The 22nd anniversary; the 25th most abundant element.
Twenty-two years on the pier, and yes, it’s been a bit quiet, imagine the requisite gesture at all of [an all-encompassing roundel of a wave] THIS, I mean, look back, to the turn of the century, then look about us, here and now: can you seriously say any of us has learned any single God damned thing? —I thought not.
There’s been shit I’ve been thinking about meaning to write, about interiority and empathy, maybe, or craft and anarchism, or necessity and, and, shit, I don’t know, death and taxes, but I haven’t, and this isn’t an I stopped because I stopped type of situation, it’s more an I haven’t got started because I haven’t got started, I mean, some of the tabs I’ve got open for some of this shit I’ve had open for, hell, years. Existentialism and High Kings. You know.
I’ve been working the city, it’s true, I wanted to make up for a short ’22 by getting four novelettes done in ’23, and managed, maybe, two and a half. I wanted to be done with volume four, with season two, I wanted to have made it to the halfway point of the epic, the thing-that-argues, the magnum opus, but I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go.
I mean, otherwise, last year? There was the thing about punctuation, I guess. And I did play with one of those LLMs, which told me I was a queer activist who’d written an historical fantasy set in Elizabethan England, and who am I to argue with that?
But, yeah. Otherwise. Quiet.
Hiaters.
Stop, what stopped, nothing stopped, this doesn’t end till I’m dead or the worldwide web collapses, and if it collapses this’ll become text files that get stored somewhere on something, tip-tap, pick-poke, on and on. —I usually begin with some kind of burst of goodwill and activity round about now, hey, new years are heady, but that usually peters out sometime in the spring or so in what might charitably be called a hiatus, and maybe some sporadic bursts in the summer, maybe a resurgence in the fall, or toward the end of the year, depending, last year was just, I don’t know. Quieter than usual, on this front. I was concentrating on the epic, sure, but I wanted to write another four novelettes last year, like I managed to do in 2021, but I only got two and a half done, ah well. I was distracted maybe by finding so many old Twitter friends on Bluesky, maybe, but not that distracted, and anyway the vibe there we’re very much agreed is it’s time to bring blogging back, again, and so. I wanted to do more reading, yes, but I’m lost in the wilds of Book III, but at least the fish dinner’s finally begun, and the malmsey and the muscatel, being strong sweet wines, are circling the board sunwise. And I’m typing, pocketa-pocketa. —Did you know that archiater, historically, was a title given to the chief physician of a city, or a court? Well. Now you do.
Out, and in, and old, and new.
So the tagine was left on a shelf in the upstairs kitchen, a little bookshelf with nothing much else on it at the moment (it had been used at some point in the downstairs kitchen, and put away on a shelf down there, but the space on that shelf needed to be used, which is why it had been brought up to the upstairs kitchen, which is mostly storage, sunlight, coffee, and cats), but then the cats during a lull between feedings got into some sort of contretemps or donnybrook that necessitated leaping onto said bookshelf and then off it, alacritously, so much so that the shelf tipped over, sending the nothing much else along with the tagine crashing to the ground, and have you seen a tagine? This was just the top, but the top is a great cone of glazed pottery, and when it hits hardwood even from just the height of a little bookshelf toppled by an enthusiastic cat, it smashes.
Which is why the cats got me a new tagine for Christmas.
