Things I Found Interesting in August 2023
The crème de la crème of things I have consumed online.
In a world oversaturated with information, we can help each other by curating the crème de la crème of things we have consumed. When I did this previously (May, February, and November 2022) I found a cornucopia of curiosities. This time, however, I struggled. Perhaps it’s because the internet is over or I am just less engaged? Either way, I hope you find something stimulating in the following list.
1. Sex Bomb
Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been widely shared by AI nerds hoping to learn from humanity’s previous attempts at playing god. But did you know that Rhodes also wrote a book about his sex life and that Martin Amis reviewed it?
When fiction works, the individual and the universal are frictionlessly combined. In real life, sex demotes individuality, leaving us only with the usual sorry quiddity of various personal fetishes and taboos. What Mr. Rhodes gives us, in any event, is a cataract of embarrassment. "Making Love" is a hot book, right enough; but the heat is all in the armpits.
2. Watching Paint Dry
According to my Substack stats, I have generated seven subscribers for my friend Chris Kohler’s (rarely updated) newsletter. In return, he has generated precisely none for mine. I’m not bitter. I’m playing the long game, having read an early version of his forthcoming (2024) novel, Phantom Limb, which is excellent. Check out his recently published short story, ‘Watching Paint Dry’ on Minor Literatures.
I took the main road straight back to the house. Claire was crying her eyes out. She was all done with The Mighty Elk. Who knows who we’ll have next. Some kind of antelope maybe, some kind of deer.
3. Bricolage Grotesque
In a world of smart devices, where it is impossible to mess around with the operating system, I suspect most people have never installed a font. Indeed, most website builders make it tricky to add custom fonts. But typography fans may enjoy Bricolage Grotesque, an open source variable font nicely described as having a “French attitude and British mannerisms.”
4. The Weird World of Cruise Ships
I have never been on a cruise. Nor has
. But I hope someone sends him on one to understand the Ballardian realities of these monstrous seaborne cities. Perhaps he could do a cruise ship lecture on cruise ship architecture?If you boiled the spirit of the modern hospitality business down to its purest concentrate, you surely get something like the Icon of the Seas, the enormous new cruise ship whose digital renderings have recently gone viral online. Imagine Hieronymus Bosch painting Disneyland, and you get some sense of the diabolical energy of this project. I can think of no other artefact that employs design, engineering and industrial capacity on this scale for the sole purpose of escapism and pleasure.
5. Radiophrenia
Radiophrenia is a temporary radio station that brings the joy of the unexpected. I love dipping in and listening to some random drones or found audio. There is, of course, a schedule and on Wednesday at 8pm, you can hear the premiere of my experimental remix of David Bowie’s Please Mr Gravedigger (1967).
6. What actually makes people happy?
I chanced upon Aveek Bhattacharya’s review of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Don’t Trust Your Gut and liked this table ranking what people think will make them happy versus what actually makes people happy. For instance, going to an Exhibition/Museum/Library was ranked 20th in predicted happiness but came 3rd when people actually experienced it.
7. Lovely Purple Dachshunds
I’m continuing to enjoy
’ Substack, now renamed Svelte Lectures. This dive into the connotations of the colour purple is particularly pleasing, waltzing as it does through Dickon’s camp canon.Whole periods of history have been labelled purple. The 1890s became known not just as the age of Decadence, capital D, but ‘the Mauve Decade’. Mauve, a lighter, pinker shade of purple, became all the rage when the mauve dye, aniline purple, was patented for mass production. Before then, purple was so difficult to manufacture that it tended to be reserved for royalty.
8. True Wealth
I mentioned in my post on routines that it doesn’t matter how much you plan, your routine will come to nothing if you don’t sleep well. I took this idea from Nassim Taleb who has an extended list of things that make a good life.
9. Death and Literature in Edinburgh
, interviewed here last year, has resurrected her Substack. No one else I know writes with such corporeal glee:I have deluded myself into thinking [Edinburgh] is a good place for a writer just to be, to recuperate and hole up and write, but after multiple summers working chaotic fringes (the ultimate celebration of mediocrity which seems to draw in the ghouls of past decades we would rather leave behind: the chuckling red faced male comedian, the guitar player, the greasy and tortured body of a Las Vegas circus performer) to barely pay my rent, looking forward to ghastly sandwiches to go out of date at work so I could eat them as grocery prices rise, the scramble to find housing, and the unrelenting mould and vermin of most places on the rental market, the endless party atmosphere of tourists and polyamorous ogre men, I can delude myself no longer.
10. Crumble Magazine
The Edinburgh-based architecture magazine, Crumble, is launching its eighth issue in September. The issue is titled ‘Bending out of Shape’ and contains an article I wrote on seeing the city anew with psychogeography. Pre-order here.
11. AI Architecture
You don’t hear so much about AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney nowadays. Their stylistic quirks become clichéd almost instantaneously. It will be interesting to see whether the same thing happens with modern architecture.
Patrick Schumacher, the controversial head of Zaha Hadid Architects, has been experimenting with AI to create potential buildings that take the Instagram aesthetics of modern architecture even further. Read Oliver Wainwright on whether AI will wipe out architects.
12. Sitcom characters discover the internet
Part of the reason I write these quarterly link posts is to preserve ephemera that would otherwise be lost in social media streams. A while back, I came across a 1994 excerpt from the sitcom 2point4 Children, where the characters hear about email and the internet for the first time. It feels positively prelapsarian.
13. Numb in China
is in China and has written a mindbending article about the complexities of the Chinese language:For a very long time, machine-translation—or even dictionary-translation—into or out of Chinese was basically impossible. Unless there was a human who actually knew both languages, you would end up with nonsense. This was part of what gave rise to ‘Engrish,’ the bizarre faulty English common in east Asia. I’ve seen some outstanding examples here. In a train station in rural Sichuan, an intensely adorable girl, maybe five years old, waved shyly at us. Her parents, who loved her, had put her in a t-shirt that read PUBERTY SILENT. In Shaanxi, a man was happily walking down the street in a top that featured a big picture of a tropical sunset and said, for reasons that presumably made sense at some point in the design process, MOOVHH BRCFNEPS: While There Is Life Hope. In a hotel room, we had a set of light switches by the bed, all helpfully labelled in English. Bedside light, desk light, hallway. The last switch was marked, alarmingly, smallpox. I didn’t press that one. The Chinese for ceiling is 天花, tiānhuā: literally, overhead-pattern. The name for smallpox, meanwhile, means Heaven-flower, for obscure reasons; maybe the disease, which bursts like blossoms over the sufferer’s skin, was thought to be a kind of divine curse. The relevant characters are 天花: exactly the same.
14. Spirit Photography
Photography became popular around the same time as spiritualism, leading to this amazing crossover genre.
15. A Photograph After Midnight
I am not much of a night owl, but was out after midnight yesterday (technically today) and it felt like another world. This was both interesting to me and useful in that it gave me a featured image to use for this post.