Author: dan-markdown-importer

Even Tom Wolfe can’t make me care about the Mercury Program Astronauts.

At age 14, when I first encountered Tom Wolfe, his work was an adrenaline shot. I got hold of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his portrait of the group of psychonaut drop-outs clustered around Ken Kesey. For the next decade I fantasized about going to San Francisco and joining a nomadic band of freaks.

If this longing was mostly caused by the subject matter, some of the responsibility of Tom Wolfe. His prose is always an overexcited, colloquial splurge of words, like a Good Ol’ Boy on speed. His fellow New Journalist Hunter S Thompson is the obvious comparison. Hunter, though, was in real life at least half as bonkers as his gonzo persona. Tom Wolfe was the straightest of the straight, but with sufficient journalistic chops to get inside the heads of the most varied people.

So even though I don’t care much about astronauts, I imagined Tom Wolfe might be able to show me their character.

The problem is, Wolfe seems not to care that much about astronauts either.

Perhaps a third of the book is dedicated to military test pilots, from whose ranks the first astronauts were chosen. This is by far the best part of the book. Wolfe describes a culture on – or sometimes over – the boundary between bravery and self-destruction, where fatal crashes are an unremarkable event. And yet he makes it comprehensible. The pilots are a band of young men who consider themselves a natural elite. Alongside bravery they share reflexes, calm under pressure, and an almost supernatural knack for getting out of tough scrapes. This combination, the ‘Right Stuff’ of the title is the defining feature of the pilots’ self-image, and is how they keep score among themselves.

The astronauts emerge from this world, but into one where there skills are all but valueless. The Mercury rockets allowed almost no manual piloting; the first flights were made by chimpanzees. In almost all their actions, the astronauts are subject to orders from engineers on the ground. So even while they are feted by society, test pilots sneer that they no longer have ‘The Right Stuff’

The problem is that, as the astronauts have nothing to do, the narrative naturally loses its drive. We hear about their car racing, their womanizing, their experiences of celebrity, their internal squabbles – but none of it seems to matter.

The suicidal passion of the test pilots might seem ridiculous from the outside, but it felt serious and honorable and life-defining. The astronauts’ mission was historic, but only minimally reliant on the men in the capsules. And so, in the end, I found it hard to work up excitement about these astronauts.

One of my very niche interests is following the fine line between heroism and masochism. So much glory is just a thin veneer over gleeful suffering.

Susan Sontag, in The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer, explores the interaction of love, art, suffering and Christianity:

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross). We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contrast, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.
The modern contribution to this Christian sensibility has been to discover the making of works of art and the venture of sexual love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering.

I’m less convinced than Sontag that this cult of suffering is purely Western, or purely Christian. Strands of Hinduism, for example, put a value on suffering which can outdo even Catholic hagiography. It’s a basic tendency which seeps out, in one form or another, from just about any cultural environment.

One of my very niche interests is following the fine line between heroism and masochism. So much glory is just a thin veneer over gleeful suffering.

Susan Sontag, in The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer, explores the interaction of love, art, suffering and Christianity:

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering—suffering as the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross). We do not find among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and the Orientals the same value placed on love because we do not find there the same positive value placed on suffering. Suffering was not the hallmark of seriousness; rather, seriousness was measured by one’s ability to evade or transcend the penalty of suffering, by one’s ability to achieve tranquillity and equilibrium. In contrast, the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion. For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain. Thus it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.
The modern contribution to this Christian sensibility has been to discover the making of works of art and the venture of sexual love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering.

I’m less convinced than Sontag that this cult of suffering is purely Western, or purely Christian. Strands of Hinduism, for example, put a value on suffering which can outdo even Catholic hagiography. It’s a basic tendency which seeps out, in one form or another, from just about any cultural environment.

This book is a short, opinionated cultural history of Weimar Germany.

“Short and opinionated” is basically the only way I can deal with reading cultural or intellectual history. When a writer attempts to be balanced and encyclopaedic, they erode any sense of excitement from the people or works being described.

Take the Warburg Institute. Wikipedia will tell you that it is a cultural history research institute, founded in Hamburg and then moving to London in 1933. Peter Gay gives some idea why you might care:

There was in [Warburg], Panofsky has written, “an enormous tension between the rational and the irrational” which induced in him “not a romantic split, but a fascinating combination of brilliant wit and dark melancholy, the keenest rational criticism and most empathetic readiness to help.”14 It was Warburg’s special achievement to recognize—I am tempted to say, re-experience—the full range of the classical heritage, which was, for him, more than serene temples and Latin poems; it was dark as it was light, and its legacy was superstitious beliefs and magical practices quite as much as sculpture and poetry. Warburg’s models—Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Usener—set his problem and suggested its solution: the study of the survival of the classical heritage demanded a broad view of cultural history, an appreciation of the Dionysian aspects of life, and close attention to man’s religious experience.

