Remember His Name

For those seeking a short but dense read, I've published my masters dissertation!

The dissy itself is a bit over 19,000 words and describes how gods are made, how they impact us, and what kind of god is scaffolding global imperialist capitalism. You can scoop it up here. Also, I've screenshot the table of contents, which you can check out below:

I wish these images were clearer but it is what it is; I fear that once Google remembers that Blogger exists, it will simply go away.

I am writing more regularly on Ko.fi, though. It is a platform that will most definitely go obsolete as Substack takes precedence. It's probably stubborn to resist Substack. But I feel like the latter will push me into something that I'm not interested in being in right now; namely, choosing a "personal brand" and a focus. 

Can we just not do that? Everybody hates that. Nobody wants to be whittled down to flesh versions of their LinkedIn and Instagram. I just don't want to live that way and I don't think anybody else wants to either.

Inklust #19: Gives and Tells

There were a few stipulations she had written into his standard contract that Mark had balked at: lemon rounds, not wedges; hypoallergenic makeup; fair-trade green tea. These, she explained, were gives—items that he was not to insist upon, which lack of insistence would make him seem like a much more reasonable person than his contract made him out to be.

— Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer

Here's a neat story: Van Halen was renowned for having a stringent, vaguely insane and crazy-detailed contract, one of whose stipulations included the demand that the band be provided with a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones picked out. If a single brown M&M was found, Van Halen could cancel the concert at the full expense of the promoter—right then and there.

This is usually told as an anecdote to illustrate how debauched and ridiculous rock-stardom had become. But there was actually a really good reason the clause existed.

Van Halen's concerts included some of the most complex and advanced pyrotechnics of any show at that time. A successful show required a number of safety precautions and precise technical measures.

If the band found brown M&Ms in the bowl, chances were high that the contract hadn't been read. It significantly increased the likelihood of an onstage accident or technical failure.

The brown M&Ms weren't a give; they were a tell.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #17: Quiet

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Station Eleven is a story about the end of civilization as we know it, and in reading it I traversed every emotion I expected: Terror, fear, deep sadness, loss, pain, guilt, hope.

But when I read this paragraph, I felt only a fleeting loneliness, like a bird skimming across the surface of water. Below that—deep below, where things resonate and expand inside you—I felt envy. This world has become so naked and noisy, and part of me wondered if that profound desire for quiet, for a day that means more than a compulsive Instagram upload, is the reason why so many people nurture only-half-jokey zombie apocalypse fantasies.

Photo Credit: Mike Shaheen via Compfight. cc

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #16: I don't want another factory

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.

— Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

To transform, it isn't enough to just undo what we've done. We have to tear out the very roots of how we think. Our deepest beliefs are so insidious, so difficult to divide from our very selves, that we have to remake that decision every day: Plough, sow, tear out the old ideas that so readily strangle what's only a seed today, the birth of your tomorrow self. We have to garden our minds with vigilance.

Image: tCentric-media.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #15: Looks like we made it

Heaven comprises of nothing save technicalities. There are eternal scribes devoted to the task of documenting such. They type every hour of every day without pause.

 — Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Scale Bright

We've come to a point in time when it seems like everything is worth recording for some mysterious future purpose, from a profound thought to that one time I accidentally ate my hair. How will people 500 years from now sift through all this data? What actually gets the privilege of living on beyond our time, and representing it?

Just please don't let it be that one show where people get dropped naked on an island and have to survive for a month. I can already imagine how that will go: "In the 21st century, when we were developing the intimacy with technology from which we all profit today, people divested themselves of all worldly goods and competed to both catch and survive diseases that didn't even exist in civilisation any longer. For entertainment! Another common tradition of this time was 'planking', when people would record themselves balancing on their forearms and toes on increasingly dangerous surfaces, then broadcast the act on a widestreaming video channel called YouTube in exchange for as many views as possible. Sometimes they died."

Heaven is crying.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #14: What goes without pain

The brain has no pain sensors and so it can’t hurt. The loss of his mind has turned out to be a curiously pain-free process. He feels that it ought to hurt more.

— Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry 

Image via Marc Dalmulder, available via a cc license.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #13: Stories are Dangerous

Stories are dangerous. And I don’t mean stories whose messages are capable of endangering. I mean that the form itself is dangerous, not the content. You know what a metaphor is? A story sent through the super distillation of imagination. You know what a story is? An extended metaphor. We live in them. We live in this swirling mass of stories written by scribes hidden in some forgotten room up there in the towers. The day someone thought of calling pigeons flying rats was the day the fate of pigeons was sealed. 

— Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know

Art credit: Ernst Philippe Zacharie.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Inklust #12: Thirsty Demons

It is chilling, in fact, the similarity between alcoholism and good ol’ fashioned demonic possession, the kind seen in The Exorcist. Like the devil, an alcoholic just wants to hide in his room, curse God, puke on visitors, and die. Attempts to cast out either alcoholism or the devil get the same response: both demon and disease will deny they exist. And when exposed, both will try to make deals to survive, or threaten suicide, or lash out, or play dead. Alcoholism is well described as a sickness of the soul because it is in the soul that the alcoholic’s problem lies.

— Luke Sullivan, Thirty Rooms to Hide In

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Chicken Soup for the Id

It's the last weekend of Ithaca's Friends of the Library book sale and in the next few days, you can make a killing. Saturday and Sunday, nothing costs more than $0.50. And on Tuesday -- the last day until Spring! -- it's a bagful for a dollar!

The weekend's spoils:

• Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
• eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work, by Randall E. Stross -- a pre-published manuscript!
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Fowler's second edition Dictionary of Modern English Usage
• Logic and Language by Huppé and Kaminsky
• Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Gayelord Hauser -- a detailed and totally elitist beauty guide from a beauty consultant (à la Kevyn Aucoin) in the '60s
• The Shackle by Colette
• Retreat from Love by Colette -- the fourth installment of her Claudine series, allegedly written while her husband locked her in a room for hours daily to pen books he had published under his name
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious -- an oft-mentioned piece of pop culture, hopefully worth the read, but I imagine it's going to be a lot like Valley of the Dolls, which is a lot like The House of Mirth for 21st-century Nicos
  
• The Arts of Costume and Personal Appearance by Grace Margaret Morton -- a grooming book from the '40s, full of useful tidbits like fighting "masculine" personality traits with the right outfit and make-up, and exercises on proper college girl or wife-of-executive attire on a budget
  

Total cost: $5. What an amazing place.

I also finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink yesterday. Definitely worth the read. It ends better than it begins, a rare quality, I think.

An interesting anecdote: seeds of the book were sown after Gladwell decided to grow out his hair and started getting unwanted attention from cops. This got him thinking about the power of first impressions. Can we avoid the hold snap judgments have on us? Not always. Can we refine our own? Yeah, when we know how they're formed and how they operate. (Comforting.)

Now I'm working my way through Tulipomania, a detailed account of the tulip craze that began to take hold of the Dutch in the late 16th century.

Their obsession with tulip bulbs was so great that the flowers commanded a futures exchange. One rare bloom could cost over 10 times what a rich merchant was paid in a year.

It's good so far. Right now I'm learning about how the Turks razed through hordes of villages and planted opulent gardens in their wake.

The Turkish word for tulip is lale, reverentially close to the letters used to write out Allah. The term tulipan may have been brought to the West in association with the bulbs because of the flowers' similarity in form to turbans.

For awhile, it seemed that tulips were going to rival gold and other precious metals in terms of raw value. Then the crash came and ruined plenty of fortunes and plenty of lives.

Way to build a house on sand. Then again...

Dot-com déjà-vu, anybody?

On the Meaning of Occupation

"Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer, of course, is yes, otherwise the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us.

"Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in a prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant [...] Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven't learned, that incapacity itself is totally defining."

-Foreword by William Gass, Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser

On Divine Delusion, or Revisiting the Pythia

A major benefit to creating your own hours is you get to read when the moment suits. I've just begun The Oracle by William J. Broad, which at heart seeks to understand why the Oracle's influence in ancient Greece was so significant she transcended centuries and, perhaps more surprisingly, the onslaught of rationalism, winning the deference of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch and Socrates.

The Oracle, otherwise known as the Pythia, was a critical voice in Greek society. Her word was sought for matters of state, coming war, governmental development and everyday questions of love, marriage, sex and legal adoption.

The final word of the Oracle can be traced back to an early democratic government and even the military success of Sparta: It was she who discouraged the Spartans from pursuing love of luxury, so they moved in the opposite direction, foregoing the precious metals in favour of iron as currency, and developing that Spartan endurance for which they later became famous.

Contrary to depictions of the Pythia as young, comely and scantily-clad, early in the Oracle tradition it was decided the position be held by a seasoned woman in her 40s or 50s, who, far from virginal, had already put matters of flesh and family behind her.

