Cold start

This spring, a hum­ming­bird reared two chicks in a tiny nest nearly within arm’s reach of my front steps. The view was obscured by a spray of branches, but, find the right angle, and you could see straight into the cup of the nest: where two birds began their lives as pea-sized eggs and bal­looned into scrawny young crea­tures who even­tu­ally hov­ered out into the world.

Nei­ther my phone’s camera nor my DSLR could cap­ture the nest or the birds it contained. With my eyes, I’d spot the little babies, the dark nee­dles of their beaks; then I’d raise a device, and they would dis­ap­pear into a murky tangle.

I went out to spy on them every day, gig­gling with delight like a total creepazoid, and it made me realize, again, the degree to which the human eye is NOT a camera. Our view of the world is so deeply and care­fully filtered; not just in terms of color and light, but somehow also atten­tion and life.

I was frus­trated that I couldn’t cap­ture and share what I was seeing, but over the month or so of the nesting/hatching/growing process, that became part of the appeal. And no, I’m not going to do that thing where I now lov­ingly describe the hum­ming­birds, ~conjure them~ with language; that’s not my point.

My point is: a hum­ming­bird reared two chicks in a tiny nest nearly within arm’s reach of my front steps. It was great.

It’s been a season of intense writing over here; wake, write, get a sandwich, write, make dinner, read a little, maybe watch an episode of Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma (I love a title with an excla­ma­tion mark and a colon), sleep. That is, unfortunately, all I’m going to say; I’ve long since learned my lesson about hyping a project before I have a man­u­script in hand. But I do want to tell you that this new book is far along: still in the nest, yes, but it has long out­grown its pea-sized egg.

Must be a scrawny young creature.

A couple of sum­mers ago, my friend Jesse Solomon Clark appeared at the lab with a vin­tage portable organ and said, “Let’s make this into some­thing.”

More recently, Jesse reviewed the video he cap­tured while we worked and edited it into a brisk recap of the project.

Jesse pro­vided the portable organ, the music theory, and a large dollop of elbow grease. I pro­vided addi­tional grease, as well as B+ pro­gram­ming skills and C- elec­tronics skills. I’m happy to report that this became one of those “level up” expe­ri­ences: the project’s scope so far beyond our capa­bil­i­ties (oops) that we had no choice but to expand them.

It’s a really lovely video, just a minute and a half long; take a look at Alouette.

Over at Fat Gold, we’re run­ning a little flash sale, offering up what remains of the Cal­i­fornia extra virgin olive oil we sent to sub­scribers in March. It’s an oppor­tu­nity to “sample” a sub­scrip­tion and see what the expe­ri­ence is like, zine and all. It is also, more straightforwardly, an oppor­tu­nity to get some good olive oil!

Also, this shipment’s magnet is a stunner; Spring (The Procession — A Chro­matic Sensation) by Joseph Stella, painted 1914-1916.

The way things work around here is, I book­mark all the beau­tiful public domain art I find … and then I either send it with this newsletter, or put it on a magnet 😝

There’s a newsletter I enjoy called Why is this inter­esting?; it feels like the curated cor­re­spon­dence of a wide circle of friends, with edi­tors Noah and Colin at the hub. The newsletter’s tastes run towards the cos­mopolitan and infrastructural; WITI is the friend with cool lug­gage who wants to talk about undersea internet cables.

I have con­tributed two edi­tions myself. Both started as replies to edi­tions I’d received … and both got out of hand. Very con­ver­sa­tional, very fun.

Here’s my Breeding Ground Edition, about some uncon­ven­tional (almost utopian) urban plan­ning in Ams­terdam.

