October 2025 Tapas
I round-up some of the books that I read, films I saw, and thoughts that I had in October, including some insights into anxiety, GenAI (hiss) and Howl's Moving Castle.
Hello. It's been a minute. I've been busy, doing lots of things. I'm doing okay, often broke but doing better than I was a little while ago. I thought I'd do a little round-up of some stuff that I was thinking about in October, in a bit of a grab-bag way that I'm still calling "tapas". Here's an outline for your convenience!
Sections
Feel free to read, or not, whatever appeals!
Books I read
I picked up a few second-hand books while in Wellington with Danni, and working through those has kept me busy.
Gershon Scholem - Major trends in Jewish mysticism I appreciate Kabbalah and believe that a historically material perspective is vital to my own approach to the subject (no shade to the Western Esoteric tradition but it loses a lot when separated from its Jewish lineage). Scholem's work does a wonderful job of tracing this lineage and its history of thought through time.
I learned fun facts, such as that Gematria (Hebraic numerology) is not, strictly speaking, a Kabbalic tradition, and that the Shekhinah of God (God's presence in the material world) is commonly understood in the Lurianic tradition to be feminine. Fun!
Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather 1996 cyberpunk that feels like it might yet have something to say about our future. I saw traces in it of J. G. Ballard's Vermillion Sands, particularly "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D".
Iain M. Banks - The Hydrogen Sonata Listened to this as an audiobook. One of the fun Culture novels centred around Subliming, the idea of an entire species leaving for some kind of transcendental existence. Lots of running around. Sort of skirts around the actuality of the Sublime, probably necessarily. Felt a little like it was torn between its political thriller plot and the emotional questions of foundational myths and the question of whether one should choose to go to a kind of heaven, if one could.
Films I watched
After reading Heavy Weather i felt the need for some storms so i watched Twister. It turns out that Twister is a hornier film than Cronenberg's Crash, absolutely a film about two estranged people whose shared libidinal obsession brings them back together.
I also watched two films in Wellington with Danni:
Rich Flu is two films smashed together and the first is very much better than the second. It's absolutely FASCINATING but do not take that as a straightforward recommendation. Watch it like a car crash, like the characters do in Cronenberg's Crash.
Problemista is very good and I feel ambivalent about it. It's magical realism in the South American vein, like a Michel Gondry with no trace of whimsy. Tilda Swinton is so infuriatingly real, just an unbearable person that the protagonist loves to bits.
Sophie's misrecognition in Howl's
While rewatching Howl's Moving Castle I realised that Sophie's dilemma is one of misrecognition: she fails to recognise her own control over her curse and the way in which the curse's mediation allows her to enjoy her disguise as an old woman.
In the novel, Howl is unable to remove the curse and concludes it is because Sophie enjoys being in disguise. In the film, when she forgets that she is supposed to be old, Sophie temporarily becomes younger, something that Howl observes but does not remark on. Why is the curse represented as being unconsciously volitional?
Sophie is a young woman and an eldest daughter who is expected to run the family business. She hears about Howl and his reputation for both charm and abandonment of young women, and then meets Howl and immediately falls in love with him. But she refuses to become another victim of his charms, and sees in him the possibility of something more, something that will be prevented by the tyranny of relating to him as an attractive young woman.
So she gets herself cursed. Now, she is free from any sexual obligation or response, including her own. She is free to have an authentic relationship with Howl, including seeing and challenging his limitations from a position that he might listen to. Her misrecognition, far from being a barrier to the development of authentic love, becomes the necessary precursor to its expression.
Working on My Social Anxiety
I started seeing a psychologist and so far I've gotten two interesting insights out of it. Both of them came from digging into David Robson's The Expectation Effect, which sounds annoyingly self-help-ish (and it is) but points to some interesting science.
Cybernetic control and reappraisal
I had not really deeply understood that the systems of the body depend on the guidance of the nervous system to control their feedback loops. Stating it in Cybernetic terms like that, it seems obvious, almost self-explanatory. But the implications for me are profound.
My mental expectation of whether I am in a performance situation or at risk of imminent blunt trauma determines whether my nervous system drives a stress cascade modulated by the release of first adrenaline and then cortisol. If it's the latter, I gain a lot of benefit from physiological effects like distal blood vessel constriction to prevent blood loss. If it's the former, over-elevated arousal will inhibit my performance.
This suggests an enormous potential benefit in reappraising situations that trigger my social anxiety as performance situations, and taking active hold of my levels of stress and arousal. It's not a case of denying that I perceive high stakes in the situation, but finding a way into thinking about it that lets me work with it.
Sidebar: pathology-only terms
Thinking about this, I've realised that when we talk about "anxiety" we are talking almost exclusively from a pathological perspective, in the same way that the term 'distraction' is a pathologised category— or subtype —of attention. That built-in valence feels like it gets in the way of reappraisal, makes it less obvious and straightforward.
The power of Ritual
Enacting a ritual prior to performing (athletic, academic, etc) seems to prime the nervous system for improved performance. For example, a 2016 study found that enacting a "ritual" (the word is important) improved both karaoke performance and helped modulate pre-performance anxiety. Given my work on an immanent material magic, this is music to my ears.
I have begun to work with Hermes, the Olympian God associated with communication (and incidentally the Western esoteric tradition through the syncretic figure of Hermes Trismegistus) by both offering instances of communication as tribute, and asking for support with communication that I struggle with. Early results have been positive. ⚚
Obviously Hermes has no transcendental existence and I'm working with myself but as Alan Moore said, our minds are the one place where Gods indisputably exist. So that's nice.
More thoughts on GenAI (sigh)
I like the simile of LLMs as blenders, but of course my stance is that LLMs are bad, and a blender is mostly just a kind of tool. I considered reframing it as "GenAI is a wood chipper sold as a food blender". It does something but that something does not provide nutrition. But a discussion with a friend prompted another idea: that it's a blender that blends everything, but unfortunately that everything includes a lot of poop. A similar insight as to Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy which states that "If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage."
I was also reflecting on the way that ChatGPT's tuned interface changes its nature. More than just a misleading interface, the way in which ChatGPT captures input and tries to farm it out to specialty solvers and/or human labour makes it more like a scam than a tool.
A site like Wolfram Alpha incorporates natural language processing with special solvers and remains a tool, one with understandable (and usefully predictable) limitations. But OpenAI are in a kind of double bind - either ChatGPT is an honest tool, or it is a kind of general intelligence. If it's an honest tool it's just an LLM with special cut-outs. If it is a general intelligence then the fact that little bits are quietly performed by special tools or human agents makes it a trick designed to fool its users. It is all a "carny gimmick" and it's gonna take the economy down. Also all our fucking software. It's exhausting.
Anyway, that's the kind of thing I was thinking about in October. I hope you are doing well. Sending you kind thoughts, and wishing you the best in the back end of 2025.