““We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
– Mark Rothko, with Adolph Gottlieb
I’m not on Instagram any more, but I revisit via web or RSS the pages I remember well, like @dailyrothko. Funny thing – the older I get, the more fascinated I am by Rothko’s work.
On revealing truth: TNW reporter discovers they can game the Google News algo.
Mike Dempsey introduces me to a book designer I didn’t know, Kelly Blair:
“Today, in the digital age, we’re more connected than ever. We’re not better connected, tho. We have become lonely figures in a sea of people. It is extremely difficult to find a slow film that does not portrait a lonely character, removed from his or her environment.”
Text of a talk on Slow Cinema by Nadin Mai. Also from this talk:
“None of these films would be possible by looking at events. The directors who make films today don’t look at what happens to us. They look at the condition that is ours today. …Slow Cinema isn’t surface cinema. It doesn’t look at the outside. Slow Cinema is human cinema. It doesn’t judge. It observes. It observes what this Human Condition does to us, what it does to our hopes and to our prospects for the future.”
Slow Cinema has fascinated me since a film professor in Dundee introduced me to the work of Bela Tarr, many years ago. Slow Cinema is still cinema, and therefore a manipulation of image, sound and viewer — but there is truth in it.
I was thinking about Meret Oppenheim’s work over the weekend, and suddenly here’s a strong piece about her by Emily Watlington. She may have had a “concern with the limits of reason, her sense of the senselessness of the world,” but you can’t say there’s no truth in this:
Jack Pritchard alleged that it was Betjeman who took (Hungarian-born Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy) to a party ‘at the end of which he said to the hostess in his strange pronunciation; “Thank you for your hostilities.” She was a little taken aback, and when Moholy told John Betjeman what had happened, Betjeman said: “oh don’t worry – she is hostile to everyone.”’
From Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus, Fiona MacCarthy (UK) (US)
Just finished reading ALL THAT LIVES, the new Inspector McLean book from James Oswald, which felt underdeveloped compared to its predecessor, the fuller and pacier WHAT WILL BURN (UK) (US). That said, ALL THAT LIVES does pull a nice trick to ratchet the tension in the back end of the book that I liked, and it does pop the occasional nicely-observed bon mot:
For the first time since they’d been introduced, Mr Devlin spoke, his whole body suddenly animated as if someone had put fifty pence in the meter.
Mr. Oswald ploughs what I imagine is a lonely furrow – supernatural Tartan Noir police procedurals. I admire his commitment to the bit immensely.
“An-My Lê’s expansive photographs do not document war as a singular act. Instead, they capture war in all its slow-moving, subtle extensions: its preparation, its maintenance, its fallout, and its uneasy passage into cultural memory.” A nice introductory piece at Artsy. Her commitment is to re-enactment of war for consideration of its mechanisms and its historical consequence, and she approaches the subject from oblique, spectral positions.
Talking of crime fiction, I just came across this image – Gerard Depardieu as Maigret, in a new film that apparently opens in France this week! I can see Depardieu pulling off a late-period Maigret.
I venerate those books, and am saving the handful I haven’t yet read for rainy days.
“A team of Jordanian and French archaeologists said Tuesday that it had found a roughly 9,000-year-old shrine at a remote Neolithic site in Jordan’s eastern desert.” This is an area where “kite traps,” two converging walls and an enclosure to funnel in gazelles for slaughter, were employed. “Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the “desert kite,” as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap.” The locals were likely to have been specialised hunters, and that this shrine was a ritualised construction, a symbol of their commitment to the life.
I overslept. The news is all about Russia, so here’s your top 20 survival foods with long shelf life, and https://thequietus.com/ is having server issues so I can’t read the new Jennifer Lucy Allan column. As I was typing that, the new NEURAL magazine hit the doormat:
So I’ll call this a status post, today, make a coffee and sit down with this, and then get to clearing my inbox out while I wait for LA to wake up.
In ring composition, the narrative appears to meander away into a digression (the point of departure from the main narrative being marked by a formulaic line or stock scene), although the digression, the ostensible straying, turns out in the end to be a circle, since the narration will return to the precise point in the action from which it had strayed, that return marked by the repetition of the very formulaic line or scene that had indicated the point of departure. The material encompassed by such rings could be a single self-contained digression or a more elaborate series of interlocked narratives, each nested within another in the manner of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.
The back two thirds of this book are in the mode of personal exegesis. While beautifully written, they are not what I bought the book for. I had not come across the term “ring composition” before, and was interested to learn what it meant. Classical storytelling is so infused into modern storytelling that sometimes we use elements of these functions without fully knowing what they are or where they came from. The author goes deep into its Greek origins, and turfs out gems like these almost obliviously:
In a fit of narcissistic preening, the grandfather who had caused so much pain to others gives his infant grandson a name best suited to himself: Odysseus, which is ultimately derived from the word odynê, pain. The hero of the complicated story has a complicated identity. He is the man of pain, one who suffers pain but causes others to suffer it, too.
I didn’t know that. Man of pain. I mean, I’m poorly educated, so maybe everyone knew that but me. In all things, I try to keep learning, and I love that I got to learn this thing.
The writer does a deep dive into ring composition, its storied history and functions, and in this reader/writer it unearthed a wealth of possibilities. Very valuable, and a wonderful read.
Auerbach’s later and somewhat quixotic belief that philology, that painstaking excavation of a given literature’s relationship to the historical moment that produced it, nonetheless held the key to the grandest plan of all: die gemeinsame Verbindung der Kulturen, “the common connectedness of all cultures.”
