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Bad stuff is now good stuff
Feels like there’s a weird amount of dialogue about how things suck these days and that they used to be good:
I liked this comment in particular:
There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of buyer's remorse, etc.
There is a tangent here that intersects with refinement culture as well. Among the group of society that (subconsciously) care about these "expedient" choices, you see everyone and everything start to look the same.
The "article posted on here" referred to in the first paragraph is this one (in a discussion, actually, about one of Robin Sloan's books—though not the one that I read recently, and which I didn't like very much.)
Or Alexander Scott on Tartaria and the aesthetics of the modern world vs the old world: Scott bemoans that societies the world over have given up on elaborate, technical aesthetics in the last century or so, converging on a sort of modernist middle ground of steel and glass (or equivalents across artistic disciplines) lacking in interest or staying power.
Personally I wouldn’t mind if architecture and style were a bit more diverse and interesting these days—why are we no longer building for thousands of years? (Expedience? Scott also seems to have some hypotheses, most of which revolve around wealthy people being public weirdos.) Pretty much everywhere has an extensive and rich history of building, dress, and art—but in broad strokes the money has moved towards generic “global” art, architecture, and music. Maybe that’s a function of the explosion of communication technology in the last 50 years.
And as a counterpoint the average westerner’s diet is orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting today than it was even 100 years ago. Aaand fashion continues to push boundaries by mixing and remixing cultures.
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Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan
Published 2012 288 pagesNot a ton to review here. I don't generally knock books for being derivative—smart writers can do a lot of exciting things with established forms or narratives—but unfortunately, Robin Sloan doesn't. Maybe I'm not the target audience? I'm not sure what readers are meant to get out of this: the common fantasy tropes are so thinly veiled that even the protagonist makes repeated reference to them as they happen.
Clay Jannon gets fired from his cringe design job and takes up as the clerk of a bookstore in San Francisco. It turns out that the bookstore is a front for a shadowy Secret Society with sinister vibes but which, it turns out, doesn't actually do anything but own a typeface and write a lot of autobiographies that no one reads. There's some weak inciting action and Clay has to rely on all of his friends to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding an encrypted old book. He does so, eventually.
Google, the multi-trillion dollar advertising company, makes continuous and gratuitous appearances that in no way holds them to account. Characters get extended descriptions of what clothes they're wearing in lieu of proper development. Clay's love interest exists exclusively as a reason to go into Google's offices. Her personality is that she wears a red shirt that makes her boobs look good. Oh and Clay's Ron Weasley is a tech founder for a company that models boob physics. He is Clay's closest friend and his work is portrayed as being a bit funny but fundamentally toothless and also very lucrative. He spends most of the novel spending money and chatting up girls about how great boobs are. Boobs take up an inordinate amount of space in this book, which is ostensibly about secret societies at the intersection of art and technology, or whatever it was that Steve Jobs said that time.
Peak 2012 content.
Further reading: this comment about how Harry Potter would read if written in the style of this book.
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Now
Got a couple of bellends living in our hedge It’s fall. There’s a light breeze up and the sky is patchy with windswept fluff carried to and fro before the sun, causing the brightness in the window to pulse gently every few minutes. The light has, over the course of a single week, adopted the watery faraway look that it will retain for the next six or seven months. I can see Daylight Saving Time at the end of the street, going door to door with its pamphlets advocating Full British Darkness. Pretty soon it’ll be here. I double-check that the rechargeable batteries for my headlight are charged.
I picked up Ghyll’s poo and mowed the lawn yesterday. Put a load of laundry out but it’s just barely too chilly to dry clothes all the way through. Tidied up the kitchen. Made up a list of chores that I’m not likely to do. I like the orderly feeling of brisk weather.
I knelt down on the ground this morning and discovered that a cable had come undone under the car. I think it probably happened while we were driving through Wark Forest at the weekend. I remember going over a bump and hearing a bit of a bang. The Check Engine light came on a little after that, and the engine started giving off a new grumbling sort of sound. I’ve plugged the cable back in and cleared the engine fault codes. I wonder if it’ll come back. We may be in the market for a new connector. Doesn’t explain the grumbling, though. I’ll get the car up on jacks at some point and see if I’ve knocked a hole in the exhaust. That would be a pain.
