SCALES #60: "seam in the year"
Hello!
Happy 2020! SCALES is back for a new run. Months of patchy silence over this channel hasn’t meant I haven’t been stewing about potential SCALES content. There’s a lot of ~new~ I want to share, but in this issue I want to be a little more backward-looking, reminiscing about media from those long-ago days of late 2019.
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives in the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is intentionally capacious. You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe/unsubscribe (link at bottom).
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Through the end of 2019 email newsletters and podcasts have continue to be for me, maybe improbably, some of the best tools I’ve come across for giving me what feels like a direct line to distinctive, idiosyncratic, sometimes knotty thoughts and deeply researched obsessions of all kinds of interesting people.
This is hardly an original observation, but to reiterate what makes them special: they both seem to hit a sweet spot in terms of having the right amount of friction in their creation and sharing—they stand apart and don’t quite get swept along in the social media torrent. In Craig Mod’s parlance, they have edges. They’re standalone transmissions that largely sidestep the pressure of gaming the algorithms that rule T H E F E E D.
So, a sampling of some of the fruits of this culture. Joys of both the reassuringly regular and the sublimely irregular dispatches. Late 2019 felt like a vibrant time in these spaces and helped inspire me to keep SCALES an ongoing concern.
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In newsletters—
"What is Enough", Leah Reich:
“One of the things I found most interesting about my time in Sweden was the curiosity I developed around what it means to live a life. To have and be enough. To enjoy a life that is a normal, average, perfectly lovely life. Picking mushrooms in the fall, ice skating and vacationing in Thailand in winter, welcoming the little Easter witches (a real thing) in spring, spending the entirety of summer outside on the water, regardless of the weather. A life where you stay put and work on building your community, and keep those friends for always. A life that worries less about achievement and accomplishment and advancement—hell, that worries less, period—and instead focuses on living life before it’s too late.”
"nothing time", Helena Fitzgerald:
“The frantic aggrandizing mood at this seam in the year can feel like it runs counter to forgiveness, and so can the next day’s arbitrary commitment to out-loud goals, as though we were never at any other time allowed to resolve to change our lives, as though this were our only chance. But the real holiday already happened, or is happening, extending across the 31st and the 1st, across the imaginary gap between years, between calendar numbers, stretching out as lazy as a cat.”
"the same, all-coordinating light", Anne Boyer:
“I like even the most disorderly garden, but I am against the sense-vacated world of the screen. In screen life, a certain kind of visuality (straight-ahead looking) has been distorted into a primary means of knowing: our eyes to see clearly should see with distance and peripherality, and every other sense, too, given the richest possibility to develop, rather than atrophying for profit, fed only the addictive, dulling, input of the marketplace. … A garden is a system of vital souls, every creature in it pushing and pulling, growing and receding, taking and contributing, beginning and ending, and myself, in that system, is both important and not, doing all the same things, respirating as the cats and the cardinals and soil microbes do. Even at its peak reckless chaos, or perhaps even most at its peak reckless chaos, the garden instructs through a series of multi-sensory inputs all of the living souls inside of it and in its way, harmonizes them, whispering into our glandular aspects instructions soon transmitted to our cells. The potatoes and barberry and the slugs and the gardener bask in the same, all-coordinating light.”
"Week 52, year of the meteor", Robin Sloan:
“It felt like a birthday packed with omens, and I decided to accept them. I had been feeling… I’m not sure how to say it: too quiet? Tucked away? Absent from a world I once inhabited? Like I had tried something—many things—and abandoned them too quickly? All that and more.”
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& in podcasts—
- On Gastropod, Frieda Caplan, the woman who brought (and named!) the kiwi to the US, along with all other bunches of “specialty” produce.
- On The Messenger, a years-later conclusion (in two parts) to Aziz’s story that is both heartening for Aziz and a continuing indictment of how much even the best-intentioned Westerners/Northerners struggle to provide anything more than the most band-aid of fixes to global refugee crises.
- On Song Exploder, Ezra Koenig, well, explodes my understanding of “Harmony Hall”
- On Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein follows a years-long story of a family agonizing over reaching out to a biological sibling.
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—Adam