Fresh from Ganymede!

I sus­pect many of the people receiving this mes­sage have paused, in recent nights, to look toward the Great Con­junc­tion of Jupiter and Saturn. I bought a tele­scope a while back, and this week I’ve kept it pointed at the two planets hud­dled in their conference.

Excuse the self-quotation but, in Sourdough, I wrote

It’s always new and aston­ishing when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.

to which we can add: seeing the pin­prick Galilean moons for the first time with your naked eye. This is old science, old magic; it remains aston­ishing.

The key, for me, is the unbroken chain of light. If my tele­scope was some kind of dig­ital device with an image sensor and a high-res­o­lu­tion display, the view would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be aston­ishing, because the aston­ish­ment is: that these pho­tons erupted out of the sun, leapt across the solar system, lev­ered matching pho­tons out of those moons — those worlds — which crossed the chasm back to Earth and car­omed between two mir­rors to strike some cells waiting in the back of my eyeball. An analog link; a silver thread.

And, just as aston­ishing: there are enough pho­tons for all of us. We can all look up and receive our allotment, fresh from Ganymede!

There are really just SO many pho­tons.

I want to end this year by going back to the basics. The Society of the Double Dagger’s inter­ests are wide-ranging — an understate­ment — but/and this newsletter began because of books, and it is always to that pre­oc­cu­pa­tion that we will return.

What IS a book?

I’m fond of Craig Mod’s argu­ment that what makes a book is its edges, to which I will add: a book requires col­li­ma­tion.

I mean that in the optical sense; a beam of light is said to be col­li­mated when all its pho­tons are pointing in the same direction.

Most light on Earth is uncol­li­mated, because most light is pro­duced by big radiant objects made up of a huge number of particles, each tossing off pho­tons in dif­ferent directions. The writhing glow of a camp­fire is text­book uncol­li­mated.

Here I unfurl my analogy, muhuha: I think the kind of writing and thinking people do on the internet — on news web­sites, on social media, in email newslet­ters — is like camp­fire light, or the light of an inscan­des­cent bulb. And that’s great! Who doesn’t like a camp­fire?

That kind of light blooms wide … and fades fast.

Col­li­mated light is dif­ferent. It doesn’t scatter and dif­fuse into darkness.

The light that reaches us from stars is col­li­mated, but only by accident; we see such a narrow needle of any star’s roaring output that the pho­tons are effec­tively parallel.

The more illus­tra­tive example is the laser, which man­u­fac­tures col­li­mated light. Most lasers (all?) have two mir­rors inside, and only pho­tons that have bounced straight between them are per­mitted to exit and become part of the laser’s beam.

This kind of light can make its way through the gulf of space, or burn a hole in the wall.

So, I think writing a book requires col­li­ma­tion: get­ting your mate­rial pointed in the same direction, fil­tering out the bits that wander elsewhere. I don’t mean to sug­gest that a book, fic­tion or nonfic­tion, ought to be single-minded; some of the very best feel polyphonic, full to bursting. But I’d argue that, in those cases, it is full-to-bursting-ness that pro­vides the axis of col­li­ma­tion. The mate­rial has been aimed at that objective.

A book is a laser beam.

The ecology of pub­lishers and book­stores and libraries all assist in this col­li­ma­tion, by the way. Maybe they’re like the mir­rors in the laser, bouncing a book back and forth, back and forth, pow­ering it up … 

There is a sense I think a lot of people share: that their con­tri­bu­tions to social media, even if they are bit-by-bit rewarding, don’t really add up to much. A sense of all those words and images just … burning away, like morning mist over a pond. And: I think that sense is correct!

The dura­bility of col­li­ma­tion is avail­able when­ever you sit down to clarify your inten­tions and orga­nize your mate­rial, in any medium. I don’t know that the internet resists this discipline, exactly … but it sure does reward the bonfires.

For as much as I enjoy sending this newsletter — and I enjoy it a LOT — its sat­is­fac­tions do not com­pare to my books, which are, if not quite laser beams … well, they point in a direction. They have been my first glimpse of a longer game.

And this is why I do the Gawain thing every year, too. It’s a chance to align myself, aston­ishingly, with all the poem’s other readers, ten years ago and fifty and five hundred; to sit inside the beam of the book.

The key, for me, is the unbroken chain of light.

Here’s a laser blast for you!

I’ve been reading The Golden Rhi­noc­eros by François-Xavier Fau­velle, trans­lated by Troy Tice. It’s fantastic, totally unexpected; a mod­ular trea­sury of scenes and events from the African Middle Ages, each with a gor­geous woodcut illus­tra­tion by Roland Sárkány. The book reads almost like a col­lec­tion of fables, but it’s all real, rig­orous his­tory.

The Golden Rhi­noc­eros also boasts one of the best intro­duc­tions I’ve read in a long time, cov­ering not only the “what” but the “how” and “why” of the book, which is chal­lenging and thrilling, espe­cially for people who have read a lot — or think they have — about the Middle Ages.

