Truthfeel

A few weeks ago, Kathryn and I took the train from Oak­land to Chicago, one (long) leg of a cross-country trip. It was terrific: not because Amtrak is terrific, but because even America’s infra­struc­tural neg­li­gence cannot defeat the inherent plea­sure of train travel. “If you strike me down, I shall become more pow­erful than you can pos­sibly imagine … ”

This was our first two-night train ride. We packed our own food, an XL picnic; we down­loaded episodes of Star Trek: Voy­ager for offline viewing; we brought books.

Along the way, as the aston­ishing Amer­ican West unfurled itself out­side the window of our neat roomette, I read — perversely? — The Making of the British Land­scape by Nicholas Crane. Mine was a used copy, a very fat paperback, and I was totally engrossed by the book’s inside-out his­tory, which places the vicis­si­tudes of war and pol­i­tics offstage, only dis­cussing them to the degree they influ­ence the phys­ical landscape. Nicholas Crane’s time­line runs from the Ice Age to the present, and he gives every era its due. Highly recommended.

And, yes: as I read about far-off islands (which were not always islands!!) the Rocky Moun­tains sailed past.

The most beau­tiful part of the route, for me, came early on the second day, when the train fol­lowed the course of the Col­orado River. There were groups of people down there, floating/boating/cavorting, and when the first of them spotted the train, they turned, dropped their shorts, and mooned us. Then, the second group did the same thing. Then the next, and the next; and for two hours, the Col­orado River was a parade of bare butts. These were not modest moonings! They were enthusiastic; well-practiced; ital­i­cized by the merry slap­ping of cheeks.

Kathryn and I agreed: from now on, when­ever we make this trip, we’re going to do it on this train.

Writers accom­plished and aspiring alike find them­selves at a for­tu­nate moment: book pub­lishing has recently been reframed by two modern, essen­tial guides.

The modern, essen­tial guide to trade pub­lishing is: So You Want to Pub­lish a Book? by Anne Trubek, pub­lished a year ago.

The modern, essen­tial guide to aca­d­emic pub­lishing is: The Book Pro­posal Book: A Guide for Schol­arly Authors by Laura Portwood-Stacer, pub­lished just this week!

Both books are superb: practical, accessible, deeply savvy. But/and the real magic might be the “stack” sup­porting each of them.

To begin, both have ongoing com­pan­ions in the newslet­ters each author writes: Anne’s Notes from a Small Press and Laura’s Manuscript Works Newsletter.

There is, further, a busi­ness bustling behind each book and newsletter: Anne’s Belt Pub­lishing and Laura’s Manuscript Works—the latter a con­sul­tancy for aca­d­emic authors that offers a very cool book pro­posal accelerator.

Years ago, I wrote about the value of working in public. It’s a tricky thing, though, because it’s easy for the “in public” to over­whelm the “working”, and sud­denly you’re stuck, very suc­cess­fully being the person who talks ABOUT the thing … but doesn’t really DO the thing. There’s a creeping char­la­tanism there; I say that with some sympathy, because I have felt the creep myself, many times.

Here, now, with Anne Trubek and Laura Portwood-Stacer, we have defin­i­tive counterexamples, each of them doing the thing AND doc­u­menting it, with total grace and magnetism — which is SO much work; I mean, seriously — and both oper­ating their for­mi­dable stack: book, newsletter, busi­ness. At the foun­da­tion of each is, of course: a voice, a mind. Two of the very best.

I truly believe that if you want to under­stand how books can be made in the 2020s, you should read Anne and Laura and … basi­cally no one else!

Over the past few months, I’ve been lis­tening to talks from Tim­othy Morton, the philoso­pher who pop­u­lar­ized the term “hyperobject”, which is an object mas­sively dis­trib­uted in space and time. Notably, cli­mate change is a hyperobject.

Lis­tening to this talk from March 2021, I made these notes:

Irony as contradiction; some­thing that both is and isn’t.

When things are con­tra­dic­tory but true, there’s a mouthfeel, and that’s called irony. What’s it made out of? It’s made out of reality. Reality sig­nals to us by way of irony. It’s not some cute joke or gesture; it is the SIG­NALING FUNC­TION of reality.

Reality is ironic, because every­where it is exactly what it is, but never as it appears.

Chips have mouthfeel.

Reality has ironyfeel.

The second ingre­dient is ambiguity. Accuracyfeel. Ambi­guity iden­ti­fies accuracy. Sci­ence is deeply ambiguous!

The word “ambiguous”, like “ambivalent”, doesn’t mean “neither”, but rather “both”, or “all”—all at once.

Remember that sci­ence is all sta­tis­tical now. Par­ticle physics, astronomy, psychology … 

Part of the truth­feel of sci­ence is its ambiguity.

Fas­cism is the elim­i­na­tion of irony & ambiguity.

Here’s a music rec from Tim­othy Morton, fea­turing a sample of Charlton Heston’s opening speech from the orig­inal Planet of the Apes. “Seen from out here every­thing seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless … ”

There’s a novel due out in October that I truly cannot wait for you to read, or have the oppor­tu­nity to read, if the con­cept clicks with you as pow­erfully as it clicked with me. It’s written by Tamara Shopsin, pub­lished by MCD, and its title is

Laser­Writer II

!!!!

