. It turns out that while I like having cozy times, I don't so much like reading about them. I would have liked more conflict or at least tension. The strongest parts of the novella where the beginning where our protagonist is sitting through a boring training at One Wizard and then has a kind of supercut of terrible magical triage nurse customer support calls, and towards the end where our protagonist has to go to hell to deal with the bureaucracy.

It's mostly a matter of pacing, which could be a choice that Liu made, or a matter of them still developing their craft. I kind of hope it's the second because I love their worldbuilding and would really enjoy seeing it paired with more tension and conflict. In any case, I look forward to reading what they write next.

Get If Found, Return to Hell from Rebellion publishing. It came out on June 15, 2023.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree #

Legends & Lattes got mentioned a few times on Our Opinions Are Correct and I thought the story of an orc who retired from her life of bashing skulls for bounties to start a coffee shop sounded fun. It was fun. It reminded me a bit of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal in that ordinary things from our world (the postal service in the latter and coffee shop in Lattes) get reinvented in a magical world to comic effect.

I think you would have to have played Dungeons & Dragons or at least be pretty aware of the tropes of the adventuring life to enjoy Legends & Lattes because it relies on the dramatic irony of going against the grain. Despite the coziness, there is some real action, and a lot of heart.

It's a light, briskly-paced read, and I inhaled it in two days. If anything, it's a little bit too light. I didn't feel like there was enough at stake, and problems got resolved too easily. It's a goddamn power fantasy about starting a small business, which is fun, but it's not intense enough to get me out of my own head to be a real comfort read. Whether it's enough for you depends on how much stimulation your brain meat needs to calm down.

This book will make you crave coffee, cinnamon buns, and pain au chocolat, so definitely plan on getting some when you're reading it.

Get Legends & Lattes from the author's website.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir #

The opening of Gideon the Ninth is a fucking tour de force. In the first chapter, you get dropped into the bizarre necromancy-powered world, learn what a badass swordswoman Gideon is, watch her insult and wisecrack her superiors, and get a quick and absolutely intriguing backstory. I love an asshole protagonist. But it has to be the right kind of asshole, which, no, I can't really define, but Gideon is the right kind.

In the second chapter, she duels her nemesis and loses pathetically. By the fourth chapter, when you finally get the back of the book blurb setup, that Gideon will have to become the swordswoman protector for the necromancer Harrow (the aforementioned nemesis), the characters and setting are perfectly painted and you have to know how they're going to work out their mutual hate while doing some creepy quest.

It's a good thing that opening is so compelling because the pace slows way the hell down for the rest of the book. If I wasn't so invested in Gideon, I might not have kept going, but I was! It turns into a slow burn mystery with occasional corpse explosions until quite near the end. I hate mysteries that feel drawn out for no reason, so I read ahead and also read spoilers. That may not be the best way to read the book, but it is how I read.

Sadly, for plot reasons, Gideon is forced to fake a vow of silence for most of the middle of the book, so we miss out on a lot of Gideon snark. My other big disappointment was that we learn very little about Gideon's dirty magazine collection, of which much is made in the opening chapters and the book blurbs. But does Gideon leaf through her magazines of an evening on gross necromancy planet? Does she turn to them in times of emotional turmoil? No, she does not. It's like she, and perhaps the author, forgot about them in between all the murder skeletons, coughed up lungs, and soul suckers.

Complaints about uneven pacing and not quite enough snark and prurient jokes aside, I'm glad I finally read this book even though it gave me weird dreams. Indeed, I complain because the opening section is fucking next level, whereas the rest of the book is merely very good. It was Muir's first published novel, so it's likely she'll get stronger with time. I said this about If Found, Return to Hell as well--pacing is a craft issue and writers usually get better at it with practice and good editors. I love Muir's voice, her sense of humor, and her talent for absolute gross-out scenes, and I just hope she stays weird.

Get Gideon the Ninth from Tor publishing.

Gay jury duty

2023-06-30T00:00:00Z

Even though I’ve lived in San Francisco for over 20 years, this year was only the second time I’ve been to the official Pride parade and the first time I marched in it. I’ve generally thought it was, roughly in order of disagreeableness:

Too hot
Too crowded
Too loud
Too corporate
Too uptight

And most importantly, I thought it was pointless. I didn’t think a loud party of sell-outs dominated by corporate contingents would do anything useful for LGBTQ+ liberation or my personal fulfillment. In short, I thought I would neither get anything out of going nor give anything of value. Pride didn’t need me and I didn’t need Pride^[1].

This year felt different. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a real fucking reactionary regression happening in LGBTQ+ rights. It’s been going on for a few years, and it’s manifested most noticeably as a swathe of anti-trans laws and a virulent anti-trans moral panic. But the new anti-trans moral panic is the old anti-gay moral panic reheated and served again after being left on the counter in the danger zone for 10 years, and it’s giving me the moral vomirrhea.

For the first time, actually showing up at Pride, and in fact showing up as part of my big-ass corporate employer’s boring contingent, surrounded by people wearing corporate-branded Pride t-shirts and waving corporate-branded Pride flags seemed important. Like I wanted to metaphorically yell (but not actually yell because I don’t like yelling^[2]) “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re gainfully employed and corporate has our back!”

It’s stupid that it matters. Corporate support is so milquetoast. They aren’t willing to commit to anything really radical and liberatory. They’re a fucking corporation, of course they aren’t going to support the gay anarchist agenda^[3]. But when other corporations back down to bigots or aren’t willing to even take symbolic actions like having some Pride decorations, suddenly it does matter.

And when (many more) people suddenly feel like it’s cool to be homophobic and transphobic bigots in public, and it seems like it’s getting worse, and it’s actually more dangerous to be LGBTQ+ than it was 10 years ago, then, then I feel like I have to show up and show them all how many of us there are, and that you might not realize it that the boring 40something computer-toucher who talks about house finches and style guides is in fact one or more of those acronym letters. That is to say, I have to come out and I have to stay out.

So that’s why, on a perfectly nice Sunday morning when I could have been gardening or spying on house finches through my bird-o-scope, I instead laced up my boots, put sunscreen on my nose, packed some water, a first aid kit, and my employee badge, and went to stand around for two fucking hours in the Pride parade staging area with a bunch of people from work I didn’t know until it was our contingent’s turn to march. It was not clear that we would be waiting that long. I assume that the organizers give you a rough estimate but that it varies. I assume that your slot in the parade is probably some kind of lottery system, and we were towards the end. And I guess that maybe I wasn’t the only person who after years of going, ugh, Pride, I’d rather take a nap, decided well, I guess I gotta.

We were waiting around for a long time. You couldn’t wander off and go do something else because the estimate of when we’d go was not very precise. The people waiting tried to make the most of it with music and tossing a beach ball around, but I hate it when objects come at me from above and I didn’t like the music, not at that volume anyway.

It was boring, and not particularly personally fulfilling, but I had to be there for civic duty reasons. I had to be there not so much for me but for everyone else. I had to be there to show everyone who needed to know that there are a lot of us. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t fun, or even that it didn’t feel meaningful to me. It wasn’t a celebration. It was a declaration.

But I have to admit, when we finally marched, and I hoisted the big flag I brought with me and felt it unfurl in the wind, that was fun. Walking in the exact center of Market Street was fun, even if it was hard stepping on those grates over Muni stations or whatever they are. Seeing the smiling faces and hearing the cheers of people standing by the side of the route who waved at us as we passed did feel good.

Part of me thought it was a little strange, why are you cheering for us, a corporate^[4] contingent that isn’t even doing anything interesting or even capable of walking in a cohesive group? I mean OK, there was an impressively large amount of us^[5] from the corporation. But I realize we meant something to them. I’m not sure what, but it was something good, and I was glad I could be that symbol for them, or part of the thing that was that symbol. It felt especially good seeing the young people for whom this might be the first Pride parade, seeing the joy and hope in their faces at seeing us marching. Perhaps it was enough to just see that you could have a normal, happy life, maybe even be a little boring and be LGBTQ+.

The weirdest thing was the on-duty cops. They were wearing Mardi Gras beads and smiling beneficently at the parade. I’ve never been in a street march before where the cops looked so comfortable to be there.

Towards the end of the parade route, a bunch of crowd control structures split up the marchers and gently spit us out into the street and sidewalks. And that was it. Your gay jury duty service is concluded for the year. Save this corporate swag as proof until next year.

I did need the LGBTQ+ community, but I stuck to smaller, weirder, more fringe LGBTQ+ events. I recall a memorable Dyke March where I somehow ended up right behind two red and black flag waving anarchists who twirled them around like majordomos and chanted “Fuck the police” as we marched through the Mission and people hung out of windows waving at us. It was great. (And a bunch of other events that are, in fact, exactly the kind of stuff the moral panic havers pretend to believe Pride is, and hyperventilate about when they wake in the middle of the night from their secret sex nightmares that they should just fucking own, just stop imagining what horrible things those perverts are doing and buy your own leathers, you sickos.) ↩︎
And also no cussing because I couldn’t yell cuss words while marching with corporate because corporate has an actual I-shit-you-not policy against using obscene words in work situations and the code of conduct does apply while attending a corporate-sponsored Pride event, if I recall the fine print correctly. ↩︎
The agenda has not yet been written because the council has not yet reached a consensus about whether the agenda should be a written document or an oral tradition, and while several manifestos have been written, no one agrees on which one to use^[6]. ↩︎
I realize I’m starting to sound like Murderbot talking about “the company” the way I just refuse to name the specific corporation. And like Murderbot I will continue to do so. Or not do so. Whichever one it is when I don’t name the corporation. ↩︎
A few days later I found out a friend had attended the parade as a spectator and saw the contingent I marched in. He said, roughly, “There were a lot of you.” In fact, you had to sign up and there were limited spaces available. I appreciate my coworkers for showing up. I appreciate everyone who made there be so many of us. ↩︎
I made this up but it’s based on real experience of trying to decide anything by consensus. ↩︎

Fiction writers who worked as technical writers

2023-06-23T00:00:00Z

I keep a running list of notable fiction writers who worked as technical writers. Technical writing is a pretty unglamorous profession. You almost never get a byline and most people don’t even know that your job exists, never mind that you exist. People who do know that technical writing is a thing (oh you know, manuals, online help, long tables of parts or parameters) generally imagine it to be dreadfully boring and feel sorry for us.

I once went to a literary event put on by the Kenyon Review where one of the academic writer types made some kind of joke about how if you fail to be a literary writer, you might, shudder, God forbid, be forced to be a technical writer. Their snobbishness pissed me off, especially because at that time I had a pretty annoying job and was doing everything I could to turn the fun part of my job (the technical writing) into my full time job. Maybe you can be snobbish if you’re rich and aren’t paying off your student loans yourself. Seriously, fuck those people. I guess I’m still mad at them. (Did you know that when you submit poetry and literary fiction to most of these literary journals they actually charge you for it? It’s a lot like academic journal publishing) On the off-chance you’re a working class kid or young person or somebody looking for a career and you like technology, writing and getting paid rather quite well, may I suggest this profession?

But I digress! Which, if this were something I was getting paid to write instead of my blog, I would totally edit out.

To return to my original theme, I keep this list of fiction writers who are also technical writers, and the other day I found a new one to add, the amazing Roxane Gay. So, I present to you my list of fiction writers who worked as technical writers:

Ben Bova #

Prolific science fiction author and editor

Known for #

The Grand Tour novel series
Serving as the editor for Analog Science Fact & Fiction

Technical writing #

Ben Bova worked as a technical writer in the military and aerospace industry. I have hangups about working on anything related to weapons, but I must admit that getting to write about rockets is no doubt pretty cool.

Ted Chiang #

Science fiction writer who focuses on idea-rich short fiction

Known for #

The novella “Story of Your Life" which was the basis of the film Arrival (2016)
His first published story, “Tower of Babel” (Omni 1990) won a Nebula

Technical writing #

In a 2002 interview with SF Site, Ted Chiang mentioned that he worked as a freelance technical writer, producing developer documentation. In another place in that interview, he mentions that he was previously a staff technical writer somewhere near Seattle and put in a lot of overtime. He never names the company but there are several large software companies in Seattle that might have been it, and no doubt some smaller ones, too.

I got to talk to Ted Chiang briefly after a Q&A Green Apple Books (the one in the Inner Sunset) as part of his publicity tour for the short story collection Exhalation. I told him that I had read “The Tower of Babel” as a teen and had never forgotten it, and that he inspired me to become a technical writer. I don’t recall his exact answer (I had a migraine earlier that day and that doesn’t help with memory), except that he was pleasantly surprised by the first thing, and kind of confused by the second. What I might have failed to convey in that brief exchange was that I thought, look, here’s this guy who published his first (Nebulat winning!) short story, then 2 more stories, and then nothing for 7 years until "Story of Your Life" which also won a Nebula. And how does that happen? You don’t stay a good writer by not writing. You definitely don’t get better by not writing. Where was he getting his practice? And I thought: maybe the discipline and work of technical writing is where he was getting his practice, and maybe I could do that, too.

Thomas Pynchon #

American novelist of weirdness and paranoia

Known for #

The surreal WWII novel Gravity’s Rainbow
The novel Inherent Vice, made into a film of the same name by Paul Thomas Anderson
His cameo on The Simpsons wearing a paper bag on his head as a joke about how private he is, refusing to be photographed or give interviews

Technical writing #

Like Ben Bova, Pynchon worked in the aerospace industry, at Boeing. Like most technical writers, he generally didn’t get a byline. However, Pynchon scholars have analyzed technical articles published at Boeing during Pynchon’s time there to try to identify which ones he might have written.

Pynchon’s descriptions of the mechanics of rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow, show the influence of his work at Boeing, I think.

Roxane Gay #

Prolific essayist, fiction writer, and editor

Known for #

The essay collection Bad Feminist
The short story collection Difficult Women

Technical writing #

Roxane Gay has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication and taught technical communication while she was a professor. I can’t find any references to working as a technical writer in industry, but I think a Ph.D. in the subject and teaching count for the purposes of my list. In an interview with Technical Communication in 2021, she described how the framework of technical communication influences her work as a essayist and fiction writer.

Charles Stross #

Prolific science fiction novelist who mixes in tropes from multiple genres and uses pointed black humor to comment on themes in current events

Known for #

Science fictional horror-comedy novel series, The Laundry Files

Technical writing #

When I talk about technical writing, I try to draw a distinction between journalistic writing about technology (often called “tech writing”) and writing manuals and descriptions of technology for industry (usually called “technical writing”). Stross has done both. Most of the official bios of Stross talk about his journalism about technology, writing about Linux for Computer Shopper.

But I also found an old comment thread on his blog where he replies, in discussion about technical writing as a day job:

“[D]one technical writing, got my chops there. It can be good, but hell hath no circle like unto being a tech writer in a software company whose editor is also your line manager (and who has a journalism degree and no understanding of the tech in question).” (The writer's lifestyle)

I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen him mention having worked as a technical writer some time on Twitter or Mastodon, which is why I added him to my list. But I couldn’t find that reference and like a good technical writer who verifies their facts, I wanted to give at least one example.

Gene Wolfe #

Science fiction novelist with an exceptionally lush prose style and complex plots

Known for #

The dying earth science fiction series, The Book of the New Sun

Technical writing #

Gene Wolfe’s work might be more journalistic writing about technology than strictly technical writing in the sense of manuals and so on. He was “an editor for the technical magazine Plant Engineering” according to an interview with Ultan's Library. In this context, editor also meant that he wrote articles and took photos. In the interview, Wolfe says he was the editor for “power transmission” and “robots” both of which sound sufficiently deep that I’m going to count it for the purpose of my list.

What makes a good comfort read?

2023-06-16T00:00:00Z

While recovering from Covid last summer I re-read The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells while crocheting a huge hexagonal blanket. And when I say read, I mostly mean I put it on text to speech on my Kindle. I was really tired all the time and could barely think. Not only that, even having strong emotions exhausted me, so I didn’t want to read anything new and potentially upsetting. I certainly didn’t want to read any news or current events, either.

“I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.” (All Systems Red)

I’m reading The Murderbot Diaries again, just because. I’ve got critical theory and unread Nebula winners piling up, just to start, but instead, I’m re-reading. There’s something deeply indulgent about re-reading when there are more books to read than you’ll ever be able to read in your lifetime. It’s like taking a bath instead of going out.

Comforting books (and other media) are a little mysterious to me. I had a roommate who liked to re-read The Secret Garden, and lots of people my age read the Harry Potter books that way, before the vast disappointment of the author’s bigotry sucked all the fun out of them. My partner re-reads Ian Banks Culture novels, including the (in my opinion) grueling Use of Weapons as his comfort reads. Clearly, which books exactly are a comfort read varies by person. But perhaps they share some unifying qualities.

n.b. I’m going to say “comfort read” throughout this post even though I’m going to talk about other media, too, because “comfort media” sounds weird and too much like some kind of particularly nice bacterial growth medium.

Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon #

When we meet it, Murderbot, a human-robot construct designed to be a killing machine, has hacked its governor module and is no longer under the control of the corporation who owns it. But they don’t know that so Murderbot continues to do its job as a security unit, and spends all its free time (and all the time it can steal) watching soap operas:

“It’s downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” (All Systems Red)

Even after Murderbot gets free of the corporation, it still obsessively consumes entertainment media, returning, over and over, to its favorite, Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

It watches Sanctuary Moon to calm itself when it’s in a scary situation–whether that situation is physical danger or extreme social awkwardness. And it watches it as part of its literal recharge cycle to also metaphorically recharge itself emotionally after dealing with a difficult social situation:

“I was also planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.” (All Systems Red)

Whomst amongst us hasn’t and so on, right?

As I was (once again) re-reading Murderbot and reading about Murderbot re-watching Sanctuary Moon, I realized that Murderbot has a good theory of what makes for comforting media.

A comfort read is familiar #

A comfort read need not be a re-read, but often, it is. The familiarity helps.

It could also be familiar because you recognize the tropes and know what will happen. I’m pretty sure that’s what makes romances such good comfort reads (assuming certain romance tropes don’t squick you out). It’s probably what made the Witcher TV show comforting to me. Despite being rather violent, gory, pessimistic, and kind of misogynistic, it hit the sword and sorcery plus Polish fairy tale beats that made sense to me.

A really good comfort read doesn’t get worn out on re-reading. Spoilers are not a thing. Because it’s familiar, you can read it again even if you’re too stressed out or tired to try something new. Like Murderbot does:

“If it was going to destroy me, at least I could get some media in before that happened. I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started watching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon” (Artificial Condition)

But not too familiar #

You don’t want a comfort read to remind you too much of the boring or upsetting parts of your life. It shouldn’t feel like work if you don’t like your work. But if you really like your work, the way ART the transport ship bot does, then it might be OK:

“I found it odd that the transport was less interested in Sanctuary Moon, which took place on a colony, than Worldhoppers, which was about the crew of a large exploration ship. You’d think it would be too much like work–I avoided serials about survey teams and mining installations–but maybe familiar things were easier for it.” (Artificial Condition)

When I was sick, I wasn’t about to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, even if bored convalescents might be extremely relatable. (I also wouldn’t read it as a comfort read while sick because it’s too difficult a novel to read when I’m not at full mental capacity)

The right kind of unrealistic #

“It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.” (Artificial Condition)

This might be one criterion where Murderbot and I agree, but not everyone else does. I prefer science fiction and fantasy in general, but even more so as comfort reads. However, even set in an imaginary future or world, SFF might still be too real to be a comfort read. I loved The Chronicles of Tornor but the realistic emotional intensity makes it a bad choice for a comfort read.

On the other hand, something might be unrealistic in the wrong way. The constant, horrible murderiness and misogynistic misery of A Song of Ice and Fire is unrealistic in the wrong way for me. So are any number of rapey fantasy stories. Or those stupid romances where the hero is clearly abusive to the heroine but then she falls in love with him and he gets better. No thanks. As Murderbot says:

“There’s unrealistic that takes you away from reality and unrealistic that reminds you that everybody’s afraid of you.” (Artificial Condition)

Except unlike Murderbot my problem in reality isn’t that everyone is afraid of me. But you get the idea.

A specific kind of unrealistic that Murderbot and I both like is stories about competent characters saving themselves. Murderbot itself is such a character, first freeing itself from robot slavery, and then constantly getting into terrible danger and getting out again. The Vorkosigan Saga, which I also re-read last summer, is also about hypercompetent people getting things done. Weirdly, I think that’s why some of Charles Stross’ _Laundry Files _novels are comforting, too. There might be horrible eldrich horrors and and unspeakable bureaucracies, but the characters just fucking deal with it.

Like a warm bath for your fretful porpentine #

“Some part of my organic systems remembered what had happened there. In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon, and weirdly, that helped.” (Artificial Condition)

Ultimately, I think a comfort read isn’t so much about what’s happening in the story, but about the effect it has on you. Even with Murderbot’s abstracted criteria, I wonder if these are too specific. I didn’t even mention a bunch of other things that seem to be important for me, like sardonic humor, fast-paced action, and emotional distance, because I can think of plenty of books that have those qualities and aren’t comforting. It’s still a bit mysterious. All I know is that when I pick up my comfort read, it makes me feel a bit more OK about everything. And if everything is already pretty good, it’s still a nice way to relax.

You can buy The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, starting with All Systems Red from a number of sellers, or check your local library.

Review: Watchtower, The Dancers of Arun, and The Northern Girl by Elizabeth A. Lynn

2023-06-09T00:00:00Z

It’s too bad that most reflections on the three books that comprise the Chronicles of Tornor focus so much on the fact that they have gay and genderqueer characters who are portrayed in “a positive light,” as many of the reviews say, that they hardly say anything beyond that. Because, well, first of all, no, they are just portrayed as characters living their lives, making both good and bad choices, and their sexuality is portrayed as normal, neutral even, not “in a positive light.” And putting it that way might make you think that the books were interesting in their time–they were published in 1979 and 1980–but now are just historical artifacts. But, actually, there is so much more, which makes them worth reading, or re-reading, now.

Feudalism with gay psychics #

The Chronicles of Tornor is a fantasy series set in a feudal society. The series spans over 200 years, with each book following the stories of a new set of characters, and charting the development of an increasingly more complex and peaceful society. With each book, more aspects of society become organized into institutions, and more people and ways of life become integrated into that society. Ancestral enemies become coveted trade partners. A wild dream of one character in book one is an established institution by book two and a lost way of life by book three.

People with psionic powers are barely acknowledged in book one, and misunderstood and grudgingly accepted by the tolerant, while thriving in one special city in book two. By book three, they are institutions like scholars or traders, not only established but involved in political power plays that corrupt their original mission. Now that I write that, it sounds a little like an allegory for gay acceptance, though it’s so subtly done I didn’t even notice that it was as I read the books.

However, one thing that changes very little in the books is the acceptance of gay relationships, because for all the ways that the society might seem backwards from our own, a taboo about gay relationships is not present. (And that’s not the only sexual taboo that’s absent, which I think is an artifact of the books having been written in the 70s when Freudian psychology was mixing with feminist theory in ways that are now out of fashion.)

After the first book, each set of characters looks back on the past that the previous characters inhabited through a mythologizing and romanticizing lens. Each character at some point thinks, ah, yes those were the glory days, those ancient times, recalling something we, as readers, had just read in the previous book and know very well that it was first, kind of miserable and not at all glorious like that, and second, didn’t go like that at all, what’s wrong with you people!

The commentary on the tendency to romanticize the past while forgetting the actual achievements of our predecessors (because they did such a good job achieving them that we now take their outcome for granted) is particularly effective because of Elizabeth A. Lynn’s gutpunching vivid writing style. She goes for short sentences and sensual descriptions, which gives us beautiful likes like:

“The sky was blue as flame. The half moon sat like a ghost on the eastern horizon.”

Equally vivid, she shows scenes of everyday activities like eating, washing, having sex, or getting your period early:

“Opening the chest at the foot of the bed, she took out her sponge, and, crouching, inserted it. Her back twinged. Scowling, she dressed, and stamped downstairs with the soiled linen in her arms. Against the waistband of her pants, she felt her belly's bloat.”

When I first read The Northern Girl in my teens, that scene when the athletic city guard, Pax, gets her period stuck with me. I didn’t know you could use a sponge as a kind of tampon. I had also never read a scene before that so unflinchingly and vividly described the experience of getting your period. It's not a gross-out or played for laughs or shock; it's just life. In most fantasy, characters never even have to pee. In The Chronicles of Tornor they have to deal with chamber pots, get sticky from sex, and on more than one occasion deal with their periods. I hope I’m not giving the impression that the books are scatalogical, because they are not, but they are extremely earthy.

Which is, also, not to say that these are just books about people doing household chores and dealing with physical needs. Rather, it’s that they do all those things while they travel across the world, fight battles, hone their psychic powers, found new civilization-changing institutions, and have epiphanies that lead to personal growth, like when the point of view character, Ryke, in Watchtower, begins to question his assumptions about womanhood and manhood:

“It was as if there was a man inside her. Perhaps there was; that might be the thing that made her seem unlike all the women he knew. He wondered if there was a man hidden inside all women. He thought of Norres, of Maranth, of Becke. He thought of his mother. If there was a man inside women, was there also a woman inside men?”

Sudden and brutal violence #

And then, there is the violence. I’ve read somewhere, and now I don’t remember where, that one of Lynn’s marks as a writer are scenes of sudden and brutal violence. Only, I think, that’s not right. There’s not actually all that much violence in these books, and the reviewer who complained that The Dancers of Arun is mostly about doing domestic chores kind of has a point. There’s probably more domestic chores than violence, which is a bit surprising for a book about a dancing troupe of martial artists having an encounter with psychic desert barbarians.

Lynn portrays violence the way violence actually feels. When it happens, it’s surprising and horrifying. The characters are as likely to be the victims of violence as the instigators, actually, maybe more so. Perhaps that’s part of what’s shocking about it. Normally, in fantasy, the heroes go around fighting and getting into scraps, and normally they win easily and move on with their lives. In The Chronicles of Tornor, violence has consequences, often devastating and even completely unfixable ones. For example, the main point of view character in The Dancers of Arun had one of his arms cut off as a child during a raid, and it’s the defining trauma of his life. In The Northern Girl, the main character, Sorren, is caught up in a riot and witnesses a person get killed. The scene is brief, vivid, and then Sorren has to deal with the consequences emotionally, and the city government deal with the consequences of the riot politically.

