Category: morning computer

William Anzalone, Red Passage, 2021

“It is too often accepted that during the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the male writers who developed and pushed the boundaries of the weird tale, with women writers following in their wake—but this is far from the truth.” – Wyrd Britain on Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird.

Mermaids in Japanese folklore, and how they seem to have been replaced by the Western version.

When a hashtag seems to mutate into a literary subgenre: “dark academia” as the new campus novel.

Ruslan Kiprich

Nadin Mai on the film BALLAD OF A WHITE COW, which sounds terrifying, but I’m fascinated by this image:

A team of scientists from University of Waterloo have come up with an exciting new theory that explains the origin of the universe, its expansion, and the presence of dark matter. It involves the existence of a mirrored doppelganger called an ‘anti-universe’ where time runs backwards. And it might even be testable.

ANTI- UNIVERSE. A bit much for me first thing in the morning, but I’m going to sit with it later. Though my immediate thought was ANTI-CLOCK.

NASA is finally rolling the Artemis 1 rocket out; this is the transLunar injection rocket that’s supposed to get crew-rated in May, in what’s called a “wet dress rehearsal” test. They basically just toss an empty can around the Moon and back, and if the can doesn’t spring a leak it’s okay to stuff it with people.

In the meantime, lunar cave explorer robots are being designed. Previously: the Moon FedEx.

The Webb telescope did a calibration shot on a single star — but captured a background of hundreds of ancient galaxies as well.

I maintain that science has the best stories.

There is a star only ten miles across that is spewing a stream of antimatter out into the galaxy. “This beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons, scientists have detected throughout the Milky Way galaxy.”

Last night, I read this fantastic piece in the London Review of Books by Simon Reynolds on Malcolm McLaren and a recent biography on him, and this morning I find that they’ve made it free to read on their website.

Grugq is always an interesting read, and this is an interesting, useful insight:

The traditional model of cyberwar has failed as a predictive, descriptive, and analytic framework. In it, cyberwar exists only to emulate kinetic war capabilities. The sheer cost of developing such capabilities makes them unattractive. Cyber does not conform to the traditional model, indeed it is inherently nonconformist.

The only rule in cyber is that you don’t play the same way twice.

Atmospheric piece at Fluid Radio on the new Svarte Greiner record.

Devolving Trust is also a reflective listen. Increasing its dank atmosphere is the fact that this is a live recording, coming from the once-bombed bunkers of Schneider Brewery, Berlin. Its dark, heavy history continues to echo into the present. Erik describes the old cellars as being ‘wet and hollow with a dark past and long reverb’, and its cello and minimal electro-acoustic improvisations are left to rot in the dark, reaching out with long tendrils and looking to invade its shadows… The cello almost seems to want to dig itself into the ground, living underneath the earth instead of succumbing to the pain of living on its surface at street level.

New single from Forndom:

I absolutely cannot connect this morning’s reading into a coherent whole so I’m just going to leave this here and get more coffee

Today I am working on evolving the newsletter, which will require me to re-read everything I wrote in the Newsletter Development series a few years ago too.

A weird short interview with Cormac McCarthy about his method. While he gets away with saying as little as possible (aside from the post title he gave me), it’s still interesting to me on a technical level.

Great piece on unified design dress for authors’ back catalogues. Found at the same time: new unified look for Ishiguro.

Also: what we lose when we lose literary magazines. I also believe that the health of the art of comics is determined by its anthologies more than its serials or novels.

Okay, I really have to put this down and get to work. Listening:

Slice one apple, one carrot, and a centimetre or two of ginger, throw into half a litre of water with the juice of one lemon and blend until liquid. Add ice or a scant handful of oats before you blend if you like. Drink. Gain life. Start reading.

Astrolab wants to be “the UPS or FedEx of the Moon,” and are “building an all-purpose truck that is intended to construct lunar infrastructure and also ferry astronauts around, enabling work that would make long-term settlement on the moon possible…the rover can carry twice the capacity of a Ford F-150 truck bed. The company eventually wants to build a fleet of rovers.” I am of a certain age and background that makes me leery of commercial space enterprise. For me, the exploration of space is the work of collaborating nation-states, and leaving the lives of explorers to the free market seems to me to be an unpleasant throwback to times well past.

