Trying to keep up with my own brain today. Flurry of thoughts. This edition of Feed Me connected to some recent notions. Mostly offline today – lots of work, and I want to capture and develop as many of these floating ideas as I can.
OPERATIONS: just processed an attachment agreement to try and turn one of my old books into a film. Prose serial I wrote a few months ago just got approved. Just punched through some edits on a consult before 11am. Still have five things on my to-do list for today. Have a phoner with a producer tonight. STATUS: make me stop looking at eBay, I have a lightweight canvas Carharrt work pant and a new watch coming, and I keep looking at chore jackets READING:HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Tatemono by Tomoyoshi Date + Stijn Hüwels DRINK: Flint Vineyard Precoce
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For better or worse, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle engineered the Western mind. Above all, they formed part of a movement that stood at the crossroads of mythological and scientific-rational thought, at the crossroads of mythos and logos. Although the path of logos had already been beaten by the pre-Socratics, and would be paved by the Stoics, it is they, the Gang of Three, that forced the carriage to turn. This book sets out to do three things: trace the journey from mythos to logos; outline the lives and thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and, in the final analysis, consider their legacy, and what can still be gained from them, especially in the universal fields of mental health and human flourishing.
THE BIG THREE is a potted history of the lives and thoughts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and is more entertaining than that sounds, at least in part because Burton is quite happy to call the great philosophers and their various associates and contemporaries out when they’re being complete dicks. Socrates was an arse. Their various antecedents and hangers-on were arses and generally tried to out-arse each other.
Heraclitus, it seems, did not have any teachers or students, but did in time sprout followers such as Cratylus. According to Aristotle, Cratylus espoused such a radical theory of flux that he berated Heraclitus for saying that one cannot step twice into the same river, ‘for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.’ Cratylus ended up thinking that one ought not speak, and resorted instead to indiscriminately wagging his finger.
Most of them were arses. But some had wit.
The almost centenarian Cratinus defended his own drinking with the line, ‘You’ll never fashion anything clever by drinking water!’
It bogged down for me towards the back, with an exhaustive/endless tour through the million fucking works of Aristotle, a journey that has convinced me never to read Aristotle. Until that point, however, it is a terrific historical situating of the philosophers in their times and places, and of all the ways these periods continue to underpin our present condition.
In 770 BCE, close contact with the Phoenicians in the east led to the adoption of a phonetic system of language notation. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad (an alphabet with only consonants), which had been developed for a semitic language, to include vowels, thereby creating the basis of our own modern alphabet.
Lots of fun.
Xanthippe’s shrewishness captured the imagination of later writers, who took to inventing or repeating stories about her, for instance, that she trampled upon a cake sent by Alcibiades, or that she emptied the chamber pot over Socrates’ head—prompting Socrates to remark, ‘After thunder comes the rain.’
THE GANG OF THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
According to Protagoras, the value of an opinion lies not in its truth but in its usefulness to the person that holds it—a slippery position that could readily be seized upon by scoundrels.
The G-Shock is running three minutes fast, it turns out! I love a big chunky G-Shock. I read yesterday that they’re coming back into fashion as the whole lo-fi anti-networked thing gains pace in some spaces.
Toby Standing, menswear editor at online shopping platform Lyst, where G-Shock currently dominates demand in the digital watch category, believes the trend is linked to the rise of “dumb” phones and wired headphones. “A willing adoption of tech that is ‘worse’ than something else available is a distinct style choice,” he says, and is redolent of “an era of less input, less doomscrolling, and more novelty”.
OPERATIONS: scripting, planning, thinking STATUS: I have been buying too many films, CDs, and possibly another watch. READING:HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+) LISTENING:Konstellationen by CAMILLA PISANI
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Sea levels are just the start of how climate change will upend the ocean. Rising temperatures are also threatening a critical artery that runs through the ocean known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. This current, in short, sends warm water northwards and dumps colder water southwards in a giant loop, massively influencing the world’s weather systems along the way.
If temperatures keep soaring, scientists fear that AMOC could collapse — and with it, climate patterns across the globe. Temperatures in Europe would plunge without the injection of warm water it brings. Rainfall in the tropics would be disrupted. And sea levels on the US east coast would rise.
To save AMOC from demise, two researchers have proposed a daring Hail Mary: building a giant dam across the Bering Strait, the channel that separates Alaska from Siberia, to stop the proverbial bleeding. As outrageous as it sounds, the megaproject could in theory stabilize the ocean current, according to the findings of a new study they published in the journal Science Advances.