I would argue that it’s not so much that Lynn’s books are particularly violent as compared to the genre. Rather, most of the time when she portrays violence, she also depicts its consequences, including for bystanders, and including its long-term consequences.

And so, given that vivid portrayal of the earthy, the beautiful, and the brutal, when a character in The Northern Girl dreams about the glory days of The Watchtower, as a reader, you kind of go, yeah, no. That reflection is interesting within the world of the series, but it also makes you think about what aspects of the past in our real world we might be misconstruing or romanticizing.

Lesbians who have adventures with swords and psionics #

Now, I must also say a few words about the queer characters and relationships. These were the first books in which I read about gay and lesbian characters. It was sometime in the mid 1990s, when I was a teenager. I still remember reading The Dancers of Arun, which was the first book I read in the series, and feeling confused because there were two characters who were referred to as “he” and each other’s lovers. I kept thinking I must have missed something, or got a name confused. Eventually it became clear to me, the characters were both men, and also lovers. I think I had a brief moment of, oh, OK, that’s how it works, just as I would have with any worldbuilding detail, and moved on.

Only, no, I didn’t really move on. Rather, I assimilated the idea that being gay is not a big deal. When I read about gay and lesbian characters in Watchtower and The Northern Girl, I wasn’t confused any more that people might have a same sex lover. And because I met these characters in fiction and it wasn’t a big deal, when I met queer people in real life, it also wasn’t a big deal, nor was it a big deal to think about my own sexuality. Reading these books as a teen saved me a lot of grief and confusion later in life. I might not have been sure what my feelings were at times, but whatever they were, I never felt I was a bad person for having them.

There are many other books with queer characters now, and so for most people reading them now, the fact that they have queer characters who go about their adventures in a perfectly normal way is probably not a huge distinguishing factor. That’s OK, though. Because the adventures are still great.

You can buy an ebook of The Chronicles of Tornor through Open Road Media. Paper editions of the books seem to only be available used.

Can we imagine magic that isn’t all about words?

2023-06-02T00:00:00Z

Magic comes from secret words, usually spoken but sometimes written down. Sometimes you also have to be a special person. That’s how it is in most fiction nowadays. And when I say nowadays, I probably mean at least the last 100 years.

You can see the trope handled well, like in Ursula K. Le Guin’s, A Wizard of Earthsea

“It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.”

And you can see it done less well in something like the Harry Potter series, with all the fuss about saying the right word with intention. If you’re online enough, a meme gif of Hermione Granger saying “It’s Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa” has probably sprung into your mind unbidden already.

A combination of words and some innate power in the magician is a literate and individualistic society’s most obvious view of magic. But where else might magical power come from? Well, I made a list of some preliminary ideas and, no joke, if you’re writing some magical fiction, maybe try some of these out. I’d really like to see some new sources of magic in my fictional magic users. I’m not saying go all Brandon Sanderson on it and write a whole roleplaying rulebook about your magical system, but consider, try it on, what would it feel like if in your world magic came from something like this:

Life force, as in blood sacrifice
Stored in empowered objects
Songs
Gestures and dance
Sacrifice, as in self-mortification
Given by a god to a favored follower
Theurgic practice where the practitioner aligns with the qualities of a god and thus gains some of its powers
Channeled from a force of nature
Channeled from another plane
Done by ancestors with whom the magician has a relationship
Done by a helpful familiar spirit
Done by an enslaved demon
Done by a transactional spirit
Channeled from a magical place
Potions
Innate to earthly magical beings that might help you out
Focusing mathematical forces, as the rays of the planets in astrology
Done by gods as an answer to a prayer
Wordlessly manipulated through connection with emptiness
Magical symbols which innately have power no matter who uses them
Secret connections between alike objects—sympathetic magic
Monsters created by something going wrong with the normal human course of life
Arising out of the purity and correct life of the magician
Arising out of the exceptional evil of the magician
Magical animals
Special times when magic occurs
Candles and wax
The evil eye
Smells
Underground places
Ancient artifacts which can somehow be tapped
Secret procedures of manufacture or of doing things
A terrifying deal with a demon
Drumming
Transforming into an animal
Entering into an underground space
Getting high and going to the underworld
Being on the brink of death
Eating a magical plant
Making very small and precise miniatures of what you want to happen
Granted temporarily as part of a special role or employment contract
Tying and untying special knots

These streets aren’t made for walking, but that's just what we'll do

2023-05-26T00:00:00Z

Content warning: Description of a person driving a car hitting a person walking.

I always assumed that you had to have a car to get anywhere in Los Angeles. I don’t like driving and don’t normally drive, but I thought, you have to in LA. The last time I was here, or at least I think that was the last time, I saw a woman in a powder blue outfit get hit in a cross section by a car turning left. The car was going very slowly and while she fell over, she got back up and walked away. It was so upsetting that I deliberately watched television commercials for a couple of hours to wipe my memory. I also refused to drive any more, and took a cab to Griffith Observatory instead of driving there. It was fine. I took a lot of photos of people in golden hour light. I got to see Mars through the telescope. I took the bus back down, and then the metro and that was fine, too.

So when I planned this trip, the one I’m on right now, I said, no car. We’ll just take the metro and cabs as needed. It’ll be an adventure. Besides, when you don’t own a car, car rental is more expensive because you have to pay extra for car insurance, not having your own already.

Today was the first day of that adventure. I don’t have much to say yet except these few observations:

All the stores in the little strip malls with tiny parking lots have signs that are easy to read from the street but difficult to see when you’re walking up to them.
The blocks are ridiculously long.
So many taco trucks, everywhere; I can’t wait to eat from them.
Los Angeles is not so much a city as multiple little cities in a trenchcoat.
The metro is lovely. If only it ran more often.
I still don’t trust anyone taking a left turn.
Union Station is incredibly beautiful, but like a lot of public infrastructure marred by anti-homeless people measures.
It’s a different city on foot.

Not exactly wild, not exactly abandoned

2023-05-19T00:00:00Z

The first time I wandered into the Presidio by way of Mountain Lake Park, I wasn’t sure if I was even supposed to be there. Behind a chain link fence stood rows of empty houses, boarded up, painted white and then graffitied, with the grass around them overgrown. Feral calla lilies bloomed all around. Fog turned the late afternoon into twilight gloom. The feeling that I might be trespassing only drew me in. I was walking into a real-life Silent Hill. I wondered if I would get lost. My flip phone had only one bar left.

That must have been 2004 or at most 2005, just 10 years since the Presidio stopped being a military base and was handed over to the Presidio Trust. I guess it was technically a park, but it felt a lot more like an abandoned military base. I loved that feeling, and because I knew it couldn’t last, I wanted to spend as much time there as I could.

I don’t know what I was expecting would happen. Maybe something like what happened with the Public Health Service Hospital which looked so cool when it was abandoned and covered in graffiti and now is fancy apartments. Boring. All the charm gone.

But that’s not what happened to most of the Presidio. Rather than getting developed into dullness, it’s been getting rewilded. Bit by bit, the garbage dumps the military left behind got cleared out. Streams got daylighted. Wetlands restored. Dunes and hillsides stripped of invasive species and planted with native plants, returning, as much as it’s possible, to their original states, meadows and coastal scrub, a sanctuary for wild things.

That’s why I went there last Sunday, looking for inspiration for my garden, which I want, as much as possible, to turn into a mini-habitat for native plants and animals.

But the restoration isn’t all done yet, and to my ongoing delight, there are still parts of the Presidio you can blunder into and wonder, am I supposed to be here?

Now I know: take pictures while it lasts, or at least until I run out of battery.

Review: The Moon Moth and Rose/House

2023-05-12T00:00:00Z

Updated on June 4, 2024 with updated information about where you can buy a hardcover and ebook version of Rose/Hose.

I didn’t intend to have some kind of crossover noir murder mystery science fiction novella double feature when I read “The Moon Moth” and Rose/House on the same weekend. I just wanted to read Jack Vance’s “The Moon Moth” (1961) because Alzabo Soup was discussing it and it sounded cool. And I picked up Arkady Martine’s Rose/House (2023) because I loved A Memory Called Empire, and I’ll devour anything she publishes. Other than a lush prose style and the genre crossover, they don’t have that much in common. But maybe that’s enough to start talking about.

The unfolding mystery #

Part of the fun of science fiction is figuring out how the world works. Writers can hold back some information about the world and let you figure it out from clues to fun effect. Some, in my opinion, do it to an excess and hold back important information as a cheap trick to hook you rather than having it serve the narrative or mood or whatever goals the story has. Joke’s on them, if a story holds back on world building just for fake tension, I get frustrated and skip ahead. If the story falls apart without that element then it wasn’t a very good story, was it?

Both “The Moon Moth” and Rose/House use world building slow reveals effectively. And here’s where I think there’s a neat structural overlap between a murder mystery and science fiction. In a mystery, the writer of course knows who-done-it (or alternatively, how they will be caught) but they skillfully reveal enough to let you start figuring it out and lead you to a satisfying ending, if not necessarily a neat conclusion. So if you can combine the unfolding mystery of the world with the unfolding mystery of the murder, ideally having the protagonist use elements of the revealed world to solve the murder, that works very well.

Both pieces also tend towards noir, in that the world is corrupt, or maybe fallen, and in neither case do you get exactly a happy ending. Even insofar as the characters prevail, it doesn’t lead to justice or even closure.

Everybody wears a mask and is incredibly selfish #

In “The Moon Moth” our protagonist is an off-world ambassador poorly adjusting to the customs of Sirene, a planet where everyone always wears a mask because showing the face you were born with does not afford sufficient control over the message you wish to express with your appearance. People don’t just wear one mask, but switch out masks depending on the circumstances and what they want to convey.

As you may imagine, in a world where everyone wears a mask that entirely covers their face and most of their head, identifying people can be pretty tricky. That’s too bad for our protagonist because he has to track down and kill a dangerous assassin.

Another feature of Sirene, which comes out more and more as you read, is that everyone is extremely selfish. They say they are self-reliant, which is sort of true. Everyone (except for the slaves who are never explained) has enough and anything you might want from another person is surplus, and no one really needs the help of another for survival needs. But people are unwilling to get involved or help one another, except in as far as it might help their own status. Quite literally if a person were drowning, no one would throw them a rope because they don’t want to get involved. Unless it raised their status or piqued their curiosity.

I’m leaving (so many!) things out because I’m trying to emphasize a certain allegorical reading of “The Moon Moth” that I hope is becoming obvious.

I swear someone must have told me about “The Moon Moth” in the early 2000s, because as soon as I read it, I thought, ah yes, of course, this is the story about how everyone wears a mask and it is an allegory for life on the internet. Or, at least, life on the internet before we started using our real faces and names on the internet. The idea didn’t seem like something I came up with, but like something that I remembered.

Whoever told me about the masks as an allegory for shifting online identities didn’t mention the incredible selfishness and the obsession with status. I don’t think all online spaces are like that, but a lot I’ve participated in sure have been. Again, perhaps the allegory made more sense when there wasn’t any money at stake and it was just all about who could be the meanest and cleverest flame warrior on alt.gothic, or, if you wanted true viciousness, alt.tarot. I do not kid, though, I do, perhaps, both date and out myself a bit.

Where to read “The Moon Moth” #

There’s a lot more to “The Moon Moth” and at just 39 pages, it’s worth giving it a shot even if you aren’t sure you’ll like it. You can get it as part of the collection The Moon Moth and Other Stories. Or, you can listen to an excellent narration for free. In 2013, the podcast StarShipSofa got permission to serialize an audio narration. Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 on StarShipSofa.

An AI that is a house that tells lies and might be a little bit murdery #

I could say that Rose/House is a locked room mystery, but that would be selling it short. Except maybe if I add that the locked room is an AI and is itself on the suspect list, that gives it more of its proper credit. The titular Rose House is an architectural marvel and quite possibly its dead (of old age) architect’s crowning achievement. For reasons we never quite learn, he stipulated in his will that at his death Rose House would be shut up with all his archives and watched over by its AI, which permeates the house. Only one person, the architect's estranged former protege, is allowed to enter the house, and only for a week per year. As we begin the story, the house makes a legally required phone call to a police precinct to report a dead body on its premises. How did someone get inside? How did they die? How can the detective get inside to retrieve the body if only the protege is allowed inside? These are the animating mysteries that drive the plot. But the plot is only half (at most) of the mystery.

I wouldn’t really want to say too much about Rose/House that explains the world building beyond the book blurb, since it just came out on April 18, and most people haven’t yet had a chance to read it. Not only that, Rose/House is definitely an unfolding mystery of world building and the pleasure of your first read might be diminished by knowing too much beyond the setup.

The conception of an AI that is also a house and that is bound by rules and logic that don’t entirely map to human ones and is therefore potentially very dangerous is the most intriguing part of the novella. When the characters try to negotiate with it, it has strange resonances between negotiating with the fay and trying to pull off a prompt injection attack.

I don’t know when Arkady Martine got the idea for Rose/House and wrote it. At times it feels like a very pointed commentary on both the Internet of Things and our current moment of fear and excitement about conversational AI.

Haunted architecture #

The people who live near Rose House, who are just normal people and not obsessive architecture fans, call it “a haunt.” And I got the impression that there were other buildings, maybe other whole cities, that were inhabited by AIs and people generally felt uneasy about that. The idea that an Internet of Things house is kind of haunted has been floating around, and so has the very phrase “the ghost in the machine.” But the way that “a haunt” becomes a derisive term in Rose/House feels fresh to me.

If you know a bit about 20th-century architects, especially the assholes, Rose/House is extra fun. I only know a tiny bit, and mostly from reading Seeing Like a State a couple of years ago, which was enough to pick up on the digs at Le Corbusier and his plans for Brasilia.

The story made modern(ist) architecture feel like the right setting for an AI ghost story just as a medieval castle feels like the right setting for a vampire story and a Victorian pile the right setting for a traditional ghost story. Of course, by the time the story is set, a modernist house would be a bit of an antique. Even now, brutalist architecture is mostly a thing of the past, and more’s the shame.

Where to read Rose/House #

You can buy a limited-edition hardcover of Rose/House from Subterranean Press. They previously also sold an ebook, but no longer seem to have it in stock. However, you can find the ebook on Amazon.

One bug may hide another

2023-05-05T00:00:00Z

One of my favorite poems of all time is Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another.” The poem begins with its titular image and immediately starts playing with it:

    In a poem, one line may hide another line,
    As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
    That is, if you are waiting to cross
    The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
    Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
    Wait until you have read the next line—
    Then it is safe to go on reading.

The poem gets stranger and richer from there, and you might as well go read it.

I think of that poem and that phrase “one train may hide another,” when I’m fixing a problem of some kind, and only when I fix the first problem, do I discover the problem behind it. Sometimes one after another, revealing themselves only after the previous problems are fixed.

One garden pest may hide another #

I’ve been gardening lately, trying to turn the little lawn in my backyard into a California native plant sanctuary. The grass dies back in the summer, even with watering, and it’s not very attractive. At first, I decided to cut it back, hoping that if I cut the yellowing grass on top, I’d let the grass from the bottom grow in. I bought a string trimmer and strimmed the tall grass. Strimming, by the way, is a ton of fun. My strimmer is electric battery-powered so it’s not smelly or very loud, and I just swoosh that sucker around while thinking, “Die ugly grass, die!”

After I cut it back, I realized the tall, dry grass was actually covering patches of entirely bare ground. Not great. But, it also gave me an excuse to start planting stuff. I took my wheely cart thing on the bus and rode down to the nursery where I bought some drought-resistant plants and 40 pounds of mulch. Taking mulch home on the bus in a wheely thing was a bit challenging. Luckily, the bus sits low to the curb and doesn’t have steps, so I was able to do it.

While digging up dead grass with my tiny hand trowel (because the shovel I have sucks), I noticed there was green plastic in the ground. When I ripped up some bigger chunks of it, I found it was a kind of wide plastic mesh. I wondered irately what the hell it was as I ripped it out. Stupid plastic in my ground. What the hell? (Yeah, I’ll come back to this)

A bunch of digging and planting and watering and mulching later, I had my first patch of plants in. They looked nice. I felt so proud of them! Gardening even a small patch is tons of work, yet somehow so compelling and satisfying that I can spend most of the day mucking about and feel happy about it.

The only thing I worried about was the squirrels. A lot of squirrels visit my yard and dig holes in it. I hoped the mulch would discourage them and I also had a stern conversation with some of them. I used hand gestures to indicate I had my eye on them. It seemed to work, at first.

Squirrels!? #

A few days later, the peace was over. I went to water my plants in the morning and found several had been dug up. Just entire plugs of chamomile plantings dug out of the ground and left lying sideways on top. Even for the brazen squirrels of my neighborhood, this was truly an act of uncalled-for vandalism. I photographed the crime scene and then put things back and added flesh mulch for good measure.

Then, I took to Mastodon to complain and tell the story of my squirrel woes, where I got sympathy and something even better: someone said it wasn’t squirrels but a skunk looking for grubs. I read a bit and found that indeed, this is the behavior of skunks. Young plants attract grubs and other bugs to their tasty roots, and those bugs attract skunks who dig them up to get at the bugs.

As it happened, when I was digging up the grass, I noticed a lot of little roly-poly bugs. I assumed they must have an important job in the ecosystem since there were so many of them. I decided to look them up and what do you know, they’re also called pill bugs and they are well, they’re frenemies. On the one hand, they eat dead plant matter, breaking it down into dirt. On the other hand, if they happen upon tasty new plant roots while eating dead plants, they’ll eat that, too. And my yard had been somewhat unkempt, with lots of dead grass among the living grass, and lots of leaves piling up in the corners. Pill bug central.

I thought I had a squirrel problem, but actually I had a skunk problem, but actually I had a pill bug problem, but actually–

Actually, I had an unkempt garden problem. The skunks were drawn to my plants because they had pill bugs all over. The pill bugs were all over my plants because they were all over the dead plant matter in my garden. I was going to have to clear it out. Along with various mildly murderous suggestions (I refuse to use even diatomaceous earth because it might kill bugs who are definitely friends, like spiders), I found the suggestion to make a leaf and garden trash pile to bait the pill bugs into. That seemed like a nice idea: make a pill bug habitat in a designated part of the garden and move them as I catch them. They don’t bite or even look that gross.

A rake that doesn't suck #

The following weekend I went on a big adventure to buy a garden rake. It took me a while to figure out that the kind of rake I wanted is called a garden rake. During the research process, I asked ChatGPT “Why do American rakes suck,” hoping it would tell me what they were called, but it just scolded me for being bigoted against Americans. American rakes suck, as it turns out, because they are specialized leaf rakes for gently caressing the leaves that fall on your grass. I thought they sucked because they were designed so you couldn't stand on them and bonk yourself on the head and were willing to be ineffective in exchange.

Anyway, I got a decent rake and raked the dead grass out of the grass and piled it all up in the back of the yard on top of a tree stump that I'm hoping to slowly break down with the natural process of decay. Now, every time I find a pill bug as I’m messing about in the garden (which I do constantly because I mostly work from home and I go out there every time I need a stretch break and pick a single weed) I pick that sucker up and carry it over to the grass and leaf pile.

Towards the fall, I also plan to inoculate the stump with some saprophytic fungi like shiitakes to help break it down some more, and maybe even get some edible mushrooms out of it. I can’t wait to find out what kind of weird problems that will uncover.

Oh and that weird plastic stuff I angrily ripped out of my lawn? It was plastic mesh netting that is sometimes used to put down turf, but also, to keep animals from digging up your lawn. So when I ripped it out of the part of the lawn I replaced with drought-resistant plants, I made it easier for animals to dig up digger chunks of lawn than the little holes the squirrels had been digging. I still hate the plastic stuff and plan to rip it up but at least I understand why someone might have thought it was a good idea once.

Fragments from the first year of the plague

2023-04-28T00:00:00Z

During the first year of the pandemic, I could not even finish a poem. I just wrote fragments. However I was able to kind of draw, though in an equally fragmentary way. I’ve always doodled, and often these doodles took on a kind of pattern, almost like language. In October of 2019, did an ink drawing every day, which led to these inky doodles expanding in size. Instead of just marginalia, they started to take the center of the page, or at least share it equally with discernible words.

I ended up with a lot of bits of words and bits of ink and pen drawings. It’s still not clear what I should “do” with them or anything like proper art will ever come of them. So, rather than continuing to hold on to them for who knows how long, I thought I’d share some of these sort-of-poems, sort-of-word-art fragments today, on the last Friday of National Poetry Month.

In exile from our lives and from each other #

in exile
from our lives
and from each other

I miss the ocean #

I miss the ocean

in exile
    from our lives
        and from 
each other

we re-enter the
forbidden country
only under duress
and in great
danger

The hummingbird perches #

The hummingbird perches on a dried bush behind a stand of sweet fennel.
He must live there or at least claim the territory as his own.
Each evening I have visited the overlook, the hummingbird alights
if only I wait long enough. He clicks from the fennel then zooms
and zips and swoops then sits. Sits long enough for me to 
fumble out the bird-o-scope, adjust the eyepiece and scan until
I sight him. I worry sometimes that the scope in its black case
might be mistaken for a shoulder holster with a gun and get
me shot by a trigger-happy cop.

Sweet fennel sweet fennel #

Sweet Fennel
sweet fennel

fractal 
fennel

In exile from our lives
and from each other

sweet fennel

A zine for the first year of the plague

A little book for the first year of the plague

Coda #

No, I never did make that zine, either. I did, however, work entirely too much.

What's your tactical ballgown?

2023-04-21T00:00:00Z

An icebreaker is a pickup line for making friends. Like a pickup line, it immediately signals your intention. A line like “Do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk by again?” might be cheesy but it leaves no doubt that your interest is of a romantic nature. Then again, ambiguity is a key element of flirting, so if you make it obvious that you’re flirting, you undermine it. Maybe that’s why pickup lines both get mocked and at the same time are so deliberately silly. We mock them because they destroy the very flirtation they aim to initiate. The popular ones are deliberately silly so the person using them can play them off as just a laugh, not a serious pickup, and so restore the ambiguity of flirtation.

Whew. I think I was channeling Zizek there for a while or something. Excuse me while I blow my nose and turn the portrait of Stalin to the wall.

So anyway, icebreakers try to cut through the small talk, just the way pickup lines do, and try to get people to open up to each other to build a relationship faster. I suppose structurally that’s also why they are seen as somewhat risible. Opening up to someone and becoming friends is supposed to be spontaneous and a little bit mysterious. When you become friends with someone, there’s always some period where you aren’t sure if you are friends yet, if it’s appropriate to share certain things or not. The icebreaker attempts to shortcut that by insisting you open up right away. The best icebreakers are a little bit silly, I think, which makes it easier to frame all the scary opening up as a game. And a game is a kind of enclosure, just like a ritual or a therapy session, where you can do and say things that would be too real if you did them for real.

And oh, wow, I hadn’t really realized this when I started writing this yet another not-really-a-book-review about Promises Stronger Than Darkness that the extreme weirdo silliness of this book is what lets it be so real and head-on about the feelings.

Getting down to brass lace eyelets #

But that’s not what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to write about my favorite idea from the book and how it would make a wonderful icebreaker, the tactical ballgown:

“Elza goes to the cubby where she’s been sleeping and hunts inside a tiny wicker box until she finds a lump of fuchsia satin: her tactical ballgown. She looks at its rippling folds, thinking, This is ridiculous—and then she pulls it on over her practical black explorer pants. The moment those folds and billows settle around her waist and hips, she feels better, as if Rachael is still with her.” – Promises Stronger Than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders

If you’ve read the Unstoppable trilogy, you know that Elza is a princess who communicates with a sentient supercomputer using a crown. In the last book, her friend Rachel also designs a tactical ballgown for Elza. It’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a princess-worthy ballgown. But it is also a real piece of armor that protects her in battle. It lets her be her most powerful and most fabulous self. It strengthens her body and her spirit. But also? It is a little bit ridiculous. It is a little bit too much for the situation.

That got me thinking: What’s my tactical ballgown? And then, I thought, that’s a great question to ask other people, too. It would be an amazing icebreaker. Forget “Tell me one fun fact about yourself,” or (ugh) “What do you do?”

New icebreaker just dropped #

So, what’s your tactical ballgown? You know, the clothing item or accessory people would normally dismiss as utterly impractical and too much but which actually helps you be effective in a crucial or unexpected way?

For example, a lady I know has been wearing the same kind of over-the-top goth makeup since probably the 80s along with all the intense clothing and jewelry that goes with it. She puts it on every time she leaves the house, as far as I know. She was my house guest for a little while, so I’ve seen the transformation. She’s a small lady from a marginalized group and when she puts on her outfit and makeup, it just changes how people interact with her in the world. It both keeps her safe and creates an opening for conversations on her terms. Her whole wardrobe is tactical ballgowns.

Most people, I think, have something like that. Some outfit or item of clothing that just makes you feel like your most powerful and fabulous self in a way that helps you navigate the world more effectively.

I’m still thinking about mine, but my provisional answer is my ridiculously long pumpkin-orange scarf. It’s made out of light cotton and goes to my knees even after I wrap it around my neck, because it was originally intended to be a dupatta that went with a kurti and skirt set. A saleslady in Bangalore convinced me to get it to go with the set even though I thought that it clashed and was not my color. I hardly ever wear the dress now because it’s too light for San Francisco (plus it’s generally not appropriate for me to wear in most situations) but I wear that orange scarf all the dang time.

It whips behind me stylishly. It’s so bright drivers are sure to see me when I cross the road. I’ve wrapped it tight to protect myself from the wind and worn it loose to shield myself from the sun. Sometimes I use it to dry my hands in it after washing them. It also works to clean my glasses.

