SCALES #15
Hello!
I've been ever-so-slowly making way through Teju Cole's essay collection, Known and Strange Things, and maybe unsurprisingly based on how much I liked his Sebaldian Open City, it's been great so far.
I don't think he would be regarded as a "stylist" in a traditional sense, in that his prose isn't aiming for lyrical heights. But the style he deploys throughout effectively matches his attitude: his writing is direct, not overly concerned with elegance, but still harmonious and balanced. You feel like you are gazing straight into his mind, which given his gifts as a wide-ranging thinker is a treat.
I had read too much into the autobiographical aspect of his Open City narrator, so I thought Cole was a doctor-turned-writer, but it turns out that's not quite the case (he started medical school, but then went on to earn an art history PhD). Part of the reason I was convinced he was a doctor was because of what could be seen as a scientific aspect to his approach: reducing things into their component pieces, an interest in rendering accurate descriptions of exactly what something is.
A few discoveries from these essays: Gueorgui Pinkhassov's Instagram account (as well as Cole's), Cole on artists trawling Street View and other Google products.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Lost Camels. (Please water your camels even if they have a hump!)
The kicker (ha!) to this story on the Brazilian national soccer jersey.
Late modernist French architect Jean Renaudie. (His social housing project at the foot of a ruined château in Givors looks beautiful.)
Highly recommend this foray into "slow radio" by the BBC: a recording of a four-hour walk to Hay-on-Wye.
Links
From way over here in Dunkinland, had no idea about the history of the pink doughnut boxes of Southern California.
Choice cut from a new Missy Elliott profile: "a place where the social codes seemed to be as thick and intricate as in Downton Abbey or any E. M. Forster novel, but with sweet tea and beepers".
Finding it pleasing that the holders of the lowest Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath numbers range from Hawking to Firth to May to Portman to Lehrer to Aldrin.
Roseville considering being Minnesota's first sanctuary suburb.
In-depth access to the first year of multiple new chemistry professors.
Seidl shows up as the publisher in a few of Teju Cole's essays on photography, so a welcome coincidence to read Rebecca Mead's profile.
The Mall of America's writer in residence definitely knows the trick to getting commercial gigs.
The Man Who Wanted to Redeem the World with Logic both contains fascinating characters in a swirling mixture of neuroscience, mathematics, and electronic computing, and illuminates how the "human-brain-as-a-digital-computer" model was prefaced by "digital-computer-as-a-human-brain". (h/t EK)
China Miévelle is deeply skeptical of "bad utopias", "carbon colonialism".
Meredith Monk figuring out how to best preserve her legacy: "“Panda Chant II,” a rousing selection from “The Games,” a science-fiction music-theater work Ms. Monk wrote with Ping Chong in 1983, is just over two minutes long but took seven years to transcribe."
Left this very carefully handled post mortem of Alan Gilbert's New York Philharmonic tenure feeling... troubled.
The challenges of preserving historic African-American cemeteries. (h/t BLDGBLOG)
"Each week, Boohoo debuts 700 new styles on its site; for context, that kind of volume is akin to two Anthropologie stores’ worth of merchandise." (h/t @s_m_i)
Recommended for the nostalgia-inducing screensaver GIFs.
"I feel that a book isn’t properly edited until it’s translated into a different language, because you get past all the fascination you have for your own language. You’re left with the very structure, the wires of the book, and you gain a deeper understanding of your limits, your inspiration."
Science (and technology)!
"As there was no longer a connection between the operator's hand movement and the bits transmitted, there was no concern about arranging the code to minimize operator fatigue, and instead Murray designed the code to minimize wear on the machinery, assigning the code combinations with the fewest punched holes to the most frequently used characters." The precursors to ASCII.
Using the "noise" in a 5-mile long fiber optic loop on Stanford's campus to see cars, pedestrians, a fountain, and more.
"The strange geology of the floor of the Gulf is mostly caused by thick underlying layers of salt. Scientists think the salt probably accumulated around the time when Africa was just starting to separate from the Americas around 200 million years ago. At that point, the Gulf was probably a separate basin that was filled with seawater that later evaporated, leaving a blanket of salt behind. Later, as the basin became a gulf, the salt was covered with sediment deposited by rivers."
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Oversized chess pieces on the move.
Feeling Peach as my favorite social network right now,
—Adam