A bunch of new subscribers signed up in the last week—welcome! A gentle reminder that if you enjoy this newsletter that I have a tip jar for one-time gestures of appreciation. (Apologies for crass acknowledgment of money but I am also a grad student piecing together freelancing and selling art to supplement a $22,000 research assistant stipend and my summer funding is in the air and in this economy, etc.)
DC-based readers: I'll be speaking with Malcolm Harris at Solid State Books on March 3 (this Friday!) about his recently published book Palo Alto. Some sentences from the advanced review copy of the book previously appeared in this newsletter.
OK, on to the sentences.
The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.
"Hobby Club's Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF", Steve Trimble for Aviation Weekly
Submitted by Kelsey, with the comment "The acronym would be clunky were it not the format: a straightforward news story about the Air Force shooting down objects that may have been hobbyist projects." Personally, I think the clunkiness of NIBBB is part of the charm in this one.
Geodesy remains our life blood.
quote from former National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) director Robert Cardillo on the NGA Geomatics website header banner
"Geodesy" is the science of accurately measuring the earth's shape and its properties. Although when photographed from space the earth looks like a precise sphere, its surface is a bit lumpier and uneven with mountains and oceanic currents. One activity within geodesy is measuring the lumpy parts so that maps (planar representations of the three-dimensional planet to two-dimensional space) are as closely aligned to the actual lumpy earth as possible.
Being in a geography department has made me think a lot more about the tools of its trade—specifically, the origins of those tools, their limitations, and the assumptions baked into them. Unsurprisingly, the history of geospatial science as it's known today is more or less the history of empire, and that legacy lives on in the way that defense agencies like NGA play a pretty big role in maintaining some of the nitty gritty standards underlying this kind of work. Of course there are other actors from other sectors involved with more altruistic objectives, but it's hard to deny the outsized presence of the military in geospatial tech (and extraction—don't get me started on EPSG codes).
"Geodesy remains our life blood" is a very dramatic sentence rendered a little goofy by the sheer silliness of the word "geodesy" but I'm taken by it because of the questions it introduces. If geodesy truly is and I guess always was the "life blood" of NGA, what does that suggest about the project of precisely measuring the earth's surface in the first place? How does, say, an imagery analyst who verifies drone strike targets think about the act of geodesy in her work? How does she think about the blood implicit in her work? What does it even mean for a government agency to have "life blood"?
Downtown is this city’s economic engine and, at present, San Francisco is a very pretty, well-upholstered car with a growing colony of possums under the hood in lieu of a functioning motor.
"Mayor's new downtown plan is neither new, nor a plan", Joe Eskenazi for Mission Local
Submitted by Sarah, with the comment "it's so evocative and also brings to mind something adorable yet dysfunctional, and also something that would horrify some folks (possums are not universally loved)."
Evil forces from the outside world included: boyfriends, anyone else at all.
White Girls, Hilton Als
Some other highlights:
The ego—what a racket.
My body and soul were a sewer, briny and foul with sexiness.
("briny and foul with sexiness"!!!!)
I love his pictures; they look like a cartographer trying to approximate a dream.
I did not want SL to die remembering the look of a thousand garbage bags in my eyes.
(there is context for the garbage bags that probably makes the resonance clearer but alone I think it's still pretty terrific)
That's how you recognize love; you've never met it before.
And this humdinger of a sentence about sentences:
I can't write one complete sentence about here because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else's because she uttered it sort of without thinking while thinking too much, I can't tell you how unusual that is in a world where, nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script.
The usual 'goblin' stuff is not good enough here.
J.R.R. Tolkien's notes to himself while writing The Lord of The Rings, via Robin Sloan's Instagram Stories
This note is apparently Tolkien exhorting himself to go harder on Minas Morgul (I have never read The Lord of the Rings so this is meaningless to me). The implication of unusual 'goblin' stuff (why in quotes?) is scintillating.
He came to believe he was visiting from a thousand years in the future and was put under psychiatric evaluation after trying to warn President Gerald Ford that solid-state electronics were an alien conspiracy.
"The Curious Life and Mind-Altering Death of Justin Clark", Christopher Robbins for New York magazine
This story is both deeply sad and deeply layered, but also has absurdly grand details (Gerald Ford, of all presidents!) that add levity and rhythm. Sorry it took me a year to read it, Chris.
Musical reproduction has subterranean connections.
"Glittery: Unearthed Histories of Music, Mica, and Work", Alejandra Bronfman in Audible Infrastructures
This essay explores procurement of mica for audio technologies in the early twentieth century, mostly focused on mining and production during World War II by Allied and Axis powers. Bronfman writes about mining in India and North Carolina and industrial processing at the Terezín concentration camp. (In addition to the sites Bronfman writes about, mica was also briefly mined in Japanese-occupied Indonesia, which you can read about in this paper.)
I've been trying to figure out how to describe the solemnity implicit in a lot of writing about rocks. Geologic stoicism, maybe? Something about the vastness of time or the depths of the earth makes writers write in a way that tries to project their words into Some Great Reverential Silence. That Silence can be powerful (I've fallen for it plenty of times), but it also can get a little caught up in itself. The progression of rock-universe scenes in Everything Everywhere All At Once does a good job of taking in, and poking fun at, the atmosphere/aesthetic I'm describing poorly here.
This essay has its moments of geologic stoicism, but I appreciate that it's explicitly about situating music (more specifically, musical reproduction) into a narrative about mineral use in technologies. Media studies writing sometimes gets so caught up in the framing of various things "as media", as conveying information, that the specific form that information takes—and the way that form matters, sound or image or smell—sometimes gets lost in all the media-ing and rocky wonder.