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2024-06 | I think about it all the time
A month of oscillating probabilities, and more sun. Monthly missive delayed somewhat because we went to the outer coast of Nootka Island for five days, where we saw a sea wolf and got sand in all our things and ate wild peas. (One of our party is an archivist for British Columbia and dug up these fascinating 1920s photographs of the same place)
• At work I'm running the simulations for the 2024 Global Carbon Budget, which is an interestingly iterative process (and also a nice litmus test of "is the code I wrote a year ago still usable?" -- this time the answer is, somewhat surprisingly, "more or less").
• On vacation I read the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, the queen of British modernism. They are short, deft sketches of the inner lives of people in ordinary Edwardian England situations - very much summer seaside reading. It's very well written (and at points queer coded as hell, which is fun for something written in the 1920s) but on the whole I couldn't quite connect - maybe a failure of empathy on my part, to traverse the space-time-class distances.
» But then her voice always sounded as though she knew something better about you than you did yourself. She was a long, strange-looking woman with narrow hands and feet. Her face, too, was long and narrow and exhausted-looking; even her fair curled fringe looked burnt out and withered. She was the only woman at the Bay who smoked, and she smoked incessantly, keeping the cigarette between her lips while she talked, and only taking it out when the ash was so long you could not understand why it did not fall. When she was not playing bridge—she played bridge every day of her life—she spent her time lying in the full glare of the sun. She could stand any amount of it; she never had enough. All the same, it did not seem to warm her. Parched, withered, cold, she lay stretched on the stones like a piece of tossed-up driftwood. The women at the Bay thought she was very, very fast. Her lack of vanity, her slang, the way she treated men as though she was one of them, and the fact that she didn’t care twopence about her house and called the servant Gladys “Glad-eyes,” was disgraceful. «
• Two interesting things about Katherine Mansfield: a) she once sent this absolute pipe bomb of a letter (to a woman who was, incidentally, older than her) b) when she died, Virginia Woolf was vaguely relieved at the loss of a rival.
•Emily Chappell wrote a beautiful essay about queerness in Four Weddings and a Funeral, which led to me seeing Four Weddings and a Funeral for the first time. I will remember the eulogy.
• Summer is also Evgeny Morozov season again, and I'm working through A Sense of Rebellion, which is a ~quirky~ look at the origins of smart tech. There are Dune references and the CIA, of course, as well as a good amount of 60s male entitlement. (I keep being reminded of the whole "remember, punks are nice people pretending to be mean, and hippies are mean people pretending to be nice" thing.) I have a tendency to zone out during podcasts, so I transcribed the whole thing, available here for reference, along with Lea Ypi's podcast.
♮ Facebook informed me that 11 years ago, quasi-employed in Brno, I made this mixtape, called 'Dance Songs', of songs with the word dance in them (In the words of younger self: "[1934-2005, arranged chronologically and also arguably in order of increasing weirdness]") It kinda holds up, in that it's still on Google Drive and I still like most of these songs. (I vaguely remember it at the time being spurred by wanting to listen to this song on my bike - things do not have to be complicated to be nice.)
♮ A new Charli xcx banger (h/t C.P., J.J., A.M, and many others)
♮ O.V. shared this haunting melody, whose text is:
כל העולם כלו
גשר צר מאד
והעקר לא לפחד כלל
The whole world
Is a very narrow bridge
and the main thing is to have no fear at all