Here’s my Urban Man­u­fac­turing Edition, about some uncon­ven­tional (almost utopian) urban plan­ning right here in my neigh­bor­hood 😎

This album by the Nor­we­gian sax­o­phonist Håkon Korn­stad has been on loop in my house­hold for the past few weeks. I think Kathryn might be nearing her breaking point, but not me. I could listen to it for another whole season. I’d better find my headphones … 

Its dis­covery was charmed: once, on our way to Ams­terdam (where I learned the things I wrote about in that WITI, linked above) Kathryn and I stopped over in Oslo, and on our first night there, lying totally awake, willing our­selves to sleep, the sun still shining out­side our hotel room, we lis­tened to the radio — good old fash­ioned ter­res­trial radio — and heard the first song on this album. This was a few years ago; I’ve had it saved since then, and lis­tened to it many times, but it wasn’t until recently that I “discovered” the album; the whole­ness of it, the vitality.

All in all, a fun way to encounter a work of art.

The album is avail­able on Spotify and every­where else; if you, like me, marvel at tracks 6 and 7 in par­tic­ular, the way the oper­atic voice mixes with the looping saxophone: be sure to watch this video afterward.

One of the great honors of pub­lishing novels has been the chance to par­tic­i­pate in com­mu­nity reading events around the United States. You know the format:

ONE X, ONE BOOK

where X can be a city, a campus, a county, or, in very spe­cial cases, a whole state. (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store was once the selec­tion for Reading Across Rhode Island.)

About a month ago, I joined the pro­ceed­ings of All Hen­rico Reads, orga­nized by the Hen­rico County Public Library in Virginia. My appear­ances were remote, of course; but it turns out, even dis­tance can’t diminish the warmth of an event like this. My inter­locutor for the big evening con­ver­sa­tion was an HCPL librarian, Lindsey Hutchison, and her ques­tions were per­cep­tive and generative. The ques­tions that fol­lowed from the library com­mu­nity were just as good.

It hap­pens every time; like a great gust of wind, you see it before you feel it, a ripple in the grass, and then, WHOOSH, it hits you: these people really read the book. They really thought about it.

It’s worth acknowl­edging and cel­e­brating the quality of atten­tion these events drum up for the books they select; there is almost nothing else like it, in any medium. Certainly, in no other circumstance, what­ever the nom­inal size of the audience, has my writing received remotely the same level of … “atten­tion” doesn’t even cap­ture it. Engagement? Care? The internet is so good for so many things, but in this regard, it just cannot compete. Falls flat on its face.

By way of small advertisement: I love doing events like these. Both Sour­dough and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store are appro­priate for readers of all ages, or nearly all, and both sug­gest plenty of inter­esting dis­cus­sions and ~pro­gram­ming~.

I mean … if they’re good enough for Rhode Island!

I read Hank Green’s novel An Absolutely Remark­able Thing and I loved it.

It’s the kind of novel that made me excited about novels in my early 20s, when I was first won­dering if it would be pos­sible for me to write one myself. (I didn’t actu­ally do it for a long time after that, but that’s when I started to wonder.) And what I mean by that is: it’s a novel about NOW, the frothing future-present cap­tured in a totally accu­rate way.

The books that were most impor­tant for me at that time were William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, and while William Gibson and Hank Green are very dif­ferent writers, their cen­tral objec­tives seem, to me, very similar: they are out to map the unevenly dis­trib­uted future, the human expe­ri­ence of it, and like, share it back: “This is where some of us are today. This is where you’re headed. Get ready.”

Hank Green’s map reveals the abstract space of social media, the weird con­tours of that par­tic­ular flavor of fame. He’s clearly writing from expe­ri­ence; his char­ac­ters describe the ebb and flow of atten­tion with tex­ture and specificity. This is not Old Nov­elist Yells at Cloud. But/and, along­side his ren­dering of “this is where some of us are today”, Hank con­jures a new, or ultimate, form of social media; an almost utopian vision. It’s very sci-fi and totally provocative.

It was also a super best seller, so it’s not like it needs more recognition … but I think this is the kind of novel that gets a bit underrated, crit­ically. And I think that’s because there aren’t enough people in the crit­ical estab­lish­ment with the expe­ri­ence to appre­ciate its verisimil­i­tude, its depth; and also because of the biases around what “counts as” lit­erary fic­tion, even now, in 2021.

A theory of fic­tion on the web: it must play at being some­thing else. Simply posting a blob of text and duti­fully labeling it “fic­tion” falls flat; the medium works against it, often fatally.

