SCALES #61: devilberries
Hello!
This here newsletter has wandered a bit from the original goal of assembling a series of small, imperfect dispatches into the wilds of perpetually unpublished over-ambition. I keep thinking I should send out a SCALES, but only after I research a little bit more about X, or finish reading Y, or reach the end of Z. I have visions of these huge magnum opuses (magnum opi? I guess not really) that, on top of everything else, frankly are not well-suited to the email newsletter form.
(What is perfectly suited to the form? An occasional dispatch reporting what’s on the author’s mind, not too long, which you can tell was dashed off in a single sitting and immediately posted, as a chatty letter would be. Can’t Complain being a prime example.)
(But also well suited to the form? As to any form, turning inward and considering the form itself. So at least I’m on firm ground there.)
I think one reason I’ve been feeling an impulse to use SCALES as a vehicle for big, open-ended projects is the change in my daily work. This newsletter started at a time when my timeline for completing a piece of work—a paper, a dissertation—was months or years of effort. Being able to write and finish a newsletter in an hour or two, on a weekly basis, was a refreshingly quick change of pace. Now that much more of my working day involves sitting down, finishing a task, and moving on to the next thing, I think I’ve been feeling less urgency to use SCALES as an outlet for finishing clearly bounded pieces of work. Which is fine! I just need to figure out how to split out my ideas into SCALES-sized pieces.
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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One part of moving to a new place is experiencing the slow shift from feeling like a visitor to a place to a resident. Actually, it’s not quite right to say it’s something that’s experienced—it’s a slow kind of adjustment, hard to perceive as it's happening. For a little bit it seems strange and new to be constrained by an isthmus’ geography, or hear strong Boston accents in the wild, or turn a corner and see the old hulking Airdock improbably emerge, but then it just becomes a legible, expected part of the landscape. A disjoint change in perspec
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A This American Life segment featuring a Denver Zoo night zookeeper going around and saying goodnight to all the animals is probably the most delightful part of the “Show of Delights” episode.
Less delightful: how this Exponent episode clearly lays out how Spotify's plan to commoditize podcast advertising threatens to do the same thing to independent podcasting that has happened to the independent web.
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Don’t eat the berries on the devil strip,
—Adam