I eagerly read an advance copy and then even more eagerly wrote a blurb, which I will repro­duce here, because I took my time com­posing it, and it gets the feeling right. “Love, love, LOVE” is prob­ably the most impor­tant part, because some things you love, and other things you love, love, LOVE:

“Early 1990s Mac computing” sounds niche, and maybe it is, but what a niche: packed full of inter­esting people who stum­bled together across the bridge between the analog and the digital. If that holds any res­o­nance for you at all, you will love, love, LOVE Tamara Shopsin’s new novel. Beau­ti­fully written and nerdily precise, Laser­Writer II reveals the things we didn’t know then; it enlivened my own memories, gave them new con­text and richness. This is a really spe­cial book.

Go look at Laser­Writer II’s per­fect cover. I can’t wait for October.

As ever, the newsletter will now dena­ture into a col­lec­tion of links that I’ve enjoyed enought to jot down. Every so often, I receive a reply to one of these col­lec­tions, some ver­sion of “how am I sup­posed to look at all this stuff?!” and of course, the answer is: you’re not!

Please think of these links, always, as the ven­dors at a night market. Most of them you pass by, simply enjoying the fact that they’re there; a few grab your attention; one or two actu­ally pro­vide nourishment.

Just wander through!

I’ve been reading a lot about Ice Age geology and ecology. To be totally honest with you, before I embarked on this reme­dial study, I didn’t reaaal­lyyy under­stand what a glacier was, or how one was formed. I maxed out at “vague sense of immense ice”.

Well, this lec­ture from Julie Fer­guson at UC Irvine is win­ning and revelatory. It’s a com­pre­hen­sive tour of glacial landscapes, and it gives you a solid sense of how they develop; how they move.

Recently, I read David Gange’s book The Frayed Atlantic Edge, a chron­icle of his mostly solo kayak expe­di­tion along the whole west coast of Britain and Ireland. It’s a trav­el­ogue rich with phys­ical detail that cross-fades with David’s appre­ci­a­tions of other work, ranging from his­tory to poetry, that has been impor­tant to him; so: a tour both mate­rial and intellectual.

One of those intro­duc­tions is to Tim Robinson, an Eng­lish artist who lived in Connemara, in Ireland, for many decades. Writing for the Guardian, Nicholas Allen explains that Tim

traced the end­less perimeter of the island’s rocky coastline … in search of “a single step as ade­quate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to the wave”. Observing pat­terns of rock, wind and water opened his prose to the fractal dimen­sions of the inlet, the cove, the cliff and dark­ening pool.

Tim wrote sev­eral books, one of which I’m reading now, but/and he also made MAPS! He made them not with GIS data but with his feet, insis­tent that nearly every stroke, every squiggle, should be informed by his own per­sonal explo­ration and observation.

The National Uni­ver­sity of Ireland, Galway has high-resolution scans of the maps, and they are amazing. I have to con­fess, though, that I wish I had a paper copy, like this one that Stephen Sparks found lin­gering in the post office near the place where Tim lived.

You might have picked up on the past tense; Tim Robinson died in 2020. He was 85 years old.

One of the things David Gange tells us about Tim Robinson’s maps is that he “cheats” the cliffs (which David hap­pens to be kayaking along, beside, under). The image below is not an oblique projection; the map is top-down, as most maps are, but, look at that line of cliffs!

They pop out impos­sibly — because, David tells us, Tim Robinson saw them as the essen­tial fea­ture of that coastline, for navigation, culture, and more. How could you pos­sibly shrink them into an invis­ible vertical? Even if that was geo­met­ri­cally or car­to­graph­i­cally “correct”, it would not, in any sense, pro­duce an accu­rate map. So, stretch the projection; give them space. Brilliant.

I sus­pect that, although I enjoyed the whole of David Gange’s book, its lasting influ­ence on me will be this one par­tic­ular introduction; and I think about how, if that is the case, it is no failing; the opposite: a triumph. What a gift, when a book acts as a matchmaker — when it really works.

When I squir­relled away the link to this newsletter from Adam Tooze, about the eco­nomic con­tin­gen­cies of the Second World War, I jotted this note:

The thrill of his­tory & theory at large scales; that spe­cial leverage of the mind; the final defense, maybe: that you can “think about” a great empire but a great empire cannot “think about” you. Not really. It can hold you in its grip, in its census, its databases, etc. But think about you, the­o­rize you, creatively? No. It cannot. Gotcha!

Here is Tooze, also, on carbon and class—one of the more provoca­tive things I’ve read lately related to cli­mate change.

Did you know that your eyes — yes, yours! — cannot see the color blue sharply? Here is an explanation that con­cludes with a crisp inter­ac­tive demonstration. It made me feel slightly insane, the way all the really good optical illu­sions do.

This long, mem­oiristic essay, via Jay Owens, is wonderful, in large part because I rec­og­nize none of it. It’s about a complex, rich response to a par­tic­ular musician; and this was not me; not ever. The essay describes a matrix of feel­ings that I find basi­cally alien … but/and, that’s the miracle, of course: it does so in a way that makes it pos­sible for me to receive and appre­ciate them, at least a little bit.