I decided to break it in today with a fish dish. Breaking in a new tagine means curing it, first, so at about six this morning (after maybe eighty-some-odd words on the epic) I rinsed out the laundry sink downstairs and piled in the base and the top and waited a good long while for the water to fill up enough to cover it all (they’re tall, tagines), and let it sit for a couple-few hours. Then haul it out and dry it out and put it in a cold oven, and let it (slowly) heat up to three hundred or so Farenheit and let it (gently) roast for another couple-few hours, and then, once it’s cooled enough to touch, set it up to cook: if you don’t happen to have a dedicated heat diffuser (which, well, we don’t), turn a pie-pan over atop an eye on the stove, then set the pottery base of the tagine on that, pour in some olive oil, and set the heat low: not more than a quarter of the total heat available, and let it (slowly) heat up while you slice some red onions into thin rounds. Pile the onions into the tagine and set the top on, gently, and, well. It’ll take a good thirty to forty-five minutes at least for the works to hot up enough for the onions to start to soften, but when they do, you can add the honey and the raisins (plumped in a bit of warm water and some lemon juice from the marinade) and the ground ginger and the cinnamon stick and then let it keep on cooking for (checks clock) a couple-three hours more at least, while the fish marinates (parsley, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, ginger, cinnamon, salt, pepper, you know the drill) in the fridge, it’ll keep, you could even make a cocktail or two (a Brooklyn: rye, dry vermouth [terribly dry], a hint of maraschino, bitters) until those onions become the jammiest of jams, it’s going on four hours now, check it again in a bit—
Thus, the end of the old, the beginning of the new. And we didn’t even get to the cabbage.
Which side you are on.
So this piece has rather deservedly become an instant classic, up there in the pantheon of speaking truth to bullshit with God’s grief-stricken press conference, or the only country where this regularly happens, but there’s nonetheless a moment’s hesitation before you recommend it, or there ought to be: in inhabiting that hateful rhetoric so completely as to so convincingly ape it with which whatever purity of motive is to risk reifying precisely that horrible hate—satire cannot be failed; it can only fail. —No, some things are so vilely hateful, some contexts are so overwhelmingly unbalanced, even the slightest chance of failure can’t be risked. Sometimes what you absolutely need is the cold clear righteously vicious opposite. —To the barricades, motherfuckers. You will lose.
What is told you three times is true.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law;
- My rules are more important than not harming you.
& yet—
Mean-spirited cracks at the Former Guy hit different now that every mention of his name really ought to be preceded by the words “genocidal stooge.” —He’s not doing anything, of course, just scampering up to the front of a bunch of people already sort of headed in that general direction, but that’s much, much more terrifying. I want so much for us all to skip straight to the bit where the folks at the head of that bunch are all face down in their respective ditches or burned-out bunkers, and a whole generation shame-facedly insists they never meant for anything like that as they quietly fail to name their children Donald, or Ronald, or Tucker, or Chaya—but without all the immiseration and deprivation and violence and death, and all of us here today can just get back to living our lives as we are, you know?
Even the bull puts in some effort.
This piece—pleasant, but slight, ending just as it feels like it’s run through the pre-flight check for a much longer trip—does, at least (as it two-steps from of all things Paper Moon to the 48 Laws of Power), manage to articulate an essential, implacable truth of the Age in Which We’ve Found Ourselves Deposited: how on earth is it possible to speak as we so often do of Donald J. Trump as a grifter, when he can’t even be bothered to begin to pretend to try?
Power in power is power in power.
Money in politics is speech. Speech about money in politics is not speech.
Mere strokes, interposed by a copyist.
There are rules to punctuation, of course, much as there are rules of grammar; the thing to keep in mind is that they’re descriptive, not prescriptive: technical documentation outlining specs, protocols, and use cases for an ancient system kludged together by oh so many divers hands, and as anyone can tell you, who’s ever had to document—and maintain said documentation for—anything at all: it’s forever going to be incomplete, inadequate, contradictory on the face of it, inexplicably controversial at unexpected points, and always always woefully out of date.
I mean, sure, yes: one uses a semicolon when joining two independent clauses that aren’t quite sentences of their own, given the broader context, when they can’t for whatever æsthetic be joined by a coordinating conjunction—but when I’m assembling sentences from key-clacks, I never not once do find myself thinking, ah, here’s two independent clauses, and no conjunction will do; let’s reach for a semicolon, shall we? —No: it’s the way the words fit one after the other, the heft of the passage in my mind’s hand, the lilt in my mind’s voice as it’s read back to my mind’s ear: this is what decides, for me, whether and when I reach for a semicolon, or an em-dash, or damn the torpedoes and splice the fuckers with a comma.