20th Century Studios has released the first trailer for Whalefall, the adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ novel coming to theaters in October.
The film — which stars Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz and more — is described as The Martian meets 127 Hours, centering on a scuba diver in search of his deceased father’s remains. The diver gets swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.
I had this on VHS about a million years ago. HAXAN is a lovely little thing, genuinely strange, and I am looking forward to discovering the ton of extras they’ve bundled in here.
Yesterday, as is tradition, I gave herself the first ripe raspberry of summer. Today, we were out in the garden in the rain with a bowl collecting raspberries and redcurrants.
I had a whole plan to Go Outside today, but the weather has not cooperated, so I’m indoors going through my Bandcamp queue and probably buying too many records again.
On Friday, we went to see The Cobras in Harlow, because we know the bassist, and on Saturday I went to the final Konsztrukting Soundz of the season. Konsztrukting Sounds is a monthly experimental music night, and it’s become the highlight of my month – I’m going to miss it over the summer. They’re running a crowdfunder to support the upcoming third season of the event right now.
Julian Simpson connecting his various audio fiction and prose fiction “universes” into a single space and brand made me sit into space and think for a while. At the same time, a musician acquaintance has been sharing with me the video album she’s making to support her new music project (shooting them with an old comics acquaintance of mine, it turns out), and that’s been making my brain churn too. Social media is a dead zone but the wider internet is still a possibility space.
OPERATIONS: consulting job needs to be wrapped by Friday, but this week I also need to get a big chunk of the novella down, and I had an idea Saturday night for a short story that I absolutely want to get landed in first draft this week, so this week is going to get a bit crunchy. STATUS: was intending to go out this morning, but it’s cold and wet again. I also need to clear this laptop off in prep for the new one that should be arriving some time in the next week – this one is still working, so long as I don’t try to do too much on it at once. Software repair processes helped it a little, but the chipset is clearly failing. Very sad. READING: HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT, Olga Tokarczuk (UK) (US+)
I don’t know why I have stored this kind of detail while forgetting the rest of the story. It must have made some sort of sense – it was a story, after all, with a beginning and an end – but I remember nothing but the pips, which my memory, quite rightly, has had to spit out later on.
LISTENING: Harju sent me their new record and it’s amazing:
LAST WATCHED: MOCK THE WEEK summer specials DRINK:Cafe de Parisienne liqueur, for an affogato with double chocolate ice cream I made
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The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot’s spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces.
A team of astronomers led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin identified the lucky dot in question: GLIMPSE-17775. By carefully analyzing the dot’s spectrum captured by Webb—the deepest spectrum to date of a little red dot—the research team has identified multiple lines of evidence, all of which support the interpretation that GLIMPSE-17775 is a supermassive black hole enveloped in a dense cocoon of partially ionized gas, a model referred to as the BH* (black hole star) scenario.
Among his many mythopoeic pronouncements, the great Sun Ra maintained that he was making music for the future. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and more than 30 years after he left the planet for the last time, his music is gaining more recognition than ever before. A recent slew of reissues, new compilations and previously unheard live recordings continues unabated. His Arkestra – under the direction of long-time member, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995 – continues to delight audiences worldwide. Just last year saw the release of two new feature-length documentaries about him. The Magic City examined his early life in Birmingham, Alabama; and the more comprehensive Sun Ra: Do The Impossible did the festival circuit before being shown on the PBS TV network this February as part of its American Masters series of artist biographies – bringing Ra’s improbable story to its widest audience yet.
It has rained all damned week. Three thunderstorms yesterday alone. Teeming down today. It’s dark when I wake up. Middle of June and I’m still going outside in the morning in a heavy coat, winter gloves and a watchcap. Everything in the garden is suffering except the bindweed coming through from the neighboring gardens. I’m hitting pause on these notes for a few days. Sunday’s newsletter is already in the scheduler.
For no good reason, I woke up today thinking about BIG WORLD CAFE, a music tv show that ran for… 1989. One year. Their idea was, if we can get you in by telling you New Order are playing, then we can also show you the Bhundu Boys and Erotic Dissidents and The Jungle Brothers.
Here’s Diamanda Galas playing live on Big World Cafe. Just typing big world cafe into YouTube will surface a surprising number of digitised VHS tapes of the show.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
READING: CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+), THE PASSAGE OF POWER: THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON Vol 4, Robert A Caro (UK) (US+)
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