This decision was made to protect her virtue, but an older woman's experience probably also contributed to her soundness of judgment, despite the state of intoxication she had to achieve for divination.

I'm only halfway through the book, so the question of why her word was so powerful hasn't yet been answered. But according to experts of the time, a major source of the Oracle's power was a mysterious sweet-smelling pneuma that rose out of a chasm at her feet (just beneath her tripod). This mist caused a kind of divine delirium, into which she had to succumb before ultimately taking her post.

The myth of the Apollonian pneuma and the chasm below the tripod were dismissed in the late 1800s by French archaeologists, which were the first to excavate the site after Delphi, long luster-lost, had been home to a small Christian village for centuries. (Christianity became the vogue religion shortly after the Pax Romana, which was blamed, among other things, for indirectly silencing the Oracle.)

In the late 1990s, however, the pneuma - and the chasm under the Oracle's feet - were validated by archaeologist Hale of Yale and geologist De Boer of Wesleyan.

The mysterious pneuma was ethylene, which stimulates the central nervous system. In the Pythia's time it rose by nature out of two seismic faults, one spanning N-S and the other spanning E-W, crossing beneath the temple site. It was the perfect condition for psychedelic euphoria - better still, ethylene emits a sweet smell, and its effects virtually vanish minutes after contact with the gas has ended.

Ethylene gas visited the site of the Pythia each year for the warmest nine months (she rested the rest of the year), long enough for the intoxicated priestess to develop a good thousand years or so of influence - then it vanished, also quite naturally, around the time of the Pax Romana, silencing her voice in deference to the notion of the One God.

Under the right conditions it's normal for gas to rise out of the earth, especially in places where violent tectonic impacts are still young, as in Greece. Ethylene in particular was a tough gas to pin to the site as it doesn't quite survive once it's gone - it vanishes into the air or sets the stage for other gases over time. Methane and ethane are two gases whose presence is easiest to marry to the site.

That's as far as I've gotten. And I've probably slaughtered all the research. In any case, this book is neat. And if nothing else, it's just another example of how far drugs can get you in life. Ask a surrealist (hallucinogens were pretty modish).

I, for one, am a huge fan of the transcendent effects of black coffee coupled with the complete absence of sleep in the Circadian rhythm. It's a lifestyle, baby.

Here, There and Everywhere

I recently completed Here, There and Everywhere by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. If you're a Beatles fan (not the kind that collects Lennon's used kerchiefs or anything), it's definitely worth the read.

To start with, I should say I really dig the Beatles. Why is this important? Because their music wasn't my gateway drug. It was a book entitled The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. That led to my purchase of Revolver, and then I got ahold of Sgt. Pepper.

One day my good friend's pops asked me about my Beatles awakening. I told him what book did it. It was, in fact, from his very shelf.

He gave me a slight wizened frown and said, "I have the best book on the Beatles ever written. It came out recently. I'll lend it to you, and I never lend my books, so you have to promise you'll return it." With that, he oh-so-delicately entrusted me with Here, There and Everywhere. It still had that new-book smell.

I read it. Slowly. Then, as promised, I returned it.

I do think it was the best book on the Beatles ever written. And even if it weren't, I'm sufficiently satisfied with the perspective presented that I'm not off mongering for other ones.

The Emerick narrative, attentively shaped by Massey, betrays an intimacy with the Beatles that stems from both a technical viewpoint and a time investment that was not always pleasant. He doesn't lend the sense that he's writing about them because he was star-stuck, and he wasn't unduly officious about his position in their world.

Emerick describes each of their records with precision and a sharp eye, alongside painstaking accounts of recording equipment that was appearing at the time. (He also broke ground for many different sound elements that are studio stock today.)

What's more, there's no parsing of public rumours or sordid details, no pop interpretation of what must have inspired their songs. Emerick's craft, and Massey's construction of the tale that shaped it, are the true gems.

The Beatles, their hectic world and their playful experiments with people and music are examined with the same technical lens as was used for their albums. But there's feeling, too. Geoff's life and craft were impacted significantly by the Beatles' travails, and the gravity of his experience rises out of the sum of those parts.

The book is clearly not just about them. It's about him, too - possibly most of all.

After I read the book I picked up Abbey Road. It's the album I like best, and it probably wouldn't mean so much if not for Here, There and Everywhere.

Hats off to Massey and Emerick.

To be helpful, and because I've got a recessive groupie gene, I also posted this on Amazon.com. But if you wanna cut right to the chase, buy Here, There and Everywhere. (I really don't think you'll be sorry.)