Category: morning computer

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

Another of the IG accounts I surf to by web from memory is collectiblesciencefiction. It’s both window shopping and memory trigger for me. I remember buying my own copy of this, on a grim early-teenage “family” “holiday” to Blackpool. It was a remaindered copy, I think, sitting on a table for fifty pence or something. This was my first exposure to Savoy Books. I know I still have my copy: I read it to death and treasured it. Just seeing this cover again sent me back to escaping into Mike Moorcock’s short fiction while smaller, crappier wars broke out around me.

There’s new archaeological analysis of environmental stresses fuelling creative thinking.

Nice piece here about writer-director Jane Arden and her film THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNDERNEATH –

The Other Side of the Underneath features — among various other disorienting and agonising scenes — a group therapy session undertaken by women dressed in Victorian nightgowns, in which Arden herself plays a belligerent therapist. In an interview given in 2007, Natasha Morgan, one of the participating actors, remembered that everyone in the session was on LSD and Arden herself was drunk, having been steadily drinking her way through the entire production. There was also reportedly a brown bear in the next room, trying to claw its way through the wall.

I’m an admirer of her film (with Jack Bond) ANTI-CLOCK, a science fiction about memory manipulation. I own the DVD remaster of ANTI-CLOCK, which struggled to find release:

Bond contacted the Technicolor lab where the masters were stored, and found himself briefly embroiled in a Kafkaesque exchange. “You can’t have them, by order of Jack Bond,” he was told, and was then shown a letter to that effect signed by himself 25 years earlier, copies of which had been taped to every can of film. “But I am Jack Bond,” he remonstrated, only to be told: “You’ll have to prove that.”

It’s a Kafka-haunted week.

From The Observer, the best books of 2021 as chosen by authors. Wonderfully, I only own one of the mentioned books, so I have some discovering to do. Solid curational work has never been so undervalued and has rarely been so important.

At the Economist, another reminder that I need to read the new Olga Tokarczuk. Another day. I’m half blind from screen-related eyestrain today after spending much of yesterday in deep-dive research. While I was doing that, NASA was apparently working out how to keep the ISS in orbit without Russian help.

Ethel Reed is “not just the most famous woman poster designer in the American canon, but the only woman of the canon.”

Theodora Allen, Syzygy (Narcissus), via this piece on her work at Art In America.

“The quantum gravity gradiometer, which was developed under a contract for the Ministry of Defense and in the UKRI-funded Gravity Pioneer project, was used to find a tunnel buried outdoors in real-world conditions one meter below the ground surface. It wins an international race to take the technology outside. The sensor works by detecting variations in microgravity using the principles of quantum physics, which is based on manipulating nature at the sub-molecular level. The success opens a commercial path to significantly improved mapping of what exists below ground level.” The possibility of mapping the underside of the ground.

A new issue of WRECKWATCH magazine showed up in my email, viewable here. WRECKWATCH does what it says on the tin: “Wreckwatch magazine, published three times a year, shares the sunken wonders and beauty of the world’s oceans that belongs to us all. The magazine covers new discoveries and the latest thinking about shipwrecks, exploration, maritime trade, history and art.” And it’s free.

I read Alan Garner’s TREACLE WALKER last night in one go and I think I will probably read it again tonight. Morning, computer.

A quarter of the northern sky reveals 4.4 million galaxies. We still can’t find dark matter, but we may have been looking in the wrong place all along, but the thing we think dark matter might be made of may not exist anyway. That said, establishing what we know we do not know is always a good start. Let’s face it: according to the first story there, we haven’t even gotten good at looking up yet. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” said Stewart Brand. And it turns out there’s a film about Stewart Brand, whom I met very briefly once about 22 years ago (same day I met Thomas Dolby), entitled WE ARE AS GODS.

And what we do with our godlike powers is to get an AI-generated Andy Warhol to narrate a tv documentary about his life. Not actually a first, mind you: AI was used to generate a few lines-worth of Anthony Bourdain’s voice last year. That said, if there were any Cosmists left, they would be delighted at anything that looked like a first step towards bringing total planetary calculation ability towards their goal of bringing our ancestors back from the dead.

I personally feel like the Cosmists would have loved Hilma af Klint:

And this piece at Artsy showcases the work of nine female artists celebrating her legacy. I discovered Agnes Pelton and Megan Rooney through this piece, and so today is a good day.

So now I’m going to make another coffee and go back to reading How to Destroy the Universe: And 34 other really interesting uses of physics by Paul Parsons (UK) (US) because we only get good at stuff by practising.

““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:

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.

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.”