Här är några böcker — gamla som nya, fiktiva som icke-fiktiva — som har plockats upp på diverse håll (recensioner, nyhetsbrev, poddar, m.m.) på sistone:
Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season (på svenska som Orkansäsong; haft på läslistan sedan tidigare, men blev påmind i den här intervjun med Philip Sherburne).
Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Pas and Promise of Electronic Music (i samma intervju)
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (via: Alan Jacobs)
Doug Bierend, In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms (via: Alicia Kennedy)
Andrew Ridker, Hope: A Novel (minns inte var, men nyutkommen och recenserad här och där)
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War (någon podcast, minns inte vilken)
Anna Kinsella, Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City (minns inte)
George Steiner, My Unwritten Books (minns inte)
Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool (förmodligen i en recension av den sista delen i trilogin som just utkommit; detta är första delen)
Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth: A Novel (via: Eliot Peper)
Andrea D. Lobel & Mark Shainblum (reds.), Other Covenants: Alternative Histories of the Jewish People (via: Mark Bernstein)
Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir (minns inte, förmodligen recension)
Adam Arvidsson & Nicolai Peitersen, The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis (via: Matt Webb)
Tara Isabella, Self-Made (många ställen)
Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (via: Folger Shakespeare Library)
…är det en grej? Var kan man läsa/förstå mer? Från en drömmig artikel om Tove och Hanna Folkesson i DN idag:
Hanna har undervisat i porträttmåleri och eko-bygge, hennes dröm är att ha kurser i intuitivt byggande i huset. Förmedla känslan av att det är enkelt, speciellt till kvinnor som sällan har haft möjlighet att bygga sina egna rum.
Marisa Libbon gräver i luften i sin essä “An archeology of air” och knyter ihop berättelsen om den medeltida dansk-engelska kungen Havelok, hur orden och ryktena färdades i luften över Nordsjön och hur luft har skördats med hjälp av väderkvarnar och gigantiska vindparker till havs (som Hornsea 1-3 utanför Grimsby).
An archaeology of the air turns up old sounds and voices, dreams and experiments that we sometimes mistake for our own. It holds the versions of history we’ve cast off, but have influenced us all the same. We think of air as preservation’s nemesis, eating away at the past’s last traces. The ground preserves objects as they were in their own time. The air preserves artifacts in transit. Carried from place to place, era to era; always in the process of becoming, of changing. Air spun rapidly and relentlessly enough can power a 21st-century city. But air, when marshaled and then excavated, can tell us things about the lives and sounds and movements that existed between the past’s tangible relics, and in so doing, can tell us something about ourselves.
Libbon har tidigare skrivit boken Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England och har boken Cultures of Power på gång, om just väderkvarnens inflytande på medeltida Englands fysiska och mentala landskap.
Jenny Turner i London Review of Books om en översatt utgåva av Fleur Jaeggys The Water Statues (Le statue d’acqua).
Fashion, the It-girl Alexa Chung once said, is just what happens when you have been wearing one thing for ages, then get bored with it. Is this the reason Jaeggy has become so fashionable, because readers are tired of big books and humanist fiction, all that inwardness that isn’t really inward, all those vulgar, boring families with ‘all of the advertising’, as Jaeggy once put it, ‘on their side’? Chung again, explaining a ‘sensation’ she gets from clothes she becomes ‘obsessed with’: ‘At first I find them almost grotesque, they make me feel a bit sick. Then I look at them again, and realise it’s not repulsion, but desire.’
I samma nummer av LRB, Mike Jay om boken Elixir: A Story of Perfume, Science and the Search for the Secret of Life av Therese Levitt.
In Elixir, Theresa Levitt tells the entwined stories of the Laugier family and the development of perfume in the first decades of what in the early 19th century would come to be called ‘organic chemistry’. The long tradition of isolating plant essences, she argues, played an underappreciated role in these discoveries. Smell has always been a crucial diagnostic sense, the one that brings us closest to the fundamental properties of matter, and the evolution of perfume follows an unbroken narrative thread that extends from alchemy to modern industrial chemistry.
