SCALES #41: smellscape survey
Hello!
I’m back! I couldn’t resist the numerological coincidence that I sent out #14 exactly a year ago, and now today, as if through a mirror, #41 falls again on Harvard commencement.
It’s the third commencement exercise here I’ve been around for, and my feelings are… more complicated this time around. I deeply wanted to be one of those red-robed folk today, but I didn’t quite manage to pull it off in time. So in addition to marveling at gorgeous weather and vicariously living through the smiling groups, a newly sharpened pinprick of envy/regret/self-pity every time I see the commencers. Soon, though!
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The break from the newsletter routine has caused me to think anew about what I want to get out of keeping a record of what I read, listen to, watch. Some recent things I've encountered along these lines: a segment on Ear Hustle about a prisoner who has read a prodigious amount since incarceration, Austin Kleon’s blog detailing his journal-intensive creative process. The innovative organizational scheme of Mandy Brown’s A Working Library. In the short novel Ties, by Domenico Starrone and translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, the elderly narrator goes through the accumulated materials in his recently ransacked study:
“…I was engrossed by what I’d underlined. I read entire pages, struggling to recall the year I’d devoted to this book or that. […] It wasn’t the written conscience of the authors I was chasing after—they were often names I’d forgotten, aging pages, concepts by now no longer used in contemporary culture—but rather, my own conscience: What had seemed right to me in the past, my convictions, my thoughts, my Self in the making.”
But then,
“Naturally I wasn’t able to find myself in any of that scrawling, in any of the exclamation points (what happens to the lovely sentences that enter our minds, how do they rouse us, how do they become devoid of meaning, or unrecognizable, or embarrassing, or ridiculous?), and I ended up forgetting the books. I proceeded to replace, into boxes and folders, papers of various sizes, index cards of my reading, notebooks with novels and short stories written before I’d turned twenty, countless cuttings from newspapers of the articles I’d published, also those in which others talked about me. To that huge amount of paper I added reels of radio programs, cassettes and DVDs that showed me on television in my glory days…”
and so on.
I’ve been messing around a little bit with archiving my SCALES-type notes on a bare-bones website. But regardless what comes of the technological noodling, I think I want to focus on recording not an exhaustive list of every piece of writing that passes in front of my eyes or audio that vibrates my eardrum, but my engagement with these things. It doesn’t have to be profound, but keeping the margin wide for my doodles, glosses, commentary.
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Sometimes, though, maybe the curation of the link collage is the personal engagement:
M. John Harrison with a too-true “recent history of bread”.
The landscape of Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s storm sequence: dream-like, constantly torn apart and reconfigured. (Inception, eat your heart out!)
“Creative Ways to Dodge a Chinese Internet Crackdown”, and the ways getting around the censorship (OCR-resistant text screenshots!) have left a mark on styles of online communication.
Tayari Jones on Death, Sex & Money, talking fame, ambition, success:
In 2011, I had a fellowship at Harvard University and I met a lot of famous people, people who had been very successful. And, actually, I think it harmed my ambition, meeting so many famous people, because I realized that the way you get famous and stay famous is to never be satisfied. You know, ambition is the opposite of contentment. And I think I decided I didn’t want to be famous because I just saw the constant kind of hamster wheel of it all. And so when the Oprah call came and I knew my book could possibly be a best-seller, I wanted to do everything I could to insulate myself against this never-satisfied, this constant running.
Sheila Heti on Longform, talking interviews, transcription, rule-following:
I like the intimacy you get with the person whose voice you’re transcribing. It feels more intimate than if you were just watching the videos, or I think even if you were the person making the videos, because you’re so attentive when you’re transcribing, and there’s a level of attentiveness and care that turns into love. So I always really liked it.
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My lab should start getting involved in smellscape measurements.
Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam