With All That Consumerism Out Of The Way
I’m sorry to report that I’ve become a shoulder bag person.
I used to overstuff all of my pockets, sometimes wearing a windbreaker in unseasonable weather just for access to more pockets. Phone, wallet, keys, sunglasses, earphones... and then where does a water bottle go? If I want to bring a book or my Kobo, where do those go?
I occasionally used tote bags for this purpose, but tote bags are a pain for daily use. I recently realized they’re supposed to be held in the held, arms fully extended, instead of slinging them on your shoulder, where they tend to fall off.
Then I realized there’s an obvious solution: those Uniqlo shoulder bags that everyone seems to have. But in practice, I didn’t like the design, so instead I went with a tomtoc Aviator-T33, specifically the 2.5L version (which is apparently only sold on tomtoc’s website, not Amazon).
Highly recommended! It’s big enough to comfortably carry a 600ml water bottle and my other pocket gear, and if I stretch it slightly, it can even fit my Kobo Libra 2. But it doesn’t take up too much space on my back or add much weight to my shoulders, and it fits snugly on my back without jostling. I can’t believe I spent so long without taking up shoulder bags.
Speaking of tomtoc: I’ve been very happy with their high-quality-lowish-price bags. I’ve settled on three bags — the 2.5L shoulder bag for daily use, a 10L briefcase for carting laptops around, and a 24L backpack for travel. They’re all nicely thought-through (luggage straps! plenty of pockets!) and feel reasonably sturdy for the price. Though caveat I haven’t had any of their bags for much more than a year or two and I’m not sure how solid their warranty policy is.
My friend Kevin recently pointed out that he’s had the same Zojirushi water bottle for something like a decade. I was in the market for a new water bottle...
My beloved a6 memobottle receives far too many “is that a flask?” comments and only carries 376ml of water.
So I ended up ordering Zojirushi’s SM-VA60, which holds 20oz (~600ml) of water, keeps drinks hot or cold for hours, has a handy lip for sipping, and locks so it doesn’t spill. Highly recommended!
With all that consumerism out of the way:
I recently finished the new R.F. Kuang novel Katabasis. I have... conflicted feelings. I love the concept in theory — grad school is so hellish that literally going to Hell is easier — but in practice found it a slog. It’s 550 pages! It didn’t need to be that long!
It almost feels like two novels awkwardly stapled together. There’s a lot of Poppy War-style classic fantasy (bone monsters controlled by evil sorcerers) but there’s also a lot of Ishiguro-adjacent introspection about Being A Very Sad Grad Student. I probably would have liked Katabasis more if the fantasy elements were cut and the focus was squarely on the mental torment of the main characters. But that probably wouldn’t have sold as well 🤷♀️
Which led me to a more general thought. Is novel length an underrated aspect of quality? The English Understood Wool works so well because it’s a breezy hundred pages — the snarky narrator would get annoying otherwise. On the other hand, I just finished Stephen King’s It, and that certainly couldn’t be less than 800 pages — it needs the time to worldbuild Derry and introduce two different versions of all seven main characters.
But novels need to be “worth the squeeze”, so to speak. I need to get enough out of my time investment, and the longer I spend reading a novel, the more I feel I need to “get out of it”. So, for instance, I enjoyed Mariana Enriquez’ Our Share of Night — but I probably would have appreciated it just as much if it was a few hundred pages shorter. Maybe that’s not fair! Maybe it needs the time to develop, just like It. But subjectively I “got more out” of It than Our Share of Night, so I rank the former higher than the latter.
But then I wonder: are short novels always going to have an advantage? It’s just more likely that a shorter novel is going to be “worth it” for the shorter time investment. Or maybe there’s effects (like in It or Infinite Jest or what have you) that depend on the additional length, and long and short novels are qualitatively and not merely quantitatively different. But then is it fair to say that Katabasis would be better shorter, or would it simply be a completely different book?
In any case: on to Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, which I can already tell based on the first ten pages is going to be an all-time favorite 😃
Small-world fun fact of the week: Eric Schwitzgebel, my favorite living philosopher, was advised in graduate school by Alison Gopnik, one of my other favorite thinkers, for whom the “Gopnikist” position on LLMs is named and who gave the “Large Language Models as a Cultural Technology” talk.
Speaking of Schwitzgebel: I’ve been noodling with my concept of farmers and foragers a bit more. A better framing I’ve come up with is fundamentalists vs skeptics.
I might expand on this more in a real essay, but essentially:
- Fundamentalists have a single viewpoint and like to argue for it (so, farmers in the old framing).
- Skeptics have varied viewpoints and are more comfortable raising questions than answering them (so foragers).
These don’t map neatly on actual fundamentalism and skepticism. A lot of capital-S Skeptics are deeply fundamentalist about their way of thinking — “that UFO sighting can’t possibly have been aliens” — while many religious figures are profoundly skeptical — by this definition, the Talmud is one of the all-time-great skeptical works.
Anyway, Schwitzgebel fits into a long line of skeptical philosophers, from Zhuangzi to Montaigne, who I tend to prefer to more fundamentalist thinkers. I’ve likely recommended it before, but I love his Weirdness of the World, which explores various “weird” philosophical hypotheses, but more fundamentally argues for a stance of openness at the weirdness and wonder of the universe.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! I hope the Thanksgiving turkey brought you gifts in the night.