Också från LRB, om boken och terapisekten The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune av Alexander Stille:
But perhaps the last word should go to Newton’s daughter Esther, who summed up the group’s mixture of aspiration and mediocrity with admirable bluntness: ‘They combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theatre.’
James Lasdun, “Chumship“, London Review of Books, 27 juli 2023
Det kanske är mest på engelska från USA som man stöter på allt fler böcker av filosofer som är mer personligt präglade och utifrån filosofiska idéer reflekterar över hur man kan/bör leva. Crispin Sartwell nämner Agnes Callard (Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, men främst genom essäer i The Point och The New Yorker (porträtt och “The Case Against Travel“) / Intervju med Ezra Klein), John Kaag (bl.a. Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, American Philosophy: A Love Story och Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living), Clancy Martin (How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind), Skye Cleary (How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy och How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment), Justin E. H. Smith (bl.a. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning, men kanske främst hans Substack “The Hinternet“, varmt rekommenderad), Kieran Setiya (Midlife: A Philosophical Guide och Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way) och Costica Bradatan (bl.a. In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility), men också New York Times-bloggen “The Stone“, i “The New Hellenism” hos Los Angeles Review of Books. Den första jag kommer att tänka på i Sverige är Jonna Bornemark men det finns så klart fler.
Then again, these new ways of writing and of using philosophical ideas are only getting started. They may well have significant implications about the nature of knowledge or the free will problem, come to think of it. Perhaps the personal and the public will provide essential routes of progress for traditional questions, or will lead to new sorts of answers. But maybe that hasn’t quite happened yet. Either way, however, and even as philosophy as an academic discipline is again endangered by budget cuts and considerations of prestige and practicality, there is no doubt that the new philosophy has brought in its train a much-needed renewal of urgency, energy, and sense of practical purpose. And it certainly brings the field some much better writing and some much more pleasurable reading.
Crispin Sartwell, “The New Hellenism“, Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 juli 2023
Inspelning från symposiet “Spinoza och början på den judiska upplysningen” som ägde rum i Stockholm i maj (och som jag hade biljetter till men GLÖMDE BORT). Jonathan Israels tegelstensbiografi (1344 sidor!) över Spinoza kommer snart ut.
Junot Diaz om Octavia Butler och hennes Kindred (och TV-serifieringen av den):
Kindred is thus simultaneously a time-travel story and a neo-slave narrative. Butler literalizes what’s implicit in the genre—after all, isn’t every neo-slave narrative a time-travel story? But don’t let the temporal hijinks confuse you: this is no Terminator fantasy; even 1962’s La Jetée seems downright cheery by comparison. Kindred, for my money, is second only to Morrison’s Beloved (1987) in approximating the insane everyday nightmare that was American slavery. How it ate flesh, how it ate souls, how it ate presents, how it ate futures. In Butler’s deft hands every moment that Dana spends in the past is torqued with dread, with the imminence of arbitrary annihilation. The real question is not whether the violation will come—it will—or if it will kill you (always a possibility), but whether it will shatter your humanity forever.
(Deborah Chasman var redaktör för Junot Diaz hos Boston Review när Diaz för några år sedan blev anklagad för sexuella trakasserier. Hon skriver insiktsrikt om det i “My #MeToo Moment“).
Octavio Butlers och Samuel R. Delanys vägar korsades. Delany porträtteras i The New Yorker. Han är en helt ny bekantskap för mig, men blir nyfiken på hans Dhalgren:
“Dhalgren” both is and is not difficult to read. The Kid, a twenty-seven-year-old poet who has forgotten his own name, wanders through the city—where streets change places, and a second moon appears—equipped with a notebook and a multi-bladed weapon called an orchid. A series of encounters befall him: sex with men and women in parks and abandoned buildings; barroom chats with draft dodgers, an astronaut, and other refugees from the outside world; and a stint working for a middle-class family who, like zombies, go on reënacting their drab daily routines in denial of the surrounding catastrophe. Somehow, while mired in a fugue that never lifts, the Kid becomes a legend, publishing a book of poetry with the help of an Auden-like visitor and assuming leadership of a multiracial street gang that loots houses and department stores while cloaked in holographic shields. Delany never resolves whether Bellona’s strange distortions are artifacts of the Kid’s psyche or glitches in the city itself, “the bricks, and the girders, and the faulty wiring and the shot elevator machinery, all conspiring together to make these myths true.”