(A comma is where you take a breath, a semicolon is how the Welsh hedge the ends of declarations; a colon is more purposive: and thus turns neither up, nor down—the em-dash is a violent interruption, incorporated—and as for the ellipsis, well: it coyly trails…)
With the advent of the web, as writing and publishing carelessly merged, mixing the (supposed) iron science of grammar with the (presumed) mere craft of typesetting, use cases multiplied, and whole new arguments raged: whether to put two spaces after a full stop (if you’re displaying in a monospaced typeface? Sure!), or to italicize the punctuation at the end of an italicized phrase (opinions differ, as do fonts), or how best to set one’s em-dashes: there’s a school that would have spaces placed to either side whenever they’re deployed — like so; but to my eye that’s too much of an irruption in the color of the text on the page. Better by far to set them snug—like so; the flow, stuttered, is nonetheless maintained. Now: if you wished to use the en-dash instead (the width of the capital N in the font, or thereabouts, a touch more narrow than the width of the capital M: thus, em, and en, in dashes), you would deploy spaces to either side: the en-dash, being a touch more demure, would otherwise read as merely a hyphen. This technique, of an en-dash with spaces, is better than the em-dash in maintaining a consistency of color in blocs of text, but it’s not as versatile: the em-dash, if usually deployed without spaces, might here or there be employed with a space to the one side, or the other, at the end of a sentence, or the beginning: joining thereby sentences that aren’t quite separate paragraphs in much the manner a semicolon joins clauses that aren’t quite separate sentences. —But I digress.
This broader divagation we return to stems from a bit by Clive Thompson on “weird 19th-century punctuation marks you should try using,” which turn out not to be unusual new marks, but mere combinations: em-dash with comma, with colon, with semicolon. Thompson’s excited by the idea of playing with these ungainly chimeræ, and ordinarily I’d be as game as the next dingbat to put inconvenient extravagance to whatever use, but the commash, the colash, the semi-colash: or rather, perhaps:—or perhaps,—perhaps;—I just don’t feel it? Or rather, I do, I can, but the nuanced subtleties of the differences between each—and the constituent parts of each—it’s just too faint, too esoteric, to be worth their clumsy interpellations; I just, I’m afraid, don’t see—the point?
Thompson finds himself enchanted by the abrupt disappearance of these widespread, well-used hybrids, vanishing as they pretty much entirely did with the onset of modernism. He quotes the thirty-year-old (and rather better, because doubtless more amply compensated) Nicholson Baker essay that occasioned his bit:
What comet or glacier made them die out? This may be the great literary question of our time. I timidly tried to use a semi-colash in a philosophical essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1983: the associate editor made a strange whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and I immediately backed down. Why, why are they gone? Was it—and one always gropes for the McLuhanesque explanation first—the increasing use of the typewriter for final drafts, whose arrangement of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a quick reach up to the hyphen key immediately after another punctuation mark physically awkward? Or was it—for one always gropes for the pseudo-scientific explanation just after McLuhan—the triumphant success of quantum mechanics? A comma is indisputably more of a quantum than a commash. Did the point-play of the Dadaists and E. E. Cummings, and the unpunctled last chapter of Ulysses, force a scramble for a simpler hegemony against which revolt could be measured?
I mean, y’know, yeah? Sure. Why not? —It’s not as if there’s a single cause for this particular effect, a grand narrative here to be untangled and assembled beyond, I mean, you know, like we said: modernism. Even their names—commash, colash, semi-colash—are obvious excrescences easily trimmed in any drive to simplify, streamline, regularize and (yes) modernize. So they no longer fit with the heft of our words as we put them together, did nothing we found we needed to tune their lilt. They fell out of fashion. Which is no reason of course not to use them yourself, if you find you want to.
—As for myself, I’m much more taken by the notion mentioned in passing, in Baker’s essay, of punctuation as an emendation not by the writer, or the editor, or the publisher, but the reader—confronted by a bloc of monochromatic, undifferentiated, unspaced text, as it was written of old, might well take it upon themselves to
decorate a work with dots and diples and paragraph marks as they read it and then proudly sign their name on the page: “I, Dulcitius, read this.” Punctuation, like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems at times to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind.