Troy Tice’s trans­la­tion is mus­cular and inviting; in the acknowledgements, Fau­velle thanks him for con­ver­sa­tions that improved the book in both languages. Now, if only Tice’s name was on the cover, too … !

I had the thought, breezing past the long lines at the post office this season: everyone should sign up for PirateShip!

It’s a simple, stream­lined web­site that allows you to pur­chase and print USPS postage at home. No sub­scrip­tion required; you can buy one label for $6 and never return. I became acquainted with the site while ship­ping olive oil, but now I use it for every­thing else, too.

This reads like a pod­cast ad, but seriously, I just want you to know about PirateShip.

I think the thing that holds a lot of people back is the per­ceived hassle of weighing things. Well, you can buy a little dig­ital kitchen scale, or, even better, you can just make your best guess, and let USPS charge (or reimburse) you for the difference! Yes, they do that!

The Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp has put its huge col­lec­tion of wood­cuts online, thou­sands and thou­sands of them, all pho­tographed at very high res­o­lu­tion and released into the public domain. Basically: per­fect.

My favorites are the ornamental capitals, like this killer R:

Or this … uh … what IS this?

Go find out.

Ear­lier this month, the Museum Plantin-Moretus streamed a pre­sen­ta­tion explaining how they doc­u­mented all these wood­cuts; if you’re inter­ested in printing and/or archives, it’s worthwhile.

What is an indi­vidual? An intro­duc­tion to some head-spinning work:

At the core of that working def­i­n­i­tion was the idea that an indi­vidual should not be con­sid­ered in spa­tial terms but in tem­poral ones: as some­thing that per­sists stably but dynam­i­cally through time. “It’s a dif­ferent way of thinking about indi­viduals,” said Mitchell, who was not involved in the work. “As kind of a verb, instead of a noun.”

Why not indeed??

A sound­board of Alex Trebek affirmations by Rex Sorgatz.

My friend Nathan Taylor recently taught a uni­ver­sity course on the dark magick of the com­mand line, and one of his slide decks pro­vides a per­fect potted his­tory of Unix. It’s fas­ci­nating and inspiring.

The year was 1969. Bell Labs had ordered a PDP-11 for the team working on what would become Unix, but the com­puter didn’t arrive all at once:

So, the soft­ware was written for the hard­ware as the hard­ware arrived, rather than designing the entire system in advance; for instance, no disk drive was sup­ported until it actu­ally showed up in the lab!

Here is Nathan’s entire syllabus, with links to slides. There’s some won­derful mate­rial here.

Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese video game industry. The web­site Video Game Densetsu is up to some­thing really interesting: a kind of feral his­tory, pow­ered by social media assemblage. If you’re inter­ested in video game his­tory, you’ll want to go explore.

Related, vibewise: Fictional Videogame Stills, Suzanne Treister’s beau­tiful art project from 1991. Another laser beam.

Sara Hen­dren on “areas of moral clarity,” and what it means to actu­ally argue over tough ques­tions in public:

Per­haps it’s little wonder that the hand-wringing stance — how complicated—is the most we can hope for in our thinking spaces and our best journalism.

But: I’m dis­sat­is­fied with the wringing of hands.

There’s a poem tucked into this newsletter from Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, and it’s a stunner. I know “follow this link and read a poem” is sort of a tough sell, but WOW this one — titled “Legal Fiction,” by William Empson — struck me powerfully. And it res­onates with the celes­tial dis­cus­sion above … 

This is your recur­ring reminder that many ubiq­ui­tous punc­tu­a­tion marks began as “crit­ical symbols” used to anno­tate manuscripts … at … the Library of Alexandria:

The asterisk, in turn, was cre­ated by one of Zenodotus’s successors. In the second cen­tury bce, Aristarchus of Samoth­race intro­duced an array of new crit­ical symbols: the diple (>) called out note­worthy fea­tures in the text; the diple peri­es­tigmene (⸖) marked lines where Aristarchus dis­agreed with Zenodotus’s edits; and, finally, the aster­iskos (※), or “little star,” denoted dupli­cate lines.

The link above will take you to Shady Characters, one of the world’s loveliest web­sites. I am way overdue for a re-recommendation of Keith Houston’s book by the same name: a truly great read on the scaf­folding of reading itself.

(Fun fact: the antag­o­nist in an early draft of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store was named Zenodotus, after the great librarian of antiquity.)

What a stun­ning moment. We are always, at all times, the people we were and the people we are going to be.

Inside the Secret Math Society Known as Nicolas Bourbaki!