I thought of this reading a recent edi­tion of Mark Slutsky’s newsletter, about the Institute for the Study of 3:32pm, April 10, 1954, which I will not label “fic­tion”.

Not unrelated, here’s a para­graph from Franco Moretti:

And yet the novel has also been widely regarded as a form that tried, for at least two centuries, to hide its fic­tionality behind verisimil­i­tude or realism, insisting on cer­tain kinds of ref­er­en­tiality and even making exten­sive truth claims. If a genre can be thought of as having an attitude, the novel has seemed ambiva­lent toward its fic­tionality — at once inventing it as an onto­log­ical ground and placing severe con­straints upon it. Nov­elists appar­ently lib­er­ated fic­tionality, for eighteenth-century prac­ti­tioners aban­doned ear­lier writers’ serious attempts to con­vince readers that their invented tales were lit­er­ally true or were at least about actual people.

Here is a moving piece by Nick Cornwell, who you know by another name, about the rela­tion­ship between his par­ents Jane and David Cornwell … who you know by another name.

The Over­fitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization, a 2020 paper from Erik Hoel at Tufts:

That is, dreams are a bio­log­ical mech­a­nism for increasing gen­er­al­iz­ability via the cre­ation of cor­rupted sen­sory inputs from sto­chastic activity across the hier­archy of neural structures. Sleep loss, specif­i­cally dream loss, leads to an over­fitted brain that can still mem­o­rize and learn but fails to gen­er­alize appro­priately.

I am always, always here for fresh hypotheses of dreaming!!

(And I’ll take the oppor­tu­nity to remind you, again, of my closely-held belief that a novel is lit­er­ally a pack­aged dream.)

There are a couple of writers who send newslet­ters that I think of as “ideal” and when­ever I receive them, I think “ugh … why can’t mine just be like that?”

(Because it can’t. Sorry.)

One is Louise Penny, whose newslet­ters come on a clock­work schedule, just like her books.

The other is Ed Brubaker, a ter­rific writer of comics and more. In a recent edi­tion, he wrote about how it feels to have laid some of the groundwork, in comics, for the Marvel Cin­e­matic Universe:

And of course, today the FALCON AND WINTER SOL­DIER show debuts on Disney+, which I sadly have very mixed feel­ings about. I’m really happy for Sebas­tian Stan, who I think is both a great guy and the per­fect Bucky/Winter Sol­dier, and I’m glad to see him get­ting more screen time finally. Also, Anthony Mackie is amazing as the Falcon, and everyone at Marvel Stu­dios that I’ve ever met (all the way up to Kevin Feige) have been nothing but kind to me … but at the same time, for the most part all Steve Epting and I have gotten for cre­ating the Winter Sol­dier and his sto­ry­line is a “thanks” here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with. [ … ]

So yeah, mixed feeling, and maybe it’ll always be like that (but I sure hope not). Work-for-hire work is what it is, and I’m hon­estly thrilled to have co-created some­thing that’s become such a big part of pop cul­ture — or even pop sub­cul­ture with all the Bucky-Steve slash fic­tion — and that run on Cap was one of the hap­piest times of my career, cer­tainly while doing super­hero comics. Also, I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Sol­dier bringing so many readers to my other work. But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach some­times when my inbox fills up with people wanting com­ments on the show.

Andrew Liptak, whose newsletter on the cul­ture and industry of sci­ence fic­tion I’m finding indispensable, pub­lished a piece about sci-fi’s roots in the western, and the way that influ­ence has dis­torted the genre’s view of space explo­ration. I thought this was so sharp:

But while the imagery of the Amer­ican western pro­vides useful inspi­ra­tion for writers and space advocates, it’s an analogy that doesn’t hold up when it comes to depicting the harsh real­i­ties of inter­plan­e­tary explo­ration. There are other his­tor­ical periods and activ­i­ties to draw from, like the explo­ration of Antarctica, that would be better suited for grounding one’s narratives.