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I’ve just recovered from a quick bout of covid. I think about covid probably less than I should. People are still out there getting covid all of the time, and some of them are getting really ill. It knocked me on my bottom pretty good. But a full day’s rest bookended with gratuitous, sweaty fever dreams was enough to break its hold in my case. I’m fascinated by the metrics my watch recorded throughout: elevated heartrate, depressed heart rate variability. My Stress Score was abysmal, and my Body Battery was pretty much empty for three days. Technology can be a marvel. I give covid
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Big man also got a haircut Sam and I watched a couple of seasons of Clarkson’s Farm recently and now we’re scrolling Zillow listings for smallholdings in the Pennines and the Borders. Twenty acres would do us. Twenty acres for a cow or two, maybe a goat. A shed to keep the car in, maybe some freeweights or a treadmill. Abutting open access land, close proximity to singletrack. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I want to live on a farm.
When we ran out of episodes of Clarkson’s Farm we went back to catch up on The Grand Tour. I can see why Clarkson has elected to stop doing it. It’s clear that the three of them just aren’t into reviewing cars anymore. That’s fair. Cars are pretty much all the same now, with minor variations. You can only say, “Please look at this 700-horsepower supercar with a Mercedes-AMG engine,” so many different ways.
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More tiling this weekend. From here on out I’m going to do my utmost never to tile another surface in my life. I expect this resolution will last maybe 4 months. for the work, for the result.
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Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
Published 2022 560 pages
Photo by Abigail Ducote on Unsplash In short
What I liked
- All the pieces up in the air, spectacularly choreographed—inherited perhaps from the source material
- The language, colloquial but poetic
- Villains were oily and despicable
What could have been better
- Relationships between people were believable but lacked emotional resonance
- Demon (and maybe David before him) doesn’t evolve as a character
In review
I read a little bit of Charles Dickens in high school, and in university I purchased a really nice edition of A Tale of Two Cities which I enjoyed but which didn’t rock my world. Somehow I came by the opinion that Dickens wrote illuminating but fundamentally unexciting books about poverty and child labour and coal and grime, with matronly characters called Mrs. Flitterbottom caring for, and villains called Squenchton Crunchly conniving against, a child protagonist who, in spite of insurmountable adversity, triumphs through personal grit and principle.
That’s basically what’s going on here: Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian retelling of Dickens’s classic semi-autobiography David Copperfield, a book that I haven’t read but which by now I think I get the broad strokes of.
Our hero, Demon Copperhead (born Damon, a name that nearly no one uses with him), is born to an teenage mom in rural Lee County, Virginia in the late 1980s. His father is absent (dead, it turns out) and his mother has no business being a parent; Demon takes up the domestic slack. He spends his first ten years in crushing poverty but he meets hardship with equanimity and develops a frank, but never despairing, relationship with his position in life.
Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.
He grows up close with his neighbours the Peggots, and particularly with young Matthew Peggot (“Maggot” to Damon—I mean Demon). The difficulties of growing up with a mom who can’t look after herself matures Demon before his time, but he doesn’t fail to appreciate his childhood where he can: a love of comics, superheroes, and an abiding urge to see the ocean.
Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.
Things take a turn when his mom takes up with an abusive trucker called Murrel “Stoner” Stone and relapses into drug use; when she dies of an overdose, Demon is turned over to the foster system at eleven years old. His case workers are by turns inexperienced, optimistic, wilfully ignorant, and worn thin that they can’t muster the effort to care. Demon is shunted between foster families—first to a farmer who uses (eleven-year-old) foster boys as free labour on his tobacco plantation, where he meets the charismatic but unscrupulous Sterling “Fast Forward” Ford and the totally incorruptible Tommy “Waddles” Waddell. When the tobacco harvest is over, the farm no longer has need for him and he’s turned over to a poor family who force Demon to take up a part-time job to help them make ends meet (again, the boy is eleven years old) sorting trash behind a meth lab (at eleven).
When I was eleven years old, I went to Club Med with my family. When Demon is eleven, he learns hard lessons about chance, about relying on other people, and about his place in American society and among the people he grew up with—but never loses his conscientious streak. He also gets nicotine poisoning.