1. There is a secret math society.
2. Its name — the name of the whole society — is Nicolas Bourbaki.
3. Yes.

From Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Min­istry for the Future:

Then later I looked it up and learned that admi­rals’ salaries top out at $200,000 a year. No one in the Navy gets paid more than that per year. So they call this the pay dif­ferential, it’s some­times expressed as a ratio from lowest pay to highest. That ratio for the Navy is about one to eight. For one of the most respected and well-run orga­ni­za­tions on Earth. Some­times this gets called wage parity or eco­nomic democracy, but let’s just call it fairness, effec­tiveness, esprit de corps. One to eight. No wonder those admi­rals seemed so normal — they were!

This respected, mythol­o­gized institution … it’s like … pretty socialist 😇

The word “gossip” is underused. Most news is gossip; I say that with total admiration. Gossip is useful! Practical! Plenty of it is true, or on its way to becoming true.

What are anony­mous senior offi­cials quoted in newspapers, if not gossips? Again, that sounds like I am trying to diminish the offi­cials, but it’s the opposite: I am trying to ele­vate the gossip.

Intelligence, likewise: call it a “gossip briefing,” frame it up right.

In dis­trib­uted com­puter systems, there’s some­thing called a gossip protocol. See, the pro­gram­mers get it.

Next time you hear someone say “he’s such a gossip,” under­stand the state­ment to be, “he’s such an effec­tive processor of socially-embedded infor­ma­tion.”

I’ve been reading Robert MacFarlane’s Land­marks, a sort of ety­mo­log­ical trav­el­ogue (!) cel­e­brating the UK’s store­house of hyper­spe­cific nat­ural language. He wants us to enjoy words like smeuse,

a Sussex dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the reg­ular pas­sage of a small animal.”

And ammil,

a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs, and grass when freeze fol­lows thaw, a beau­tifully exact word for a fugi­tive phe­nom­enon I have sev­eral times seen but never before been able to name.

There’s the almost painfully beau­tiful èit, which

refers to “the prac­tice of placing quartz stones in moor­land streams so that they would sparkle in moon­light and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.”

And here we find the res­o­nant root of Darth Vader’s dark order:

a sìth, “a fairy hill or mound,” is a knoll or hillock pos­sessing the qual­i­ties which were thought to con­sti­tute desir­able real estate for fairies — being well-drained, for instance, with a dis­tinc­tive rise, and crowned by green grass.

I bought the Kindle edi­tion because I was impa­tient but I regret the choice, because this is a book thick with glos­sary pages, as much for random access as reading straight through. I’ll def­i­nitely acquire a paper copy.

Besides, Land­marks needs to stand on the shelf next to one of my finest finds ever, Word-Hoard by Stephen A. Barney — 

—an Old Eng­lish vocabulary, nothing more, nothing less, slim as a pamphlet. Inside, it’s just a repro­duc­tion of a type­written original; per­fect.

Above, you can see the entry for helm, which is of course a helmet. We learn that it’s related to hall and hell—and suddenly, an invis­ible web blazes to life. On the next page, Stephen A. Barney tells us

HALL, HELL, and HELM are all cov­ered places of a sort; derived from the same root are HOLE, HOLLOW, HULL, and HOLSTER.

Of course; isn’t a helmet just a hall for the head?

Words res­onate with each other, and with us, like the strings in a piano. I didn’t always know this: when you play a piano’s key, it strikes one string, but many pro­duce sound, sum­moned into sym­pa­thetic vibration.

Words are spells; there’s no get­ting around it. There’s a reason glamour (which meant magic spell before it meant glossy allure) shares a root with grammar.

All of this is woven tight with my attrac­tion to what I have called Eng­lish Mid­winter Mode. I love riders in the snow, magic that works only on the longest night of the year, a sprig of holly set above the door as ward against malevolence. I guess what I’m saying is I love The Dark Is Rising, but only because Susan Cooper dis­tills it so well, this Anglo­phone inheritance.

And it is all just Eng­lish, of course. Hop over to another lin­guistic net­work and you’ll find a whole dif­ferent set of sounds and spells … but still, I believe, some of the same feelings.

The images in this newsletter are water­color ren­di­tions by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche of strange effects wit­nessed in skies all over the world fol­lowing the erup­tion of Krakatoa in 1883. (One is from 1876, unrelated, but lovely.) There haven’t been that many events expe­ri­enced in sync by every person on this planet. The pan­demic is surely one. Krakatoa was per­haps another.

Eruptions; there’s an ety­mology for you.

The images are avail­able thanks to the Public Domain Review, one of the truly great web­sites. Their Instagram account is a dream.

For a while, these newslet­ters have felt to me like “too much and not enough”:

• “too much” because they are so comically overstuffed, and
• “not enough” because you have no idea how much I cut out!! 😝

I have some reme­dies for this coming in 2021: a new design and some fresh affor­dances for me and you both.

In the meantime, happy Christmas, hap­pier New Year. I hope to see you on Jan­uary 1st; the Green Knight awaits, as freaky as always.

From Oakland, the dif­fuse glow of a friendly bulb,

Robin

December 2020