Weeknote 06/2024
“If you care more than everybody else, you pay better attention, and you see things that others don’t see. To ask the questions that need to be asked, you have to care more than others about what happens, but care less about what others might think of you in the moment.”
Verbs
Reading: Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’ve read a fair few books from Adrian Tchaikovsky in the past. Many of which I’ve loved (Children of Time is a particular stand-out), but Elder Race may be my favourite of his so far. It’s a short thing, only just over 200 pages, but I could very happily have kept reading for 2 or 3 times that if not more. It’s a simple conceit that keeps the book ticking over, but such a beguiling and fascinating one - and one which I can’t remember ever having come across before - that it gripped me from the first chapter and bowled me along right through to the end. From start to finish I kept thinking of the great Ursula Le Guin as there’s a powerful strand of sociological exploration in this book that just elevates the narrative. I would love to see a film adaptation of this, though perhaps its brilliance lies in the way that literature can shuttle us between different, and wildly diverging, perspectives to show us how two people can inhabit radically different worlds whilst standing in exactly the same place.
Watching: The Bear, Disney+
A little late getting on the train with this one, but better late than never. We've absolutely mainlined season 1 of this incredible, gutsy, brash, brilliant show and are happily gobbling down season 2 already. Of course, I’d heard huge things about how great this show was and it’s wonderful for something to really live up to the hype. Incredibly tight, razor-sharp episodes at only 30 minutes (or less!) a piece, and 7 or 8 episodes a season make this an absolute blast. Performances that just keep on getting better and better and some of the most astonishing and creative direction, cinematography, and writing I’ve enjoyed in a fair while. Season 1 Ep. 7 may in fact be one of the very best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. Every episode feels like every single person involved was firing non-stop, on all cylinders. Truly brilliant.
Loving: Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), John Cage
Some years ago I played a class of Italian students (the students were Italian, it wasn’t an Italian class…) a video of John Cage’s famous and controversial piece 4’33” - a piece of music that is entirely “silent”. Enduring a little over 4 minutes of silence nearly drove these teenagers to acts of extraordinary violence unable, as they were, to inhabit anything but a dopamine-dripping, fun-house nightmare of technology-mediated reality. It seemed to almost be physically painful for them - and I was fascinated by this. I love Cage, and I love his writings on aesthetics, silence, noise, and music as well. This piece, Organ 2/ASLP, is a piece of music that does actually have some sound - it blasts away for 639 years from start to finish. This performance began in 2001 and has just celebrated a chord change! Two years until the next and it won’t be until 2072 that the first of the eight movements is finished.
Worrying: ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything, Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow’s 2022 article, which first coined the term enshittification, perfectly nailed an unsettling kind of meta-phenomena. Something felt, and seen, and known, but lying just out of reach of articulation. Doctorow put a name to this monster, all the better for us to know it by. This follow-up article, ironically hidden behind a sign-up link in the Financial Times, is an even more potent and bloody dissection of just what is going wrong in the guts of the technology platforms we use every day. It’s not just bleak prognostication, though, tearing through the entrails of our digital lives, there’s real, concrete, no-bullshit discussion of ways to dig our way out and remedy the ills we’ve brought on ourselves. It’s a tough read, but if you’re interested in modern technology it feels all but essential. And just to fight back, in the very ways Doctorow suggests, I made a PDF version of the article so you don’t need to offer up your email address to the maw of the mailing list.
Words
Chinese New Year lantern in Limanski Park in Novi Sad.
Huge vistas of this week have, once again, been taken up by bits and pieces, and things, and stuff, and jobs, and tasks, and etc etc etc. We’ve got through it, though, and there are glimmers of light on the other side. Coupled with that, we’ve been getting ready for a trip to the UK that we’ll be leaving for on Sunday. It’ll be a relatively brief trip, but there are some logistics to manage (flying into one city and out of another) along with travel whilst we’re in the UK (Newcastle, Durham, York, and London) so that’s required some thought and planning to make sure everything lines up. Once that was all out of the way we had to actually think about what we will spend our time doing once we are there so that meant places to eat, places to stay, things to do, things to see, and lots of research, and messaging friends and family, and booking tickets and fiddling with timezones in Google Calendar.
We’re pretty set, now, aside from packing of course. It’s looking like it’ll be a really fun trip with some exciting plans along the way. I’m particularly excited to be going back to Durham, where I spent 5 years at university, and to which I’ve not been back in a very long time. I know that most of our time there will involve me pointing at things and saying “Oh my god! That used to be an X! Can you believe it!” Which will be enormous fun for my wife, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Somehow, amongst all of this, I managed to crack on and get a whole set of project and workshop applications and pitches written, finished up, and sent off to different people. Even the ones that required *shudder* a video as part of the submission. I dislike those as I’m just not comfortable recording myself though it seems like something I’m going to need to overcome. In any case, I’m now working on the maxim that volume negates luck which means I’m tossing hats into every ring going and seeing where things lead. It’s quite a nice approach in some ways as it helps to deflate the kind of thinking that says any one thing has got to be the thing. No need when a half dozen more threads are getting pulled on!