SCALES #27: "Oh plum! My Captain!"
Hello!
Happy December. This newsletter is back. A bunch of newsletter-unfriendly Thursdays have flown by and I've finally realized I'd rather get one out than stay tied to the Thursday schedule. Writing this is also part of today's strategy to stay off Twitter, which has has been killing it as far as serving up a view of both a steady breakdown of democratic norms and increasingly ornate plum & icebox tweets is concerned. (Subject line courtesy of @tinysubversion's latest.)
Do you know what I've been much happier spending time online doing? Taking a Lancaster University free online course on Humphry Davy, his science and his poetry. I get the sense the student body is 90% British pensioners, leading to delightful, nostalgia-heavy discussion threads.
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Recently my research group has purchased, from a different lab, an improved version of the electrodynamic balance we use to levitate single charged droplets. Getting it set up has been fun in a way that's much more "putting together a Lego set" than the normal laboratory "flailing about, trying new ideas until something works". A refreshing clarity about the intended outcome. Of course, that kind of task tends to get done quickly, and pretty soon it will be time once again to use the device to do something new and uncertain.
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I just finished Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I haven't read one of these self-conscious Big American Novels for a while, and I enjoyed the luxurious slowness with which large-scale formal structures come into view, symphony-like: the capaciousness of several standalone sections (the escape from Prague, the Antarctic sojourn), the motivic tying-together (the Empire State Building, the Golem, the escapes). One thing that felt very strange and of its year 2000 publication to me: the intermittent butting in of the omniscient pseudo-scholarly narrator from well after the story's end.
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So I was listening to this podcast...
New podcast of note: Closer Than They Appear. I've loved podcast host Carvell Wallace's essayistic approach. The form is pretty standard—interviews and some surrounding commentary—but he harnesses that form to probe a deeply-felt question: what effect can an individual's interactions with others have, in the current political moment in the U.S.? Cuts perpendicularly to a lot of what I read about massive, impersonal systems and structures in an interesting way, with enough clear-eyed rigor that it doesn't get lost in unfounded optimism or pessimism. Great guests, too: Mahershala Ali, Shereen Marisol Meraji, Dr. Ayaz Virji (the Muslim doctor living in Dawson, Minnesota).
On Code Switch: how Freedom Rider Miss Mary Hamilton fought for the use of an honorific in court, and the legacy of black women in connecting the civil rights movement to the women's liberation movement.
The Daily fleshing out the Times story on under-reported civilian casualties in Iraq is the Daily doing what it does best.
The New Yorker has a new poetry editor, Kevin Young, so the magazine's poetry podcast has similarly moved on from Paul Muldoon's gentle brogue. Recently: Tracy K. Smith, feat. her fire-breathing poem from the magazine, "Declaration".
99% Invisible on the hollowing out of a prominent African-American neighborhood in St. Louis, and the ongoing theft of valuable St. Louis brick from vacant historic houses.
On Uncivil: Female Civil War reënactors, and Civil War soldiers themselves, disguised as men.
The Messenger. Honestly, this show. At least from my limited vantage point, criminally underlooked.
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Newsletter news
Tim Carmody's is active! Writer Michelle Dean has started one. Mallory is trying out a paid email subscription model. Judy Berman's New York Review of Reviews is perfect for my love of reading tons of reviews of works I never actually experience myself.
Late-breaking news: Sensor Readings will be a newsletter by Matthew Braga on "a fascination with sensors, the data they collect, and how that data is used and abused. I'm talking about the myriad lasers, microphones, cameras, and radios that are changing everything from the way we drive to how we shop — and, of course, the algorithms that underly it all."
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If you want to follow the production of small-batch California olive oil, might I recommend @fatgoldoliveoil on Instagram?
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Two series and a one-off from the Paris Review Daily:
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Nina MacLaughlin's Novemberance: "The smell of sweet mulching leaves. Milkweed silk like moonlight. Listen. Quiet. Listen. Footfalls in steady rhythm in the air, the constant beat, unlimping: no vem ber no vem ber no vem ber no vem no vem no vem"
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Life Sentence, careful unpackings of single sentences by Jeff Dolven: "That and is the moment when the sentence’s ambition to periodicity—to being the kind of sentence that makes a rainbow of its syntax, bending toward a promised end—is flicked away like cigarette ash," — and — "Such hard skepticism about rhetoric is encoded in Stein’s rhetorical sentence, which lifts, sustains, and settles us into its conclusions as though they had the natural force of gravity. It would not be like Stein, however, to turn such a sentence—and it is a beaut—merely against itself. She fights the cadences, mocks them, but loves them, too; if you hear, beneath or somehow alongside the demagogue, the student of rhetoric self-correcting through a rudimentary exercise, practicing oratory, it all sounds a little different."
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And from Anthony Madrid, a golden close reading of "Oh, Susanna". ("Another thing. Getting technical here, but have you ever noticed the run of vowel sounds in the chorus?")
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I think this Adam Serwer piece will have real staying power: "Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied."
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Science!
Lake Vanda is a meromictic, hypersaline lake in Victoria Land, Antarctica, with salinity ten times that of seawater and three distinct temperature layers of water (via Kottke and @hildug).
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A new home for droplets.
Programming note: Conference and personal travel make the release schedule for the rest of this month uncertain. If an issue doesn't get out before then, I'll see you in the New Year!
—Adam