Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
“It is good to chase one’s dreams, but bad, as it mostly turns out, to be chased by them.”
There are older, and therefore cheaper, editions of this, also known as the Zirau Aphorisms – but this is the newest, and I always go for the newest translations of work, because they tend to build on the older ones and therefore may be more informed, considered and exact. On top of that, here each aphorism comes with a few pages of context, which are very rich and add a great deal to the experience. Some of them even include aphorisms Kafka discarded, of which this is my favourite:
“Sancho Panza, who, it should be said, never boasted of it, was able, over the course of years, in the evening and night hours, to divert his demon—whom he later dubbed Don Quixote—away from himself by amassing a great many chivalry romances and picaresque novels.”
Many of the aphorisms concern Kafka’s obsession with the Biblical Fall, which I found less interesting than the pure notes of invention he was capable of sounding in this abbreviated form, of which the most important for me was:
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony.
That’s the sort of thing I picked the book up for, and the sort of thing that makes me sit for an hour with it.
I’ve been thinking for a good while, on and off, about this particular form of writing. Kafka shows its value and its potentials. It’s a wonderful, educational and even sometimes funny little book.
THE APHORISMS OF FRANZ KAFKA (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: Very full day already, hopes of a relaxing day scripting already dashed. I’m going to be up and down from the desk all day. I’m on my fourth ristretto and it’s barely noon.
READING: FUTURE DAYS: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, David Stubbs (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: EXPENDABLES 4. In this house, we always give a Jason Statham film a try. I both detect and ignore your judgement, reader.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.
Showing an artist pages from THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE to illustrate a process that can usefully be adapted for the graphic novel feels, all at once, weirdly backwards and weirdly like completing a circle.
I pre-ordered this and it landed on the Kindle overnight. (UK) (US+) Very much looking forward to seeing how the excellent MacLeod lands this: he’s a great storyteller.
Previously: Scottish Submarine Starships: BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY, Ken MacLeod
bookofjoe: Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming in conversation (1958)
inc. transcript of the conversation
May 14, 2024 at 04:25PM
Screenshot from the new MEGALOPOLIS trailer.
Also:
The last one is right in the zone of other stuff I’ve been looking at and thinking about right now.
I know I’ll never get to see this film on a big screen, but I’m looking forward to getting a copy to pick apart at home one day.
OPERATIONS: Marking up the boards, adding in producer Zoom calls later today, getting into some scripting, need to confirm some format stuff with a publisher, confer with the office, send out some status check emails, adjust calendar
READING: FUTURE DAYS: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, David Stubbs (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: MUSIK VON HARMONIA, Harmonia
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATON JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.
I’m one of those people who ordered the Rabbit R1. It hasn’t arrived yet. The reviews of the first batch are out and are uniformly terrible. I’m not too worried. For one thing, by the time my device arrived, the OTA updates will have fixed a bunch of things that reviewers complained about. For another, many of the things the reviewers complained about don’t affect my use case for the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit can’t use Doordash or Uber properly? Well, Doordash and Uber don’t even operate in my location, so that was never an issue for me. Can’t play your Spotify playlists? I don’t use Spotify and seriously, what kind of sound experience do you expect off a plastic puck? Can’t save your bullshit Midjourney pictures? Tough shit. Go and look at art made by people or learn how to draw. The AI hallucinates? All AI hallucinates. I’ve been messing around with Perplexity AI, the system Rabbit uses, and I’ve only caught it hallucinating once.
I want to try a separate AI knowledge device. I have an iPhone. Siri is not very good. I can’t summon Perplexity from the lock screen. Siri may well get a big AI-related update, but I am betting 1) you’ll have to buy a new iPhone to get the full effect 2) it otherwise won’t be as frictionless as pressing a button and speaking to get the knowledge I want. At night I sit downstairs with a notebook on a lapboard, writing and researching, and a little puck on the board next to the notebook that I can thumb and talk into to get the information I may need does seem a hell of a lot easier than having to pick up the phone, clear the notification scroll, swipe and tap and tap and tap to get to the same point. The Rabbit R1 seems to me like a calm little box full of libraries, rather than a slab of screaming glass, and that’s what I paid for. Maybe next month I’ll see how wrong I was.
One hundred years after his birth, a fascinating portrait of the composer, engineer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), a leader of the avant-garde and a pioneer of sound and light shows, who turned contemporary music upside down by bringing art and mathematics together.
This was excellent. A well-structured introduction to an artist I still don’t know enough about, and beautifully made.
That last point is the thing: cross-pollination and applying ideas from one form to another.