It is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. I read his entire available oeuvre by the time I was sixteen, which was either the best or worst time to experience his work. It is “of its time” in many ways, which is the phrase we use to explain away casual sexism, racism and other phobias in things we have otherwise loved. (Even in the eighties, and as a kid, I was shocked at how his celebration of marginalised people could turn on a sixpence into homophobia.) But it also means it’s a document of its time, which in many ways is what Kerouac intended. His own model was Proust, and we go to Proust for memory and place, not for the news. I don’t forgive Kerouac his monstrosity or his probable gynephobia, or the damage he left in his wake – at sixteen, at the end of my Jack Kerouac journey, I read Jan Kerouac’s BABY DRIVER (UK) (US), which makes a lot of that very clear as well as being a great book in its own right — but he liberated American prose and gave me a whole new world to think about. He could be many things, at least in his prime before the drink and the fame. In the year of Jan’s birth, he wrote the genre-bending novel DOCTOR SAX (UK) (US), at the end of which, the eponymous Shadow-like figure, stripped of his trenchcoat and slouch hat and other signifiers of mystery and power, stands in shirtsleeves in the aftermath of the transcendental climax and says;

“I’ll be damned. The universe disposes of its own evil.”

I must admit, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to read Kerouac now. Lots of unpleasant throwbacks to times well past, I would suppose. But he taught me to get the first thought down, and how to have music in the prose.

This was my copy of BABY DRIVER. Remember Jan Kerouac too. Put her back into print.

Going down my own memory hole: Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg fell out towards the end of Kerouac’s life, but Ginsberg had the last word(s),as he found himself writing introductions to at least one Kerouac reprint. I think it was VISIONS OF CODY in which, discussing Kerouac’s “bleak male energy,” he suggests that Kerouac and Neal Cassady (who was bi) should have fucked as “it would have done ’em both some good.” The late-period Kerouac, whose complicated sexuality hardened into weird Catholic conservativism, would probably have shat.

Fluid Radio has been doing a series of interviews with musicians from Ukraine. Here’s their interview with protoU, whom I own a few records by.

Listening: FAKE CREEK, Kate Carr

New single from GAIKA, who was a lovely guy when I met him.

The new edition of MONUMENT podcast is an immense set by Yukari Okamura, drifting from urbanscape ambient into a rising sequence of propulsion that is giving me life. The sort of collection of sounds that reminds me of listening to Mary Ann Hobbs on XFM at the weekends, way back when. I remember one night I was stuck on the pacing of a crucial sequence in GUN MACHINE – just couldn’t get the rhythm right — and Mary Ann played “Bolts” by Northern Structures. It was precisely the rhythm I was looking for. So that book got finished because of Mary Ann.

I got delivered the wrong coffee so today has started on a dissonant note. Onwards.

This morning I have seen a grey squirrel, a fox, and a new neighbourhood cat.

This morning’s question: why fill a galaxy with self-reproducing probes? The answer, in a perhaps surprisingly reflective and personal article, is, broadly, “why not,” but comes with awareness and angles. Also, this lovely idea:

Freitas had originally come up with a self-reproducing probe concept at the macro-scale called REPRO, but went on to delve into the implications of nano-technology. He made Matloff’s point in our discussion: If probe technologies operate at this scale, the surface of planet Earth itself could be home to an observing network about which we would have no awareness.

At which point, you enter the Phildickian space and start wondering exactly why that cat was sitting there and what the hell it wants. The author KW Jeter, from that link:

“I would define ‘phildickians’ as the descriptive modifier for all situations and events characterized by an extreme difficulty in determining what reality is. Or to put it another way, if you’re having a hard time deciding whether you’re actually talking to your best friend or a giant bug from the Proxima system wearing a mask of your best friend – you’re having a phildickians moment.”

