Terrible night’s sleep, it’s cold and the wind has been booming for twenty-four hours now. Amazingly, the rebuilt mini-greenhouse has stayed intact and upright even as pots and shredded branches were flying across the garden. It’s grim down south.
OPERATIONS: Same as yesterday, only with less sleep. Conferring with publishers on press releases. Need to make a start on the newsletter. COMMS: Inbox 91, a lot to process later. LISTENING:
READING: OCEAN OF SOUND, David Toop (UK) (US) LAST WATCHED: THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER (UK) (US), which I will note later THINKING ABOUT: exploring obscure musics on YouTube. ORBITAL:
Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia is reportage of the sort that shrinking foreign news budgets have made scarce. It is the story of the Wa, a people who once proudly collected the heads of their enemies, and who came to preside over one of the world’s most important narco-states in their homelands in the mountains of Burma. The author describes the culture of the Wa, who kept both the British and the Burmese military junta at bay, as being that of the “warrior-farmer, an anarchist who did as he or she pleased”.
Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au xxe siècle) is a science fictionnovel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne’s future, when society places value only on business and technology.
Written in 1863,[1] but first published in 1994, the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced but culturally backward world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological civilization.
Many of Verne’s predictions are remarkably on target. However, his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, did not accept the book because he thought that it was too unbelievable and that its sales prospects would be inferior to those of Verne’s previous work, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
The novel’s main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late.
Michel has been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.
The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th-century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores.
A team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Germany has found that ritualized human sacrifice was common across Europe during the Neolithic.
As they report in the journal Science Advances, the group studied the remains of three women found in a tomb in France who appeared to have been ritually brutalized sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE and compared the remains with others like them found at sites in Europe.
The work began with the study of the remains of three women found in a tomb in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux—two of the bodies showed the women were buried in unusual positions, one on her back with her legs bent upward, the other in a prone position with her neck on the torso of the other woman—characteristics associated with incaprettamento, a murder technique used by organized criminals as a means of intimidation in modern times.
Sharp turn to the cold today, rain and wind and single-digit temperatures. I got nothing done out here at the weekend because I was just too damn tired, so now I have to wait for the cold snap to pass. Always waiting for something. But I have a couple of weeks before I absolutely have to put seeds in the ground, so it should be okay.
OPERATIONS: I am in the same two documents all week. One should be done by EOD Friday, the other will be half-done because it’s longer and more complex. COMMS: Inbox 92, because I just haven’t been bothered. I’m getting smacked away by a cat while it’s still dark, and then getting smacked awake again when the little bastard decides he’s waited too long for his breakfast. LISTENING:
READING: finishing VITA CONTEMPLATIVA, which seems to have morphed into a “internet bad/ Heidegger good/ Arendt bad” round of peculiar axe-grinding. I picked this book as a place to start with Byung-Chul Han, and it may be the place I finish. I’m starting to wonder if he doesn’t have that Zizek thing going on, where every book starts out notionally as being something different from the last, then there’s a decent joke, then it’s the same old slightly cokey blast about the same old things. There’s good and useful stuff in there, but the rot sets in around “The heart is the organ of remembrance and memory, and in the digital age we are without heart.”
LAST WATCHED: sampled episodes of THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, BEACON 23 ORBITAL:
As the lines between art and craft have become more liminal, so too a new generation has arisen that appears to walk a blurred creative line. Are they craftspeople, makers, artists – or a different creative hybrid? Our spring design issue is dedicated to just some of the proponents of this “future craft”.
Antonia Kuo has developed a technique for photochemical paintings where she manipulates light-sensitive paper and photo chemicals to create intricate abstractions while still using traditional drawing and painting methods.
That being said, it’s understandable that coming across striking photos like Tomas Mayer’s “Handmade Miniature Library” can send you into a spiral of questioning how—and who— brought it into existence. Luckily, we have insight.
Working out of his Stockholm studio, Mayer expertly constructs miniatures and dioramas. The “Handmade Miniature Library” is an incredibly detailed scene filled with hundreds of books, scrolls, and shelves, all created with the artist’s dextrous skill and dedication to a tedious craft.
OPERATIONS: Not much, today. Tiredness came down like a hammer yesterday. So today I am marking up the boards, roughing out a schedule for the next six weeks and clearing the decks for a fresh start tomorrow.
COMMS: Inbox 79 – a lot of work-related stuff sitting in there for easy access right now. Give me an hour before I start looking at messaging apps. LISTENING: right now, The New Music Show READING: VITA CONTEMPLATIVA, which is annoying me in its middle sections. “Waiting without intention” is against the definition of the word “wait,” and the heart is not the organ of remembrance. I suspect a slightly troubled translation. LAST WATCHED: OPPENHEIMER, finally. OUTSIDE:
Roman wine tasted better than we thought. I don’t like to think about this, because my partner has been off alcohol all year due to medical treatments, and therefore so am I, and I am dying for a glass of red.
