Fastnar för ett par svar från kosmologen/fysikern Claudia de Rham i en intervju med henne med anledning av hennes bok The Beauty Of Falling: A Life In Pursuit Of Gravity

… Every day, I try out an idea and it fails. And there’s something beautiful in failing, and falling. The book is about gravity, but it is also about embracing this falling, because it’s how we get better — it’s how we understand the world. With gravity, failing has an even deeper meaning. The way that we describe gravity at the moment is with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which predicts its own downfall.

How so?

If you have a gravitational collapse of matter, the endpoint will be in a black hole, with a singularity at its centre. The singularity means that, if you agree with Einstein’s theory, some quantities you can measure would be infinite. What that really means is that the theory has stopped working there, and it gives a prediction that doesn’t make any sense. So the theory itself is telling you that you shouldn’t trust it any more. And that is not something to be ashamed of. It is an opportunity to learn something more.

Davide Castelvecchi, “Cosmologist Claudia de Rham on falling for gravity“, Nature, 2 april 2024

Det där senare svaret är säkert skåpmat för någon som är bekant med relativitetsteorin, svarta hål och kosmologi, men jag gillar alltid en märgfull förklaring.

Nature har för övrigt en recension av Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation, som inleder starkt:

Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Candice L. Odgers, “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?“, Nature, 29 mars 2024

Jag lyssnar på Gästabudet och de pratar om systemromanen. Det får mig att dra ihop några trådar jag samlat på, även om det kanske inte passar in helt i den genredefinition som bl.a. Agri Ismaïl refererar i avsnittet. Hans roman Hyper (ej läst, men läst en del om) fick mig att tänka på en artikel om Lydia Kiesling och hennes roman Mobility, där hon försöker fånga hyperobjeketet oljeindustrin.

Thinking ecologically about global warming requires a kind of mental upgrade,” Timothy Morton, the environmental philosopher, has written, “to cope with something that is so big and so powerful that until now we had no real word for it.” In 2008, Morton tried to invent one: hyperobject. The term doesn’t necessarily connote a value judgment, that this enormous thing is good or bad, but simply that in its hugeness it is inescapable, like air. To wrap one’s mind around the idea of a hyperobject is to accept that we, humans, “can’t jump out of the universe.” And according to Morton, being able to acknowledge the scale of a phenomenon as all-encompassing as, say, climate change, to name it, might be the first step toward actually doing something about it.

Hyperobjects abound in our globalized world: the internet, fast fashion, microplastics—things that cannot easily be measured using a single metric. A character in Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, tries to explain the concept and lands on this: “It’s something so big and sticky with so many parts that it can’t be seen, something that touches so many other things.” Something, another character offers, like the oil industry.

Amy Weiss-Meyer, “What Do You Do When You Realize You’re Ruining the Earth?“, The Atlantic, 17 augusti 2023

Emile Zolas romancykel Les Rougon-Macquart är nog något annat än en systemroman enligt de mest liberala kriterierna. Men jag kom att tänka på den eftersom författaren Brandon Taylor (Real Life, Filthy Animals, The Late Americans) har spenderat ohemult mycket tid åt att läsa den och koka ned för oss andra i essän “Is it even good?“.

Les Rougon-Macquart encompasses almost every area of social life, from the rural bourgeoisie (The Fortune of the Rougons, The Conquest of Plassans, The Bright Side of Life) to the working poor (Germinal, The Assommoir, Earth) to the heights of government power (His Excellency Eugène Rougon) to the markets and commerce of Paris (The Belly of Paris, Money, The Kill, The Ladies’ Paradise, La Bête humaine) to the art world (The Masterpiece, Nana) to the theatres of war (La Débâcle), and everything in between. At times, it feels as if nothing that exists is outside Zola’s intimate knowledge. He seems familiar with every screw and bolt in the machines that lower men into mines and the trains that carry passengers from Le Havre to Paris, every nuance of the inner workings of the French parliament, every change of fashion on the boulevards. Then there is the size of the cycle itself, twenty novels filled with events and with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of characters, many of whom reappear, creating a taut network of narrative relations. I planned to summarise the books and describe this network, but had to stop when I realised that this in itself would result in a book-length account.

Brandon Taylor, “Is it even good?“, London Review of Books, 4 april 2024

Den apokalyptiska systemromanen, kontrafaktisk men inte fantastik, exemplifieras av Hari Kunzru med Elliot Ackerman och James Stavridis 2034 och 2054, Lawrence Wrights The End of October (som handlar om en global pandemi, utgiven precis i början av 2020) och Kim Stanley Robinsons The Ministry of the Future. Kunzru jämför den här sortens romaner med Zolas tidigare nämnda storskaliga roman, men också med den sortens scenarioplanering som The RAND Corporation använde(r) sig av för att hjälpa regeringar att planera för alla möjliga framtider.