Phildickian is derived from the author Philip K Dick, who once wrote a book where most real animals had died off and people bought robot replicas as pets. They alluded to that when the book was adapted as the film BLADE RUNNER, though the title “Blade Runner” was bought from William S Burroughs, as it was the title of his novella that started out as a film adaptation of the Alan Nourse novel THE BLADERUNNER. Nourse was a well known American sf writer in the mid-20th Century, and Robert Heinlein’s…. difficult novel FARNHAM’S FREEHOLD is dedicated to him. As ugly and stupid as that novel is, it’s one of the books that put enough money in Heinlein’s pocket that, when Philip K Dick ran into hard times — Heinlein bailed him out.

Of course, there’s a fair chance Dick thought the cheque came from a giant bug from the Proxima system – or, in fact, an alien space probe — but it didn’t bounce, so what the hell…

First signs of spring here. Still cold. Laid in bed with Minnie the cat for extra warm time before I got up today. Meanwhile, someone else was figuring out that life on Earth was actually generated via quantum tunneling. I am therefore the laziest lazy bastard who ever lazed. Someone even built a Bell state analyser, which determines when quantum information is in its optimal condition of entanglement. This allows for quantum teleportation of information, which is freaky. On one level, this device is detecting things that aren’t technically “there.” JPL are readying to put a quantum communication system on the ISS, which will be “self-healing” – there’s a laser in the package that will burn away radiation damage.

A simple description of “time crystals,” a quantum system that illustrates just how weird quantum science is. The time crystal is a thing that should not happen but uses loopholes in classical physics to exist forever. As I noted the other day, I am not good at understanding this stuff, but what I can grasp of it tells me wonderful stories. For me, science and art have been entangled forever. The world is quantum poetry, and it buzzes and blooms with wonder.

This is a really interesting and useful article: the job of a marketing designer at a book publishing house. It is not book cover design. It is all the promotional and branding work that wraps around that cover and that book.

Is Kindle Vella going to work? I personally would have loved to have a go at that form, not least because much of my training as a writer is in serialisation. Vella is still locked to US-only.

International best-selling books, February 2022. I think it’s useful to look around.

Brandon Sanderson crowdfunds four new novels to the tune of USD $23 million. But this was my takeaway:

“I have a team of 30 people and We sat down to work out if we could really publish a front-list title ourselves, just in case a disaster happened with how my books are sold at the moment.”

Brandon Sanderson has a team of thirty people. That is amazing. That’s also a narrative shift. This isn’t a scrappy, entrepreneurial-minded author trying to force the future on their own. This is a whole company working to serve one writer’s goal. I am impressed by the power move. The actual story here: a group of people crowdfunds the launch of a major new publishing company off four books. I’m really interested to see what Sanderson and his crew do next.

As noted previously, other peoples’ reading lists are useful curation for me. Here’s Cal Newport’s five books from last month.

“…as Russian forces drew ever closer to Kyiv, a Ukrainian “urban researcher” named Lev Shevchenko used his impressive library to protect himself from possible blown-in windows.“

Apropos of nothing, save that I love that LOW-TECH is still online: how to build a bike generator with control panel.

Listening:

Chilling new comics short at Bad Space. Ordering the structure of a novel as a mixtape metaphor. Read that, then go back to the Bad Space comic and look at the tonal shift in panel 6.

James Joyce is still following me around. A magnificent essay from Jessa Crispin:

Ulysses is a symbol, all right. But in these times, it’s a symbol for all the wrongheaded and frustrating ways we talk and think about the way art is made and received and appreciated. There are better, and more accurate, ways of thinking about Ulysses that explain why this maligned, beloved, and still controversial novel holds such a power over our understanding of what art does.

It is big, it is furious, and it is very, very sharp.

This is a gorgeous idea: The Body Of Horror – Music Inspired By The Cinema Of David Cronenberg.

“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.” – David Cronenberg

—You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

– ULYSSES, James Joyce