Well, that, and also a lingering puzzlement with those who insist on using guillemets as quotation marks. The hell is up with that? Seriously. It’s like, kkkttcht, every line of dialogue’s being spoken over a walkie-talkie or something, kkkttcht. —Over.
You know what it takes to blog?
Twenty-one years on the pier. —I’m told appropriate gifts for such an occasion are made of brass.
Kinematograph.
Then, what do we mean when we say “this is so cinematic!” There is of course the implication of the visual rendered in prose, but there is also, anecdotally, sometimes a level at which cinematic fiction also implies something about pacing or narrative rhythm or narrative composition—things that for my convenience I’ll group and condense into the term narrative depth. To be clear, I do not mean depth in the modern sense of a value judgement. I mean it in the sense of the distance between what is occurring in the narrative foreground and what is occurring in the narrative background, giving a sense of relief or contrast. In cinema, this contrast seems diminished. That is, in cinema, things are happening and there is less ostensible commentary upon the events or the psychology of the narrative. This is due to the nature of film as a medium. In prose fiction, there is a greater potential for contrast between event or incident and commentary, and one might say that cinematic fiction is fiction that emulates this lessened narrative contrast: the flattened narrative relief of cinema.
That’s from Brandon Taylor’s Miserly Eye, which makes some interesting points in the matter of cinematic fiction, and in a manner that doesn’t make me twitchy. I’ll continue to maintain, myself, that the primary distinctions ultimately stem from their respective mediums—that cinema’s dependence on images fixes it on specificities that prose’s narrow channel of one word after another can only approach with great effort—but I’ll spend some time thinking with this notion of depth of field, and Bellardi’s notion of foreground and background tenses, maybe.
In the meanwhile, it’s an excuse to index a number of old posts hereabouts on the matter: a couple of extended quotes from John Fowles; a brief divagation on why it is I might tend to twitch when the subject comes up; a disquisition on, well, it has more to do with comics and serialization, but it’s still pertinent to the work of translating the techniques of one medium into another; some consideration of less-than-obvious implications of a cinematic mode; and what I might maybe call the keystone piece. —So there’s that.
Hydriotaphia.
All these people everywhere whittering over how Midjourney AI and ChatGPT and whatnot mean computers or machine learning or artificial intelligence or whatever we’re calling it this week is on the verge of surpassing us all the rest of us when it comes to drawing or writing or pontificating or illustrating or designing or coding or bullshitting or doing our homework, and to be frank also all those people cheerfully playfully wickedly teasing the networks or inputs or weighted averages, or however it is it works, it’s all starting to remind me of nothing so much as what happens at the end of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—and you know what that means. Go on revising, in the quiet of the days; work as if you do not intend to see it published.
A good reality will parry the blow.
I don’t recall how I first heard of Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai; I don’t have any longer that first copy (a Tina Brown Talk Miramax edition, I say, with an air of vaguely smugness); I think one of the many many times I lent it out it never made its way back, or I hope that’s the case, and it’s still vagabonding about, from hand to reading hand. (I’ve got a Chatto & Windus edition these days, which imprint was founded in 1855, then bought by Random House the year I graduated high school, then unceremoniously dumped under Vintage Books somewhere in the drafty halls of Penguin UK.) —I trust, at any rate, that the esteem in which I hold DeWitt is well known about these parts, and so you’ll understand I’ve just put in an order for Lee Konstantinou’s The Last Samurai Reread, about which I’ve only just found out.
The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.
I really gotta stop eavesdropping on the hellsite. If I did, I’d never have to deal with the tsuris stirred up by this centrist jackass, who’s anyways never not on his bullshit:
And oh, he goes ahead and walks it all back with another tweet, oh, I don’t mean denying climate change, or going antivax, or denying the results of any elections, or standing up for antisemitism, or believing anyone in Hollywood is a pedophilic monster, no no, and we can all agree that these are all the basic benchmarks of being a basically decent human being, and Lord knows we’d all like to get older without losing our decency. But of course what this centrist jackass neglects to mention is his shining example of why it’s okay didn’t only hobnob with Reagan when things got to the point that they got, but also with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker and but also John Birch Society conspiracy-monger Wllard Cleon Skousen, which is exactly and precisely how you fucking get to antivax and antisemitism and denying elections and terminating the fucking Constitution and believing Comet Ping Pong has a goddamn fucking basement. —But we don’t even have to do that much barely minimal research: this centrist jackass’s okay point that he wants to fucking normalize is betraying everything you ever said you stood for to support Ronald God damn Reagan, the singular fucking Jonbar hinge that swung us all of us, every one, from everything we could’ve maybe might’ve had to what we’re fucking stuck with now.