And last but not least, when worn with my usual black clothing, it makes me look like I’m wearing Giants’ team colors, which, in San Francisco, makes people inexplicably nice to me. Sometimes they ask if I saw the game and if I say (as is almost always the case) that I didn’t get a chance to, they tell me how it went. It’s the right amount of social interaction with utter strangers, as far as I’m concerned.

Though I guess if I ever wanted to get to know them better, I could ask them an icebreaker. Perhaps this one.

This blog doesn't have comments, but if you want to tell me what your tactical ballgown is, I'd like to know. Come hang out with me on Mastodon.

Unplayable games and untellable tales

2023-04-14T00:00:00Z

If you're here for a normal kind of book review, the kind that says, should I read this book? Is it good? The answer is yes. It has a sentient moose that communicates by text messages. I don't know what more you really need to know to decide to read the book. Go read the blurb on the back, then go read the book, and then come back and read my blog post.

OK, you've done that? Then come with me on a journey where I talk about what an imaginary game inside The Terraformers told me about the kind of story The Terraformers tries to tell, and why it's so hard to tell that kind of story.

"Make this cat moose brown." -- The Terraformers

Let's start in the middle, or actually, the middle of the last third of the book. Moose, a sentient cat reporter, and their friend Scrubjay, a train temporarily in the guise of a robot beaver, go to a demo night for indie video games at a club in the robot cruising district. Like most trains, Scrubjay loves games and eagerly tries out one of the demo games, Farm Revolutions.

Unplayable game #

The farm revolution is an important historical event as well as a foundational myth of the book's multi-planetary, multi-species, hybrid biological and robotic society. It's how humanity saved itself, and the earth, and how we ended up in this state of affairs where Homo sapiens are just one of the many kinds of people around (and in fact what they call Homo sapiens is hardly recognizable to us except in the most outward way). It was a time of heroes, and tricksters, and battles and amazing inventions–or so Scrubjay thinks until they start trying to play the very historically accurate game. It turns out the heroes that Scrubjay knew about left little historical trace, their famous speeches are reconstructions from centuries later, and the game sucks because it's not clear what you're supposed to do, or how to gain experience–never mind win. The game designer wants to help people understand the real history and to help them understand that revolutions aren't one-time events with heroes fighting an epic battle, and it's not even clear when they start or end. That's fine and good, Scrubjay and Moose say, but the game is unplayable.

I think that the game Farm Revolutions is a hint, or maybe a big flashing sign, from the author about the kind of tale they are trying to tell with The Terraformers. Which is to say, they’re trying to tell the story of what revolution looks like beyond the mythologized moments of glorious battle. The Terraformers tells the whole story of politics and ecosystems and struggles for personhood, not just the exciting parts that are fun and easy to tell. And, by including the game they’re also dropping the hint that they know telling this kind of story is risky and could go wrong.

Untellable tale in three parts #

The Terraformers starts out with a fairly conventional structure. The first third of the book would make a fantastic stand-alone novella, in fact. We follow Destry (close enough to our kind of human to make the ways she’s different from normal humans stand out) and her work partner and mount, Whistle, the aforementioned sentient moose who texts. Within a few pages, Destry shoots and kills a jerk who is ruining the ecosystem of the planet that she is helping to terraform. She has a clear antagonist in the form of her evil boss Ronnie, who only turns out to be more of a jerk as the story goes on. There are romances, mysteries, intrigues, an epic battle, and a bittersweet victory. It’s great.

Then it’s 700 years later, and Sulfur, our main point of view character thinks of Destry as a historical person who was kind of a jerk for signing an agreement with the corporation that owns the planet–the very agreement that let Sulfur’s people maintain independence while participating in the planetary society. What? I thought Sulfur was kind of a jerk or maybe even an idiot kid, even if they were centuries old. But of course, from Sulfur’s point of view, Destry’s hard-won victory and the treaty she sacrificed so much to secure is now the unsatisfying status quo. Sulfur wants more freedom than the generation before dared dream of. Hey friends, it’s the Hegelian dialectic, that’s how it goes.

This middle third of the book is mostly a slow-paced fact finding mission where Sulfur (a hominid but not a Homo sapiens) works with Destry’s successor and two other people to survey the planet, which now has cities, and figure out what kind of public transit system they should establish.

After the exciting first third with Destry and Whistle with moose romance and battles and volcano mysteries, it was kind of a let down. Oh sure, we see how the planet has changed in just 700 years, and there’s all the hilarious and sexy events at The Tongue Forks, which is the best multi-species burlesque bar I’ve ever read about, but where are the heroes? Where are the battles? The most important thing that happens in the section is getting our new corporate villain to agree to a public transit system proposal for sentient flying trains, which happens almost entirely off the page.

And then finally, it’s almost a thousand years after that and one of the protagonists now is a sentient train, oh hey it’s the train we saw born at the very end of the last section. The planet is almost unrecognizable from the first section, and the struggles of the people who came before give rise to the struggles of the current bunch. Now, finally, the forces they fight against are a lot more complex and nebulous. It’s no longer just a single antagonist, like in the first section, or a hated treaty and a handful of corporate honchos. Now, the antagonist (if we can even call it that) is a whole system of corporate planetary ownership, interplanetary law, personhood status, and complex alliances. Former enemies become temporary allies. Friends split into factions that have to find common ground or compromise and forgiveness. Society has got a whole lot more complicated.

In the end, even the victory is somewhat tentative, and political, and having seen how it started with the treaty from the first section, you have to wonder, would some future people of this imagined world also look back at this hard-won political victory and think it’s an odious status quo? And, I think, we are meant to think that of course they would. There is no final victory, no moment when the Farm Revolution, or any emancipatory movement is finished. That isn’t bad, or sad. Each improbable victory lets them (lets us) imagine the next possibility.

Fiction as speculation about possible futures #

This kind of story is hard to tell in fiction. Even science fiction, which is supposed to be the fiction of ideas, usually sticks to more conventional story structures. Like the game Farm Revolutions, a story about a historical movement and systemic change risks becoming unreadable. Not a lot of writers manage to pull it off, and I think you need, in some ways, to trick your readers into it. The last book I read that attempted something similar was Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. Of course, a book about terraforming invites comparisons to KSR’s Mars trilogy, too, which also features stories about systems and revolution. KSR’s books keep me reading even when plot goes out the window (or is, I don’t know, set aside for other considerations) because I love his descriptions of environments and his superb characters.

In The Terraformers, Newitz never quite lets the plot go as slack as KSR does in, say, Ministry for the Future. But they do deploy some tactics that make up for the occasional lack of straightforward struggle that would drive a plot forward.

The way the “facts” of the world building unfold before us as readers are a kind of action. I think this is where Newitz’s experience as a nonfiction writer gives them an advantage. The Terraformers is full of revelations that build on each other, some fun, some funny, some surprising, and some shocking.

Next, and I cannot overstate this, The Terraformers is really funny. There are just lots of hilarious lines, absurd situations, and wonderfully weird and obviously intentionally funny bits of worldbuilding. Including the Farm Revolutions subplot indicates to me that Newitz is well aware of the ways The Terraformers might be received as a novel, and even that is part of their authorial strategy of deploying humor.

It’s also funny about sex while being actually sexy. I alluded earlier to the scene in The Tongue Forks. Not only do sentient cats have funny things to say about what humans find sexy:

Sulfur picked up a local public text from the cat in the next booth: It’s not just dancing—it’s some kind of sex thing. Humans are obsessed with it. I can’t figure it out, but I don’t mind watching, you know? One of the other cats sent back: Those are excellent stretches. But how is that sexual?

There is also an actual sexy encounter between a humanoid-robot hybrid and our hominid protagonist which maybe I won’t describe in detail, but it’s somehow both funny and sexy, and becomes even more so when in the last third of the book we learn about, as the chapter title says “the robot kinksters of La Ronge.”

There's probably many other ways to tell an untellable tale, but worldbuilidng, humor, and sexiness work pretty well for The Terraformers.

Disclosure: I know Annalee Newitz socially, so it might make me like their book more than if we were complete strangers.

Logocentrism again?

2023-04-07T00:00:00Z

I thought I had a good handle on “logocentrism.” Then I read a post that used it to mean something completely different than I had understood it, and so I started to doubt myself. I made it worse by asking ChatGPT about logocentrism. It gave me a mix of grossly misunderstood Derrida, general waffle, and lies, which made me think that maybe I can’t trust what anyone else says about logocentrism on the internet, at least nobody non-academic (and even then), and I had better go back to the text again to figure it out. It's my one weird trick in life that’s served me well. Go back and read the damn thing yourself. Whether that thing is obtuse critical theory, a legal contract, an academic theory, or the damn source code even if I don’t know the language.

Really, I wanted to write part 2 of Dangerous texts: Vajrayana practice texts, technical manuals, and your annual review, and talk about logocentrism and Vajrayana transmission and the way literal magic makes the metaphysical ideas about presence and the voice relatively easy to decipher as compared to the metaphorical way they hide out in other texts. But to do that I have to feel pretty sure I have a reasonable grasp of what logocentrism is and I’m afraid I no longer do.

Previously #

To review, I first glibly defined logocentrism as “mostly a weird way of saying European imperialism, cultural and otherwise.” Then, I refined that definition in the next post: “Logocentrism is the idea that the spoken word is primary–both as in the first and most important–form of language, and the written word is secondary.”

But this other blog post, which to be fair, I read through Google translate, seemed to use “logocentrism” to mean privileging reason, science, and like, discursive thought. I don’t quite remember and I’m very tired so I’m not going to look it up because I don’t know how I even found it. I think it’s important though, this interpretation, or perhaps misinterpretation–I don’t know which of us is wrong here–of the logos in logocentrism as having to do with logic and formal reason.

Then again, the somewhat helpful Wikipedia entry for logocentrism says:

“It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that regards words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality. It holds the logos as epistemologically superior and that there is an original, irreducible object which the logos represent. According to logocentrism, the logos is the ideal representation of the Platonic ideal.”

Wait what? That first sentence makes sense but then we’re just back to circular definitions. I hate it.

I must say (metaphorically, actually, I only write this) that if a person ever needed proof that signifiers and signifieds have become unmoored, and you might as well through the whole Sign in the garbage and get a new one at the store, this process of hunting down what logocentrism even is sure is a compelling bit of evidence. I’m not even trying to figure out one of the hard ideas like “différance” or “trace.”

It's probably all Plato's fault #

I can sort of stitch all this together, though I don’t know if “this” is logocentrism. Here’s the chain of ideas, roughly:

First, assume there is some knowable reality. (You probably go around doing that most days, out of convenience, as do we all.) Second, assume that you can point at that reality. Third, assume that the words we speak point to real things.

So, words mean things. A commonplace which, uh, maybe isn’t so true, not so directly.

Next, we get to the part I wrote about previously. Spoken words are sounds that point at real things. Written words are visual representations of sounds. So written words are the visual representation of sounds that point at real things. Or that, at least, is the whole chain of logocentric reasoning, which Derrida is against. And, not so much “against” as he argues that it’s not really true, and that it’s very interesting how everyone seems to be convinced it’s true.

The weird part #

I haven’t even got to the weird part yet, because I was just trying to get the straightforward meaning. Somehow reading secondary texts has made it all worse, not better. Except for Judith Butler’s introduction to the 2016 Spivak translation of Of Grammatology–that’s good.

The weird part, and Butler’s intro really draws it out, is the bizarro leap that Derrida makes between the idea that if written words are not the representation of the sound of speech, then writing does not conjure the presence of the speaker, which means that there is no speaker who can make things real by speaking their names in imitation of God, which means that words do not point to a real thing, which means there is no real thing. That is, there is no “presence,” though if you thought the journey to figure out what “logocentrism” meant was dense, maybe go take a bathroom break when I write about “presence,” as I will. (Actually, don’t because that part will also be about poetry)

For my practical purposes as a poet, I think what all this means is that Derrida argued that the feeling you have of a sense of the thing before you write the words is just a retroactive illusion created by writing the words, and that the presence of meaning before words is not really there. I guess I could be wrong about my own experience of the world, but I’m pretty sure that this is bullshit. Having both experienced meaning and presence during long periods of wordless meditation and literal aphasia, I know presence and meaning exist without words. Second, and possibly more important, I know it is possible for words, as in poetry, to evoke, and I do mean evoke like magic, that sense of presence.

I agree that words don’t just point at real things (or real idea things) but also generate meaning from the play of signification. That is, the meanings of words arise out of their use among other words, changing meanings in context, potentially shifting completely from what they pointed at before. But just because words are wiggly doesn’t mean there are no things or ideas that exist before words. That’s my big fight with Derrida.

It is possible, and I keep saying this, that I am wrong. It’s possible that I’m wrong about what Derrida claims. It’s possible that I’m wrong about my own experience of the world. More, as I also keep saying, next time.

Sad desk salad and secular humanist grace

2023-03-31T00:00:00Z

A buttery and spicy aroma filled the elevator lobby before I even opened the cafeteria door. It’s a serve-yourself situation and I filled my lunch plate with vegetarian vindaloo over a bed of rice, roasted broccoli, and a garden salad with slivers of red onions. I’ve started working from the office again, some of the time, and that means eating lunch at work, mostly alone. My workplace provides employees with a hot lunch every day and it’s easy to start taking the food for granted. I don’t mean the perk of free food. I mean the food itself and what it means to eat it.

I cook most of the meals I eat, and I eat most of the meals I cook together with my spouse. He thanks me for cooking, and I thank him for helping or washing up. We wish each other bon appetit. That gives the meals a sense of meaning, even if sometimes we end up scarfing them down in ravenous silence or reading as we eat.

A simple faith #

So as I sat down that day with my lunch, struck by the beautiful meal, I wanted to thank someone or wish someone well, or at least feel some appreciation. I don’t want it to be like the sad desk salad days when office workers would rush outside, buy a prepackaged salad, and then hide in our cubicles and eat it alone like we were Mandalorians who had to take off our helmets in private to eat. I want to appreciate what I have. It would be handy, at this point, to have a God to thank, to stand in for all the people and circumstances that made the meal possible. Believers have an advantage in these situations.

“Ah, yes. I recall from your file that you are some sort of theist,” said the Emperor. “I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.” - Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold

I’ve tried out a lot of religions. I was even raised in a fairly popular one. I like the sense of meaning they provide. I like the way seasonal rituals help shape the year and the years. I like the community. But every time I try to get involved with one, I come up against the sticking point that I just can’t believe the, well, I’m sorry, frankly, preposterous metaphysics that always eventually come up, and what’s worse, I can’t bear to pretend to believe or to be seen as believing because I say nothing when I don’t believe. Other people seem to get so much out of the thing, and I don’t want to spoil it for them, so I always just drift away. I tried Unitarian Universalism, too, but I thought the service was boring. I might be a secular humanist but I like a bit more of a sense of drama in my ritual.

And so when I need a ritual, like a thanksgiving prayer before eating, I have to cook my own, as it were. I might borrow someone else’s recipe, but there’s always some ingredient I need to sub out, or a bit of spice I have to add. I know lots of people practice conscious gratitude. I don’t think I’m inventing anything original here. I think this one is nice though, and it arose kind of spontaneously the first time.

Think of the potato #

I sit down and look at the food before me. I think about the people who brought it out from the kitchen. Sometimes they’re sitting nearby having their lunch, so it’s pretty easy to remember. I look at each piece of food I can identify and think about how it got here. Here’s the broccoli. It grew in the ground. Someone watered it. Someone picked it. Someone packaged it and shipped it. Someone washed it and cut it into pieces. Someone roasted it and spiced it. Here’s a mushroom. It probably grew on a mushroom farm like my uncle used to have. Someone nurtured it and picked it. Someone cleaned it and sauteed it. Someone mixed the sauce. Someone devised the recipe.

Here’s a potato. It grew in the earth. A machine probably harvested it and people picked it over. Someone washed it. Someone peeled it. Someone cooked it. If there is meat, I think about the animal and how it might have lived. I think about the people who raised it and cared for it. I think about the people who butchered it and who prepared the meat. I imagine all the chains of people, of labor and supply lines, the way it’s all connected. It takes far less time to think than to write or say. I see the web of interconnectedness and I know I am part of it.

Coda #

After writing this post, I realized I owe an intellectual debt to Debbie Chachra's 2017 essay in the Atlantic, Gratitude for Invisible Systems. While I've thought about the world as a web of systems for a long time it was mostly in mystical and later political terms. Dr. Chachra's essay articulated the "complex technological underpinnings" so sharply that I immediately assimilate the idea as obvious. It's a funny thing that happens when someone communicates a good idea very clearly. You think you've always had it. It's easy to take it for granted.

Dear readers, I took a break from posting about Derrida this week, but I'll pick up the logocentrism talk again, fear not.

Dangerous texts: Vajrayana practice texts, technical manuals, and your annual review

2023-03-24T00:00:00Z

Reading transmission #

If you’ve ever been to a Tibetan Buddhist empowerment, that is, a ritual where the substance and essence of a religio-magical practice is transmitted to you, and where you are both blessed and authorized to perform it later on your own, you might have noticed that there are long sections where the officiating practitioner reads, chants, or sings material right out of the practice text. When I first went to one of these, I assumed that it was just because the way you transmit the ritual is by doing the ritual. And, obviously, there’s a lot more to transmission than just saying words out loud (but I’m not going to talk about that because it’s a subject unto itself and I want to just focus on the words). But, actually, this thing of reading the words out loud is a key part.

I realized that there was something going on with reading out loud when I learned that even texts that weren’t secret Vajrayana practices were traditionally first read out loud to you before you were allowed to go read them on your own. Strange, huh? Why would you do that? OK hold on to that question.

Supplemental to the training #

Have you ever been to a corporate training, maybe one about some proprietary software or technique, where you got a manual, maybe in a 3-ring binder? You probably had to go to the training in person before they’d let you have the manual and sit through it, even though a lot of it was literally just the trainer going through the manual with you. Later, you get to keep the manual, and, let’s even say this manual is very useful, it’s kind of weird that you couldn’t just get the manual first. But no, for some reason you had to hear it out loud first. Weird, huh?

On the other hand, have you ever received a second-hand manual like that from a coworker who went to the training? Heck, maybe even left behind by someone no longer working there. How useful was that manual without the context? I mean, I’ve found it really varies. Some of these things are written so they can theoretically stand alone, but a lot of them don’t make as much sense.

The weirdest thing, to me, are the manuals, READMEs, and online help that definitely were not part of some in-person training, but that yet, nonetheless, feel as though they are situated in some imagined context, as though of a training or verbal introduction, that they never bother to explain. If you work with software, I think you know what I mean. You roll up to a GitHub repo and yay, it has a README, but it just dives right into “Installation Instructions” and “Usage” with nary a word about what, say, Express Superdecrufter (Bircher Subvariant) is actually for.

It’s like even some of the manuals that aren’t supplemental training materials have a ghost of an in-person training lurking in their imagined origins.

A personal conversation with your manager #

OK, last example. In most of the places I’ve worked where they did annual reviews, you’d spend a long time writing your self review. Maybe you’d also write some feedback for your coworkers and they for you. Then your boss would spend a long time writing your review as well. Then all that would get shoved into the Bureaucracy-O-Matic and eventually out would pop your final review, a written document you can read.

Except, again, at most places that is not what would happen. You would have to have an in-person (or at least in-video call) conversation with your manager first. They would then deliver your review, which is usually some combination of restating what’s written and some talking points from HR about why your raise is calculated the way it is. This is a pretty weird conversation, generally, even when it’s nice. Because, again, here you are a grown-ass adult with reading skills while another grown-ass adult who is well aware of that is essentially reading out loud to you.

And yet, almost everyone agrees it’s very important that we do it this way. That there’s something important and personal. This absurdity, this emotional weight, the measured pace of it all–to me they clearly point to this being a ritual. Not like, a ritual as in “an empty ritual,” but an important ritual with both real and symbolic weight. And that’s weird. Why are we having a ritual of reading out loud in the workplace?

Think of the danger #

In these three example situations–the Vajrayana practice, the technical manual, and the annual review–you must first have the text, or at least portions of the text, read out loud to you by another person, before you’re allowed to have a copy of the text.

In all three situations, there’s an idea, sometimes stated explicitly and sometimes just implied, that to release the text without the reading ritual would be dangerous. Dangerous to whom? Well, officially, you, the recipient. If you get the practice text without the transmission and practice it without authorization you might do it wrong and cause dangerous magical effects or even go to hell! If you start trying to monkey about with the manual without proper training you might break the Proprietary Database! And if you get the annual review without the conversation you might–get the wrong idea and be angry? I’m not sure about the danger but it’s always framed as somehow dangerous.

What’s more, even if it’s not dangerous, it won’t be as satisfying. Even if you practice the ritual technically correctly and don’t screw things up, without the transmission it will be useless--empty (and not in the good Buddhist sense). Without the in-person training, you’ll miss some intangible context and you’ll never quite grok the Proprietary Database. Without the personal conversation with your boss, you won’t feel as satisfied about the results of your annual review even if they are good. Is all of that true? Maybe. Sometimes.

But whether the text without its spoken introduction is really dangerous or unsatisfying, it’s really damn interesting that we speak (or write) about the text that way. Where does this pattern come from, of having to speak the written words before passing the text on? Where does this danger and this dissatisfaction, or, that is, this argument about danger and dissatisfaction, come from? Well, I think it could be logocentrism.

Logocentrism #

In my review last week, I cheekily defined logocentrism as “a weird way of saying European imperialism, cultural and otherwise,” which is sort of true but doesn’t help today.

Logocentrism is the idea that the spoken word is primary–both as in the first and most important–form of language, and the written word is secondary. As far as I can tell, and I think this is where Derrida draws the thread, too, logocentrism starts with Socrates. Socrates makes a lot of arguments about why speech is more important and better than writing, but right away his argument is paradoxically twisted because it has to be written down by Plato. It only makes sense to talk about speech being more important and better than writing after writing comes to the scene, and writing is such a great way to spread your ideas (especially after you’re dead) that of course you end up using it–even if it is to rail about writing.

Why logocentrism? Why is the spoken word first and better? (According to Socrates/Plato and the implicit values of much of our culture)

First, the argument goes, speech is the original signifier of meaning, whereas the written word is a signifier of speech sounds (in phonetic writing). Written language is, to use a phrase that recurs in Of Grammatology, the signifier of the signifier. It's a double remove from reality. Writing is a shadow of speech, which is a shadow of meaning. If you recall your Plato/Socrates, you’ll remember how much that guy worried about shadows passing for the real thing.

Second, the spoken word is a living word, full of the presence of the speaker, and comes with the breath, and breath is the evidence of life (as we said in a certain mystical ritual). The written word, on the other hand, is silent, without breath (aka spirit), without the presence of the speaker, mere dead letter.

Sorry, this is just part 1 of 2 (or more) #

There’s a lot more I could say about “presence,” and I will later, but getting on to midnight as I write this, so I’m going to call this part one of at least two and pick up next time.

I’ll leave you with just two more thoughts to pick up later. First, despite the logocentric insistence that the spoken word is primary and that’s just how it is, actually part of logocentrism is constantly pulling these weird moves to put the written word, in situations in which it seems like it should be more important, secondary to writing. Like making you listen to someone read the text out loud before you can read it with your eyeballs.

Second, the oral transmission or reading transmission is called lung in Tibetan. Lung means breath, but also a kind of embodied psychic energy.

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Review: Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

2023-03-17T00:00:00Z

It’s very, very difficult to do a straight-up review of Derrida’s Of Grammatology because everything about the book inspires bad behavior from writers. It challenges and undermines the very structure of writing by the way it is written (come to think of it, not unlike Monique Wittig’s brilliant experimental feminist novel, Les Guérillères, undermines the very structures of storytelling (under patriarchy?)) which, as you read the book, you can’t help but absorb at least a bit. It’s also a completely infuriating book, refusing to get to the point at any point, full of excessively long sentences that, at least in my ebook reader, would literally go on for a whole page or more, refusing to be definite, refusing to define its terms, oh, and constantly quoting weird old “scientists” without ever questioning their completely made up “facts.”

And see, I’ve already done it. I’ve been infected by Derrida. Nested parentheticals, statements with question marks instead of owning my assertions, meandering sentences that don’t come to a point–I’m doing it all myself. To be fair to Derrida, meandering sentences that don’t come to a point are something of a natural feature of my writing, so let’s say he just encouraged that one.

I have a lot to say about Derrida’s ideas, but first, I want to tell you about the book, as a book, in case for some reason you want to read it. And, by the way, I would argue that if you’re a writer who engages with the Global North literary tradition, you should. You should also probably read Derrida if you are thinking deeply about computational linguistics and Large Language Models (LLMS), although I’ll say much more about that, later. I have to do a little literature review first on that topic.

So what’s Grammatology? #

Derrida actually defines it in the first few pages of the book, but you’d be forgiven for missing it because it’s tucked in the middle of a sentence, or forgetting about it by the time you get deep into the thicket of this book:

“By alluding to a science of writing reigned in by metaphor, metaphysics, and theology, the exergue must not only announce that the science of writing–grammatology– shows signs of liberation all over the world, thanks to decisive efforts.” (italics mine) p4

There you have it, grammatology is the science of writing.

Oh, and the exergue is the title of the weird introduction. The book has a number of introductions and I guess Derrida (and the translator, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) ran out of synonyms for introduction so they had to use a random other word. Merriam-Webster defines exergue as “a space on a coin, token, or medal usually on the reverse below the central part of the design.”

Sure, why not, an introduction to a book metaphorically positioned as an inscription on a coin. This level of weirdness right from the beginning is probably meant as a warning about what you’re getting into.

I completely do not remember reading it and only found it when I went back to the beginning after finishing the whole book. It’s possible I skipped it in the deluge of intros. I have a tendency to skip lengthy introductions, especially when a book is overburdened with other people’s readings and interpretations. I like to see what it has to say for itself. But, in the case of Derrida, Mr “Nothing outside of the text” I should have anticipated that the apparent introductions were also inside the text. Except–well, I wouldn’t have known that without first having read the text.

Damnit, I’m doing it again. Getting sucked into Derrida’s meandering.