Quixotic or naive it may have been, but I find it kind of charming and beautiful. In my head, it connected back to Gordon White’s STAR SHIPS (UK) (US): “Mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence.” THREE RINGS is a book that sets off many rings of connection in this reader, all steering back to the start even as Finnegan’s Wake starts where it stops. It was an energising read as much as anything, setting the mind off in new directions from ancient signposts, always knowing it was going to bring you back home in the end.
THREE RINGS, Daniel Mendelsohn (UK) (US)
Via 70s Sci Fi Art, one of my favourite images from Philippe Druillet’s LONE SLOANE sequence, circa 1972. I discovered Druillet in my early teens — I made myself finish learning French at school so I could read the untranslated LA NUIT — and I blatantly ripped this image off for a sequence in SUPREME BLUE ROSE. (UK) (US)
Art by the sainted Tula Lotay, who did not know I was making her commit a crime.
In ten years, our own bridge in space, the International Space Station, will be decommissioned. Which means it will be crashed back into the planet. Specifically, the Pacific Ocean, at a location termed Point Nemo. Point Nemo is the furthest point on the planet from land, being some 2688 kilometers off the shore of Motu Nui. Point Nemo is also known as the “spacecraft graveyard.”
At Centauri Dreams, a series has begun on a proposal for a laser-thermal rocket that would put Mars 45 days away. Also at that site, physicist Freeman Dyson’s note to a student has a wonderful little piece in it from Dyson:
General remarks. In my own career I never made long-range plans. I would advise you not to stick to plans. Always be prepared to grab at unexpected opportunities as they arise. Be prepared to switch fields whenever you have the chance to work with somebody who is doing exciting stuff. My daughter Esther, who is a successful venture capitalist running her own business, puts at the bottom of every E-mail her motto, “Always make new mistakes’’. That is a good rule if you want to have an interesting life.
Be open, wing it, adapt on the fly. Build skills on the way. There are always new skills to learn and new and interesting pathways to wander down.
Like these: 8 skills for embracing solitude.
The wind is booming here, and I want to try something new in the “digital notebook” framework here, using a legacy title. Listening to this while I try the thought out:
I hadn’t noticed this, and will likely forget it again, so I’m making a note: the Bandcamp phone app now allows for queueing and playlists. I have bought (checks site) 1355 records through Bandcamp, so this is a good thing for me, except that I will now spend days trawling through those 1355 records building playlists I will hardly ever use.
Probably the most expensive photograph in the world, apparently. Also, world photos from the month of January 2022 from Foreign Policy. Though I certainly still miss the flow of imagery from Instagram on the desktop, my RSS feeds are still highly visual — and I don’t have the tug of IG on a phone to go look at some nice photos for a few minutes.
Nathen Chen didn’t even take his phone to the Olympics: “so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.” In leisure reading, the Guardian has a short primer for starting with James Joyce – I’ve been dipping back into both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake over the last several months. Ulysses remains beautiful:
Old and secret she had entered from a morning world
And FInnegan’s Wake remains the exhausting, if often lovely, work of a man who should have been beaten to death for compulsive punning:
Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback
(But lovely!)
The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay.
“Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in ‘collective computation’—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.”
Studies suggest that writing systems emerge only when cities emerge. James Joyce said of Ulysses that if the city of Dublin was destroyed tomorrow, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.”
Thanks to the person who pointed out the RSS feed was janky, that should be fixed now.
“What are you doing in London? Are you even allowed in London?”
“Why the fuck wouldn’t I be allowed in London?” Hoon asked.
“I don’t know. I just sort of assumed there’d be some reason.”
Okay, so: imagine Jack Reacher, only he’s a bug-eyed psychopathic Scottish ex-Detective Superintendent in his fifties called Bob Hoon and he talks like this:
He squirmed, tears springing to his eyes. “You’re breaking my arm.”
“You’ll know I’m breaking your arm when you start spitting jaggy wee fragments of it out of your arse, son,” Hoon told him.
Hoon. The sound of a foghorn lowing in the distance, warning of approaching menace. He was, it seems, a supporting character in a previous series by author JD Kirk, and the bastard apparently rattled around in Kirk’s head enough that he had to release Hoon into his own series. From the afterword, it seems Kirk felt the need to humanise Hoon somewhat for him to support a series, and sets off a fairly textbook clutch of emotional inciting events to launch Hoon on his way. This reader suspects that these events, though fairly powerfully felt and communicated, were really just an excuse for Kirk to get to the good fun stuff – Hoon swearing at people and then fucking them up.
“I like to think I’m different things to different people. To some, I’m a wise fucking mentor, guiding them through these challenging times we find ourselves in. Like yon wee green homeless bastard in Star Trek, or whatever. Wi’ the ears and the funny voice.”
It is, as I suggest by the Reacher comparison, the knight-errant story form, something that Reacher author Lee Child expands upon in his book THE HERO. Hoon’s ageing, ill-preserved carcass soaks up a lot more damage, though, and part of the extended gag is that he’s simply too insane and angry to die. As the book progresses, Hoon’s dialogue gets more florid and eccentric, as if Hoon, in this new phase of his life, is finding his true voice. I particularly enjoyed:
“They’ll no’ just give you a medal for this, they’ll make one in the shape of your face, and then give that one to other, lesser bastards.”
As well as the most puerilely funny interrogation scene I’ve read in years. Hoon is a monster, and, as much as Kirk tries to tack heroic or even decent traits on to him, the monstrousness continually leaks out. Though I wasn’t pleased by the obvious lead-in to a forthcoming sequel, NORTHWIND was a fine entertainment which played with the tropes of its form enjoyably – as Mike Moorcock says, obey and enjoy the genre — and I hope that in the future books JD Kirk gives up a little on making Hoon a functional human, finds some shamelessness and just releases his Creature on the world.