Ronald fucking Reagan.
It’s a poisonously seductive notion, that we must become more conservative as we age, that as we acquire things, stuff, stability, position, power, privilege, we must necessarily crouch and grasp to hold, maintain, conserve. Because we can, we might, we should also acquire knowledge, perspective, empathy, experience, possibility, as we get older, all of which, each of which, militates against conservatism qua fucking Ronald fucking Reagan fucking conservatism.
So, I mean, basically, fuck this centrist jackass, is my point.
There can be only one—and yet:
“Akerman’s extraordinary qualities as a filmmaker made the film the phenomenon it was and is, but the sense of unrepeatability is rooted in the 1970s and in the consciousness and the possibilities associated with feminism and the avant garde. Jeanne Dielman remains, to my mind, the outstanding film of that particular conjuncture of radical politics and radical æsthetics. However, the film raises an issue that is hard to articulate: how the energy and creative demands of a political movement interact with the energy and creativity of an individual; when, that is, someone touches, and then draws on, a nerve of urgency beyond the sum of his or her parts, the product is more exemplary than personal, more transcendent than subjective.” —Laura Mulvey
If the basilisk sees its reflection within 30 ft. of it in bright light, it mistakes itself for a rival and targets itself with its gaze.
Mike Hoye wrote a charming takedown of the implications of and actual use cases for “effective altruism,” soi-so-very-disingenuously-disant, and I call it to your attention for that, but also for his description of the more abstruse theology behind the ideology:
It’s what you’d end up with if you started with Scientology and replaced “thetans” with “dollars.”
I expect you all to be doing your part to immortalize it.
As to that theology: it’s as grubby and grasping as you’d expect, a premillennialism that dispenses with any need to give an inconvenient shit about the here and now in favor of the serenely happy could-be maybes of literally trillions of one-day someday others—an imaginary euphoria so massively vast that a billionth of a percentage point of the chance that it might come to pass outweighs whatever petty sun-dried raisins might float in the head of whomever’s life is spent in the grindingly horrible labor necessary to build the device that calculates it. The whole affair’s suffused with an overwhelming, overweening aroma of three-in-the-morning dorm-room debate, and it took me a moment to realize the déjà I kept vuing as I read along:
Effective altruism is nothing more than Roko’s basilisk.
Oh, some of the rough edges have been smoothed away, some of the bullshit wiped off: we’ve lost the time-travel and the tortured clones and the games of Prisoner’s Dilemma you’re supposedly playing with yourself; we’ve traded a bizarrely psychotic omnipotent future-AI supremely concerned with what we are doing here and now to bring it someday about for a future of trillions of happy intelligences happily skipping about endless holodecks of fun and adventure that can only someday be brought about by what we’re doing here and now—but that’s just the sort of renovation you’d do to weaponize the notion into a nostrum you could sell to tech-addled billionaires. One can’t help but be (disgusted, but) impressed.
I mean, Jiminy flippin’ Cricket: the post in which Roko first introduced the damned thing is titled Solutions to the Altruist’s Burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.
—It’s a cold comfort (most of our comforts are chilly, these days), but it’s worth noting that the basilisk is one of the dumber monsters in the D&D bestiary, with an Intelligence of 2. It helps to explain why Zuckerberg’s burning Facebook to the ground for a metaverse nobody wants, here and now: someday, maybe, trillions of legless avatars might blissfully revere his name.
Every billionaire is a policy failure. Every billionaire is a weapon of mass destruction. Every billionaire is history’s greatest monster. Every billionaire is an injury to the world. Every billionaire is an affront to God. Every billionaire must be taxed out of existence.