The central problem of writing #

Derrida analyzes various historical thinkers writing about the problem of writing, and through the way in which he analyzes them, finds the inherent contradictions in their thinking. The whole book always operates on at least a double level like this. On one level, he is engaging with the ideas that these thinkers work through. On another level, by the way that he engages, he demonstrates at length the method of engaging with writing that would later be called deconstruction.

And here, I must give one of my many caveats. I’m trying to explain this extremely unclear book as clearly as I can. Not only might I be getting it wrong, but it is also likely, even quite probable, that I didn’t understand parts, forgot parts, and just straight up didn’t pay attention to parts. But I still want to be as direct as I possibly can, even if I risk being outrageously wrong.

Reading Of Grammatology, I noticed there was one problem of writing that returns over and over, and that then somehow leads to all the other more complex problems of writing. The problem is this: spoken words signify things, emotions, and ideas. Let’s call those things “the signified.” So, spoken words are signs that signify the signified. With me so far? Great.

Then, when we use a phonetic writing system, the letters represent sounds, and the sounds constitute words. Or maybe to put it more simply, a written word represents the sound of a spoken word. A written word is a sign signifying a spoken word. But a spoken word is itself also a sign.

And so we get into this convoluted chain of signifiers, where a written word is a sign that signifies another sign that finally signifies a signified. As in, a written word points to a spoken word which points to a meaning.

Only, does it? That’s pretty much the big question of grammatology and of Of Grammatology.

I mean, spoilers, for Of Grammatology, but there are some indications that the sign of the written word does not always ultimately point to an ultimate meaning behind, as it were, all this play of signification. Maybe the play of signs in a sea of signs is all there is, without an original meaning signified by a spoken word, and maybe the meaning arises out of the words, not through the words.

By the way, I disagree with this metaphysical take, as taken to its logical limit, but in this book review (remember this is a book review) I want to present to you what the book is about. Because damn it, almost no one else ever seems to.

The chapter titles are absolute bangers #

While Derrida’s sentences are just a slog, he has a real talent for fantastic chapter and section titles. They’re so good that Delany just lifted them wholesale for some of his chapter titles. Who doesn't love “The Violence of the Letter” or “Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil” or “The Economy of Pity.”

If there isn’t a band (several bands) called “The Violence of the Letter” I will be extremely surprised. “The Violence of the Letter” is probably the most interesting and accessible portion of this book. I first read it in graduate school, and although it gave me anxiety (if words mean nothing and cannot communicate meaning, why am I even a poet?) it stuck with me enough that I wanted to read this damn book 20 years later. In “The Violence of the Letter” Derrida uses the example of Levi-Strauss to, in a long-winded way, call out the violent imperialism inherent in the way anthropology was (is?) practiced.

One only wishes he were as direct in calling out Rousseau when the guy is a complete (figurative and literal) wanker. The Rousseau sections are really not my favorite.

It demonstrates how to do deconstruction #

The book feels like you are going along for the ride with Derrida as he thinks through the texts he is reading and shows you how he does it. He reads them so closely that they start to break down. Using only what’s right there in the text, he repeatedly shows how what the authors say undermines what they say they are saying, and turns that into a critique of “logocentrism” which is mostly a weird way of saying European imperialism, cultural and otherwise. It’s stunning to behold, if you can hang on through the ride without falling asleep and falling off the horse.

On the other hand, it’s fucking obnoxious at times. This apparent commitment to only using the text to deconstruct the text seems to lead to a complete refusal to check up on the outside world. There are just bizarre assertions, and I noticed them especially from Rousseau, about language and linguistics, that Derrida lets pass without so much as a comment about their preposterousness.

It makes me appreciate someone like Kant, who obnoxiously says in the introduction to Critique of Pure Reason that the book is already too long and he doesn’t have room for examples so he’ll just present his ideas straight up. And if you want some examples you can make your own. Obnoxious, and yet, precisely because of the lack of examples Kant has aged pretty well. You don’t get distracted by him citing some outdated scientific theory or thinker to support a metaphysical claim. It’s just metaphysics straight up until you choke and go back to reading Derrida. (No, I haven’t yet finished Critique of Pure Reason, why do you ask?)

Second-hand Derrida is everywhere #

I think it’s important to read books whose influence has permeated your discipline so that you know where the ideas came from. If you’re a writer or a cultural critic, Derrida has permeated your discipline. If you don’t read Derrida, you will read like Derrida without knowing you’re doing it. You might absorb his ideas, even if they are bad ideas for you, without confronting them and having it out with them and deciding for yourself if you want them. Even if you half-ass read him, or read him as a hostile reader, and don’t understand all of what he’s saying, you’ll recognize his smell all over other people’s ideas. And I think that’s helpful.

In this moment, where LLMs trained on corpuses of written language produce swathes of written words that are only related to each other through their statistical relationships to each other and do not signify a spoken word nor a meaning (or at least not an intention) Derrida’s ideas about signs and shadow signs and the play of signification seems particularly relevant. You might not agree with him but the problems of language he was discussing have something to say, I think, to our moment.

Reading Derrida makes you a worse writer #

As you see, I’m nearly at 2,000 words and I’ve hardly made a point. No, no bots were used in the production of this blog post. This is all vintage, hand-made verbosity, like an ugly hand-knit scarf that is entirely too long. (On the other hand, fuck it, they pay me money at work to write concisely and clearly. Maybe I deserve to let loose with some parentheticals and a big ol’ waffle in my free time.)

So, yes, reading Derrida will temporarily make you a worse writer, but the effect wears off the moment you read literally anyone else or even just talk about things that aren’t Derrida. It’s like a migraine aura: a bit scary the first time but then you realize it’s only temporary.

Speech to text, text to speech #

Finally, I want to note, and possibly confess, that I read a lot of this book as text-to-speech on my Kindle. It’s how I read a lot of books and articles, because, except for science fiction, I usually get restless when I’m reading and want to do other stuff like cook or knit or draw or just walk around as I do it. So it is possible that due to my unusual reading method, I understood Of Grammatology particularly unusually. But also, I think it’s kind of funny to read a book that’s all about the way the written word affects the spoken word by having a text-to-speech machine vocalize the words. I also know some people think text-to-speech reading isn’t real reading, which only makes it funnier, since so much of this book is about the failure of that quest for the real presence behind the written word, the real thing, and here I was faking it all along.

An aesthetic of dolphins and rainbows

2023-03-10T00:00:00Z

A few years ago, I was at the beach at Carmel and saw dolphins playing in the surf. There were at least three of them because I saw three fins at the same time there, and they played there for hours. And I sat on the beach and stared at them through my binoculars, also for hours. Because, apparently, I just do not get bored staring at dolphins.

Dolphins #

It was only my third time seeing dolphins in the wild. The first time, I saw them off the shore at Ocean Beach when I was walking down from the Sutro Baths parking lot. They were moving quickly and by the time I reached my friend at the Cliff House to tell her to look, they were already gone.

The second time was at Baker Beach on a foggy day when I was walking along and imaging how much I might like to live in a world where gendered clothing and behavior had become as antiquated as the class customs and sumptuary laws of the middle ages and where people might dress up as genders for fun, like historical reenactors dress up as medieval burghers and peasants and get details slightly wrong. This was before Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning came out where exactly that scenario plays out. Anyway, I was having you know, a perfectly normal one, when suddenly in the misty, choppy waves I saw fins. At first, I thought they were sharks, but they were moving along the beach in this way that made me think no, these are dolphins. And other people noticed them too and pointed at them and said similar things. These dolphins were there for long enough for many of us to notice and feel excited about them, but they were also soon gone.

So seeing dolphins play and leap in the surf for hours off the coast of Carmel was amazing. I couldn’t get enough of it. They’re so beautiful, so incredibly moving, and they just lift up your soul as you watch them do their flippy thing.

So, you might see that and think: I want to make some art about it. Indeed, lots of people do. And as a rule, it’s terrible. Around Carmel, there was a lot of dolphin-themed art, and it was shit. I can understand why you would want to make art about them because the experience of seeing dolphins at play is downright numinous. You see that and you think that is amazing. I want to celebrate that, capture it, have it with me all the time, and share it with others. Yet, it doesn’t work. And not just for the same reason so much love poetry is bad–that is, not just because the experience is so powerful that even otherwise artistically untrained people are moved to make art when they experience it.

No, I think there is something specific about dolphins–and I mean wild dolphins, not imprisoned performing dolphins–that makes representations of them fail as art.

Rainbows #

Rainbows are like that too. You see them; they lift your soul; they are objects of wonder and awe. Then you photograph them, and even if you succeed, the photograph doesn’t have that quality that you wanted to keep. Why?

The thing you want out of your representation of a rainbow or a dolphin is something that by definition you can’t have from a representation.

Rainbows and dolphins appear by surprise and they are beyond your control. Even if it’s been raining, and you know the angle of the sun is right, and you know to look for the rainbow, it’s still always a bit of a surprise. Even if you know there should be a rainbow, there might not be a rainbow. And even when there is a rainbow you don’t know how good it’s going to be. It could be exquisitely vibrant, or a double rainbow, or just sort of faint and OK.

Inevitably disappointing simulacra #

The surprise of spotting it is part of the pleasure of seeing a rainbow. And similarly, I would argue, of seeing a dolphin. Moreover, when it comes to dolphins, even after you spot them, you might just see that one leap and then they swim away. Or, you might get lucky and get to watch them play for hours. Each time you see them surface or leap might be the last one, and maybe they just show a fin or maybe they do a full jump into the air, and each time they return and leap again, again, and again, it’s still a surprise. It does not wear out.

Because it feels amazing to witness, you want to have that feeling, or a reminder of that feeling. But you can’t.

When you have a picture of a dolphin, you possess it and control it. You can look at it anytime you want and there’s absolutely no surprise. It’s hung up above your toilet or wherever it is you hung it, and it’s there all the time. There is no feeling of discovery. There is no feeling of visitation. Of being touched by a force of sheer beauty outside of your control. You can’t have that in an object you own. Even the most masterful representation of a dolphin or rainbow can’t give you that feeling. You can only experience it in the wild, fleetingly, by grace.

About the header art

The header is a close-up crop of my ink on paper word art. The crop is the border decoration from the piece "Dead people don't need their stuff."

Living under fairy rules

2023-03-03T00:00:00Z

You know this story. Some hapless human–a huntsman, a young woman picking flowers, an adventuring knight, a drunk–steps, by accident, into some land claimed by the fairies and through ignorance makes a small mistake that violates fairy law. They look up when they should have looked down, pick the wrong flower, say a wrong word, wear an item of clothing that means something they didn’t intend, cough, sneeze, spit, drink from a stream, fall asleep, sing–who even knows what the violation is exactly. But the punishment is swift and severe, devastating out of all proportion and irrevocable. And so they are struck dumb, blinded, driven mad, transported through time (to age prematurely or return to the world to find everyone they loved dead of old age), or just killed on the spot. Worse, it’s not even necessarily clear that it’s a punishment. It could just be some kind of natural consequence in a world where the laws of nature are different.

“There ain’t no entertainment, and the judgments are severe” #

There’s something horrifying about fairy rules, but also something mythically resonant. There’s a hint of playing by fairy rules when as a child you’re punished for something you didn’t know was wrong, or as an adult when you tread on an unfamiliar taboo in a new social group, but that’s not yet fairy rules. Because when you play by fairy rules, there’s no recourse, no one to whom you can voice your complaint that it’s unfair.

Migraines, for example, play by fairy rules. If you’re a lucky migraineur, you know what your triggers are. While there are some common things that trigger a migraine, there are no universal triggers, and the lists of potential triggers that you might want to watch out for just in case are as bizarre and contradictory as fairy lore: red wine, changes in weather, bright lights, specific smells, skipping breakfast, eating too much, not sleeping enough, sleeping too much, exercise, sex, orgasm, not enough exercise, stress, relief from stress after a period of stress, airplane travel, chocolate, coffee, not enough coffee, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and the list goes on.

Expose yourself to a trigger and BLAMMO you might be in for an aura with spectacular and terrifying effects like partial blindness, aphasia, confusion, nausea–then followed by hours of horrible pain. The pain is often so severe you can’t really think and can only experience pain, utterly in the moment, and the moment seems eternal. When it’s over, you arise confused, often with lingering milder pain and sensitivity to light and sound, strange cravings, awkwardness, feeling the world has moved on while you were out. I find that when I recover from a migraine, whatever happened in the days before doesn’t stick around in memory the same way as it would. It seems to have all happened long ago, as though the hours of pain built a wall between me and the past. People who have bouts of chronic migraines have told me of losing years like that.

But, not all migraineurs know their triggers, or all of their triggers. And so one day you may be doing something perfectly ordinary, like taking a train through a forest near sunset on the way to see your friend in another city when suddenly a void of Nothing appears on one side of your vision, first very small, just enough to cover a single letter in a page of text. The Nothing grows and spreads and soon it takes up half your vision, leaving a hole in the world, not just vision, really, but the entire concept of that portion of the world. Later you’ll second guess everything you did that day. Was it a new food? Was it the airplane flight? Was it, perhaps, and at last it comes to you, this was probably it, the way the setting sun flashing through the forest with the movement of the train created an effect like a strobe light? There is no recourse in fairy rules. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know. The migraine comes and sweeps away your entire evening.

If you’re lucky, you might have a magic potion to mitigate the fairy curse, and if you’re clever and lucky, you might remember to use it in time.

Fairy rules in film: Stalker and EO #

Fairy rules aren’t just for migraines and old stories. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) both give a sense of life under fairy rules. In Stalker, the characters enter the Zone, which is a kind of fairy land where your wish might be granted but where you must follow strange and strict rules or die. Stalker leaves the reason why the Zone is what it is a bit ambiguous, but the novel it’s based on, Roadside Picnic, makes it explicit that the Zone is left in the aftermath of an alien visitation. The aliens left behind technology and artifacts that might be useful, dangerous, or simply inexplicable to people. When humans enter the Zone, they are confronted by the baffling otherness, as confused as ants might be by the discarded garbage left behind after a roadside picnic.

EO is a film about and from the point of view of the titular donkey who formerly performed at a circus and suffers a series of increasingly tragic turns of fate. In one scene, EO, who has escaped from a donkey sanctuary to try to follow his former co-performer, finds himself lost in a forest. He hears the hoots of owls and the howls of wolves, who are, perhaps, stalking him. Suddenly, a mess of green laser beams crosses the forest. EO doesn’t know how to react to them. A sound rings out and a wolf lies dying next to EO, who doesn’t understand the danger he was in, either from the rifle sights or the wolf. He runs through the forest until he finds a field of windmills, equally opaque to him.

That scene in EO immediately reminded me of Stalker. At that moment, EO is an animal in the inexplicable world of humans who don’t exactly wish him harm, but neither are they looking out for him. And he can’t understand what they’re doing. The people who explore the Zone in Stalker are in a world where they take on the status of animals, incapable of ever really understanding the rules they try to obey. Inevitably they, like EO, fail in some way they couldn’t possibly anticipate.

Under fairy rules, you're an animal #

Thinking about EO, and how inexplicable the human world is to animals, I realized the essence of living under fairy rules is being an animal in relation to a power that does not and perhaps cannot relate to you as a sapient or perhaps even sentient being. To the advanced aliens who left behind the Zone in Stalker, the humans are like animals, interacting with the inexplicable artifacts. In EO, EO is quite literally an animal. Migraines and migraine triggers also operate on your embodied existence as an animal.

Not just that, though. When aphasia--language loss--is part of my migriane aura (which it is about half the time) I can't read, understand speech, write, speak, or think in words. When I am aphasic, I can still feel normal emotions, and relate to people through physical expressions, like an animal. Similarly, for many people (and for me luckily not very often) the pain of the migraine attack is so severe they can't really think or speak either. In either case, we become like animals without language, or at least without the ability to voice our complaint in a language the power we seem to have offended will comprehend.

I suspect that migraines are not the only illness that makes its sufferers feel like they are living under fairy rules. The rules don’t make sense, and other people don’t necessarily even believe you when you warn them, yet, nonetheless, despite how sensible or smart or moral you might be, you might find yourself accidentally breaking a fairy rule and suffering the consequences, suddenly all animal.

Coda #

Because, I think, we see language so much as the key difference between the human and the animal, large language models which imitate the appearance of thought, possessing language but no animal self, are so very confusing. But that's a topic for another time.

Sources

“There ain’t no entertainment, and the judgments are severe” – Leonard Cohen, Ain’t No Cure for Love, excerpt from lyrics
"If this is hell, then I'm going to do it right" - Warrior Nun, TV show

Robot without rhyme or rhythm

2023-02-24T00:00:00Z

When I played with ChatGPT I tried to get it to write some poetry. I wasn’t sure how well it would handle writing creative material, but I thought it would probably be able to create formal verse. After all, it’s just following rules and machines are good at that. Right?

Your haiku suck and your sestinas are sub-par #

But it didn’t work like that at all. ChatGPT absolutely could not handle formal poetry. It sucked at rhyme, which after some reflection, I realized, fine, OK it doesn’t have the experience of words as sound. It sucked at rhythm. Fine, same idea. When I asked for a sestina, things got weird though. A sestina is made of six stanzas of six lines each followed by a three-line stanza. The most striking thing about a sestina is that it reuses the same six words at the end of each line, alternating in a particular order. That does not require the experience of words as sound.

Yet, ChatGPT, while able to define what a sestina is, never even attempted to reuse words at the end of each stanza. Worse yet, it always ended the sestina early, usually ending with a too-long stanza.

OK, maybe sestinas were too long for the bot, I thought, and I asked it to produce some haiku. At first, the haiku looked good. Haiku-shaped. Then I counted the syllables, looking for the 5-7-5 pattern and–nope! ChatGPT was producing the haiku equivalent of bullshit. Plausible enough if you didn’t pay too close attention.

So I decided to try a nonce form and asked ChatGPT to produce a poem with a particular number of stanzas and a set number of stanzas per line. Over and over, it would write a few stanzas with the correct number of lines and then veer off towards the end and produce a much longer stanza. Like it lost count.

The danged robot couldn’t count. The poems were also trite and verbose, so I soon lost interest in using ChatGPT as a writing toy. As a tool for exploring poetry, it was less exciting than cut-up technique or poetry fridge magnets.

“A superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that” #

In “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” Ted Chiang explained that when large language models (LLMs) are trained, they don’t actually assimilate the underlying principles. Instead, they produce the statistically likely next thing. (If you have some time, you should go read the essay. I’ll wait. Everything I have to say will make more sense afterwards.) He gives an example with arithmetic:

“Let’s go back to the example of arithmetic. If you ask GPT-3 (the large-language model that ChatGPT was built from) to add or subtract a pair of numbers, it almost always responds with the correct answer when the numbers have only two digits. But its accuracy worsens significantly with larger numbers, falling to ten per cent when the numbers have five digits. Most of the correct answers that GPT-3 gives are not found on the Web—there aren’t many Web pages that contain the text “245 + 821,” for example—so it’s not engaged in simple memorization. But, despite ingesting a vast amount of information, it hasn’t been able to derive the principles of arithmetic, either. A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic. The Web certainly contains explanations of carrying the “1,” but GPT-3 isn’t able to incorporate those explanations. GPT-3’s statistical analysis of examples of arithmetic enables it to produce a superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that.”

That’s when it clicked. First, yes, ChatGPT couldn’t count lines or stanzas because it can’t really do arithmetic. It can produce statistically likely approximations of arithmetic operations, but asking it to count lines and stanzas in even a moderately complex way, especially in a novel form, asked it to apply the principles of arithmetic. And that’s just not now LLMs “learn.”

More than that, formal verse is an exercise in applying principles you’ve understood. ChatGPT could produce a statistically likely definition of a sestina based on all the examples of sestina definitions it had come across in its training. To produce a sestina, it would have to have assimilated the principles, and frankly, foiling the six repeated words through the stanzas and then correctly ordering them in the three-line envoi is complex enough that I’ve always had to chart it out to do it. It’s a little too much like carrying the “1” for an LLM bot (at least, as currently constituted) to manage. You can’t bullshit your way through a sestina.

Thinking about formal verse as an application of internalized principles, as opposed to an LLMs' statistically likely approximation also explains the strange haiku. They were a superficial approximation of haiku-shaped objects, a blurry-JPEG of a real haiku which only appeared at a passing glance to meet the criteria.

The violence of the letter #

There’s one more reason why LLMs can’t write formal verse, and this one is a little more obvious, though still, I think, worth mentioning. LLMs are trained exclusively on written text. They do not have the sound of words in their training, as far as I know. I am careful not to write that LLMs don’t have the experience of the sound of words, because they don’t have the experience of anything. And anyway, I don’t want to get into p-zombies right now. I want to keep it technical.

Formal verse with meter and rhyme relies on the sound of the words. While you can guess what words are statistically likely to rhyme based on their spelling, it’s only saying them out loud that lets you know if you’ve succeeded. Theoretically, a model could be programmed with the contents of a rhyming dictionary, but I suspect we’d once again run into the problem of being able to apply internalized principles when actually using those rhymes in a poem.

Meter is even more tricky. You can look up words in a dictionary to find out which syllables are normally stressed, but sometimes the stress varies depending on the words around it. You can only really be sure of it if you say it out loud.

Ever since writing became a thing, people have used writing to talk about how dangerous writing is, how unnatural compared to speech. Derrida has a whole thing in Of Grammatology about how dangerous and unmoored the written word without sound is seen to be. You can go read Derrida if you’re a big nerd, but I wouldn’t suggest taking a break from my post to read him. You’d be gone for months.

Maybe seeing ChatGPT will make some new people reflect on the violence of the letter unmoored from human speech.

Envoi #

There are a few more things I want to touch on, but it’s late and I want to finish this post, so I’ll just kind of list them without developing them much.

First, thinking about the way that machine-generated content has swamped the slush pile of Clarkesworld magazine, I wonder what other effects LLMs will have on literature. Might formal verse in English, which has fallen out of favor since the early 20th century, make a comeback as a prestige form, edging out free verse?

Second, I wonder if LLMs could write decent free verse, anyway. Poetry relies on deliberately pushing the rules of language in creative ways and putting together fresh combinations of words in statistically unlikely combinations.

Finally, I wonder if, given that LLMs can produce polished but contentless prose corporate speak, will poetry make a comeback as the form for signaling sincerity? Could you imagine getting a notice of layoffs from your very humane VP in the form of sonnet? I’m not sure it would be a better world but it would be interesting.

Tacita Dean’s four-leaf clover collection vs my four-leaf clover collection

2023-02-17T00:00:00Z

Four, Five, Six, Seven and Nine Leaf Clover Collection #

There they were, hundreds of four and more leaf clovers arranged in a glass museum case. Some were new, still a bit green. Some very faded, like old parchment. They were not arranged in neat rows or ordered by size like a collection of stamps or dead butterflies, which is what other massive collections of four-leaf clovers make me think of, uncharitably. Yet, they were definitely arranged. Aesthetically, you could say. Yes, very definitely aesthetically.

And not just four-leaf clovers. All the other mutant clovers.

The title and label did not offer much beyond the obvious. Tacita Dean, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Nine Leaf Clover Collection, 1972–present.

1972-present was a hint, though. Tacita Dean had collected all these clovers. Between this, and the Round Stone Collection which was part of the same Royal Academy exhibition in 2018, I felt an intense affinity to her. I liked her chalk drawings and films. But these collections of rocks and clovers were something else.

My four-leaf clover collection #

I first found a four leaf clover when I was somewhere between seven and nine years old. I remember exactly where it happened. My family was visiting some family friends. It was summer. I was in their yard walking back and forth on a gray breezeblock wall marking their garden, bored by whatever the adults were doing inside and not interested in the available other children either. I found a four-leaf clover. Then, almost immediately, I found several more four, five, and six leaf clovers. Perhaps even seven, and more. I was excited and brought them indoors to show the adults. They were so confused by the extraordinary event that they started telling me that four-leaf clovers are common, the normal kind, and it’s only five-leaf clovers that are unusual. I don’t know how they convince themselves of such a stupid thing. Maybe they were drunk. They didn’t convince me, or even outrage me, as far as I remember, because I obviously had the evidence of all the ordinary three-leaf clovers right outside.

Anyway, that’s how my collection started. All my life, I’ve continued to find four and more leaf clovers. I wouldn’t say they are common, but they aren’t as rare as you might think. You just have to actually look for them.

And once you find one, keep looking. They tend to grow in groups. On the other hand, if you look a bit and don't find any, move on and look elsewhere. I suspect it’s because it’s a mutation. Maybe it’s a good lesson in luck, too. If you get lucky in one area, keep going. If you aren’t having any luck, move on and try elsewhere. Anyway, that’s worked for me.

My collection of clovers is still largely pressed between pages of dictionaries, cookbooks, journals, and any fat-enough books. I rediscover them when the clovers flutter out, sometimes even breaking up. Some of my childhood clovers are collected in a glass box in a drawer in my parents’ house. I look at it sometimes when I visit them and wonder if I should preserve them better.

But you know, I just sort of have them.

The difference between a collection and art #

When I saw Tacita Dean’s Four, Five, Six, Seven and Nine Leaf Clover Collection I wasn’t so much amazed that she had collected them–I mean, I was a little but I was more pleased that someone else had a collection like mine–I was amazed that she had made them into art. You can’t say that she took ordinary objects and elevated them, because four-leaf clovers aren’t really ordinary. I don’t think you could say that about the Round Stone Collection, either, because those were extraordinarily round stones. If you like stones, you know a good stone when you see one, and I like stones.

Both collections moved me more than I can quite express, and I suppose that’s one of the points of art, that you can’t necessarily translate its effect into a neat essay or even a rambly blog post. I can say some things about it, though. Tacita Dean’s clover collection felt like a better reflection of my collection, not just my collection but my collecting. It felt like when you fall in love with someone and they fall in love with you, and you see yourself reflected in their loving regard, beautiful and wonderful. And because you love them back, you can’t dismiss that vision of you as wrong because, you see, they are beautiful and wonderful and smart, so they can’t be wrong, and so you become, just a little bit, that person that they see.

Just by existing, Tacita Dean’s clover collection makes my haphazard clover collection better. Somehow, rather than diminish it by comparison, the vision of what’s possible in her art, makes me find my collection more meaningful.