Jag läste Mackenzie Warks autoteoretiska Raving efter att ha läst den här recensionen:
Raving, a narrated microethnography that pulses forward with alacrity, is an enjoyable read. Wark is a deft writer with an eye for detail, the kind of person who notices a grate in the ground and listens for the ocean below. Raves occur in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, almost always literally and a couple of times “psychogeographically”; these spaces are generally tight-knit and moderately gatekept, with flyers posted on private Instagrams and disseminated via Telegram group chats. Wark’s “rave crew” of friends and lovers is similarly semi-anonymized, reduced to referential letters. Unnaming turns characters into avatars readers can more readily envision in their own lives, occasionally at the expense of clarity (wait, so what happened between Wark and J? Does C like F or was that Z?). Exceptions are made for a few friends quoted as theorists or working the rave, bartending and designing lights, as bouncers and ticket takers and DJs.
Ett möte med David Keenan (bl.a. This Is Memorial Device, Monument Maker och England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground):
There were no throwaway niceties. Keenan speaks as he writes: with great speed and absolute conviction. Over the course of the afternoon our conversation topics included the mystical pull of Airdrie; his lifelong fascination with the occult; his reverence of Lester Bangs, Roberto Bolaño and William Blake; and what could loosely be referred to as his writing “process” – a state he described as bursts of intense creative mania, bordering on possession. It isn’t a metaphor, he stressed, when he said that his books often feel as if they were written by an unseen force. Over the years, he has come to see them as “organisms in a way. They’re moving and pliable. You’re dealing with something that doesn’t have a fixed point.”
Thick rules are rules that come upholstered with all manner of qualifications, examples, caveats, and exceptions. They are rules that are braced to confront a world in which recalcitrant particulars refuse to conform to universals—as opposed to thin rules, of which algorithms are perhaps the best prototype: thin rules are formulated without attention to circumstances. Thin rules brook no quarter, they offer no sense of a variable world. Many bureaucratic rules, especially bureaucratic rules in their Kafkaesque exaggeration, also fit this description.
Här några saker som jag tydligen hoardat av någon anledning men inte uppmärksammat själv. De är alla värda en href. Det är ett urval från Pinboard under november 2022:
Ett begrepp: Pentimento: “In painting, a pentimento (Italian for ‘repentance’; from the verb pentirsi, meaning ‘to repent’; plural pentimenti) is ‘the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over’.” (Jag tror möjligen att jag hade läst något om Jan van Eycks Arnolfini-porträtt och hur det målas om/över, vilket också finns med som exempel.)
Och apropå lager av mening: Liza Dalys bidrag till förra årets National Novel Generation Month är så sinnrikt! A Letter Groove: “Given a URL of an IIIF manifest pointing at a series of scanned book pages, produce a new book that cuts out words revealing the pages beneath. (IIIF is an API and data format for describing image sequences for use in academia and research, and can be applied to individual documents, maps, books, or ephemera.)”
Ella Webb: “Series of mountain sections, stratigraphies, axonometric projections of geological phenomena are carefully arranged to compose pages of charts. The resulting diagrams don’t correspond anymore to any specific information, but make sense only because of their visual value.”
“Live Coding: A User’s Manual is the first comprehensive introduction to the practice and a broader cultural commentary on the potential for live coding to open up deeper questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture.
Pappret “Perceptual grouping explains similarities in constellations across cultures” (PDF) känns spekulativt, alltså intressant. Här undersöks orsaken till att olika “kulturer” genom tiderna och över jorden har haft en tendens att grupperna stjärnor (asterism, ett nytt begrepp) på ett liknande sätt.
Man hittade lådor med nedteckningar från Hegels tidiga föreläsningar i ett arkiv i Tyskland (Daily Nous; The Guardian). Tom Whyman (bra namn på en filosof) funderar: “And so if I’d discovered the new Hegel, I’m not really sure I’d have told anyone … If Hegel still has anything relevant to tell us, and in my view he probably does, I think it might be better if there was less of him.”
