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Now: 3 - 9 March 2025
Thursday was maybe the second or third Nice Day of the Year—a pleasure. Doors were opened and washing was hung out on lines across the neighbourhood. The solar panels booted back up and charged up the battery downstairs to like full power. The grass and the trees and the hedgerows and thickets all across East Durham came alive and started booting pollen out into the hazy sky and pretty much disabled me from like 10am onwards.
Then at the weekend we had a couple more nice days; on Sunday I even went for a run in just a t-shirt. The Boston Marathon (not that one) is looming and I want to make sure that I’m prepared, so I’ve been out pretty consistently as the weather has gotten better.
A bit of sweat and fresh warm air feels like just about the only thing keeping me together, mentally, at the minute. I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’m starting to butt up against the limits of my background: yes I can read Shakespeare (with annotations) but no I don’t have the muscle memory to keep track of Turing machine states in my head. I can understand—and handle—feeling out of my depth, but reading through historical computer science A-level exams, or trying to figure out logic puzzles, makes me feel like I’m in a whole nother body of water, in terms of out of my depth.
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I’ve given up YouTube for Lent, which is one of those things that only 30ish-year-olds in 2025 do, because 30ish-year-olds in 2025 have impulse control problems related to YouTube Shorts. In February I spent probably more time than I want to know about watching 22-second clips of men laying concrete or traffic accidents on UK roads. I’ve lost that time for good, but the Lenten Spirit of Jesus Christ is going to help stop me from losing any more time in the future.
As a result I’ve gotten back into books; that’s right I’m back baby, I’ve put Dhalgren behind me and I’m reading for pleasure again. I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this week and I’ve moved on to Michael Schur’s How to be Perfect, which has been… middling. Maybe a bit less rigorous than I’d like it to be. Oh and Sam and I are reading Hamlet, which is a lot more dramatic and a little bit more funny than I remember it being. Anyway the point is that without the distraction of rapid-fire content about two-handed greatsword technique I’m back to staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.
Also found a hole in the bothy roof, but it's over the byre and it's Officially Springtime so not horrible -
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Published 2004 782 pages
Photo by Andy Carne on Unsplash Falls flatly into that category of 2000s fantasy of which Neil Gaiman is basically the undisputed leader. Terrific atmosphere, if a little light on plot. The prose makes me wish I was re-reading Mason & Dixon.
The basic premise is: Regency-era England, magic was rife during the middle ages but has retreated from the country and is studied more or less as history. But lo: by dint of hard study, one man (Norrell) begins to do practical magic in England again. He takes on a pupil (Strange), who goes a little bit off the rails (but in a good way). In the process, magic begins to return in earnest to England.
(No evidence that magic exists or ever existed in other countries, which must be very frustrating for them.)
There’s a bit of conflict that builds very, very slowly and then is resolved hastily at the end, but I think that the major appeal of the book is textural more than narrative. The world of magic feels dangerous and alien; the borders between worlds blur in just the right way. The mechanics of magic are beyond the scope of the work; while there’s some diegetic scholarship to the working of magic, as far as the reader is concerned magic just happens—maybe with a bit of effort but never really with any limits. Nevertheless I didn’t find myself questioning why don’t they just resolve this problem in such and such a way with magic? but maybe that’s because I’m not a very critical reader.
Where I found the book fell flat was in its pacing. We spend long stretches building and building narrative tension but it doesn’t make any move towards resolution or climax until like 100 pages from the end (of an 800-page book). For the whole first half is scene-setting; things don’t get going until Strange goes away to Spain.
There’s a curious duplication of plot elements as well: Strange goes to war twice; two women are abducted into Faerie; Norrell is advised by two ne’er-do-wells. I think that at least some of these are on purpose—things happening in pair seems to be a theme here—but others just feel like rehashing the same scenes over again.
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Shakespeare on Genius.com
I'm of the firm belief that if you're going to read Shakespeare, you should read with annotations. Shakespeare interjects too much context, and indeed sometimes writes things in such a roundabout way, that the text alone winds up only revealing part of the picture. Or at least it does for me.
But annotated Shakespeare tends to be the domain of books that you have to go out and rent from the library, if the library has them at all—and there's no way of determining whether the annotated edition you're getting is any good.
Genius.com, however—yeah, the rap lyrics website—hosts a bunch of Shakespeare plays, and the more popular ones even have pretty good, comprehensive annotations! Problem solved. Here's Hamlet.
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The Hazards of Love
Once upon a time a buddy of mine and me (well, mostly a buddy of mine) staged the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love. This was 2011-2012. We'd originally tried to stage it in 2010 but Players' Theatre was like, "You have no book, you have no actors, you have no plan, so uh no."
So over the winter of 2010-2011 my buddy and I squirrelled ourselves away in his office on the 5th floor of the Arts Building and wrote a book to connect up all of the songs, acting out the romance and the drama between us with the janitors walking up and down the halls and the student protests crashed like waves on the shields of the riot police. And we went back to Players' Theatre in August 2011 and brought them the book and brought them evidence of the performance rights and brought them the album and brought them a Plan and they said, "Oh cool, let's do it."
So we staged auditions and we wandered all over campus holding auditions in the student union building and the lobby of the music school and friends' basements and I think on the street, perhaps, at one point; and we drove up to the garment district to purchase burlap in bulk; and we spent two days painting leaves on the floor of the black box we were staging the thing in; and at one point I got kicked in the face and took an abortive trip to A&E; and then before we knew it, it was Showtime and the Gazette was there.
Anyway, 13 years have gone by and I don't listen to the album much anymore because it was such a Moment in my life and I feel a sort of reverence about it, and no one seems to mention it, or mention the Decemberists at all really, anymore. They're still putting out music and I still listen to it but not with the wide-eyed wonder of hearing Picaresque or Hazards for the first time.
But Jeremy Keith mentioned it recently in the context of Brad Frost's Cold Album Drumming project and it reminded me of a good old day when we dared, and when we won, and when we got our name on Wikipedia and citation-ed up so heavily that they can never take it off.
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Rationalism
So I’ve been reading Astral Codex Ten for a little while. I think that sentence comes with a little bit of baggage, but I also think the people that would want to beat me with that baggage probably don’t read my blog, and the people that do read my blog (all 2 of them, where 1 of them is me (and the other 1 of them is you (unless you are me, in which case there's someone else out there)!)) probably don’t care who Scott Alexander is.
Anyway.
Alexander got his start on the “rationalist web,” which I think means on the website LessWrong.com or whatever it was that came before LessWrong.com. Or maybe in parallel.
So being a reader Astral Codex Ten I decided to give the LessWrong community a go. But lo I find that everyone over there sort of oozes this online-ish sagacity and couches esoteric opinions in interpreted evidence and says things like,
But if you imagine a billion worlds—Everett branches, or Tegmark duplicates—this thought process will not systematically correlate optimists to branches in which no nuclear war occurs.
Which, what? This is from the very first document in the set of foundational texts in the Online Rationalist canon.
I get that their whole shtick is that they’re trying to, like, uncover Truth or something, but all of this feels so alienated from the real problems and questions of life that I can’t help but feel like the “rationalist community” is just a bunch of men cosplaying at the Business of Living rather than actually participating in it.
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