Multi-stranded, terse, often anchored in character just enough to drive the action forward, these books invite us to take an elevated, panoramic view of events that extend too far in space and time to be grasped by a single narrative consciousness. Conflict, climate change, pandemics and natural disasters offer ways to contemplate our interconnection and interdependence. At its best, this kind of fiction can induce a kind of sublime awe at the complexity of the global networks in which we’re enmeshed: A butterfly flaps its wings in Seoul and the Dow crashes; a hacker steals a password and war breaks out.

Hari Kunzru, “This Is the Way the World Ends (According to Novelists)“, New York Times, 29 mars 2024

I ett (tyvärr sällsynt) utskick av Missiverna nämnde jag en roman av Aurélien Bellanger om/med Walter Benjamin, men han har skrivit fler:

Aurélien Bellanger writes ambitious novels. His favoured technique is to take transformative phenomena as his starting point and then synthesize whole eras. His debut, La Théorie de l’information (2012), explored the impact of the rise of the internet. L’Aménagement du territoire (2014) swapped the web for the TGV, France’s high-speed rail network. Bellanger has since published fiction on urban development (Le Grand Paris, 2017), European integration (Le Continent de la douceur, 2019) and reality television (Téléréalité, 2021). All of these novels are marked by the author’s restless obsession with technical detail and include long, encyclopedic passages of intense description

Luka Werde, “Document of barbarism“, TLS, 14 april 2023

Bara en liten detalj från en krönika om försäljningen av Tom Verlaines boksamling:

Verlaine had split his enormous collection between storage units: one a short walk from his Chelsea one-bedroom, four more across the river in Red Hook, near the foot of the Gowanus Canal. Verlaine didn’t use Uber. To get to the Brooklyn facility he’d take a rickety grocery cart on the F train, ride it out to Smith and Ninth Street, the highest Subway station in the city, and walk the rest of the way. In a crowd, Verlaine stood out. He was tall, thin, fine-featured. (‘Tom Verlaine has the most beautiful neck in rock and roll,’ Patti Smith wrote in 1974. ‘Real swan like.’) He had never quit smoking and wore a car coat, like a character out of film noir. But there he had been, bumping his cart down several sets of stairs and escalators and wheeling it, under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, across seven lanes of traffic, to Red Hook. The books had to go somewhere.

Alex Abramovich, “At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale“, London Review of Books, 4 mars 2024

“Det är anmärkningsvärt grundande” att ha Matt Webbs lilla app på sin telefon som alltid pekar på Vintergatans centrum, 26 000 ljusår bort.

Ett slags kosmiskt sammanträffande: för något år sedan så skojade jag tillsammans med andra privat om en “affärsidé” som skulle kunna uppstå om man en bra sak – varmkorv med bröd – kombinerades med något slags infrastrukturplattformigt, och “taxi”-tjänster à la Uber var det som kändes mest rimligt. Tanken var att man skulle kombinera taxikörandet med att samtidigt sälja korv med bröd från bakluckan. Du hör, det var en inte särskilt seriös diskussion, men kul för stunden. Andra kombinatoriska element förekom, men det här var den som fastnade. Korv-Uber har blivit en shibboleth för korkade affärsidéer sedan dess.

Nu har jag börjat läsa Cory Doctorows nya bok The Bezzle – den andra i serien om tech-detektiv-revisorn Martin Hench (den första var Red Team Blues) – och vad förekommer i inledningen av den om inte detta:

Jag läste Percival Everetts Erasure (2001) nyligen och gillade den mycket. Noterar att man från och med idag kan se American Fiction – filmatiseringen av den – på Amazon Prime.

Apropå Waxahatchee så finns det en ny låt nu – “Bored” (Spotify). Albumet “Tigers Blood” kommer 22 mars.

Här är ett från publiken filmat framförande av “Bored” från december:

…och här är den officiella videon:

Jag dagbokar på en massa olika sätt slår det mig. Några sätt jag har: Obsidian (oftast dagliga anteckningar), appen Day One, analogt i anteckningsböcker med eller utan datum, .md-filer i Sublime Text, lösa lappar, kamerarullen. Filosofin är att alltid ha ett verktyg eller en yta för att notera på och inte behöva hitta verktyget.