Ett annat begrepp: “Fenologi (från grekiskans phainesthai, komma i dagen, bli synlig), botanisk och zoologisk term för läran om de periodiska företeelsernas uppträdande inom växt- och djurriket, dvs. hur naturen förändras över årstiderna.” (Från Jen Lowes “phenological signs“).
Bartosz Ciechanowskis illustrerande förklaringar noterades – en om ljud, en om klockor. Senare kom en om cykeln.
“Gullah (also called Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English, and Geechee) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called “Geechees” within the community), an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.”
“Renaissance paintings are often as crowded with people as a car would be in one of China’s 46 subway systems today. Yet neither in the time of Jesus nor in the time of Masaccio was either the Middle East or Europe densely populated. Life would have been agrarian, with plants and animals everywhere humans went. But these frescoes were not painted to show life as it was. They were simplified models whose purpose was to teach the stories and values.”
It’s not that ideas come in universities, and we apply them in industry. It’s much more nonlinear and complex than that. My own research later in soft matter, for example—my first big bite of a new puzzle—had to do with what happens if you take these long-chain molecules and branch them into tree-like or cone-like structures. After all, we’ve learned that part of their key physics is that two strings can’t cross each other in three dimensions. That was a fundamental interaction, what we’d call a topological interaction. So it became obvious to ask, what happens when one changes the topology of the molecules themselves? And the answer is whole new emergent properties leap out, and that was fun to explore for quite a few years, in collaboration with chemists and engineers and computer scientists and industrial scientists, too. So that gives you an idea of soft matter, and the latest thing that’s happening is, of course, that we are made, life is made, of soft materials. So you’ll now find myself and other soft-matter physicists engaging more and more with biologists and together exploring how the physics of biological cells and biological matter works.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Om betydelsen av sinnen:
Fascinatingly, one really important property, which later became a real key to its physical physics, is that when you stretch rubber, it gets warm. And if you take a stretched rubber at room temperature and you relax it, it cools. So there’s strange thermodynamics going on. It’s called the Gough effect, after a man named John Gough who lived in the Lake District. And, very interestingly, he was blind from birth, so he had to develop his other senses, his non-sighted senses, in his exploration of the science that he loved, and I think it’s really a wonderful thing that he discovered an effect that other people completely missed because it’s a very subtle change of temperature. Anyone can detect it. Just stretch a rubber band on your lower lip, which is sensitive to temperature. This is what he would do. So the Gough effect goes back to the nineteenth century.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Om “hur det får lugna ner sig lite”:
And all that quantum-mechanical stuff had to calm down for a few decades before people went back in the sixties to say, “Well, now we know a bit more mathematics than this. What was this fascinating program on complex fluids that that was going on before we all got excited about quantum mechanics?” That’s slightly tongue in cheek, but only a bit. That’s the potted history.
“Science Is a Long Story: A Conversation with Tom McLeish, Part One”, Marginalia, 3 februari 2023
Jag är alltid på jakt efter beskrivningar av vardagliga skrivsätt och metoder hos författare. Kathy Acker verkar ha haft en speciell relation till sina anteckningsböcker. Det här kommer från biografin över Kathy Acker, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, av Jason McBride:
In lined, spiral-bound notebooks of various sizes, in handwriting that is loopy and almost childlike, Acker chronicles the ups and downs of her relationship with Neufeld, other sexual affairs, her half-hearted attempts at employment, gossip about writers, her own fragile mental and physical state, her dreams, her cats, books she’s reading, her thoughts on writing, compositional methods, memory, and representation. Even when broke, she usually used, as she would for the rest of her life, a Montblanc fountain pen. For the most part, these entries are rapid, raw, and intimate, a punctuation-free stream of consciousness, where one event or thought suddenly gives way to another, and subjects and subjectivities shift without warning or signpost. Seemingly factual events butt up against, or run headlong into, fantasy and dream. As in her later writing, friends, lovers, and colleagues appear frequently, their names unchanged.
