Mouth-juice of vowels
hello,
Lots of self-promotional content in this one. Apologies. But regular readers will be excited for the first appearance of a picture (if I can make it work).
Also I’ve received occasional complaints that this doesn’t format properly in dark mode on some devices. I don’t really know how to fix that but I’ve started with a fresh template in the hope that it’ll help.
But if that, or anything else fails to satisfy, please unsubscribe.
5 things:
One of the miracles of the modern world is how well the Acquired podcast works. It shouldn’t. It’s very long. It’s about bizzness and venture capital. It’s two men. You honestly wouldn’t believe how long it is. But it’s often very compelling. And this episode, about Epic Health Systems is magnificent. An extraordinary company. An extraordinary founder. (Judith Faulkner “the most successful female entrepreneur in history”). And a great set of principles, including
Do not go public.
Do not be acquired.
2. Here’s a passage from Question 7, about Leo Szilard:
"Wiping his glasses with a wet finger, Leo Szilard decided to pursue his irreconcilable thoughts by walking London’s streets. But he had scarcely left his hotel that dreary damp day when, approaching the flank of Russell Square heading towards the British Museum, he was stopped from crossing the road by a red stoplight on Southampton Row. One light goes out and another lights up, thought Szilard. And after that? As he stared at the traffic light’s three coloured circles, one illuminated, two dimmed, all other things—traffic, pedestrians, smog, buildings, drizzle—abruptly receded into oblivion. For several critical seconds nothing else existed in the world— —and when the world returned it was a world forever changed. One light goes out and another lights up and then another — and another! And another, and another. These banalities struck Leo Szilard with the force of mystical revelation. But for a moment what that revelation was eluded him. Szilard could see and know but he was unable to say exactly what it was he saw and knew. What if there were a country where there were many birds? Where every bird shot magically produced two more bullets killing two more birds in turn, and those two dead birds produced four more bullets killing four birds and producing eight bullets? And what if that eight became sixteen and sixteen thirty-two? What then? Leo Szilard felt a sudden and overwhelming vertigo. The traffic lights swirled all around, multiplying before him as three lights became nine and nine eighty-one. Knowledge collided with imagination to produce a fever of ideas that in turn released more energy into Szilard’s suddenly cascading thoughts. The lights changed. As he crossed the street he continued staring at the lights. If there were an element which when split by one neutron emitted two neutrons, it would only need massing enough of that element together to sustain more of the same as more atoms were split by more neutrons, creating new, unlimited energy as they continued multiplying. No one before had ever thought of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.”
I’m in Russell Square a lot and I often think about this moment. I even made a short video.
4. From Essay’s After Eighty, Donald Hall on the time when poets began performing, like musicians.
"When my generation learned to read aloud, publishing from platforms more often than in print, we heard our poems change. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the out-loud mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.”
5. Since Russell Square has come up. Here’s Deborah Levy:
"At the far end of the square is the Gardens Café, its white plastic chairs stacked in a puddle of rain. One remaining plastic table and a broken umbrella have not yet been put away, reminding the public of the true purpose of the gardens: a place to convivially eat and drink al fresco in a square of old trees, to flirt, to rest, to think, to enjoy the general ambience of History and Scholarship via the universities and British Museum nearby. Inside the café, which is open despite the weather, the walls are painted a deep Mediterranean blue. There is something about this garden square that resembles a deserted beach resort in winter. Fellini’s film La Strada comes to mind. The roar of the traffic can sound like the ocean and the café has all the melancholy of a seaside tea room selling sun hats out of season. Fellini called his film ‘a kind of Chernobyl of the psyche’, and while it would be an over-dramatic comparison with Russell Square Gardens on a grey day of ceaseless rain, lone London seagulls scream in the sky. It is possible to listen to the cadence of the traffic as if it were waves and imagine you are about to deliver a heartbreaking revelation to the person you most love.”
SELF-PROMOTIONAL CONTENT
About 40 of you were kind enough to listen to the last Elite Panic I stuck on here. Thank you! Especially since it was a slightly dreary ambient thing. This time I’d like to direct your attention to an EP of danceable, jazzy, housey grooves. I’m quite pleased with it. And with the sub-Morley ZTT meanderings on bandcamp. (Also forgive the way that an LLM has improved me while putting me in a suit and making som artwork. Old men and their vanity.
Less selfishly, some of you might remember The Account Planning School of the Web. Well, I’m bringing it back. Sort of. Deets.
I’ll give you back your day.
Russell
(There are 1012 of you. 1012 is a trillion. There are roughly 1012 stars in the Andromeda galaxy and the surface of the human body houses roughly 1012 bacteria.)