A Pleasurable Headache - 5th April 2020
A smattering of links I have read whilst staring wistfully out of the window.
1) John Scalzi with advice for the creative during what he’s calling ‘the great pause’:
“Nor do I think we’ll get back exactly to where we were before — things are going to change and the models of how we sell and distribute and share things will likely be something other than what they are now. Mind you, “things will change and be different” is a statement that was going to be accurate anyway; a decade ago the landscape of my book sales was very different than it is now. Audiobooks came up, Borders bookstores went down, and there was a big fight over what the cost of an ebook should be. What I mean here is that the changes now are likely to come faster, because the economic situation we’re in is going to be that much more volatile. What’s going to come out of it will be good for some, less good for others, and who will be in those respective camps, we don’t yet know.”
Ramifications for this whole ordeal are going to affect us for years to come. Fingers crossed something good comes of it all ultimately. The opening question from this conversation between Ted Chiang and Halimah Marcus sums it up nicely.
“Earlier this week, I shared a recollection of a Brooklyn Book Festival panel you did with Mark Doten and N.K. Jemisin. Your idea, as I recall it, was that in conservative narratives, there’s a disaster/problem/war. It’s resolved, and everything returns to normal. In progressive narratives, there’s a disaster, it’s resolved, and nothing is the same. Can you expand on that? It seems to me we are in a progressive narrative, and that this pandemic will fundamentally change our society.”
Here’s hoping, truly hoping, that we’re in the progressive narrative strand.
2) Robin Sloan on blogging. It’s a short post, referencing a few other recent links he has taken in, and nicely whittles blogging down to a simple mantra:
” 1. love a thing, and 2. write about it.”
3) John Kaag at Aeon on the advantages of a good walk. It seems ideally suited for the era of people leaving their houses for the specific aim of just taking a walk. I’ve seen more families and couples taking walks this past few weeks than I have in a long, long time. Hopefully it’s something that continues. Again, a potential positive change from all of this.
“These days, it’s difficult to understand the point of doing something, or doing anything, without an underlying aim. We typically walk in order to get somewhere: the grocery store, the yoga studio, the water cooler. We need to walk the dog, or we walk in protest for a cause. We walk to get in shape, tallying up our steps on a Fitbit or smartwatch. Perambulation becomes a matter of proving, achieving, gaining, winning, meeting a concrete objective. There is something both funny and sad about orienting our walking exclusively around such discrete ends. The frantic attempt to get somewhere, and to be on time about it, amounts to a Sisyphean struggle against the clock: when we reach a destination, we must immediately set off again, intent on the next stopping place. The point of the journey is no more than to ‘get there’. Moving our feet is just the drudgery endured between moments of rest.”
4) Somewhat topical is this piece from The Guardian about a business that offers doomsday luxury accomodation to the rich and powerful. The entire piece is written whilst giving the whole setup, and those behind it, a severe case of side-eye. It reads like an unmade episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. There’s the larger than life characters:
“I walked up the steps into the shipping crate and into a kitchenette. From a room in the back, a gigantic man in his early 60s emerged and ambled toward me, and immediately embroiled me in a painfully vigorous handshake. Robert Vicino was a man of intimidating physical scale: 6ft 8in tall, as he made of point of clarifying.
The crimson bulb of a nose, the pockmarked face, the neat grey goatee: before he even began to speak – which he quickly did, and never let up – he presented himself to me as a distinctly Mephistophelian figure. Before long, we were in the Lexus, getting ready to head to the nearest town to get diesel for the generator. His seat leaned backward at an absurdly steep angle, Vicino removed a large wooden-backed hairbrush from a side compartment and began to groom, with firm and precisely rhythmical sweeps, first his beard and then his hair.”
/
“Sitting in the back was Jin Zhengii, a 23-year-old recent engineering graduate whom Vicino had hired as his intern. Jin didn’t say much – partly on account of being Chinese and not having particularly good English, but mostly, I guessed, on account of just being the kind of person who didn’t say much.
“I tell him, Jin, I’m like your American dad,” said Vicino. “Right, Jin? He’s a great kid. Great kid.”
Or the supremely odd dashed with the odd bit of humour:
“I drove for 40 minutes or so, stopping now and then to unlock a cattle gate, and once or twice to get out and observe the delirious spectacle of the endless grass-covered vaults, the hexagonal fronts – an architecture less proportionate to the physical than to the psychic dimensions of human beings. I clambered up on to the top of one of these, to survey the immensity from a higher vantage. The day before, Jin and I had stood on top of another of these structures, and my growing apprehension of a military-industrial sublime had been casually undermined by Jin’s solemnly informing me that he had recently taken a shit on the roof of one such vault, although “probably not this one”.
5) This is an amazing deep dive, by Violet Adele Bloch, into the game Cultist Simulator. CS is a consciously obtuse game with no manual, tutorial or explanation to its various interlocking systems and gameplay loops. To see them discussed and held up to the light makes for an interesting read. Bonus points because it also discusses James Bridle’s amazing New Dark Age.
“If our London is also Valdrada, glimpses of our waterbound reflection have become functional, even mundane. Our Hours, then, could be neural networks and encryption algorithms, the tools that oversee and safeguard our networks. They can create new people from whole cloth, and they can build convincing facsimiles of familiar faces. They’ll hide evidence from authority, but they can identify any suspect of any crime in the background of a photo.
Unlike in Cultist, though, our Hours are artifacts, not Gods. They’re machines, gifted with the human power of association. They rule over our networked dreams, but they’re also networks, who Dream of themselves.”
6) A great post over at Book Forum about the chaotic hustle of the American jewelry business. Even if you haven’t seen Uncut Gems you’ll get something from this, it’s list of characters ripped straight from an Elmore Leonard novel, all living in a highly stressful maelstrom of a world.
7) Something hopeful to finish things up. This Guardian long read by Samanth Subramanian covers the efforts to find a vaccine for Covid-19. It’s not mired in buzzwords or jargon and still manages to fascinate and walk the reader through all that has been achieved so far (which is a lot in such a short space of time).
“For the first time ever, scientists have been able to muster up vaccine prospects mere weeks into a new, fast-spreading disease. Right now, there are at least 43 Covid-19 vaccines in development around the world – in Brisbane and Hong Kong, in the US and the UK, in the labs of universities and companies. Most of these are DNA or RNA vaccines. One vaccine, made in 63 days by an American biotech firm named Moderna, moved into human trials on 16 March, entering the bloodstream of the first of 45 healthy adult volunteers in Seattle. It was a “world indoor record”, said Anthony Fauci, the doctor who heads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Nothing has ever gone that fast.”
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I’m off to take a shit on the roof of a robber-baron’s bunker. See you in two!