Scratch Pad: Chainsaw, Overload, LitRPG
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:
▰ The sound of chainsaws becomes immediately commonplace following the close call with a tornado
▰ There’s a new Steven Soderbergh–directed movie coming, titled Black Bag, starring Michael Fassbender in yet another spy role (following, recently, The Killer and The Agency), alongside Cate Blanchett. No composer is, at the moment, listed on IMDB, but Thomas Newman was reportedly associated with the project along the way.
▰ Had dinner at a Thai restaurant where I’m fairly certain the house stereo played just the same two Christmas songs on repeat the entire time.
▰ The practicalities of courtship in 1817: “the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader.” I started reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. If I understand this early passage correctly, a gentleman, Mr. Casaubon, is saying he is looking for a wife who will read to him when his eyes are tired. Now that is early audiobook culture. One of the sisters involved in this scene, only a few pages earlier, said taking care of the blind John Milton would have been a calling. So who knows what’s to come? Also, this is the third novel I’ve read this year that mentions Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations early on (the others being Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), the main difference being that at the time when Eliot wrote Middlemarch, Smith’s book’s publication was still a somewhat recent memory.
▰ Someday I’ll remember that Command+Option+Esc is the Mac’s Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Someday.
▰ Filed a 500-word article. You know how these things go: it would have taken me half as long had it been 1,000 words.
▰ The artist Hannes Pasqualini and I now have the first two of our four-panel comics complete, and we’ll begin rolling them out later this month (beginning on December 30th), with subsequent ones at a fairly regular cadence in the coming year. We did a half dozen of these during the first year of the pandemic.
▰ We had an earthquake, a tsunami alert, and a tornado alert, plus intense wind and rain, over the past couple weeks. I’d like a chill rest of the year. I’ve pretty much logged off of work until January 6.
▰ I hurt my left wrist 12 weeks ago yesterday, and I still can’t comfortably play guitar, but I’ve been using my synths a lot, and fortunately typing is fine.
▰ I think the only way through the onslaught of information and chaos in our the world is to make something of your own over a long period of time. That is the through line; that is where balance is found. You can’t just absorb; you perhaps should also produce. This proposal isn’t about becoming part of the problem; it’s about processing as a means of managing.
▰ My search data on this website inform me that a number of people have come here this week and searched for the title of the new Aphex Twin compilation, Music from the Merch Desk (2016 – 2023), which makes sense, since I wrote a book 10 years ago for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series about Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I don’t have much to say about Music from the Merch Desk at the moment. We’ll see where my ears take me. I will say this: I’ve just never been the sort of music critic who has an opinion about everything. If I don’t write about something, it doesn’t mean I don’t like it; it just means I feel I have nothing in particular to add. So much writing doesn’t add anything. I may weigh in at some point, but trigger-finger urgency is part of what’s wrong with the modern internet: hot takes, cursory judgement, filler, fodder, SEO optimization. AI isn’t the only entity on the planet that creates slop.
▰ It would be the most natural thing for me to start a record label, but it just seems like a lot of work to merely contribute another drop in the ocean, and in turn to undertake a vast amount of uninteresting promotional activity as a requisite to achieve the pleasure of sharing good work by people I admire, and to do right by them. Unless there was really a “different” way for me to go about it, something I think about regularly, I don’t think I’d do it. In many ways, the Disquiet Junto is that record label: weekly compilation albums that anyone can join in. Still …
▰ So far I’ve finished reading 29 novels this year, and that number doesn’t include getting well into War and Peace and Life: A User’s Manual before, respectively, pausing and stopping, and less far into many other books I won’t name. This week I finished reading two novels: Survival Quest, in the LitRPG genre (which is new to me), by Vasily Mahanenko, and Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. Reading Survival Quest is a bit like playing an RPG campaign with a stellar DM and some highly experienced other players; they are top of their game, and you’re more along for an enjoyable ride. Considering I started reading it just out of curiosity, and fairly certain I wouldn’t enjoy it, I had a great time. Case Histories I’m not so sure about: so many characters, a lot of moments evocatively told, but perhaps so many that they become easily confused, and so many incidents and confessions and so forth, so much emotion right at the surface, but then so many significant events that just pass right by. That much emotion can feel like a meal that is all dessert, which for some people may sound excellent, but for me is a lot to take in.