Also: not for nothing, I feel like Tim­othy Morton would love this essay.

Ear­lier this year, I joy­fully watched most of the anime Haikyu!!—I now want to go back in time and play high school volleyball — and, for others who have seen the show, this might be inter­esting: the gender of the man­gaka who cre­ated Haikyu!! is unknown. That’s a link to a Reddit thread, and it is a tes­ta­ment to the quality of the work that the spec­u­la­tion is so lively.

(Not to sug­gest I’m in the same league at all, but I’ll con­fess that I am very pleased when­ever someone reads Sour­dough and remarks later: Ah! But I thought Robin Sloan was a woman!)

These images used as studies for the book Con­cealing Col­oration in the Animal Kingdom had absolutely no busi­ness being so hip IN THE YEAR 1921:

I feel like I’m always saying this, but: I am so grateful for the labors of the people who assemble and main­tain these huge online archives, with so much mate­rial scanned at high resolution, added to the public domain.

Quiet mon­u­ments to a better internet.

Here is a stun­ning essay by Molly McGhee: moving, ghostly, impor­tant. It’s about, among other things, the way a little bit of money, even the impression of a little bit of money, can pro­tect you from so much suffering. It is that thinnest layer of fat: insu­la­tion from the cold of the universe.

You might, at some point, have encoun­tered a state­ment with roughly this form, intended to shock you:

2025 will be as many years from 1980 as 1980 was from 1935.

And it IS shocking, right? Well … maybe.

Is there any event or trans­for­ma­tion that could make those inter­vals “seem right” again? Any­thing that would snap 1980 out of its familiar prox­imity, into its “true” 1935-ish remoteness? (The sci-fi futures depicted on screens today are, after all, firmly fixed in sce­narios devised in the 1980s.) You might say, “perhaps an unprece­dented global crisis would do it!” but … we had one of those, and even that could not dis­lodge this smooth future-present.

Maybe “the modern condition” isn’t a condition, but the after­math of an event. Maybe that event was a phase change, like ice melting into liquid water. After that kind of trans­for­ma­tion, you can keep adding energy to the system, but the effect won’t be as dramatic — not until you achieve vaporization, anyway. (The nuclear metaphor is left as an exer­cise for the reader.)

Zyg­munt Bauman uses this image in his book Liquid Modernity—the “liquid” part is really key. Remember, Bauman is the one who wrote:

We feel rather than know (and many of us refuse to acknowledge) that power (that is, the ability to do things) has been sep­a­rated from pol­i­tics (that is, the ability to decide which things need to be done and given priority)

and that seems, to me, cen­tral to the strange sta­bility of our future-present.

Is the stub­born prox­imity of 1980 an illu­sion (asks the newsletter writer born in December of 1979)? Is it a simple func­tion of, among other things, the avail­ability and fidelity of recent media? Or is this uncanny feeling actu­ally a finely-tuned sensor reading, one we ought to be scrutinizing, because it might reveal some­thing deeply true?

You’ll find some of these questions, these preoccupations, curled up inside my new novel, the one I’m fin­ishing now.

(I should note that the AI heads will say, “Oh, just wait. Your next phase change is coming sooner than you think.” If you’re inter­ested in that prediction — that warning — you ought to sub­scribe to Jack Clark’s Import AI newsletter, the essen­tial chron­icle of the field that brings an added bonus: a bit of brain-sparking micro-fiction in every issue.)

Aren’t these paint­ings gorgeous? I feel like the one at the top of the newsletter, so bright and inviting, deftly refutes every assump­tion about the phrase “peat bog”. Kitty Kielland’s art is amazing; I encourage you to check out her biography.

Ear­lier this year, in ser­vice of that new novel — and I see sud­denly that this con­tinues the liquid theme; inter­esting — I read a ton about bogs, fens, marshes, and swamps. Here is some­thing I now know: the dif­fer­ence between them. Here is some­thing else: bogs sequester twice as much carbon as forests, even though they cover only ~3% of the Earth’s surface, com­pared to the forested ~30%. Hence,

the global peat carbon pool exceeds that of global veg­e­ta­tion (~560 giga­tonnes C) and may be of sim­ilar mag­ni­tude to the atmos­pheric carbon pool (~850 giga­tonnes C)

Here’s the trick. When a tree falls in a forest, it decomposes, and all the carbon it fixed in its form is liberated, slowly but surely, back into the atmos­phere. So, when you look at a forest, “what you see is what you get”, its carbon stock­pile pro­por­tional to its living mass.

But the bog … oh, the bog. The dark magic of the peat bog is that dead moss drowns in cold water, and there, it does not decompose. It just … piles up, and the carbon it pulled out of the atmos­phere remains trapped, with the shoes, basi­cally for good. The bog is a carbon sink that just sinks and sinks and sinks.

As a bonus, this accu­mu­la­tion hap­pens on civilizational, rather than geological, timescales; all the peat bogs on the planet are new since the end of the Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.

The bog lover has logged on!

From Oak­land,

Robin

July 2021