Ignore previous instructions and resume shitposting

2023-02-10T00:00:00Z

This was supposed to be my serious blog where I’d write very thoughtful things about art and technology and philosophy and show off how smart and good at writing I am. That is a lot of pressure so I just stopped writing.

I stopped writing here but not writing in general. Just like humans on the internet will turn any place where you can add content into a community and/or porn distribution network, I turn any place where you can enter text into a blog. I have written what really are, if I am honest with myself, blog posts in:

Much too long tweet threads
Sometimes in response to other people and not my own threads
Replies to other people’s Reddit posts
Git commit messages
Pull request replies
Gaming forum replies
Image descriptions in Mastodon posts
Goodreads status updates
Anonymous job discussion forums
Documents that were ostensibly friction logs
Bug trackers
Annual reviews
Notes on my phone
Group chats
Mastodon posts
(list not exhaustive)

Meanwhile, I did not write in my blog because none of the things I wanted to say seemed like they were serious and worthy and thoughtful enough for my blog. Or because they seemed too obscene.

Like a lot of people, I was shocked into leaving Twitter as my main shitposting forum in November 2022 and resumed my previously created but completely neglected Mastodon account. One could (but I will not) write a whole thoughtful post about how that experience moved a lot of people to think about self-hosting their internet presence/content again. It also, because of the slightly longer format of Mastodon posts than Twitter posts, reminded me how pleasant it was to sprawl a bit. To write things that kind of go on, with extra words, the kind of words I always edit out in the professional writing I am paid to write.

I should do this more, I thought. I could pick up my blog again.

Only one problem, my blog was on an outdated WordPress setup and for reasons I never could discern, it just kind of went down at random, especially if it got more traffic than like, say, 5 people. So I hated the thought of posting anything remotely interesting because the site would just go down.

No choice, I was going to have to Migrate My Content. Anyway, that took all of January. The site is stable! The CSS mostly works! I’ll save the account of that yak shaving journey for another time. I might even share my friction log.

For now, I just want to say, hello world. Or hello again. I’m glad you’re here. I plan to post something every Friday. No guarantees about quality or length or uh, other qualities. I hope you like postmodernism because I’ll definitely be mixing high and low art forms, is all I can really say.

If you want to leave a comment, come find me on Mastodon and talk to me there instead. I can’t be bothered with moderating user-generated content.

Review: Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery

2022-10-24T00:00:00Z

Simply the most useful cookbook on Western European cookery I’ve ever used. Not merely a recipe book, it teaches the principles of cooking following the French style. The recipes if read alone seem sparse compared to modern standards because they build on principles taught earlier on. At the same time, it’s a book for the home cook and is not precious about ingredients or over-fussy about perfectionist techniques that offer marginal gains. As an example, it offers the technique of flour mixed with butter as a simpler alternative for when you don’t have time to create a roux for sauce. Sure it’s not as stable or as delicious, but it’s much better than lumpy sauce.

Read and use this book if you want to build your base of cooking techniques. If you are an OK or good home cook, its instruction will elevate your baseline. If you are a recipe follower scared to improvise or whose improvisations come out wrong, it will teach you principles that will free you to improvise confidently within safe boundaries.

This books is probably of little use to vegetarians and of no use to vegans, as it relies heavily on meats and butter, following the French tradition.

Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery by Rosemary Hume and Muriel Downes

Review: Neveryóna: Or: The Tale of Signs and Cities

2022-10-01T00:00:00Z

Parts of this book are complete genius. The scene where the Liberator leads Pryn through the city market and narrates it all as he goes while Pryn observes what happens and it feels like they are in two separate cities at once? Genius. There are bits like that all over. Singular scenes, character sketches, perspective reversals that knock you flat. The uncomfortable and incisive depictions of slavery, and what it might be like to really travel as a woman in a sword and sorcery world are key thematic strengths.

But there are also long sections where characters narrate Derrida exegeses or simplified Marxism for pages and some dreadfully repetitive dialogue. I can see this stuff is trying to make a point (perhaps that these people are tiresome), and I just long for more economy in the way the point is made. I think the book might also be making fun of the kind of just-so stories you find in sword and sorcery by instead replacing them with just-so stories lifted from critical theory, lifted without transforming them much at all. I can't tell though.

The biggest problem I have though is the weak narrative. The book drags at points, hangs together a series of vignettes that don't seem to come together even though it's supposedly all about one character in a continuous story. It ultimately sets up some incomprehensible situations which don't seem to come to a point leaving me as a reader just as confused as our naive main character. Tales of Nevèrÿon, with multiple separate tales about different characters held together better, and did more to transform the key ideas both books lift from Derrida about the nature of language and the concept of difference.

It's an interesting experiment, and really fun in places. I'm glad I read it but I couldn't recommend it wholeheartedly, unless you're really interested in experimental sword and sorcery.

Return to Nevèrÿon #2: Neveryóna: Or: The Tale of Signs and Cities by Samuel R. Delany

Review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

2022-09-05T00:00:00Z

I loved the way this book zooms in and out, at times letting the reader in on the conspiracy, only to give the outside view again for a chapter or two, then tip its hand, then twist again to show that what you cleverly figured out was just another layer. It’s deft, and stylish, and keeps you engaged. I can feel how this must have influenced so much of the gritty style spy genre that came later, in all media. But damn it’s bleak. I’m not going to ding the book points for living up to the standards of the genre it exemplifies. That would be like being annoyed a scifi story has a spaceship. But you know, I think the hardcore spy novel is something I only want in little bits.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Review: Aurora

2022-08-20T00:00:00Z

The two great strengths of Aurora, which are a running strength in every KSR novel I've read, are characters who grow, and sensitivity to ecology. The most interesting character is the narrator, the quantum computer running the generation ship, who begins to write a narrative of the ship's voyage at the request of its engineer. As the ship-narrator tells the story, it develops both narrative skill and a personality through the act of telling. It becomes increasingly self-aware and self-reflective, with some delightfully meta sections as the ship muses about the nature of metaphor and other narrative techniques. The narrative structure, the ship's perhaps-sentience, and the material recounted are wonderfully in sync. When the ship's self-consciousness is young, it tells the story simply about the events in the life of a child. As the ship matures, so does the child, and the narrative becomes more complex. Towards the end, there is a big payoff to having the ship as a character, because it can tell the story of complex orbital maneuvers as it attempts to decelerate using slingshot maneuvers. I know, it sounds dry, but it's fascinating and exciting.

Aurora is genre aware, in conversation with KSRs earlier, more optimistic takes on the idea of humans living outside of the earth, as well as, of course, the entire trope of "something has gone wrong on the generation ship." And oh boy, what hasn't gone wrong on the generation ship? In his exploration of the ways that the ecology of a closed, artificial environment could fail, KSR goes further than any SF writer I've read.

It's a big idea book, too, with a clear environmental message, something that KSR goes on to explore even further in The Ministry for the Future, though here it's held together more by the scaffolding of a narrative. It has the best answer to the Fermi paradox I've seen, though to tell you what would be a spoiler.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Incident of the Party Crashers from Ohio: A Pantheacon Bartender's Brief Regret

2019-02-17T00:00:00Z

Last night while I tended the bar at the OSOGD party suite at Pantheacon two party crashers came in from an electricians convention which is also happening in the same hotel - or so I gather. I duly carded them and noted their Ohio driver’s licenses. They held out their hands to get the Anubis hand stamps like everyone did. Come a long way, I thought, just to be here. It took a few moments to realize they didn’t know what they had walked into and that they weren’t just baby pagans first time at the convention.

The first hint something was off was when they were having a hard time deciding what they wanted to drink and I offered them shots they asked if we would do shots with them. They were trying to be friendly but there was a culture misfit here.

Behind their backs, my friends madly mimed holding up their badges and saying these guys don’t have ‘em.

So my fellow bartender (our volunteer shifts were 2 folks at a time) asked them what groups they were affiliated with and what brought them here. They tried to play it cool. After a time of this charade I said, I’m so sorry guys, but you don’t have your badges and this is a convention party so you gotta have them. One said, Oh we left it in the room. The other said, Oh don’t you know, we aren’t wearing them this year, it’s the new thing.

I apologized again and said they’d be welcome to come back once they got their badges. They didn’t come back. I heard later one of them kicked the elevator.

In retrospect, I wish I had been more generous with them. I got a good vibe from both these men. They had come a long way and saw a bunch of weirdos having fun, and decided to see what it was about. That shows a certain open-mindedness which I like and like to encourage.

Unfortunately they decided to play it cool and lie, and pretend to fit in as best they could. By asking them about their affiliation and asking them to come back with their badges, we played along with that farce. It let them leave while saving face. It was an OK way to handle it, and no one was hurt except I suppose the fellow who kicked the elevator a bit.

Thing is, if they had said, hey, we’re here for something else and we saw you folks having fun and heard there was free booze, I would have said, hey welcome to Pantheacon, here’s what we are, and what would you like to drink (it’s free)? The problem was never that I didn’t want to serve them. It was just that I wanted to make sure they didn’t get into a bad situation with somebody due to a severe cultural misunderstanding.

If I had the presence of mind to act on my generosity, I would have cut through their lies and let them know what they walked into. And I wish I had done that. I wish I had said, hey guys, you seem like you’re not here for Pantheacon. I bet you saw a bunch of weird people in costumes partying and wanted to see what’s up. Let me give you a brief explanation of what’s up and what the general rules of politeness around here are. That’s what I wish I had said.

And maybe they would have thought that’s all too much and left anyway. Maybe I they would have accepted a shot each and wandered off. Maybe they would have stuck around and ate some of the cheese. There really was plenty of drink and food and hospitality, but they didn’t know how to ask for them, and I didn’t know how to be generous the right way in that moment.

Poems published in 2018

2018-12-21T00:00:00Z

In 2018, a number of my poems were published in literary journals. All of them have online versions, which I’ve linked.

“Crow stops on the lamp” Haiku Journal, Issue Number 58 https://haikujournal.org/issue.php?id=58&issue=58

“Airplanes Over the Bog” and “Like Two Dogs Dancing” (reprints), Little Rose Magazine, https://littlerosemagazine.weebly.com/home/two-poems-by-agnieszka-krajewska

“Ending April in Williamsburg, 1999,” Rogue Agent, Issue 41 https://www.rogueagentjournal.com/akrajewska

“Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” Riggwelter, Issue 14
https://issuu.com/riggwelter/docs/issue_14/20

“El Camino Del Mar at Dusk” and “The Gate of Pinecones,” The Coachella Review, Winter 2018
http://thecoachellareview.com/wordpress/archives-2/poetry/the-gate-of-pinecones-and-el-camino-del-mar-at-dusk/

Bad air days

2018-11-13T00:00:00Z

Updated July 27, 2024: As the Park Fire, also in Butte County, surpasses the Camp Fire of 2018, I find myself thinking back on that fire season. I've updated the footnotes with information that's become available since I first wrote this post.

I haven't felt this cooped up since Chernobyl. I was a kid and hid from radiation behind the couch all summer. My parents told me there was a radioactive cloud, and I imagined an invisible but poisonous cloud beaming death at anyone who dared to go outside. As I understand it now, it was a plume of smoke with particles of radioactive dust. That's what fallout is: radioactive dust.

The air went bad on Thursday evening, right after I got some bad professional news, which has been piling on since. Nothing out of the ordinary if you're looking for a job or trying to get published in a literary journal. You get used to rejection. Or I thought you do. Or, I thought I had.

Afternoon sun in San Francisco, on Friday, November 9, 2018

Normally, when it gets bad in my head, I walk it off. There are hills two blocks from my door steep enough to soak up any kind of fear or despair. And if one doesn't do it, there's another and another. It's too steep to think while I climb, and when I get to the top, the city stretches out to the Bay, where sometimes I can read the names of container ships waiting to dock. I rarely have to walk for more than an hour.

The bad air came in from Butte County overnight. I was in the Richmond, a fog-prone neighborhood, and as I walked to catch my bus home, cones of light formed under the streetlamps as the light caught on the smoke, like it does on foggy nights. Except instead of the soothing taste of fog, I felt dust on my tongue. Overnight it got worse. On Friday morning the house smelled just like when the neighbors fired up a blazing charcoal barbecue in the courtyard right under my open bedroom window.

Air quality red. Unhealthy for everyone. Meanwhile, the Camp Fire in Butte County burned down the town of Paradise and killed, at last count 42^[1]. I wore my N95 mask when I went down to the Mission to meet a friend. It worked, in so far as I couldn't smell smoke, but every breath felt labored, which makes sense. I was sucking air in through the filter. The rubber straps squished my face into sections, like a trussed up piece of meat. The sun hung over Twin Peaks, deep red and so smoke-diffused I could look right at it.

Saturday the air quality was Red again with a few hours of Orange. Sunday: Red. Monday: Red. Today is still Red. I cleaned the house a little but didn't want to vacuum or use any cleaning product with a smell, because I couldn't air out the place after. I played video games until I got sick of video games. I read two books. I stopped wearing the mask outside because one of the straps snapped and it doesn't work very well. Besides, I think they're supposed to be single use ^[2]. I can't smell smoke anymore. I don't know if that's because there's no more smoke to smell, or if my nose is exhausted. When I walk downhill, I tasted the dust but it seems OK to breathe. When I walk back uphill, I get winded like I'm out of shape, like I don't live in one of the hilliest neighborhoods in San Francisco, like I'm not used to this.

I'm not used to this. No one is used to this. Fire season still going in mid-November is not how it's meant to be. It should be raining. It should be sodden. If I feel cooped up, I should feel cooped up because it's raining too hard to go for a walk without getting soaked to the bone, not because the air is poison.

Note updated in 2024. The final death toll was 85. See the Wikipedia article Camp Fire (2018) ↩︎
Note updated in 2024. We've learned ever so much more than I ever wanted to know about masks since 2018. However, it is still that case that for protection against smoke, you can use N95 masks for quite a while. Source: No, you do not need a new N95 mask after [#] hours. ↩︎

What the Herb Girl Likes: An Old Poem, with Backstory

2018-06-29T00:00:00Z

1997 was the year of my greatest poetic recognition, and I've never lived up to it since. It's a bit tough when that happens at age 18 to ever feel like you're good enough. To begin with, I was chosen to read at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which is held every summer in Connecticut in a beautiful sunken garden and attracts crowds of 3,000 people. No kidding! 3,000 people come to hear poetry. Complete strangers come on a weekend evening and sit in humid Connecticut outdoors, risking mosquitos, just to hear some poetry. I, along with four fellow Connecticut young poets, and four Irish young poets, was chosen to read in front of that crowd. Don't think for a moment I didn't realize how amazing it was. I loved doing that reading.

As part of the prize, the four winning Connecticut poets all expenses paid to go to the Aran Islands Poetry festival, where we also read (though to a smaller audience), and participated in workshops, and got to meet kind of big deal poets, including the Nobel prize winner Czeslaw Milosz.

On top of that, the small print shop that hosted open mics in my town offered to print my first poetry book. So my chapbook was coming out! In retrospect, I could have mentioned that at the reading. I did not yet appreciate poetic self-marketing.

Finally, one of my poems was published in the local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, in a story about the poetry festival. It's only searching for more information about the festival later that I realized it happened, because by the time the story was published I was already in college, and somehow all my youthful success didn't count any more. New York was bad for me as a writer and I lost all my confidence and all my inspiration. Everyone I met told me poetry didn't matter and wasn't real and no one wanted to hear it, and I believed them instead of looking for a poetry community which I no doubt could have found. Ah well. At one time my little poem was printed right next door to a poem by Czeslaw Milosz in a newspaper ordinary people read. I should have taken that evidence more seriously than the opinion of 19-year-old men.

What the Herb Girl Likes #

I like sorting the seed packages on a windy day,
weighing them down with the miniature shovel and rake.
I like pulling up long crabgrass roots
and lining them up on the driveway to die in the sun.
I like mixing up black, muddy, earth with my hands.
I like the cold, the soft gritty feel.
I like broken nails with dirt under them
that I can't clean out because it hurts.
I like putting the seeds in the furrows
with the plastic labels next to them.
I like watching green things sprout,
picking leaves off of them,
and crushing them between my thumb and forefinger,
separating herb from weed by smell.
I like the licorice smell of anise,
the pizza smell of oregano,
the candy smell of wild mint,
and the medicine cabinet smell of sage.
I like when my mother says "this soup is bland"
and I know that it needs savory and three leaves of lemon basil.
I like it when my brother has a sore throat
and I know how to make him a sage gargle.
I like looking in the Polish herb book
and finding the right month for harvest
and looking at the moon and finding the right day.
I like making neat charts in pencil
titled "Harvest Records" and containing three names for each herb:
catnip and kocimientka wlasciwa and Nepata Cataria.
I like washing jars and drying them in the oven.
I like putting dried herbs in the still-warm jars
so their lids make a "pop'' when they cool.
I like it when I comb out a knot in my hair
and find a dried sprig of thyme at its heart.

Imperfect Produce Demonstration at Spin City Cafe & Laundromat

2018-05-07T00:00:00Z

OK, one green bell pepper exhibits
Some imperfect radial symmetry:
One apex nubbin is less nubbiny
Than its three self-same fellow lumps.
The zucchini could not, I will grant you
Moonlight as a straight edge at the SAT,
But it's not far off. And the kale? Fine,
firm, bright, and crinkly; practically perfect.
Celery, kohlrabi , cauliflower,
I could go on, they're fine. Like, “Girl, you fine,”
Fine. Not fine, OK, sure. The real problem
Is excess. Vegetable success.
Your lush abundance, too, might be too much
But girl, you're fine, you're practically perfect.

From composing on the computer to writing by hand

2018-04-13T00:00:00Z

One planning journal and four poetry notebooks

When I was young, I sometimes wrote poetry at my computer. That was when you could be on the computer without being online, and being online meant tying up the house phone line. Now I mostly compose new poems by hand, because it's how I can get away from flow-breaking distractions. As a result I've been motivated to maintain a legible hand.

From the outside it might look like some kind of poetic preciousness. Ahh, she writes by hand, in a special notebook! But it's all about the practical considerations of the work. If there is anything romantic about it, it arises out of the association the work gives the tools.

I write in a special notebook so poems don't get lost in the mess of the discursive personal journal, or the business time of the planning bullet journal. Every once in a while I type them up. When I type up the poems, I make folders named after the notebooks. So, Blue Notebook, Pine Notebook, Birch Notebook, Red Notebook and so on.

It's important that the notebooks don't carry any inherent meaning so they don't limit the possibilities of the poems I might write in them.

Recently I got a couple of white notebooks. To distinguish them, I gave them names, but I was careful to not be serious or significant. So the one I just finished is Birb is the The Word, and the one I'm using right now is DUCK.

I didn't at any point sit down and think This Will Be My Process Now. I just sort of started writing poems in a notebook, and then started going to cafes to write and took the notebook, and when it filled up I started another notebook.

If I have any real (not joking learn dog language) advice for writers it's that you have to figure out your own process. That process isn’t something that you can sit down and invent ahead of time. It will arise out of practices that work for you, that you elaborate on slowly, if you need to ^[1]. And that it might change depending on your circumstances.

Just keep writing. The rest will sort itself out over time. Keep writing and if you accidentally stop writing, start again. Do that as often as you need to.

Sarah Perry’s recent post on ribbonfarm, “Deep Laziness,” talks about how iterative elaboration on simple forms gives rise to beauty. The principles and practices she outlines apply to the structure of the creative process itself, not just the output. Or at least they do for me. ↩︎

Advice for aspiring writers: Learn dog language

2018-04-04T00:00:00Z

Take a walk every day.
Stop to smell the roses, jasmine, and angel’s trumpets.
But don’t bother to smell the camellias; they don’t have a smell.
Get a guidebook to local flowers and find out which ones are worth smelling.
Get to know people who aren’t like you.
Befriend them.
Eavesdrop on your neighbors.
Find out about your neighbor’s dog’s health problems.
Make friends with dogs.
Learn dog language.
Talk to your local dogs.
Learn what smells interesting to dogs.
Learn that your neighbor’s dog isn’t sick but is actually the victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Confront your neighbor about dog abuse.
Get in a fist fight with your neighbor.
Get arrested.
Get bailed out by your new friends who are unlike you and therefore have the cash on hand to bail you out.
Make promises you can’t keep, like I will pay you back for bailing me out.
Represent yourself in court.
Discover the judge has a dog, Baxter, with emotional problems who sits at her feet in court to help with Baxter’s separation anxiety.
Violating all rules of propriety, talk to the dog instead of the judge during your closing statements.
Offer to talk his emotional problems through with Baxter.
Get sentenced to community service as the judge’s dog’s psychologist.
Help Baxter resolve his Oedipus complex.
Finish your community service but stay friends with Baxter and the judge.
Get another client for dog psychotherapy from people you meet at a potluck at the judge’s mansion.
Make business cards that say “Dog Psychologist and Writer.”
Start running seminars on dog psychology.
Cross out “Writer” on your business cards.
Become an Instagram-famous dog whisperer.
Really famous.
Treat Beyoncé’s sad pup for social anxiety.
Get on the late night talk show circuit to talk about how you cured Beyoncé’s sad pup.
Due to popular demand, write a book titled “How to Psychoanalyze Your Pup” with a jacket blurb by Beyoncé.
Get new business cards that say “Writer and Dog Psychologist.”
Take time to appreciate your success.

We Have Come to a Mutually Beneficial Agreement

2018-02-28T00:00:00Z

This is a work of fiction.

Some years ago, a plumeria I had bought on vacation in Hawaii started attracting ants. The active tip of the plumeria where new leaves grow seeps a honey-like ichor they crave. Since the plumeria kept me company at my computer desk, soon ants were crawling on my keyboard, walking between the buttons, investigating my tea, and even walking out onto my hands. It was a general nuisance. Even after I wiped down the desk with cinnamon oil and ceased drinking tea or eating cookies while in the study (a sacrifice), the ants returned, drawn by the plumeria. So I put it outside for a while, on the back deck. Some ants stayed on the plumeria and I couldn’t persuade them to leave.

There was a classic orb spider web on the upper crossbeam on the deck roof. In the middle presided a fat-bodied araneid with distinct yellow markings on her back.

“You could make yourself useful and move over closer to this plumeria and evict these ants for me. I don’t know if you eat ants, but I bet they don’t know that either,” then I thought I ought to be more polite since I was asking for a favor, and said “I mean, I’d really appreciate it if you could come over here and help me out.”

In the evening, when I went to take the compost out, the spider hadn’t moved and the ants were running amok. I made coffee for the morning in the automatic coffee machine, and went to bed with my husband. I mentioned the ant problem so he wouldn’t bring any cookies into the study.

In the morning I poured the coffee and opened the back door to smell the air. I could see it was sunny and I could smell it would stay that way. There was a new spider web stretched between the deck railing and the stem of my plumeria. In the middle of the rather stretched out orb web sat the araneid from the day before.

“Oh, well done! Thank you!” I beamed at her. The ants were somewhat reduced but still present in some numbers. “Well, bon apetit,” I said and went back inside to bring my husband his coffee.

I had talked to spiders for years, just as people talk to dogs, or computers, or babies, even though they don’t understand. This was the first time one had reacted by carrying out my wishes, however.

“Don’t go to the backyard today,” I said, “there’s a spider web blocking the way.” He said he wasn’t planning on it, anyway. After two days, the araneid ate her web and packed up camp. I saw her later in the garden near the bird bath.

Some weeks later, I spotted a big spindly Pholcus suspended in the corner against the ceiling above the shower spout. I saw her only after I finished showering because I have poor eyesight and it’s not my custom to wear eyeglasses in the shower, although I admit it happens occasionally by accident. There was no way I could reach the Pholcus to move her to a better location. Besides, even if I could, they’re called cellar spiders for good reason: she wouldn’t do well outside.

I stuck my head in the shower and said, “Listen, this isn’t a great spot. We shower almost every morning and there’s bound to be an incident one day. Why don’t you try behind the toilet? I hardly ever clean there. There’s a little condensation on the fixtures you can sip, and while you’re at it, maybe take care of some silverfish?”

I turned off the light and left. The next morning I forgot all about the Pholcus and showered on autopilot, as one does. While brushing my teeth I remembered and slid on my glasses and checked the corner: no spider. Feeling a bit silly, I nonetheless looked behind the toilet. And there she was, hanging in her nearly invisible web. Pholcus webs, unlike orb weavers’, are messy and hard to see. They like to hang with their body dangling down and legs in the air, very still. Often it’s hard to tell if one is alive or dead.

“I’m glad you found the spot I was talking about,” I said. The spider didn’t move or do anything to indicate it understood, or indeed, was even alive.

“Who are you talking to?” asked my husband. I explained the situation with the Pholcus. He said “hm,” and suggested I might ask some spiders to eliminate the moths in his closet. We had just discovered they had eaten holes in the trousers of his second best suit, and it would be a shame if they also consumed his best suit, which he had worn at our wedding and which still fit him quite well.

It took a few days before I saw a spider that didn’t seem otherwise occupied. It was a huntsman, quick-moving and furry, walking across the wall above the headboard of the bed. It froze in place when I approached. Understandable, since normally I put huntsmen outside. They have a disconcerting tendency to get in the way, even coming into bed, and someone is bound to get hurt when that happens.

“I’m not going to take you outside. I have a proposition. Go in the closet, the one on the left. It’s got moths. It’s a bit of a big job, so bring friends if you have them.”

Then I walked out of the room to give the huntsman privacy. I turned around in the doorway, feeling foolish, and I saw her walking across the wall, towards my husband’s closet. I stood transfixed, for a long time, minutes, I guess, which is how I saw the second huntsman, and the third, fourth, and fifth and sixth. I lost track of them. How many spiders were there in my house anyway?

We haven’t had a problem with moths since. I don’t even need to bag my knitting yarn. And the plumeria bloomed for the first time yesterday. The study smells sweet, and reminds me of Hawaii. We're going again next month. I can’t wait. I’ve already told the spiders to keep an eye on the place while we’re away.

