Weeknote 12/2024
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Verbs
Writing: The Spice Must Flow: Power, Politics, and the Struggle for Arrakis
Having recently rewatched Dune Part I, seen Dune Part II in the cinema, listened to both the soundtrack albums, and now having finished the first book it seemed only fitting to cap my journey through the sands of Arakkis by writing a little bit about it all. As usual, I wanted to use philosophy as a kind of interpretative lens and Dune is a book that is hugely amenable to philosophical exploration. From everything that the book offered up, I decided to focus on the movements of power and the nature of politics in the Dune universe. It’s a complex web in Dune and, whilst power is really the motivating energy of so much that happens in the book, Herbert writes with great insight and sophistication. I think there’s a lot more to dig into in this book and I’ll probably return to it again further down the road. I’d like to try and unpack some of the thinking around religion, messianic figures, and mythologising, and there’s plenty more to be said about free will, ecology, relationships with technology, and the nature of identity. For now, though, it’s all about power.
Watching: The Creator (2023)
Director Gareth Edwards has done some exceptional work over the years. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is one of the best pieces of Star Wars media since the original trilogy, and his 2010 sleeper hit Monsters was a brilliantly original take on the sci-fi monster genre with Edwards serving as writer, director, DP, and visual effects designer all by himself. Seeing Edwards talk about the work he did to make this film a reality is well worth a watch. The Creator is, hands-down, one of the most beautiful and visually inventive sci-fi films I’ve ever seen. It’s lush, rich, complex, and incredibly impressive. The Southeast Asian backdrop brings a fresh, exciting energy to the film, and the use of a small, on-location crew, combined with a pioneering approach to the VFX makes it an arresting and exhilarating film to watch. I’ll say, for balance, that the script is a little weak, and the plotting and pacing don’t quite hit the mark - which holds the film back from being the masterpiece that it really could have been. However, as a vision of vibrant, living, science-fiction it’s a triumph.
Playing: Baldur’s Gate 3
Because I’m an exceptionally lucky little nerdy boy, friends of mine got me a copy of Larian Studio’s monumental hit Baldur’s Gate 3 for my birthday. It’s a huge, HUGE, sprawling, Dungeons and Dragons game that is so enormously packed with stuff that it’s hard to imagine humans were ever even able to design the thing. I’ve only played a little, so far, and I‘m sure on the scale of the colossal iceberg that the game is, it’s just a fraction, of a portion, of a percent of what it has to offer. What has also really blown me away is how I’m playing the game. Sadly, it’s much too complex and intensive for my beloved Nintendo Switch, I don’t have any other consoles, and my MacBook Pro, whilst relatively new, hasn’t got the guts for it either. Instead of all of that, I’m playing the game using Nvidia’s GeForce Now service which effectively lets you buy a game, and then use cloud computing to play it through an application on your own computer. This means I can play a Triple-A game, anywhere in the world, without all the trouble of building a gaming PC or buying a brand-new PlayStation. It works really well - even without having splurged on the top tier of the service. I know, in the long run, it’s not going to be totally cost-effective but I’ll only be keeping the service until I’m through this game. Although, by the looks of things, that could be longer than my own, frail, human life-span…
Reading: Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin
I’ve not been shy about my absolute adoration of Ursula Le Guin, as a writer of science fiction, of fantasy, of exceptionally insightful and moving essays, and as a human being. There are two general ‘collections’ within her constellation of work, the Earthsea stories that bring together a number of her fantasy novels and short stories, and her Hainish Cycle stories that bring together a number of her science fiction novels and short stories. Le Guin was endlessly evasive about quite which stories and novels should be considered part of each family, but there’s some general consensus amongst scholars and readers. In the Hainish Cycle, it’s really The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed that are best known, and quite rightly, as they’re towering achievements of literature. Until now, those were also the only novels within the Hainish Cycle that I’d read but now I can add Rocannon’s World - sometimes considered the first of the Hainish Cycle - to that list as well. It doesn’t have the monumental, intellectual, power that those better-known novels do - it’s gentler, more circumspect - but everything you might love of Le Guin is already fully in place. It is deeply human and threaded with the anthropologists’ curiosity that I think of as so typically Le Guinean. It balances the fantastical alongside the tropes and gestures of science fiction and gives us a quite moving picture of isolation, loss, and companionship. There are two other novels usually thought to round out the full Hainish Cycle, along with the short stories, and they will definitely be moving towards the top of my to-read list.
Words
I spent a huge amount of this week pretty much stuck. Starting with writing; I’ve a whole digital pile of discarded essays, blog posts, and articles that I tried writing - all of which collapsed like wet cakes. Something I used to write, very often, on my philosophy students’ work was the words “So what?” And I can tell you that was all I was saying to myself with everything I tried to write, for the the first 3 days of the week. So what? So. What? And I couldn’t answer the question.
I made two mistakes, in hindsight. The first was forgetting my own advice. Advice I had even written about. Rather than change things up, get outside, or work from somewhere else, I just sat at my desk mashing my face into my Bluetooth keyboard hoping that grimacing in frustration would suddenly unlock the big box of not-shit words that I was trying to access. Reader, this did not work. On day 4 (yes, it took three days to figure this out) I went for a big walk and took my laptop to my favourite cafe and… I could write again.
The other thing that unstuck me was changing what I was trying to write about. All of the other attempts were me trying to write about things I found interesting but that I didn’t particularly have any view, idea, argument, or perspective on. They were interesting things, some were even important things, but I didn’t really have anything of my own to say about them. So when I came to try and write nothing came out but stuff from the big box of shit words. Which wasn’t what I was aiming for. In the end, I wrote about a science fiction book and the philosophy it explored and, I know you’ll be quite shocked to hear, I had thoughts about that.
We’ve also been stuck in an incredibly first-world-problems sort of way because we’re trying to plan a trip in mid-May and we’re getting nowhere in figuring out where to go. Now, the brutal, and unbearable dilemma of where exactly to have a nice week away in May isn’t super interesting - except to us - but I think how the problem emerges maybe is. Challenge 1) Super specific. There are lots of very tricky little specifics around where we go which makes it much more complex than usual. Challenge 2) I’m a maximiser, not a satisficer. At least when it comes to holidays.
A satisficer is someone who will look and research until they find an answer to their problem that’s “good or good enough”. Choosing a restaurant? Yeah, that looks good. What do you want to eat? *Simming the menu* That pasta looks decent. A satisficer will want to make a choice pretty quickly and will prioritise choosing and moving on with things over analysing every choice. That’s not me.
What if there’s a better restaurant we’ve just not found yet? Obviously, we need to read all of the reviews, and look at the ratings on Google Maps, and see if there are any proper reviews of the place by some critics. And do we know anyone who's been there? And I’ll be looking through every item on the menu on the way there. And again when I get there. And I’ll ask the wait staff for a recommendation…
I’m a maximiser. Not in everything, but in a lot of things. I always think that with just a little more knowledge, a little more time, and a little more research there will be, not just a better option, but a perfect option. Trips, cars, restaurants, films, books, apps, services. You don’t want to know how long it took me to choose a new backpack when my old one broke beyond repair. I think it’s because I’m always so conscious of the fact that my energy, my money, and my time are so very finite and that to not get the best from all of these is, in a sense, to waste them. Does that mean I never waste time or money? Of course not. It’s what I fill most of my days with. After all, the perfect pocket notebook isn’t going to find itself.