The villains of these sections—first the tobacco plantation owner, then the operator of te meth lab, and, in an oblique sense, his foster family—are driven to oiliness in turns by desperation and sheer malice, and while the misery that they inflict on Demon’s life is inarguable, the fire inside of him never really seems at risk of going out. Maybe that’s just the nature of the character, both here and in Dickens’s original, but it serves almost to declaw the awful stuff that happens to him.
When his foster family finally hits financial rock bottom and decides to alight for Ohio, Demon runs away to Tennessee, where he suspects he may have a living relative. His trip to Murder Valley, TN is the stuff of American nightmares: long empty roads, truck stops populated by the desperate and bored, nights spent in the sticky runoff of fast food dumpsters. At length he finds his grandmother on his father’s side, a knot of an old woman who helps raise young girls and who has low opinions of men in general. She doesn’t intend to raise Demon herself but puts him in touch with a family back in Lee County who can take care of him: Coach Winfield and his daughter Angus.
Winfield is the coach of the local high school football team and a minor local celebrity; Angus (born Agnes) is a toughie with principles that Demon really connects with. In the Winfield house, Demon’s fortunes turn around: Coach sticks with him and Agnes grows to be a close friend and confidante. He finds a mentor in his progressive guidance counselor Mr. Strong, and starts to develop an keen sense of the social injustice perpetrated against the people of Appalachia. As Demon moves into high school, Winfield trains him as a tight end for the Lee County Generals, thereby reaching the upper echelons of high school society.
Fortunes turn again on a rough tackle and a broken leg; Demon is prescribed opioid painkillers in the aftermath and develops a dependence that erodes his comfortable life out from under him. At the same time, Coach Winfield’s latent alcoholism worsens and the assistant manager of the football team takes progressive financial advantage of the situation. Fast Forward, from back on the tobacco plantation, re-enters his life and Demon eagerly takes up with him again, even as it becomes clearer and clearer how Fast Forward uses and abuses everyone who puts their confidence in him—culminating in the all-but-abduction one of the Peggot relatives, Demon’s erstwhile crush Emmy.
Around the same time, Demon enters his first proper relationship with Dori Spencer, the first new character in like 300 pages. Demon is smitten at first sight. Dori’s life revolves around her terminally-ill father, at once caring for him and stealing his prescriptions to consume recreationally. When her father dies, Demon and Dori move in together and Demon finds himself on the cusp of an adulthood he was truly not prepared for.
The one light in his world is a burgeoning partnership with Tommy Waddell (also of the tobacco plantation), who’s now working at a local paper and with whom Demon starts publishing a comic about an Appalachia-themed superhero, to critical local acclaim.
This doesn’t stave off the worst, when it comes:
It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. [...]
I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other number first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.
And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.”
Without much of a reason to keep living, Demon moves in to a drug house and spends his days only semiconscious. This meagre existence is interrupted by a scheme to bring him low before Fast Forward at the place where his father died, a local waterfall and swimming hole. However, a complex set of circumstances, including a raging storm and the presence of a Peggot relative with a big gun, lead to the (to be fair, blameless) death of the relative and of Fast Forward himself—which for Demon marks rock bottom.
The choreography of rock bottom, over the last 120 pages or so, is something to behold from a technical perspective. Demon’s relationship with Dori, his partnership with Tommy Traddles, the abduction of Emmy Peggot, and the ongoing misery of unbreakable addiction—all are held aloft with Demon’s head just barely above the water. And while they’re resolved separately, it never feels like tying up narrative loose ends. Things eventuate mostly naturally.
With nearly nothing left to lose, Demon enters a halfway house on the urging of his sort-of-aunt (it’s a long story) June Peggot to get clean to get his life back on track. Not another ordeal on the long list, his term at the halfway house comes to him almost as a vacation from the rough life he’s led to this point. Almost as a reward. Unburdened by addiction, he starts a webcomic and finds a measure of inner peace. He reconnects with Angus, who has, throughout it all, made herself available as a friend and confidante, the one steady presence in his life. Together they set out on a trip to finally see the ocean.
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Now
It’s been a minute: time to reconsolidate. What have I been up to lately.
The Olympics...
...were on. I have good memories of watching the Tokyo Olympics 3 years ago, so we dropped £6 on Discovery+ so that we could watch the catchups at the end of the day, or watch the full versions of high-profile events like the cycling time trials or triathlons or athletics. The announcers on Discovery+ weren’t quite as good as I remember the BBC ones being.