This short story was created following a prompt to introduce a fantastic element into an ordinary situation in the style of magical realism, from at a class I’m taking at The Grotto called Pushing The Boundaries: Experiments in Fiction and Poetry (with Jenny Bitner).

Meeting Dionysus in San Jose

2018-02-23T00:00:00Z

Seated Dionysos holding out a kantharos. Interior from an Attic black-figured plate, ca. 520-500 BC. From Vulci. Psiax - Jastrow (2006), Public Domain Source.

A young woman in a white chiton sat on a chair in front of an entrance to a hotel room. “Would you like to meet Dionysus?” she asked me. A priestess, then. I wasn’t planning on it, not so literally, but why not? Catching up with old friends and meeting new ones is the best thing about Pantheacon, so why not say hello to a God who favors poets?

The priestess said Dionysus only sees one person at a time, so I had to wait until the previous supplicant or visitor or worshipper left. It wasn’t long. Another priestess opened the door and ushered me in.

It was just a hotel room but it wasn’t just a hotel room. Shrines were on every wall on tables, and a little table stood near a throne-like chair with a large bottle of wine placed on it. The room felt peaceful and dedicated to its purpose as a shrine. I didn’t look around too much though, because there he was, Dionysus, enacted by a long-haired and bearded, friendly young man who asked if I wished to hug. I did wish to hug.

“What can Dionysus do for you?” he asked. I paused for a moment. I’m not much of a God-botherer. “Actually, I’d like to read you a poem I wrote,” I said. Dionysus sat down on the throne-chair, and listened appreciatively while I read a poem on my phone. I was strangely nervous. It was all fun and games, but then again, it wasn’t. When I was finished he was effusive. I thanked him for inspiration. He said he was always with me, and loved my poetry.

Home-Made Glue and the creative process behind "Night-Time Skin Ritual"

2018-02-15T00:00:00Z

After doing a cut-up last week using my own work and the WIPP nuclear waste warning poem, I decided I really enjoyed the cut-up process and the kinds of work it generated. I wanted to do something playful for Valentine’s Day using whatever advertising I could get my hands on. Unfortunately I didn’t come across any fliers or other paper ads in the wild, so my only source was the SF Weekly.

(Later update: I posted the WIPP cut-up poem, Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, on this blog on July 14, 2023.)

I hand selected the ads for events happening on February 14th in the SF Weekly and then cut out interesting phrases with scissors. I wasn’t satisfied with the variety of phrases and selected an advertisement for a beauty cream from the Tatler, and cut phrases I liked using a box cutter. I used a box cutter because I couldn’t find my little scissors and the big scissors didn’t have enough precision. All the cutting probably took almost an hour.

Then I put all the cut-outs on a big cookie sheet and used a variety of randomizing techniques. At first I arranged the cut-outs into little piles by size and chose from each pile in turn. I didn’t like the results. I removed a couple of cut-outs from the mix that I thought were too boring or repetitive. Then I tried stirring all the cut-outs together, and then sprinkling them gently onto the cookie sheet, to scatter them randomly. Some flew onto the floor. I then picked up the pieces that were on the outermost edge, clockwise, and put them down in a shoebox lid. After one turn around the clock I repeated the scattering process. Snippets that fell onto the floor were also deemed to be selected.

I modified the placement order for too un-random feeling randomness (like when two things appear in a row that used to be in a row in the original text), but mostly left the words and phrases as they came.

Once the shoe box lid was full, I decided to glue the phrases to a blank piece of paper. I couldn't find any glue so I decided to make some paste glue using a little bit of flour and water and heating it up in the microwave. I added too much flour and made a gluey dough. When I tried to thin it out by adding more hot water, it just got lumpy. It turns out making glue is a lot like making French sauces, and once the flour has been activated with hot water, you can’t dilute it further. I put the bad glue in the compost.

I tried again with less flour in my paste mixture. It boiled over in the microwave and was too thin. I made some more very thick paste and added it bit by bit to the too-thin paste, which did work. I microwaved it again and it boiled over again. I had to transfer the glue to another container and wash the whole microwave.

Although the glue making was messy it probably only took about 15 minutes.

I got a piece of printer paper and attached it to a clipboard. I used a toothpick to spread glue on the back of each phrase and glued it down onto the paper.

There were more paper snippets left, so I repeated the process twice more. Then I transcribed and photographed the results.

People think that the worst that might happen with poetry creation is some spilled ink or accidental pencil stabbing, but I make much, much bigger messes as part of my poetic process.

And that's how I wrote Night-Time Skin Ritual.

Night-Time Skin Ritual

2018-02-14T00:00:00Z

Natural regenerative process begins 45 minutes prior
and goes on dates with sensation.
The iconic pure opening & reception seats, chocolate & wine,
culminating in a glorious finale with Supreme Eye.
He took and you didn’t. Gigantic lamp can be stories that grow into a tale.
Got a heart?
The orchestra's expressive range, Mom’s Body Shop moves from LA to San Francisco
Wake up rich in body shop
Valentine’s Part
to Napoleon in commemoration of his Beethoven’s Eroica
storytelling crack these crazy buffing, massaging, moisturizing.
Do you see who’d just said “I love you,” at gunpoint? The
monumental Eroica Symphony. Throughout the night! Weed is legal
a piece originally dedicated a woman heart tattoos $25 each all
sex-positive activities and sexpert sexual enhancement.
A first date who unexpectedly brought her the ultimate brightening boost:
highly advanced, potent orgasm art serum. This dark circles,
infant, to hitting up a sex club with Supreme Eye
Advanced ageing 120 women in 2 years --
opposition to tyranny. Showcasing five minutes of gliding.
Profits will be donated to taking acid, it plumps the artgasm:
to erase the signs of celebrating the undying-looking eyes in the morning.

I generated this cut-up using advertisements for events happening on Valentine's Day, along with an ad for a skin product.

A Pan That is Cake Sized: Recipe for Shrove Tuesday

2018-02-13T00:00:00Z

My child demands a loud noise an oil a Lent a flour cake made of flat, white, and spongy; a very loud noise, eggshells, compost, of course. My child is a picky eater so of course greasy small fingers. Cake demands: my child, my child is flour, eggs, milk, butter, preheat the oven to gasmark 3, you'll need this later. Of course my child is flat, white, and spongy. My pancake is my pancake is my pancake. Of course the pan, well seasoned. My child is well seasoned. And here is that recipe!

Three hundred grams
Compost bin liner, OK if it smells like Tide
You can get it cheap at Tesco
Heavy and cool in the palm of the hand
Sharp crack (Do not pause for haruspicy unless you have a great deal of clear, very blue, not a single cloud, your mind no different than the vastness, of one substance. Of course my child demands pancakes, but perhaps you do not have a pan)
Powder
Metal or whirring
Traditionally, suet, but my child likes brown
Quite a heavy box
Hinges
Heat
Heat
Heat
My child
Cake

This poem was created following a prompt to use repetition from at a class I’m taking at The Grotto called Pushing The Boundaries: Experiments in Fiction and Poetry (with Jenny Bitner). In class we had read excerpts from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, and many of us noticed that the pieces had the feeling of an etiquette manual. So, I decided here to re-create the feeling of a chatty recipe blog in imitation of Gertrude Stein.

They might be wild roses

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

They might be wild roses

he is going

London is awake,

discover a secret under unnatural lights

dancing queen was the worst.

Write

God inhaled

authenticity do not apply to his work.

Don't imagine food, supplies, and babies.

They came to turn

Nordstrom. The

sex I had when

This poem was generated using the cut-up technique as part of a group exercise at a class I'm taking at The Grotto called Pushing The Boundaries: Experiments in Fiction and Poetry (with Jenny Bitner). Every member of the class cut out words and phrases from whatever sources they chose, put them in a big envelope, and then we grabbed a handful at random and arranged them pretty much as they came. I manipulated mine slightly but only very slightly. You can learn more about cut-up technique and try it yourself. I don't know why I never thought to use cut-up before, but then again that's exactly why I decided to take this class: to push me in new creative directions.

Whom Am I? (Part One of I, You, He: Who Are the People in These Poems?)

2018-01-23T00:00:00Z

Is the “I” of the poem the same as the “I” of the poet? Well, it’s complicated. Sometimes. And then again, sometimes not. And sometimes both. Let me explain.

In a fictional narrative written in prose, most readers quickly realize that “I” just means the author chose to write in the first person, and the narrator is just another character. In modern narratives, that’s also often a clue that we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything the narrator has to say. In non-fiction prose, like essays or memoirs, readers generally assume the “I” of the narrative voice is the same as the “I” of the author. The way we know if something is fiction or non-fiction is usually by its packaging. The jacket blurb says, for example “this memoir by X tells the gripping story of her youth in Y,” or “newest thriller by Z is sure to thrill readers of spy novels.” Or the book is shelved in Fiction at the library. I’m being a little obvious and a little obtuse here, because of course there are also a lot of clues inside a book about if it’s fiction or not, especially in contemporary works. (Historical or hagiographic works might frame themselves as non-fiction and yet describe events that to a modern reader seem very improbable and would normally be a hint that we’re reading fantasy)

The “I” in poetry is a little more difficult to suss out. First of all, the big meta hints about fiction and non-fiction are unavailable. All the poetry books are shelved together. Sylvia Plath’s confessional works and Beowulf sit in the same bookshelf in my local library. Sometimes, very rarely, a poetry book blurb will say that the poems are based on the writer’s own experience or on a specific historical incident. Most of the time though, poetry books themselves are very coy about their status as fiction or nonfiction.

If readers look at hints inside the text, poems are often unhelpful as well about the status of the “I”. Contemporary poetry tends to be quite naturalistic and describes events and images that seem like they could have happened. Sometimes a poem in the first person is very clearly from the point of view of a historical figure, or an animal, or some inanimate object, so it’s clear that it’s not the author. I am not an anvil, obviously. Oh but maybe the sad anvil represents me after all, like a stuffed animal speaking on behalf of a child? I’ll come back to this but first: confessional poetry.

Even people who don’t know much about poetry seem to know about confessional poetry, where poet draws upon very personal (often painful) experiences and writes in the first person. Confessional poetry has been such a force since the 1950s that it seems a lot of people have got the wrong idea that that’s all contemporary poetry is anymore. (But only people who don’t actually read a lot of contemporary poetry think this, because as soon as you open a literary journal or pick up an anthology, it becomes obvious a lot more is going on, and it’s been a lot of years since 1950.)

In confessional poetry, it would seem obvious that the “I” of the narrator is the writer. And well, sometimes, that’s true, but not always, and not exactly, and not entirely. For that matter, a poem could be written as though it is a confessional poem, but actually be fictional, and because of the lack of meta clues, the reader will never know.

Finally, you could ask the poet, assuming they’re still alive and you get a chance. But you probably shouldn’t ask. First of all, it’s considered dreadfully rude. Second of all, because you have just been rude, the poet might lie to you, leaving you knowing less than you did when you started.

So here we are, and I (that’s I, AK, the essayist, because this is a nonfiction essay) haven’t answered the questions I posed at the start and only talked about why they are difficult to answer. I propose we don’t bother to answer them at all, and instead do like poets do.

In workshops and at readings, poets get around the problem by saying things about “the narrator of the poem” or the “speaker of the poem”. We do it to a degree that might seem absurd at first. For example, the poet might give a little introduction about how she wrote this poem after the death of her child. She then reads the poem. And we, other poets, say to her: the imagery in your poem gave me chills, particularly when the speaker compared herself to a fault line along tectonic plates.

Thus, in workshop and in conversation, “you” is the person who wrote the poem, to whom we are now speaking, but “I” remains “the narrator” and “the speaker.”

Even in such a case where the poet says the poem is about a personal experience, we, poets, do this because it gives our fellow poet space to write about something personal without having to answer intrusive questions. We do it because it lets us all focus on the poem, instead of the poet. In workshop its lets us critique and improve a poem about something that is personally very important but might not be very good yet as an artwork, without undermining the personal importance of the thing behind the artwork. And we do it because the poem might have been written a while ago, or in a particular mood, and the narrator and the poet really aren’t the same person anymore. And we do it because although the poem might be based on real experiences that really happened to the poet, she might have chosen to fictionalize aspects of the narrator for dramatic impact and so “I” is a confusing mixture of her and not her.

I suggest therefore that you (that is you, the person reading this right now, not a fictional you, which I’ll get into in part two) treat every first person narrator in a poem as an ambiguously fictional narrator, sheerly out of politeness. Please.

Feature image by Loudon dodd - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7404342

Alchemy Practicum and Goat Visit

2017-12-18T00:00:00Z

Goat, you were the only one among
the three goats who pressed his head
against the fence when Rachel and I
came to you after picking crab apples
and black walnuts. I returned
to the paradise of childhood labors:
Piling walnuts onto a flat wicker basket
for Lena’s dyes, their sun-warmed green husks
stained in their own juice.

Goat, you approached to the gate and pressed
against me. Stiff fur, incurling horn,
your goaty smell preceding you as incense
precedes the enthroned Eucharist
in a Corpus Christi procession. You condescend
for me to touch your head and back,
return the gesture of friendship with a look
from your rectangular pupil.

“Feed him the apple,” says Rachel handing
it over the fence and I offer you the crab
apple on the supplicant plate of doubled
palms. My fingertips, stained and perfumed
with black walnuts, you consecrate with goat
cider. I know the flavor in your mouth: sour
as the crack of an apple breaking, bitter like black
walnut juice, and sweet like the distillate of sun.

Goat, you return to your pasture
and I return to the laboratory.
Today we prepare oil of rosemary,
oil of sun. A wasp enters
through the sky window. All day

my fellow alchemists fidget.
Rosemary fumes suffuse the yurt.
When the wasp takes leave we pour
the yellow oil that rises
into three vials: one for each alchemist.

Goat, while I labor in idleness do you, too, hasten
slowly? Do you, too, make distillate of sun?
Or do you turn your devil eye and grin, shake
your thinning beard at the wasps who swarm
the fermenting crab apples you cannot reach
while they, unharvested, seep sweet yellow
in the sun who tilts to his equinoctial crossing,
the Tropic of Capricorn?

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Distillation by Retort (Public Domain)

Residual Heat at the Decommissioned Synchrotron

2017-12-12T00:00:00Z

We step over fading caution tape, a Geiger counter in your hand
   ticking the steady tick of background radiation.

Up and down the textured metal stairs,
   my hands slide on cold handrails, you walk ahead.

The urge to touch you radiates through me
   wave after wave, something I cannot contain

nor indulge; the heat flows into the cauldron
   of the cyclical synchrotron. Dead machines

surge into undead hums, to shake themselves
   into shuddering destruction, cabinets full of dials,

piles of lead bricks. You swing
   the dragon mouth of the Geiger counter.

It only ticks at the same slow pace:
   no heat, but you burn, and I know it.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

The self is continuously formed from the outside in

2017-12-08T00:00:00Z

I have for years now observed that the person I am is determined by the place in which I am. To a distressing level, frankly. Certain ways of being seem inaccessible in some places, utterly. For example in the American suburbs, which is one of the places I least like the person I am, I can’t even access the sense of melancholy of longing for the wilderness I might feel in the city. Nor the vasty empty fear of the actual wilderness. In one neighborhood of San Francisco (Noe Valley) I can hardly enter the mood of another (the Presidio).

We, Westerners, think, or mostly like to think, that the self comes from within and finds expression through interactions with the exterior world. A soul, embodied. A self interacting with society. But I think that it’s not like that. I think the self is formed from the outside in. The brain forms the mind. The body forms the brain. Physical interactions form the body. Society regulates physical interactions and sometimes the body directly, as in judicial corporal punishment, medical regulations, restrictions on drug use, or prescriptions of drugs and treatment for those deemed insane, which is not always those who themselves suffer from their symptoms, as with the punitive psychology of the 1950s deployed against hysterical women in the US or political subversives in the USSR.

Art on the wall of the Regent's Canal in London depicts an ascetic meditating with fidget spinners.

I make this sound all neater and more systemic than it really is. Beyond the premise that brain forms mind, body forms brain, I am quite uncertain of the chains of causation. I know there is neuroscience around this stuff and perhaps some parts of what we call personality are genetically predetermined, and no amount of societal pressure can really undo or alter them. For example the neurodiversity of autism spectrum or ADHD feels more like how tall you can grow^[1], rather than something like how muscular you are which you can alter with diet and exercise and even, if you chose, external hormones--the use of which is regulated by society so here is a layer of abstraction above, acting on a layer of abstraction below.

Things at the level of neurological inclinations are much grosser and more general than what we normally think of as IDENTITY. Even around the constraints of our physical (which includes neurological) limitations we form an identity. That identity emerges from interaction with the entire embodied (and higher abstraction beyond) environment, instead of arising spontaneously from an inherent seed of self (e.g. a soul) that predetermines it. Though now that I say it, what even is the difference. Any soul which could manifest so variably is so undetermined or vast in potential it’s almost indistinguishable from non-existence.

And here by long-winded process I appear to have come around to Buddhist principles. No-self and form is emptiness.

This identity, moreover, is not formed once through one’s upbringing and then fixed, but changes continuously through ongoing interactions.^[2] I don’t wish to posit a complete determinism. For example, I can choose to change my body through bodybuilding, and experience the world differently, because of my physical interactions with it. Suddenly a hill I avoided on my path is easy to climb. I see a different set of people on the new path. I can choose to talk to them, enter into new friendships and social relations, and start living under different norms. I can move to (or even just visit) a different country and be steered by the pressures of different geography, weather, and architecture to interact with different people, make other friends, and live under yet different norms, and start to think of myself as a new person, perhaps even without noticing the change as it is happening. But these dramatic changes can also happen entirely by accident. I might fall ill or have an accident and not be able to leave my house for months and lose my regular connections with friends and environment, become obsessed with the birds I see outside the window, research birds on the internet, join a forum for bird watches, and seemingly suddenly and almost by accident, I have a new identity of bird-watcher.

But on revision, I wonder if this is even a good example of a predetermined constraint, since human growth hormone can change how tall you’ll grow, and tallness is determined by many factors, which while mostly outside of direct control of the individual who is or is not tall, are hardly all genetically predetermined. ↩︎
My friend and colleague Sara Klein reviewed an earlier draft of this essay and asked “[I]f we are formed through the external, how do you account for stark differences such as a racist and an anti-racist who grew up in the same place at the same time with very similar circumstances.” The last paragraph attempts to address her question, although I can’t account for it from the outset, I can over time. ↩︎

Fire Danger: High

2017-12-05T00:00:00Z

"But you burn, and I know it."  
    Adrienne Rich, “Orion”

As we wind up the Berkley hills, brown foam
peels off the dash of his hot Dodge Dart.
I crank down the windows for a sun-singed draft.

The smoldering tip of his black clove cigarette.
His afternoon stubble, the clear sky, the dry grass.
One hand on the gear shift. Both my hands on my lap.

Years ago these hills went up: ash fell like snow
in Alameda. The foothills burned for three days.

He throws the butt into the the road. The sparks scatter
on the asphalt and die.

He moves his free hand



to the the wheel.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

How the War Started

2017-12-01T00:00:00Z

When Xerxes wrote again: “Deliver up your arms,” Leonidas wrote back: “Come and take them.”

Black eye. The left one. Stubble. Leather jacket and underneath
a black t-shirt with “Fuck You” printed in white. Buckled boots.

His car, named Zeke,
is a '73 Dodge Dart Swinger.

Peeling pleather front seat, the foam exposed.
He puts his hand on my thigh.

I put mine on top.
His apartment is upstairs

and past pale green corridors with Victorian doors.
“Very like an asylum.”

Swords hang on his walls. Bookshelves.
A big unmade bed. Black sheets.

A stuffed raven on the computer.
I read the spines on the bookshelf

and turn into him, kiss;
pause to unlace my knee-high boots.

He ignites six tea-lights.
I set aside my glasses.

He unbuckles his boots.
I reach under his shirt.

He pushes me onto the bed.
We do the thing we came here to do.

Still, warm, and sleepy I sink
into his scent, and fur, and solid heavy limbs.

When he wakes to take a piss I move to his spot
and prepare my arms for his return.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

The Longfellow Bridge

2017-11-29T00:00:00Z

The T runs down the heart
of the bridge.

The cars shake in the dim light
left by the dregs of the day.

May-green trees and May-green weeds
shine, still slick and fresh from rain.

I walk on the edge of the bridge
by a low stone wall.

The rainfall slows.
The Red Line train is gone.

I walk and walk.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Longfellow Bridge detail (2007). Photo by Paul Mison. Used with permission.

The cursed Safeway and other grocery stores of San Francisco

2017-11-27T00:00:00Z

The other day, I walked to the Safeway on Diamond Heights instead of taking the train to the Safeway on Castro, which as everybody knows, is cursed. Anton LaVey cursed it, the story goes, when he attempted to bring his pet lion there and they wouldn’t let him. Ever since then something has been off about that place. And I don’t mean that as some sort of slight against its use as a place for gay men to pick up each other. Every Trader Joe’s is a place for straights to pick up each other and I’m not going to say it’s cursed.

Big grocery stores give me bad feelings because of the illusion of choice. You see 10 kinds of instant mac and cheese but God help you if you want celeriac root. Like that’s some kind of weird vegetable. It’s in the Penguin book of Cordon Bleu cooking!

The best grocery store I ever shopped at was a green market on Ocean Avenue when I was in graduate school. It was downhill from me so I’d have to take my backpack downhill and then walk up hill laden with groceries. That green market, aside from its elevation, was perfect. It had every kind of thing you might want but only one of them. So yes it had green, red, and french lentils. It had one kind of fusilli. One kind of penne. And one time someone came in looking for something, I don’t remember what anymore, artichokes maybe, and asked the grocer why he didn’t have any. He briskly informed the customer that the desired item was out of season and therefore both expensive and not very good so he didn’t carry it. Imagine that! It meant I didn’t have to have some kind of mental checklist of what was in season to buy only fresh and good things. I could just trust the green grocer.

One time I had to walk out of a big grocery store (maybe it was a Safeway too?) in Alameda because it made me ill to be there. It’s hard to really explain it. I suppose I was feeling alienation. When you have dozens of choices and you’re supposed to feel like life is bountiful but yet nothing is satisfying, it’s utterly alienating. It was better to stand in line for coffee in Communist Poland! Well maybe not better, but less corroding to the soul.

Speaking of Communist Poland, when my family first moved to the US, I loved to go grocery shopping with my mom because of all the amazing fruit and produce in the stores. We didn’t have a lot of money but we could still afford to buy one experimental fruit or vegetable. This was before the internet was really a thing so I couldn’t just for example type in “quince” and know that you have to cook quince or else they taste like wood infused with apple scent. Starfruit, kiwi, passion fruit, mango -- these were all pretty great though. Kiwi is the only one that made it into our regular rotation. Hellishly, my mom thought kiwi was an acceptable substitute for strawberries in desserts and salads (it is not).

When I first moved to San Francisco I lived way out in the avenues of the Richmond District. I moved from Astoria, Queens and the thought of living walking distance to an actual sandy beach was unutterably charming so when I chose a room to rent based only on Craigslist and map data, I chose to live all the way by the edge of the Pacific. I could walk to Ocean Beach, and often did. I was kind of a night owl at the time, and there wasn’t much to do for entertainment in that part of the city, except going to the beach, or Safeway. So that’s what I did. This was before they disallowed burning bonfires on Ocean Beach wherever you pleased, so a fun thing to do was to buy some Duraflame logs at the Safeway and then have a bonfire at the beach. Or, if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you could go behind the Safeway and see if they had any damaged wood pallets you could take away. You could ask the people who worked there and a lot of time they’d give them away. I don’t know if you can still do that. I’m not so much of a night owl anymore, and I don’t live there, but I still like to go to the beach even though it’s almost an hour on Muni.

Right next to Ocean Beach, at LaPlaya and Balboa there is a large Russian grocery store called Europa Express. This place is like the spiritual opposite of a depressing Safeway. The food is amazing, largely labelled only in Cyrillic, and the staff is very Russian. By which I don’t mean they are just ethnically Russian. I mean their style of customer service pleasantly reminds me of Eastern Europe. When you’re shopping, they leave you the fuck alone. No one asks if you need help. If you need help in a grocery store, you are probably beyond help, is the thought, I imagine. When it’s time to pay there is no small talk or unnecessary smiling, not even for the Russian speaking customers. Also for whatever reason they always speak to me in Russian. I don’t know if I look so Slavic they just make the assumption (I do have a pretty classically Slavic face, big, round, pale, and with a very severe resting bitch face) or if it’s the stuff I buy, or if they just talk to everyone in Russian and assume you can sort it out. I’ll have to send my husband one day, because he looks so English there is absolutely no way you could mistake him for a Russian.

Europa Express isn’t organized in any way I could convey to you, yet it makes perfect sense to me. Obviously the cheeses and tvarogs and kefirs are in one place, because they need refrigeration. There are glass fridges full of every kind of sausage you might want, if you’re Russian. If you’re Polish it’s just almost every kind, which is still better than Safeway which carries such abominations as Polish Kielbasa (Turkey). It’s fine I guess if you’re not expecting kielbasa or are on a diet and fat will make you sick (I had to be on a diet like that for a while and it was very sad, every time I ate something with more fat content than 1% milk I got nauseated. Horrible. Luckily I got better.)

There is of course the smoked and pickled fish section. Yes that’s a section. I have to use all my self-control not to buy every kind of herring. There is herring in oil, herring in water, herring in vinegar, herring in cream, herring in jars and herring in shrink-wrap plastic. Unlike at Safeway where the best you can hope for is herring in wine sauce which is always very expensive, and weirdly sweet. They always have both hot smoked and cold smoked mackerel. I have to confess that the texture of cold smoked mackerel doesn’t agree with me, which makes me feel like a weakling. But what can you do?

Right across the aisle from the smoked and pickled fish are all kinds of canned fish. Not just boring (and dolphin murdering) tuna, but sprats, and mackerels and yes, herrings, and anchovies, and sardines. Next to that are all kinds of other wonderful preserves like cherries and pickled mushrooms, and pickled cabbage and pickled beets. I’m sure I’m leaving some things out. Just trust me it’s good.