How about “power plant cold start videos” as a genre?

It’s really worth making time for this nerdy, humane narration of a small-ish hydropower plant’s startup process, which unfolds through rigid engi­neering but/and also requires a deeply intu­itive touch; “surfing a power plant on a river”, our guide tells us. Amazing.

This plant in Fin­land is uhhh some­what larger, but the prin­ciple is exactly the same. Wait for it … waiiit for it … 

That second link is via The Prepared, which I feel com­pelled to rec­om­mend, strongly, again. It is prob­ably my single favorite newsletter. For me, it’s come to rep­re­sent a curious, crit­ical engage­ment with the real phys­ical world, at nearly every scale, from hob­byist elec­tronics projects to (as above) 300-megawatt power plants.

I feel like the newsletter already “sells itself” to the makers of the world, pro­fes­sional and ama­teur alike … but hon­estly, everyone ought to read it, because it’s just so con­sis­tently eyebrow-raising and smile-producing.

Samuel Johnson, updated: “Sir, when a reader is tired of The Prepared, they are tired of life.”

Lately I’ve under­stood the word “ambiva­lent” in a dif­ferent way. I think its pop­ular def­i­n­i­tion shifted at some point toward “I don’t have an opinion” or “it really doesn’t matter to me”; a kind of cool, low-energy state. But that’s not what the word means at all. To feel ambiva­lent is to have many thoughts at once, some of them contradictory; to hold them, unresolved, in your head.

I find this useful because I feel ambiva­lent about a lot of things!

Iris Murdoch, by way of Alan Jacobs:

The achieve­ment of coher­ence is itself ambiguous. Coher­ence is not nec­es­sarily good, and one must ques­tion its cost. Better some­times to remain confused.

Just as I was get­ting ready to send this, a newsletter came in, bearing a line too deli­cious not to share. Here’s Mandy Brown with a short assess­ment of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, chan­neling the great one:

I also read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, having evi­dently com­pletely for­gotten how strongly I dis­liked his last book, The Buried Giant. After fin­ishing it, I recalled that Le Guin had politely mur­dered him, not only for the hack­neyed writing but also his choice to use fan­tasy tropes while evi­dently har­boring a supreme dis­like for fan­tasy. (“It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, ‘Are they going to say I’m a tight-rope walker?’”) I sup­pose Klara isn’t as bad as it could have been, given that it was written by a dead man. But I can’t rec­om­mend it.

Ear­lier this spring, in an online event for Point Reyes Books, I inter­viewed Kim Stanley Robinson about his novel Min­istry for the Future. Just a few min­utes before we were set to begin, there was a surge of new arrivals; a bit of a surprise, hon­estly. Where had they come from?

In the chat, they hap­pily explained: they’d just been watching a dif­ferent online event, orga­nized by Powell’s, fea­turing Bill McK­ibben and Eliz­a­beth Kolbert; near its conclusion, both writers had expressed their admi­ra­tion for KSR, and, oh, isn’t he doing an event right after this? Yes, he’s being inter­viewed by some dweeb from the Bay Area … 

So, a not-insignificant frac­tion of their view­er­ship just … hopped over! They came in hot, a bit raucous; it had the spirit of a bar crawl; wonderful.

This past year trans­formed book events, obviously, and I don’t think they’ll simply snap back to the way they were before. I mean — a lit crawl across hun­dreds of miles, a swarm of readers flowing from one vir­tual room to another! That’s too cool to abandon entirely, right?

Can you believe these illustrations?? They are the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, who lived and worked at the turn of the 17th century. You can see a col­lec­tion here.

The hum­ming­bird chicks have taken flight, but I don’t think they’ve gone too far, at least not yet. There seem to be more hum­ming­birds around the house; some­times three or four at once, which is, yes, about two more than usual. The little nest is empty. Do hum­ming­birds reuse them? I guess I’ll find out. For now, I still spy it between the branches some­times, a little gray-green capsule, no bigger than a golf ball. An XL walnut.

They build them out of, among other things, spider webs.

From Oakland,

Robin

April 2021