I love the spirit and the aesthetics of the Olympics: people of all backgrounds coming together in one place to show everyone else just how good they are at stuff. I'm not bothered by the endless firehose of People Are Amazing YouTube videos that seem to be published at a rate of several lifetimes of footage per day, but I will get out of bed (or, more likely, not get into bed) for the Olympics every time.
Right on schedule, the Internet Content Hot Take Machine spooled up to produce a boatload of dumb Olympics opinions, and right on schedule I loaded up my internet browser to consume and scoff at them. I don’t have a ton to say about any of it except for that I agree with the proposal to hold the Games in the same place every year. Pick a summer spot (probably Greece) and a winter spot (I don’t know) and just have them there every year.
Running
Some progress on the running front. Conscious that it’s not particularly interesting to hear the news of someone’s work-in-progress, but I’ve mostly shaken free of the knee troubles that bothered me throughout the summer and I’m back on a running plan that at least temporarily nudges me into the “Productive” status on my Garmin. If the app says it’s progress, then it’s progress!
Here is a complaint about Jack White
I listened to a lot of The White Stripes in university, but when he went off to do his own thing and swapped all of his red t-shirts for blue ones I sort of tuned out. Apparently he’s been doing some critically-panned stuff since then, I don’t know. Anyway he’s got a new album out and it’s return-to-form-adjacent, mostly big licks.
I think I read Jack White described as having “beaten all of the levels of real-life Guitar Hero” somewhere and I thought that was accurate.
I listened through the new album on a run recently and I can’t help but feel like Jack White has the same kind of naive righteousness that John Lennon gives off. But like where John Lennon would say things like, “Give peace a chance,” or “All you need is love,” as if tapping a deep well of morality, Jack White says things like, “I’m backseat driving when you’re driving me crazy / But I can’t drive a stick,” as if tapping a deep well of cool. I like the sounds he makes with a guitar but I have to force myself not to listen to the words.
And here is a complaint about Siri
I don’t have the right silicon to get Apple Intelligence™ whenever it comes out, so I’m stuck with Vanilla Siri. Siri is very good for setting timers and adding things to the Groceries list and getting directions back to my house and occasionally for getting directions to a postcode if I have the patience to try three or four times.
Sometimes I find new things that Siri can do, as when I asked it recently to put on “the latest Decemberists album” and it correctly starts playing As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
Other times,
—Hey Siri, play a random album from my library.
—Okay, what would you like to play?
—A random album.
—Here’s what I found for ‘a random album’ on the web.I don’t know how after so many years it continues to be quite this bad.
Counting calories
I’ve started counting calories with an app called Lose It. I don’t know if I want to Lose It. But I want to be a little bit more deliberate about what I eat: I spent much of my training for the Fellsman just shoving back whole bags of sweets and McDonald’s on top of my regular meals and while I don’t think it’s done me irrevocable harm, I just know that one day in my forties I’m going to wake up and rue the quantities of sugar that I consumed when I was younger.
Anyway, the whole thing has been an instructive exercise in the sheer volume of calories that Asda seems to be able to squeeze into e.g. muffins, jellybeans, yogurt bars. I don’t know how they do it.
Back outdoors
After we got Ghyll, we sort of put wild camping on hold while he grew up and settled down a bit. Now he’s a bit grown up and a bit settled down, and we’ve busted the tent and sleeping bags back out for a couple of overnight walks through the countryside.
It’s gone well: it turns out that traipsing 20 kilometres across heath and moor puts a real Weariness into the bones of a mutt with an unslakable enthusiasm for such things. As a result he’s quite happy to curl up in a corner of the tent (usually the corner where we have heaped the sleeping bags to fluff up) while we cook dinner and settle in for the night.
The first night, in the Lakes, we only brought the flysheet and slept on a thin Polycryo groundsheet, which was a mistake: torrential rain descended while we slept, and I awoke to a Morning Dampness in the Sleeping Bag. This past weekend in the Cheviots we brought the full tent and he slept through the night with nary a bother. Plus I woke up dry.
The prospect of further nights in the wilderness ahead and another (admittedly farty) body in the tent to keep us warm through the lingering dark makes the upcoming winter marginally more bearable.
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