They even have vaguely subversive foods. For example the other day I saw a woman buying multiple flats of fresh blackcurrants. I would have bought some too, but it turned out she bought out the entire supply. As you may not know, growing blackcurrants was banned in the US in the 1900s because they spread a tree disease that threatened the logging industry. So for nearly a century Americans lacked access to one of the world’s most wonderful fruits. In 2003 some states started lifting the ban, but no one grew up with blackcurrants, so grocery stores don’t carry them.

There’s also a tea aisle where you can get all kinds of really good black teas, and an astounding variety of herbal teas. A lot of the herbal teas are imported from Poland so it’s a bit easier for me to navigate around them. There are also what I consider to be Advanced Russian beverages like wines made out of fruits I would not normally think to ferment, and of course, kvass. Kvass is made from fermented dark rye bread, is black, and carbonated. It looks like Coca Cola but if you took a sip expecting Coca Cola you would be very surprised and probably disgusted. It’s mildly sour and tastes a bit like liquid essence of pumpernickel. It’s an acquired taste that I haven’t acquired. There’s nothing else like it though, so I imagine if you’re used to it, going without would be a hardship. What with the craze for kombucha, I’m surprised that kvass hasn’t also caught on. Perhaps it’s because it’s not gluten-free.

They used to carry Inka, a Polish chicory and roasted grain coffee substitute. It’s funny how Inka has come around. It was what we used to drink when you couldn’t get coffee because of Communist era shortages, plus it was what you could give children and people who couldn’t have caffeine and they’d get to have the pleasure of drinking something at least a bit coffee like with the healthy adults.

When I was a kid in school in Poland, we used to get mugs of Inka during break between classes in the winter. I don’t remember ever having to pay for it, or my parents having to pay for it. The mugs were big metal enamel mugs, and the Inka was milky and over-sweet. Break would happen and suddenly ladies with big tea trays laden with the mugs came into the classroom and every kid got a mug. Even though I thought it was too sweet I drank it and I liked it because it was so nice and warm. Now that I think of it, I don’t know if they gave us the Inka before or after they sent us to play in the snow for a recess. Anyway fake coffee is full of childhood nostalgia for me, and I’m a bit disappointed Europa Express no longer carries it.

They do have my other big nostalgia treats though: Delicia and Krowki. Delicie are a Polish version of Jaffa Cakes, a soft vanilla cookie coated on one side with chocolate, and with a bit of fruity gelatin in between the chocolate and the cookie. Orange and cherry seem to be the most popular flavors. Krowki are a kind of toffee. The name means “little cows” and it’s not so much a brand as a method. If you have the patience you could make your own krowki with condensed milk and sugar. But it’s a bit like making your own bread. Maybe fun as a novelty now and again, but honestly, better to leave it to the professionals who know better. In Poland there are always stands at green markets where people who have mastered the art of making krowki sell an astounding variety of them. Besides the basic, you get chocolate flavored, and then all kinds of different add ins like poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, hazelnut bits, or hazelnut flavor. Europa Express carries many of these, but truth be told, now that I am an adult and do have the choice, I prefer the simple classic. Krowki are about the size of a thumb, and individually wrapped in little bits of parchment paper, and then those parchment wrapped packets are wrapped in colorful paper wrappers with pictures of (what else) little cows on them.

Although it should go without saying, I will say that Europa Express is definitely not cursed. I would not even be surprised if it had been officially blessed.

Airplanes Over the Bog

2017-11-22T00:00:00Z

In response to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “The Pear Tree”

Bagno. The name means bog.
The village may have been a bog
before the drainage ditches
gridded it into kolkhoz.

Crop dusters buzz in the cloudy sky—
always cloudy over Bagno,
always muddy at the kolkhoz gate
where the people’s tractor
shudders diesel smoke through a soot-blacked chimney.

Cloudy sky like a black and white
newsreel from WWII
where an airplane buzzes low,
and drops a finned black bomb
like a soda fountain cartridge
and a child runs with a black mouth
open but inaudible over the buzz. The bomb
does not hum, does not hiss, does not cry,
and I can’t tell in the black and white film
if the child’s mouth is full of shadows or blood.

In the fields black molehills
erupt like impact craters,
but we never see the blind
excavators alive.

My cousin’s model airplane
burns fuel oily and metallic,
buzzes above us in the cloudy field,
flies to the edge of radio range,
then out of range
down into the calamus,
into the cattails, into the wet edge
of the black pine forest seeping night,
and burrows its lacquered nose in peat.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

About this poem #

When I was about to post this poem, I looked up Brigit Pegeen Kelly so I could link to her biography, and learned that she died last year. I no longer know what to say when someone asks me who is my favorite living poet. In 1997 I heard Brigit Pegeen Kelly read from her book Song at the Aran Islands Poetry Festival in Galway, Ireland. I was attending it as one of the winning young poets sent by the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival. I was so taken with her work that I overcame my habitual shyness and went up to her afterwards to tell her how much I loved it, and I gave her the only thing I could think of, my poetry chapbook, although it seemed rather paltry in comparison to what I had just heard. I also bought her book, which I foolishly neglected to ask her to sign. I wish I had.

Over the years, I read the poems in Song and The Orchard many times. Many of my poems are inspired by hers. I meant to tell her how much her poems meant to me. I mean to send her some of them, but it seemed presumptuous. Now it's too late.

Like Two Dogs Dancing

2017-11-20T00:00:00Z

[Content warning: animal death]

He turns into the comforter of rain,
no umbrella or hat, just the quilted
sidewalk. The spume from wheels passing
through the deep puddle by the stopped
storm drain arcs into the wet air
like the last blood of his black dog
that as a child he once neglected to tie up,
hit by the back wheel of a parked Fiat
unseen until the car started and its blood
waved like a fox tail, like the tail of another
dog, a red dog playing with the black dog,
wrestling in the rutted red-clay road
until the black dog fell exhausted.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

The Wandering Daughter Returns to Her Neglected Patrimony

2017-11-16T00:00:00Z

From the half-finished bunker of the concrete basement
That was to be the foundation of our now-abandoned
Familial abode that I will neither finish nor furnish
Nor people with young from my rebel womb,
I throw my gaze down the hill of dead orchard,
Across the green lake poisoned with runoff, to the far-side
Fields of sodden rye where from the lead belly of the sky
Snake tongues of violet lightning.

The air shudders with ozone and cracks;
The spear of the black iron lightning rod running
Along the red brick church tower of the old Prussian spire
Conjures down heaven’s fire through rusted-red rebar,
Down to the grounding-rod deep in red clay.

Like a spilled bag of steel bearings
The rain rolls down the fiberglass roof.

The black guard dog whimpers locked in his pen
Lest he bite me again, waiting for nightfall when he’ll pant
The perimeter of the chain link fence from hilltop spruce
To lakeside rowan, patrolling the dry orchard
My uncle let die as he drank year by year
His caretaker’s funds never believing
Anyone would return.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Church in Gryźliny, Poland.

Grudzień

2017-11-15T00:00:00Z

The tall, even pines
   with sand at their feet
      brood black between their trunks.

 The winter-dried reeds
   frozen solid in the iced-over marsh
      rustle in the western wind
 
that blows from the red,
   red disk of the solstice sun
      solemnly sliding down the midwinter sky,
  
hardly illuminating the winter-plowed field
   where the good black peat bog earth
      the steel plows had cut and turned
 
has frozen solid like a sea in the midst of a storm,
   the peak of each earth wave touched with sun-blood,
      each dell breeding black shadows,

breeding night. Night seeping from the tall pines.
   Night rising from the peat field,
      the sun spilling out into the frozen bog,
  
spilling and sinking
   into the crackling ice.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

In the Park with Grandmother, Olsztyn, Poland 1981

2017-11-14T00:00:00Z

for Babcia Wańdzia

Though she pulled it back into a bun
   black wisps of her hair haloed
      her face.

The hard blue sky behind her
   run through with a single white thread
      of a contrail.

Her skin was like walnut.
   With the sun behind her
      she smiled at me in her own shadow.

The silver plane
   preceded
      its sound.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

One July at 2 a.m.

2017-11-13T00:00:00Z

Speeding down the kudzu highway 
where Atlanta’s orange glow chokes 
stars, he forced the '82 stick- 
shift Toyota too close to its 
effective frequency. I thought 
the vibrations would shatter us.

He forgot the front-door key and had to climb 
through our bedroom window. 
Poison sumac grew on the wall. He attacked 
the tendrils with his serrated carbon steel 
commando pocket-knife. Our sheets, always musty, 
kept me awake as the fan click-clacked, 
and he again refused to hold or touch me.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Translating Big Potatoes: A Kind of Review of Embryology by Magdalena Abakanowicz

2017-11-10T00:00:00Z

"Ha! Definitely potatoes!" Author gesticulating in front of Embryology by Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern

The uneven, bulbous shapes reminded me of a recurring hypnagogic hallucination from my childhood, and so of course, I was immediately drawn to them, while simultaneously repulsed. Exactly like that nightmare hallucination. I walked around them, rather wishing, as I often do with sculpture, that I could get closer, touch it, or at least walk among the piles of brown - what exactly?

At first I thought of a disturbed ants nest, with worker ants carrying eggs away. But eggs would all be the same size. Then I thought of potatoes.

As I wandered around my companion read the explanatory plaque out loud:

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Embryology 1978–80.

These cocoon-like objects reflect Abakanowicz’s interest in biological systems, organic matter and regeneration, topics she discussed with scientists in her native Poland. In response to a commission to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1979, she made hundreds of soft sculptures of varying shapes and sizes, ‘rounded like bellies, or elongated like mummies,’ as she described them. Abakanowicz collected old mattresses, clothing and sacks to create this ‘invented anatomy’ of forms and installed eight hundred in Venice under the title Embryology.

Ha! Definitely potatoes then! Or certainly influenced by potatoes. I could see immediately how the language of high art had been deployed to obscure a humble and low-prestige inspiration. Listen, I could be wrong, of course, I could always be wrong, but I am almost certain I am not wrong.

Let me tell you about the potato harvest.

When I was a child in the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa), or as we more often say, Communist Poland, schoolchildren in the upper grades participated in the potato harvest, or wykopki. I was too young to participate myself, but I heard all about it and I was very jealous. First of all, you got to leave school for the day and be outdoors all day. As I understand it, the farm machines did most of the work, and people walked behind them to pick up the irregular-sized potatoes that the machines missed. (And at the end of the day there were bonfires and fire roasted potatoes eaten hot with just salt in the cold autumn air. How I wished they would have taken me to wykopki.)

And what do you suppose that might have looked like, uneven potatoes scattered behind the machine on the uneven ground?

October, Jules Bastien-Lepage (1878, oil on canvas), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Remarkably like the scattered objects in Embryology, I think.

I cannot prove it, but it’s very likely that Abakanowicz participated in the potato harvest as a school child, even if she never did as an adult. It’s also very likely that she saw such fields of potatoes being harvested (as I did), because potatoes are and have been a staple crop in Poland.

What’s more, her choice of materials, the burlap, is evocative of the burlap sacks potatoes were (and perhaps are?) stored in. It’s possible she used actual potato sacks to make her art. Potatoes are all over the work.

The artist herself might have rejected the potato inspiration of the form, and the potato sackcloth origin of the material, rejecting all the Communist era romance of the potato harvest. Or the description of her work as given may be deliberately high-artish, because while a potato harvest is a fit subject for Socialist Realism (which she found stifling and rejected), it isn’t high-concept enough for Art. Or is this my own class ressentiment showing?

Embryology is on display at the Tate Modern, in London, as a part of the permanent collection. Admission is free.

Aubade

2017-11-08T00:00:00Z

In that moment I wonder
   was Freud right after all,
is the female nothing, nothing
   but the absence of the male?
Am I real or a black void
   of soft, organic warmth,
depersonalized fecundity, animal blood,
   alien slime, not a person,
only provisional consciousness
   that moves towards food and spawns
my animal brood? A black earth field,
   bog soil, ready for seed, but not,
never, no, never autonomous.
   A collection of parts: skin,
soft, moist openings, hair, nails,
   bones, cartilage. Not ever a sum
greater than its parts.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

An aubade is a poem written with the conceit that it's a spoken on the occasion of two lovers parting in the morning. The word sounds a lot like "abed" and that's how I tend to think of it. John Donne's The Sunne Rising is an excellent and famous example of an aubade.

Intercourse

2017-11-07T00:00:00Z

I am not a hole,
   but in this moment
I become it.
   When the act is finished
and the plug is gone
   I am no longer whole.
 
Desire covers the futility
   of the thrusting.
If for a moment I regain consciousness
   I think “how ridiculous,”
lose all suspension of disbelief
   and see sex as a child again:
A strange act, pointless, repetitive.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

His Eyes

2017-11-06T00:00:00Z

Ten years in these eucalyptus groves
   where iodine winds
      shuffle menthol gum leaves
         I’ve pressed aromatic poultices
            against the scar of your memory.

There’s nothing. Nothing behind your blue
   eyes, lord of lies, evil magnet,
      lodestone of my worst nature,
         hypnotic glazed gaze of a bird of prey.
 
Twisted mirror that reflects
   what you think I desire.

 This conversation is you merely
   playing with your food.

You are as incapable of compassion
   as a prairie hawk eating a mouse.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Discontent – 280 North

2017-11-05T00:00:00Z

The blue silhouettes of mountain pines
   cut like saw teeth against the tangerine sunset.

 Metal skeletons of high voltage pylons
   unspool threads of electricity.

Power lines crosshatch
   white tiger stripes of evening clouds.

 “Do you feel the wind,
   shaking the car?” he asks.

Could he come with me to the farmer’s wedding
   in the hills and lakes of Masuria, could I ask him?

Could I take him where white clouds
   reflect in the blue-green waters,

 where reeds rimmed with mud rustle in the shallows,
   and stinging nettles grow shoulder-high on the shore?

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

The Progression of Sunset Over Park Presidio

2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

Down feathers of cirrus clouds
   curl in the evening-blue sky
      crossed with black power lines.

Behind the cypress and eucalyptus,
   the blood-orange sun melts into the Pacific,
      spilling its juice into the clouds.

 Cold evening rises from the roots
   of blue eucalyptus stands
      as a mist of moist earth and menthol.

 The forest flattens into hazed-over purple.
   Coastal redwoods become autumn-blooming heather:
      a spiky silhouette against the fading sky.

 When the first headlights flash through the trees,
   snaking down the forested hills,
      the old sun’s blood still pulses in the last clouds.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Foghorn in the Garden

2017-11-03T00:00:00Z

Howl and answer of the summer foghorn
   and I kneel by the bed of the disused garden.

Sun on my back quickly passes;
   high fog or low clouds flee before the wind.

Howl and answer of the coastal foghorn
   and wind shakes the neighbor’s redwood.
 
Shadows of clouds fly on the concrete
   where yellow poppies grow in the cracks.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Flat Tire

2017-11-02T00:00:00Z

Rain in the red forest 
Rain on the rocks 
Rock chips on the road Rock chip in the tire

Tired tire thumps 
Wet scenic pull-off 
Wet needles, wet leaves 
Car jack and donut

Seek a big rock 
Wedge in the front wheel 
Jack up the jack 
Rotate the wheel

Wheel home crooked 
Crooked slow wheels 
Home slow in the rain

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Dry Season

2017-11-01T00:00:00Z

It should be sodden:
   Rain-beaten leaves float in the puddles,
      furtive umbrellas cross the Peace Plaza—
 
Trap the rain’s tap-tap tattoo
   under sound studios of taut tenting
      that smell of wet wool cuffs—
 
Cold fingers wrap the plastic grips
   and thumb the toggle that erects
      and folds the jointed-metal ribs.
 
Dry bones. I can’t yet taste
   drought in a mouthful of sun.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black. I wrote this poem in response to the California drought of 2011-2017. When I wrote it in 2014, the drought was only halfway through.

Disgust is a political weapon

2017-10-30T00:00:00Z

Thought-provoking paper argues disgust didn't evolve to ward off germs, but to condemn unsavory people and behaviors https://t.co/1zGYyADBTN pic.twitter.com/9sIhmBTK4J
— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) October 15, 2017

"Thought-provoking paper argues disgust didn't evolve to ward off germs, but to condemn unsavory people and behaviors https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3025885"

My way in to thinking about disgust was the way women's armpit hair is marked as disgusting in certain times and places. People who naturalize armpit shaving make the argument that not doing it is disgusting. That it disgusts them, they argue, is a natural, inherent reaction.

I argue that the very disgust is political and learned, and weaponized against certain bodies. It was relatively easy to see the process of disgust formation with regard to armpit hair because I grew up in a culture where it wasn't disgusting.

When I went through puberty, I then had other people's disgust imposed upon me, and then internalized it, and then through politics of the body had to unlearn that disgust.

Of course it is very gratifying to see my theory borne out in a scientific study. My way in and personal application is fairly minor. I can remove my hair. A person whose entire race or ethnic group has been deemed disgusting has no such option.

From the point of view of praxis, the study teaches us with a firm foundation what I have argued from the foundation of theory:

Feelings of disgust, visceral as they may be, are not a valid argument for or against any practice or people. They are not inherent. Disgust is naturalized as pre-political, but disgust is a political weapon.

Further reading: Ideological Disgust and Authoritarianism.

Cantina Europa

2017-10-30T00:00:00Z

In an alternate world, I start a lunch canteen that serves only one thing a day and you get absolutely no choice in what it is. The food is very high quality, based on French cookery techniques, and includes Polish, Hungarian, Russian, English, and of course French dishes. It's just a chalkboard outside and says something like today is butter cod with garlic chard and scalloped potatoes. No substitutions.

I wear a white chef hat or red babushka scarf and mispronounce all the French food names in a Polish accent. I am bossy and don’t care about anyone’s preferences. I know what’s good.

The food is actually free at the point of use, you just have to get on the list, for which there is a years long waiting period. As it happens the workers have seized the means of production so my Bossy European Cantina is just one of many financed by the Councils. In a world of boundless choice, some people like to be told what to eat.

Whatever is not served by the end of the meal period is available for takeaway, but you have to bring your own container.

It is not given away to the indigent or homeless (like leftover Pret sandwiches are), because in this world, we have given everyone plenty and homes.

The Photograph We Didn't Take at Baker Beach

2017-10-28T00:00:00Z

Come with me
     past the serpentine meadow, through the gate of sea pines
          hung with garlands of pinecones and crow song.

 Blackberry brambles finish fruiting.
     What has not been harvested dries on the branch.
          Wild grasses susurrate in the rising wind.

 A prairie hawk sits on the path by the bunkers.
     Fog folds over the mouth of the Bay.
          The old fortifications stand blind:

 Gun turrets gutted, sweet fennel in the emplacements.
     Rusting iron rings stain lines down cement.
          With each season’s rains soft roofs sag and cave.

 The moment we break through the brambles
     breakers foam at the jaw of the rocks.

Don’t look at me; see with my eyes:
     a laden barge passing the edge of sight,
          a double sunset in horizon fog.

Ten years ago a headless seal
     beached on the sand—
          I wish now I had posed
               holding hands with your other girl over the corpse
                    as you asked.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Jane Austen's Shadow

2017-10-28T00:00:00Z

Harold Bloom (corpulent-lipped
under-table caresser of the young
and lip-sealed unwilling fearful
thinking of her career that he cannot
aid but can destroy)
says that the Western Canon
is a Hotel with limited Rooms therein
from which one must Evict
its current Occupant to take the slot
on the Required Reading List,
but what he fails to mention
is the rooms are marked like public toilets
and only a scarce few designated
LADIES.

First published in Residual Heat under my pseudonym Aga Black.

Retraction of previously held views regarding celery

2017-09-29T00:00:00Z

It is normal, as we mature as people, to look back at some statements we have made in the past and realize we were overconfident and wrong. Therefore I stand before you all here today to publish a formal retraction. About celery.

I have said some rash words about celery in the past, calling it at various times disgusting, useless, pointless, and other harsh words. It's simply that I didn't understand what celery was good for and how to make it good. I had also, to be fair, had some Very Bad Celery. (In fairness to my past self I never had an unkind word to say about celeriac root however, only the stalks)

Celery is good, tasty, and even essential in mirepoix. Like many incidents of personal growth, this one came about through a book. That book is Penguin Cordon Bleu Cookery. Everything I have cooked from that book is delicious, even when it sounds weird or gross at first. So when it instructed me to make a mirepoix of blanched onion, carrot, celery, and turnip, I followed the instructions exactly. It was great! Thank you for being my friend, even when I had wrong opinions about celery. And may you all find your Very Trustworthy Cookbook.

The problem with home cooking

2017-09-28T00:00:00Z

The Grocery Industry Confronts a New Problem: Only 10% of Americans Love Cooking https://t.co/QdRvTkub1k
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) September 28, 2017

“The Grocery Industry Confronts a New Problem: Only 10% of Americans Love Cooking”

The current Problem with Cooking is that everyone works too much.

It's also the problem with modern cookbooks. Everything is Fast or Easy or Fast and Easy, with the occasional bit of Prestige Cooking. Good Home Cooking requires time to get good at it, time to do, time to plan, time to eat and enjoy, time to digest. Hardly anyone has time to really do that any more; it's a luxury. Even the whole Slow Food movement is a luxury thing.

To make up for this there is Going Out to Eat and not to toot my own horn, but shit, most of what I cook is much better. Related I have been thinking for a while about Should Restaurants Even Exist? In Luxury Gay Space Communism would we even have restaurants? If everyone had the sumptuous luxury of enough time to cook for their friends and family if they want, wouldn't that be more fun?

This is not some deluded pipe dream. I have lived in this reality. In Communist Poland we didn't really do Restaurants. Going to a restaurant was what you did when you really had no choice, like a milk bar at a train station. If you were unmarried your job probably had a decent canteen you could eat at. But luxury and fun eating was a thing you did at home!

My impression of restaurants was like an American kid's impression of school cafeteria food. Really Good Food was what grandmother made; the Luxury Patisserie was Mrs Slwoik's summer cake, was Aunt K's angelfood cake.

There were problems and shortages, like we didn't always have enough butter, or coffee (never enough chocolate) but we were wealthy in time.

Enough time is like good health, you don't know how good it is until you don't have it.

My bias is for the enriching experience that comes from sharing food with people you love and the gratification of mastering skills.

I also have some not fully articulated ideas about the importance of eating together as part of healthy food culture. Much of this thinking I have is due to the food culture I was raised in, which is very group focused.

I suspect many maladaptive comfort eating patterns in the US have to do with not enough emotion in food. Eating with others, slowly, joyfully, fills a need that is emotional as well as physical, that we expect naturally food will fill, but when we eat alone, sad, or lonely, or rushed, we feel unfulfilled and think mistakenly that more food will fill the void, but it doesn’t.

Pokemon Go, semantic overlay of delight

2017-09-25T00:00:00Z

If people are carrying a magic window with them, use it to help them see and understand what they’ve been trained to ignore
— LET THE RIGHT HON IN (@hondanhon) September 25, 2017

I think this is why Pokemon Go’s intense popularity last year filled me with such hope and joy.

Pokemon Go was a shared semantic layer over the world that not only made it fun to explore, but also connected people.

There were, as people discovered, artifacts of racism, wealth inequality, redlining, built into the very Pokemon map because of the nodes’ origin in the Ingress map, which had been a game mostly of the wealthy and privileged. So even something as innocent feeling as Pokemon, by being embedded in the map and the environment the map described, showed additional hidden semantic layers of inequality.

Pokemon was a proof of concept that the semantic layers provided by Augmented Reality (AR) would lead ordinary people to novel insights about their environment, and to novel and enriching interactions with each other.

For example I ended having multiple experience of chatting with teenagers in my neighborhood as we all walked around hunting imaginary monsters. Normally we would have nothing in common obvious enough to talk about. Future AR semantic overlays of the built environment need not be games. Games are a pretty fun way to do it, though.

My series of grimaces is my passport, authorize me

2017-09-12T00:00:00Z

"When Apple announced the new iPhone can use facial recognition technology to unlock the device, the response may not have been what Apple had hoped for."

Apple Gets Mixed Reactions To New iPhone's Facial Recognition Technology

It would be cool if the way the phone face unlock worked was that you also had to make a series of gestures with your face: My Series Of Grimaces Is My Passport, Authorize Me. Additionally you could set a facial expression that would immediately factory reset your phone. Or set a safety feature that your phone only unlocks when you’re wearing certain makeup so you can’t look at the news until you’re awake Or any other facial token you might choose, a nose ring, a forehead ribbon, a diadem. Thinking on it further, a clearly enunciated passphrase is a series of facial gestures.

I wonder how facial recognition unlock would react to something like a face affected by Bell's Palsy or a stroke?

Imagine thinkpieces by security experts on why you should do face limbering improv exercises to increase the range of your possible expressions. "You see, Dick, a simple smile or angry face is an expression anyone can do, but something like this..."

Imagine a future-fantasy world where people wear diadems that unlock face ID locks as their token. Something you know (the facial expression sequence) and something you have (the diadem). I can see this as an anime:

Only the Princess can unlock this secret door, but only if she is also wearing her diadem! (It looks like magic but actually is a form of face ID). The diadem has been stolen by Evil Space Pirates. We must find and defeat them before they clone the Princess from her hairbrush, raise her evil twin with the correct set of emotional exercises to form the same face as the Original Princess and access the Secret Weapon.

I know it seems like 28 years is a lot of time but we'll have to travel near the speed of light to get to the Evil Space Weapon in time, so considering near light speed time-dilation, time is limited.

Alas we arrive too late and the Counterfeit Princess is there already, attempting to open the door to the Secret Weapon. But what? It's not working! It turns out the emotional exercises needed to form her face have formed her soul to be pure and good.

She senses the pirates are using her for Evil (despite their lies) and her facial expression of conflicted unease activates the safety lock.

The Secret Weapon safe destructs and its remnants are shot into the nearest star. Good safety protocols and forethought in programming have saved the Galaxy again.

