← back // zpět ←
2024-09 | We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it
I’m back in Norwich, doing vaguely this . I like rainy landscapes, which is handy, I guess. Through my office window I look at this sculpture, and though I actually quite like it, I do often wonder what someone is doing up on the roof.
The wars keep getting worse. There is no good way of (me) talking about that. I won’t try. It’s important to keep paying attention, and it’s important to not be cynical, even if money sent and letters to various MPs feel pointless to the point of insulting.
Here are other things that happened:
• For the first time, I ate a whelk. It was awful! Why would anyone eat a whelk?
• I presented more graphs about the ozone hole and the Southern Ocean at the Challenger meeting. I also met two other women from Vyszegrad Europe doing things with computers and the ocean, which was a first, and felt really cool. (Paper still in first review.)
• Lael Wilcox broke the world record for circumnavigation of the globe by bike in a somewhat insane time of 108.5 days. She did it so beautifully: every day she posted her route ahead of time and invited whoever was around to ride with her. There’s a very pleasant podcast about the journey that she recorded with her wife, one episode per day, which I’ve been listening to on morning runs. Her voice has almost an ASMR-like quality, and she has great stories of meeting strangers and mountains and conflicts with the Turkish border police. Her combination of optimistic confidence without bravado, friendliness, generosity of spirit, and grit are very identifiable (to me) as "what the American mindset is, at the best of times". (The Czech and British equivalents often seem to be "grim good humour combined with terrifying competence and resilience to foul weathers" - not a bad way to go about the same goal, but a distinctly different one.)
• I start many days with coffee and cake, both of which are frowned upon by Andrew Huberman. According to Andrew Huberman, I am pretty sure I am already dead. I enjoyed James Hoffman, whom I like rather more than Andrew Huberman, somewhat dismantling the former's easy narratives about coffee and tiredness. As usual, simple narratives are often a trap.
• Years after everyone recommended it, I’m reading the Argonauts, which is excellent.
• This podcast kicked off another Vaguely Angsty Bob Dylan Fall (maybe the first since 2010?). I tend to be on J’s side of the (maybe-poorly-posed?) Cohen vs Dylan debate, but these weeks may make me reconsider. J’s point is that Cohen is k-selected (make few things, obsess over each line) and Dylan is r-selected (just say many things and wait for the meaning to come along later). Often the former is better, or at least more interesting, but Dylan has enough moments of I-have-only-a-foggy-idea-of what-this-means-but-it's-brilliant that he may be an exception. In any case it remains that it’s absolutely wild for the same person to write The Perfect Love Song (this, or maybe this), the perfect hey-what’re-you-doing-later song , and the perfect diss track (this, though this isn’t bad). (And then of course any number of rambling missives to the desolation of the American Century &or the human condition.)
You say you’ve lost yr faith, but that’s not where it’s at; you had no faith to lose and you know it. Oof.
(One September when I was 20 and really dumb I ill-advisedly rode my bike from Montréal across the state of New Hampshire overnight to casually visit someone and I listened to Dylan on the way. It was a memorable morning alone in the mist on the banks of the Connecticut River, red leaves everywhere, canonical New England fall, but I’m glad I’m maybe not that dumb anymore.)