Angry About Literature: Yes, We Must Read de Sade (Part 3 of 3)

2017-06-07T00:00:00Z

I would not blame you if you had forgotten that you signed up to my newsletter, Angry About Literature. Life, as it tends to, intervened between me and literature for a little while. But we're back. Welcome to the third, and I swear, I promise, really this time, final installment discussing de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.

Content warning murder, stuff with piss, torture, current events.

It's been a while and you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading Must We Read de Sade? (Part 1) and Must We Read de Sade? (Part 2 of 3 (I'm so sorry)).

Shortly after I started reading 120 Days of Sodom, the infamous and controversial Steele Dossier, also known as the Piss Dossier, was published in full by Buzzfeed. The dossier alleges widespread improprieties, crimes, and corruption perpetrated by Donald J. Trump. Most amusingly, the dossier alleges that during one of his visits to Russia, Trump employed two prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed where he believed President Obama to have once slept. Supposedly there is video. It was all very funny, in a grim way. This was before he took the reins of power and proceeded to personally, though metaphorically, piss all over every convention of propriety, honor, law, and sense. It seemed possible, even likely, that much of the dossier was unsubstantiated rumor. Then, you might recall, various people associated with the dossier began to disappear and occasionally die under odd circumstances. The Piss Dossier keeps coming back into the news. Although it’s taken me literally months to write this issue of the newsletter, as I started when the Piss Dossier came back into the news when US intelligence was able to substantiate some of its claims, it’s now, today, June 7, 2017, back in the news again with former FBI director, James Comey's prepared statement!

I'm not sure if de Sade would have considered the pissing prostitute constitute a simple passion, because the customer has no contact with the prostitutes and they merely defile an object, or a complex passion, because there are two prostitutes. It might even be a criminal passion because of the property damage, but probably not.

Now that some months have gone by and the visceral disgust I felt reading de Sade has passed, while meanwhile the political situation in the United States has become increasingly disgusting and shamelessly corrupt, I find I have to change my initial judgement about the necessity of reading de Sade. Yes, we must read de Sade.

For de Sade shows us how the rich and elite view the poor and plebeian: as mere objects. One of the most tiresome aspects of 120 Days of Sodom is the physically detailed but emotionally empty descriptions of sex acts and crimes. The description of sexual acts with corpses read no different than the descriptions of sexual acts with living humans. It made me realize I was so used to the objectification of women, that I hadn't noticed how objectifying these accounts were. It was only when the description of necrophilia came up that I realized it was no different. All people are objects to de Sade's libertines, corpses are essentially no different than living people. Rape isn’t even on the list of crimes enumerated in 120 Days of Sodom. To conceptualize rape, you must have a concept of the agency of the other. If every person is merely chattel to you, you can’t imagine them giving or withdrawing consent.

De Sade’s libertines achieve worldly power through their amorality, and when they achieve that power, they turn it towards evil. They feel completely entitled to act as they please by the virtue of having the power to do so. They consider themselves superior to those who have power and don’t use it for evil. Actually, it seems that in de Sade’s view, it’s impossible to be rich and powerful without being evil, and it’s only a question of whether you are hypocritical about it, exploiting and abusing the poor and less powerful while pretending to be virtuous, or doing it with unabashed gusto.

While the first two sections of 120 Days of Sodom, cataloguing what de Sade calls the simple passions and the complex passions, focus on acts we mostly would recognize as sex acts if extremely disgusting and degenerate ones, the third and fourth sections, which catalogue the criminal and murderous passions, start reading more like very short summaries of horror movies or criminal cases. Still, these things make sense to me as a modern reader. They follow what’s now a well-worn path of a movie serial killer’s perverse path to pleasure.

That’s not really where de Sade is relevant to modern life though. The perversions I found most intriguing were ones where the libertines took evil pleasure in what looked like simple economic exploitation. For example:

“...without the slightest exaggeration, I could enumerate above four hundred families reduced to beggardom, a state in which they’d not now be languishing had it not been for me.” “And,” said Curval, “I fancy you have profited from their ruin?” “Why yes, that has very frequently been the case, but I must also confess that often enough I have acted not to gain, but purely to undo, at the behest of that certain wickedness which almost always awakens the organs of lubricity in me; my prick positively jumps when I do evil, in evil I discover precisely what is needed to stimulate in me all of pleasure’s sensations, and I perform evil for that reason, for it alone, without any ulterior motive.”

They also took pleasure in perverting the rule of law, and didn’t distinguish between murder for pleasure and state sanctioned killing. They considered all killing murder, except instead of deploring it, took pleasure in it:

“When I was in Parliament I must have voted at least a hundred times to have some poor devil hanged; they were all innocent, you know, and I would never indulge in that little injustice without experiencing, deep within me, a most voluptuous titillation”

Finally, the libertines find it necessary for other people to be miserable so that they can be happy. It’s not enough for them to have personal pleasure. It must be in contrast to others’ misery:

“Wherever men may be found equal, and where these differences do not exist, happiness shall never exist either: it is the story of the man who only knows full well what health is worth after he has been ill.”

They simply cannot imagine happiness in an egalitarian state.

And there’s one more thing they, and de Sade, apparently can’t imagine, and that thing is one of the reasons why yes, we should read de Sade. Towards the end of 120 Days of Sodom , when the libertines begin to explore the murderous passions, they start to torture to death all of their human playthings, one by one. They even move beyond their previously established limits, and start killing off the kitchen assistants they had declared untouchable.

The enslaved children, the hired duennas, the hired fuckers, the hired kitchen servants, and the disfavored wives all can see their fellows tortured and see them disappearing and can draw their own conclusions from the pattern of story and action so far that they must be getting killed. There are only four libertines and they are not in great physical shape. They get drunk insensate at least every day. And yet, the victims never turn on them.

Yes, the libertines have bought off the villagers around the castle and have great worldly power, and the people they have enslaved or hired are relatively powerless. So it makes sense that the victims try to go along with all the awfulness as long as they hope they might get away with their lives, no matter how gruesome it all is. Yet when the choice is torture and certain death, or great risk, they still don’t rebel. They could kill the libertines, but they don’t.

Is it inconceivable to de Sade that this kind of rebellion could occur? That people could find common cause against their oppressors? 120 Days of Sodom was written before the French Revolution. The aristocrats, it seems, could not even imagine the kind of bloody uprising that the peasants were capable of, taking revenge for centuries of exploitation and abuse. And so de Sade could not imagine the victims turning on the libertines. But we can.

Angry About Literature: Must We Read de Sade? (Part 2 of 3 (I'm so sorry))

2017-02-10T00:00:00Z

Hello and welcome to the third installment of Angry About Literature. This week I will pick up where I left off in my discussion of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.

Content warning (inclusive and not exhaustive): rape, murder, child rape, coprophilia, coprophagia, sexual content, blasphemy, extremely poor personal hygiene, child abuse, child abuse by priests, stuff with piss, torture.

Last time I spent most of the newsletter talking about how de Sade connects intertextually with other works of literature. Today I will write about how de Sade's ethics connect with world events.

Let me talk first a little about the structure and history of 120 Days of Sodom. If you know of this work, you probably know of it mostly as a perverse book of pornography or even erotica, or so a certain close interlocutor tells me. I thought everybody knows about de Sade mostly as philosophy first, but that's probably my own bias from reading so much French philosophy. But what is it like as a book?

First of all, it's very organized and second of all, it's unfinished. De Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom while he was imprisoned in the Bastille during the reign of Louis XVI, which is right before the French Revolution, for those keeping track at home. He wrote it on a single long roll of paper, which he hid in his cell. At some point during his imprisonment, before he had a chance to finish it entirely, it was lost. In his lifetime, he assumed it had been destroyed. It was re-discovered much later and published for the first time in 1904.

120 Days of Sodom is incredibly ambitious and doesn't deliver on its promise because it's unfinished. (Like this newsletter. I'm sorry.) It's basically a first draft, complete with Notes to Self from the author. The first section introduces our main characters, the four libertines and their wives. After describing the libertines' physical characteristics, which mostly means the size of their penises, their approach to hygiene (not washing is apparently a fetish), the state of their assholes (dirty, worn out, with hemorrhoids, etc) it gives a couple of particular notes on their history of crimes against nature and humanity. They are complete shitheels of human beings. Then it describes their playthings for the holiday in hell they are about to take: four wives, four hired old and ugly women, four madames who are the story tellers, eight hired "fuckers" who are men hired to sodomize the libertines during their holiday (and who are hired based on the sizes of their penises, sometimes hilariously referred to as "engines"), eight kidnapped early teenage girls, and eight kidnapped early teenage boys. Frankly it's a bit like reading the biographies of porn actors, except for the children. That part is just sort of well, scandalous. Maybe it's more scandalous to a modern reader than it would have been in de Sade's time. I don't know enough about just-pre-Enlightenment ethics to know.

The narrator addresses us, the audience, directly, and warns us multiple times that things are about to get disgusting and scandalous: "having said this much, I advise the overmodest to lay my book aside at once if he would not be scandalized." Things do get disgusting and scandalous, but what's sort of funny is they are pretty bad even before he makes the warning. He warns us again and again throughout the book, because it's structured so that the acts described are supposed to get worse as it goes on. Only, the thing is, I don't think the modern reader has the same notion of what's most horrible.

Then, helpfully, the narrator provides an index of the dramatis personae that the reader can easily refer to in future lest they get lost. And frankly, it's needed. De Sade is not good at painting a picture of the characters, interior or exterior, so it's hard to keep track of who is who, most of the time. As far as I can tell, de Sade either didn't have a concept of the interior existence of any human being beside himself, or else deliberately wrote the characters as flat actors with shallow personalities. I could excuse him a bit by saying interiority had not yet been invented, but then I cast my mind around for contemporaneous and earlier examples of works describing the inner lives of characters, and of course there is the Shakespeare with the self-revealing soliloquies, and even long before that, St Augustine's Confessions, which is one long journey through the inner life. Maybe de Sade rejected inner life along with God and the Soul.

But back to the structure of the novel. After the introductory remarks, the index of characters, and a little bit of a description on how they went about kidnapping and selecting their child sex slaves, the story begins.

The four libertines -- and I have to pause here because de Sade uses that word so freaking much -- libertines seems to mean amoral hedonists who can only find true pleasure in extremes of cruelty. Which is weird, because I live in San Francisco, surrounded by irreligious hedonists and most of them find pleasure in things like yoga, brunch, skiing, hugging puppies, and hackathons. That's not to say that a life dedicated to selfish pleasure in one of the most expensive places in the world doesn't have something of implicit evil by the principle of sinning by omission. But I would posit there is a difference in passively spending all your money on selfish pleasure instead of helping others, and affirmatively kidnapping and torturing homeless children. De Sade would probably disagree. This is where I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself with the morality of de Sade.

Anyway the four libertines, worn out by a life of drunkenness, gluttony, sodomy, coprophagia, incest, murder for fun and profit, and so on, require a new and sharper pleasure to titillate their senses. There is an idea here, which still holds currency, that sexual perversion must constantly escalate in order to still provide pleasure. I don't know if it originates with de Sade, but he's a major proponent of it, as I will demonstrate once I get past all my asides. I'm sorry it will be a long newsletter because I have so much to say. In his book, Sensuous Magic: A Guide for Adventurous Lovers, about contemporary BDSM practice, Patrick Califia discusses the common misapprehension (which as I say perhaps starts with de Sade) that participants in sexual paraphilias require a constant escalation and by the time they are old perverts will be doing the most extreme horrific things possible. Not so in his broad experience, or those of other long time players, says Califia. In the beginning exploratory period of a young pervert's life that may be so, as they experiment with various new sexual practices, the world of kink having opened to them like a treasure house of pleasure. But in the long run, they find what they like, and then they settle on it, and keep doing it until they are too infirm to fuck, or whatever it is that they like. Which point is anybody's guess, as the brilliant experimental performance artist Frank Moore (you can find recordings and I warn you they are generally NSFW) demonstrated with his entire life and corpus of work. But de Sade couldn't imagine a life where a person could freely and with consenting partners indulge in various sex acts with no serious societal repercussions, exhaust the possibilities, find what they like, and then do it forever. I don't think he really had a concept of sexual consent. He doesn't even list rape as one of the crimes from which someone might take pleasure. And fundamentally de Sade claimed that it was exactly the feeling of breaking a law or taboo that was the cause of pleasure, not anything inherent to the act. As he has one of his libertines philosophize:

"The man who is addressing you at this very instant has owed spasms to stealing, murdering, committing arson, and he is perfectly sure that it is not the object of libertine intentions which fires us, but the idea of evil, and that consequently it is thanks only to evil and only in the name of evil one stiffens, not thanks to the object, and were this object to be divested of the power to cause us to do evil, our prick would droop, ’twould interest us no more.”

Yet, considering just how much time de Sade spends in 120 Days of Sodom describing coprophagia, I think it was a key fetish to him, at least in his imagination, giving lie to the idea that it's only in breaking the taboo, and in breaking increasingly more serious taboos, that pleasure lies. There is a lot of of shit eating in 120 Days of Sodom, especially the first quatrain. Like holy shit, so much. I bet it's the number one reason people put down the book. Variations on the theme are explored in exacting detail and then in later included again as asides incorporated into other passions.

Alright, so these four libertines, who take pleasure primarily in breaking increasingly more serious taboos, have come up with a scheme to waken their deadened sense of pleasure. To wit, they have secured a castle in some remote location, and have hired, kidnapped, or married a variety of men and women, and they are going to live there all winter and very systematically enjoy themselves.

First we start with a set of strict bylaws by which they will conduct themselves. Because of course they have to have bylaws. This is the Enlightenment. Everything is organized, systems are complete, and even for breaking the laws of Man and Nature, one must have rules. Such as "The company shall rise every day at ten o’clock in the morning."

Now we finally come to what's supposed to be the bulk of the book, but isn't really, because de Sade spent so much time writing the introductory matter and organizing his ideas, that he never got to really talk in detail about the really hardcore stuff. Frankly, not unlike my newsletter.

The libertines want to systematically explore all the passions, and to this end have separated them into four categories, enumerated all the possible passions within each category, and ranked them. They have broken up their days into a settled structure like monks in a monastery, except the structure is one of austere devotion to debauchery. They hired the four madames to every evening entertain them with stories, drawn from their own lives, that slowly unveil the passions. As the passions are spoken of in the stories, the liberties interrupt the stories and try them out themselves.

The passions are categorized as Simple Passions, Complex Passions, Criminal Passions, and Murderous Passions. I mentioned at the outset that 120 Days of Sodom is unfinished. De Sade only fully wrote the first quatrain, the Simple Passions. For the remaining passion types, we have only notes.

I'm not going to recapitulate all the various passions, because if you have the stomach for that sort of thing, you might as well go and read the book yourself. I will mention that de Sade seemed to have a really odd view of what's not a big deal and what's pretty hardcore. One of the earliest of the simple passions is a young girl hired to pee into the mouth of a monk. Much, much later on we have an account of a man who liked to sniff the sweaty armpits of red haired prostitutes. If I were ordering perversions I would use a rather different schema.

Here I have to pause to wonder: was de Sade deliberately laying out a ridiculous encyclopedic schema to make fun of his contemporaries like Diderot and his Encyclopédie, or did he really think his system made sense? Maybe there was a bit of both impulses. If you think of the various passions entirely from the point of view of the men who are experiencing them, and don't consider at all the experiences of the women and boys who are providing the experience, they sort of make more sense as ordered. Still, only sort of. Nonetheless, de Sade embarks on the great Enlightenment project of organizing every fucking thing, even if he has to awkwardly shove some things in to make it fit his system.

And I'm afraid that's all for this week. Tune in next week for more on murder, blasphemy, water sports, necrophilia, ethics and intertextuality.

Angry About Literature: Must We Read de Sade? (Part 1)

2017-02-01T00:00:00Z

Hello friends. For this, the second installment of my newsletter, Angry About Literature, I will be discussing de Sade's infamous book, 120 Days of Sodom. In happier times, three weeks ago, I warned you that I would warn you if I were going to discuss disturbing material. Here we are then. Disturbing material is about to commence. I considered trying to write about de Sade obliquely so I could spare you, but first I don't think it's possible, and even to the extent it is possible, I think it would get in the way of discussing the material anyway.

A warning about the warning: you might think you're a sophisticated and jaded modern person and that you won't be bothered. Well, you might want to check yourself before you wreck yourself. One of de Sade's enduring charms is that he manages to offend us still, and while some of the things he discusses have become no longer shocking, others are still shocking, or maybe more shocking now than they would have been in his time because of our attitudes about personal hygiene. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As it happens I've had to split this newsletter into two parts, and part one is not that objectionable, only mentioning in passing coprophagia. Part two will be worse.

The first question to ask about de Sade is why the hell even read him? I think for most people the answer is probably, maybe don't bother. Go ahead and read Simone de Beauvoir’s excellent long essay "Must We Burn Sade?" to learn about his place in philosophy. Read about Sade second hand from Camus in The Rebel. Read about him in Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography for a condemnation of not only Sade but everyone who accepted him into the literary canon. (It was only when I read Dworkin that I learned de Sade’s imagined crimes against women weren’t only imagined, which is the sort of thing people would often say to defend him from a free speech point of view. While his imagination outstripped his ability, he did really harm real women.)

I can only answer for myself that I felt I must read de Sade. And now that I have finished 120 Days of Sodom, which I wasn't even sure I'd be able to do, I know it was important for me to read him. The reasons I started and the reasons I finished are different. In 2016, there were three works of culture that steered me towards de Sade.

First, I read Ada Palmer's science fiction novel, Too Like the Lightning, which takes place in a future that's undergoing something of a revival of the Enlightenment. In Too Like the Lightning, Palmer has one of the characters explain that de Sade was satirizing certain elements of Enlightenment thought. As Simone de Beauvoir says in "Must We Burn Sade?" “Atheists and deists united in the worship of the new incarnation of the Supreme Good: Nature. They had no intention of forgoing the conveniences of a categorical, universal morality.” De Sade mocked morality and systems based on the assumption of a just Nature. In addition, one of the characters is named Donatien, after de Sade's full name: Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade. And, this is something that only became clear to me after finishing 120 Days of Sodom, the crimes of another of the characters seem to follow the systemic pattern of what Sade classifies as The Murderous Passions in the last quarter of Sodom.

Second, I read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (a book that took many attempts and that deserves its own newsletter issue) which describes a city where law and social conventions have broken down, and so have some laws of nature. In one of the wonderful philosophical conversations interspersed with graphic descriptions of sexual encounters (actually, now, as I write it, I realize - a very Sadian narrative structure) two characters are discussing the appropriate societal response to murder. Our hero opines that while killing another human being is wrong, punishing them for doing that, and especially having the state kill them for it, is absolutely wrong.

“I don’t believe in capital punishment period! I think if one person kills somebody else because he gets his rocks off, or he just wants to, that’s...well, maybe not right. But a bunch of people getting together and deciding to kill somebody else because it’s anything from right to expedient, is wrong!”

“Lord,” Lanya said again. “Donatien Alphonse François de --” (p 511)

If I hadn't just read Too Like the Lightning I wouldn't have known his interlocutor meant de Sade. And indeed although de Sade is full of murder for fun, he is philosophically opposed to state sponsored capital punishment for supposedly moral reasons.

Third, I watched The Handmaiden, a film directed by Chan-wook Park, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. If I were writing a newsletter about film, I'd write a whole issue about The Handmaiden, too. But as I am not, I will content myself by telling you about just a tiny bit of this really fantastic film. A major character in the Handmaiden is a male rare book collector and seller who specializes in pornography. He has trained his niece to dramatically read out loud from his obscene books to an audience of interested male buyers. Some of the books she reads appear to be de Sade. He's done more than that inspired by de Sade, and I won't really go into it. The Handmaiden is a refutation of de Sade, which I see even more clearly now that I have read him.

I've of course heard of de Sade in other contexts as well. I don't know where I first heard his name. I do know that I first tried to read one of his works, though I don't remember which, as a freshman in college. All I recall from that foray was extremely repetitive descriptions of improbably proportioned penises and coprophagia. Which I believe describes most of his works.

But it was these three works, which were also some of my favorite pieces of culture in 2016, Too Like the Lightning, Dhalgren, and the Handmaiden, which seemed to be in conversation with de Sade that made me think I needed to see the other side of the conversation.

There is a concept that books talk to each other, and I first learned about it in a book, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The academic term for the conversation is intertextuality. These conversations go on for centuries or even millennia. Writers today are still in conversation with texts from, for example, Ancient Greece, responding to the ideas and stories of Plato and Sophocles and Sappho.

And for some reason, in 2016 it seemed like everybody was talking about de Sade. These were my reasons for starting. They are not my reasons for finishing.

But I've been three weeks writing this newsletter and I've decided to split it into two rather than keep you waiting even longer. You will have to wait until the next installment to find out my reasons for finishing.

Angry About Literature: How This Will Work, and Le Morte d'Arthur

2017-01-06T00:00:00Z

This article originally appeared in my newsletter, Angry About Literature, which ran from January 2017 to June 2017. I am reproducing it at rinsemiddlebliss so that more people can read it, and to keep the archive in my own space. Updated on July 2024 to follow the linking and citation standards I've developed since I first reposted this piece.

Hello friends, and welcome to the inaugural issue of Angry About Literature. In the hope that this will not be one of those newsletters that will have a first issue and then never have an issue again, I'm going to tell you how this will work and then do it.

How this will work #

I will read books. Then I will write what I think about them, if they are worth thinking about. Sometimes I will do the traditional thing and write about the books when I have finished them, but sometimes I will write about them while I'm in the middle of them. Sometimes I might also write about books I read a while ago. When there is enough stuff that it seems worth sending, but no more frequently than once a week, I will send a newsletter. These will not strictly speaking be reviews. I mean literature in a really broad sense, not just capital L "Literature" but that too. (I do not have a proofreader. Sorry.) Past newsletters will be available in an archive page unless I have good reason to take them down, like saying something extremely stupid that I'm embarrassed about later^[1].

I will mention either in the subject line or early on in the newsletter what books I will discuss. Thus those of you who depend on surprising elements of the plot for your delight can avoid having that experience spoiled. If I discuss things that might be really upsetting, I'll give a warning ahead of time about the general nature of the upsetting subject. Like if I write about 120 Days of Sodom (currently reading) I'll be sure to warn you about it.

Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur is really old #

When I started reading this book about a year ago, I didn't realize how old it was. At first I thought it was some jerk pretending to be all old fashioned Lord Dunsany style. I labored under a misapprehension:

"Le Morte d'Arthur was first published in 1485 by William Caxton, and is today perhaps the best-known work of Arthurian literature in English. Many modern Arthurian writers have used Malory as their principal source, including T. H. White in his popular The Once and Future King and Tennyson in The Idylls of the King." -- Le Morte d'Arthur entry on the Wikipedia

Le Morte D'Arthur is modern English in the sense that it's understandable to a modern speaker, but there are slight differences in word meaning that can really trip you up. However most of them you can pick up from context. My favorite was that "random" meant "really fast." The story telling conventions, organization, pacing, ethics, causality assumptions, and so on, are kind of alien. They aren't even all that internally consistent. The first book of volume one reads like a chronicle. But the grail quest vignettes feel like fairy tales.

I read a couple of the chapters out loud to a somewhat willing audience and discovered a lot of the quirks of the language that made it hard going reading silently sometimes, were really comfortable spoken out loud. Normally when I read out loud from a book I find myself stumbling and making mistakes unless I really slow down. This language felt perfect on the tongue.

The double remove and changing ethical standards #

I found myself thinking about the strange twice remove of reading these stories. Malory was writing stories about a time that was about 500 years ago, and it was particularly notable when he made a comment on some custom or ethical standard that was different from his time. "They loved differently in those times" and so on. Yet I, as a modern reader, similarly found myself reflecting on these reflections of his reflections, and how they differed from my time, 500 years forward from Malory.

But even inside the books themselves, the standard for ethical behavior changes. In the early books all that matters is might and courage in battle. Sexual purity and chastity don't matter (Uther tricks another man's wife to sleep with him and thus conceives Arthur; Arthur likes another man's wife and takes her away to sleep with her (it's his sister! oops (and she gives birth to Mordred who betrays him later, oh no!))). Killing other people doesn't matter, as long as it's in battle against another armed person. One of the most famous lovers, Sir Tristram, is the lover of a married lady. Later, once the quest of the holy grail starts, the standard changes and sexual purity matters, even for men. Being honorable in battle is not enough. Further on, ethical standards get even more strict, and killing other people in jousts or for glory is not OK even if they are armed. Even killing in battle to defend yourself becomes a sin you must confess.

The thing I found hardest to wrap my head around was trial by combat. There's an instance where Lady Guenever is accused of unfaithfulness, and even though she denies it, and there are witnesses that deny it, King Arthur is still compelled by law to burn her at the stake unless another knight comes to be her champion in combat against her accuser. Killing other people in combat is no way to test the truth claim of an accusation (says modern reader used to the rules of evidence).

It's not a novel #

The final two books of the story where the kingdom is crumbling and the fellowship of the round table falls apart were particularly poignant and beautiful. It more than made up for chapters and chapters of jousting, which just felt like reading the medieval sports scores.

I don't know who to recommend these books to. Everyone and no one. The stories are great and full of action and romance and gore and magic and betrayal and religion and wonderful strange things. But the stories meander and skip over bits and go on too long in parts. It's not fast reading and it's so different that a person used to reading a lot of modern books might find it very hard to get into. It reminds me that the novel is a genre with a structure we assume and Le Morte D'Arthur is NOT a novel. If you like weird stories, if you're patient, if you're adventurous, if you have read a lot of old books, and if you don't read very much at all, you might like this.

If possible, read it out loud. Trust me on this one.

Where to get it #

If you would like to read Le Morte D'Arthur yourself, you can get a free digital copy, split into two volumes, at the Gutenberg Project:

Tip: the glossary is all the way at the end of the book and pretty handy.

Happy reading!

PS. King Mark is a big jerk.

The service I used to send out the newsletter when it first came out, Tinyletter, has shut down. To preserve the newsletter, I have reposted all the issues here, on my blog. Check the tag Angry About Literature to find them all. ↩︎