I find Gay’s prose style captivating. As the author of a book on Style in History, he obviously also values the craft of writing.

This book is a short, opinionated cultural history of Weimar Germany.

“Short and opinionated” is basically the only way I can deal with reading cultural or intellectual history. When a writer attempts to be balanced and encyclopaedic, they erode any sense of excitement from the people or works being described.

Take the Warburg Institute. Wikipedia will tell you that it is a cultural history research institute, founded in Hamburg and then moving to London in 1933. Peter Gay gives some idea why you might care:

There was in [Warburg], Panofsky has written, “an enormous tension between the rational and the irrational” which induced in him “not a romantic split, but a fascinating combination of brilliant wit and dark melancholy, the keenest rational criticism and most empathetic readiness to help.”14 It was Warburg’s special achievement to recognize—I am tempted to say, re-experience—the full range of the classical heritage, which was, for him, more than serene temples and Latin poems; it was dark as it was light, and its legacy was superstitious beliefs and magical practices quite as much as sculpture and poetry. Warburg’s models—Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Usener—set his problem and suggested its solution: the study of the survival of the classical heritage demanded a broad view of cultural history, an appreciation of the Dionysian aspects of life, and close attention to man’s religious experience.

I find Gay’s prose style captivating. As the author of a book on Style in History, he obviously also values the craft of writing.

Last night I ventured out to a lake to watch the Perseid meteor shower.

I had the predictable city-boi revelation that yes, there really are stars in the sky. But – I grew up in the countryside, so I have some vague memory that there are Things Up There.

What I had not expected were the satellites. I’m sure that back in the 90s, when little-me was lying on their back in nighttime fields, spotting a satellite was at least mildly exciting. Now, it seems there is no moment without them.

So I looked it up. The number of satellites has indeed quintupled since I was a kid, and has doubled in just the past 6 years. It’s bewildering that the night sky has changed so much while I wasn’t paying attention.

Last night I ventured out to a lake to watch the Perseid meteor shower.

I had the predictable city-boi revelation that yes, there really are stars in the sky. But – I grew up in the countryside, so I have some vague memory that there are Things Up There.

What I had not expected were the satellites. I’m sure that back in the 90s, when little-me was lying on their back in nighttime fields, spotting a satellite was at least mildly exciting. Now, it seems there is no moment without them.

So I looked it up. The number of satellites has indeed quintupled since I was a kid, and has doubled in just the past 6 years. It’s bewildering that the night sky has changed so much while I wasn’t paying attention.

Practice and Procrastination is not a piece of Jane Austin fanfic, but a miniature revelation about one of the reasons why I put things off.

A very typical cause of procrastination is an unacknowledged confusion about what to do next. There is a gap between the overall plan (which is understood), and the immediate next step (which is not).

Thinking about practice makes me aware of another gap. Namely, the gap between my brain knowing what to do next, and having sufficient practice that the knowledge how has percolated down into the body. So every action must labouriously be directed from consciousness, with correspondingly greater temptation to give up.

For example, for months I have been putting off doing some home renovation work. I could write down, step by step, what is needed. But I have only minimal experience of actually doing any of it. So, when I finally get going, I will need to think through each element of the work.

What happens if I think in terms of practice? Maybe I would drill holes into bricks until the process became automatic. Or paint walls, or rewire plugs, or any similar task. This might not justify itself for a single DIY task, but would if I had any intention of doing this more frequently.

Practice and Procrastination is not a piece of Jane Austin fanfic, but a miniature revelation about one of the reasons why I put things off.

A very typical cause of procrastination is an unacknowledged confusion about what to do next. There is a gap between the overall plan (which is understood), and the immediate next step (which is not).

Thinking about practice makes me aware of another gap. Namely, the gap between my brain knowing what to do next, and having sufficient practice that the knowledge how has percolated down into the body. So every action must labouriously be directed from consciousness, with correspondingly greater temptation to give up.

For example, for months I have been putting off doing some home renovation work. I could write down, step by step, what is needed. But I have only minimal experience of actually doing any of it. So, when I finally get going, I will need to think through each element of the work.

What happens if I think in terms of practice? Maybe I would drill holes into bricks until the process became automatic. Or paint walls, or rewire plugs, or any similar task. This might not justify itself for a single DIY task, but would if I had any intention of doing this more frequently.

This is a cozy tale of queer-poly family, under a thin veneer of urban fantasy.

The setup is that a magician goes missing. His two partners must join forces to track him down. The main attraction of the book is watching their mutual connection develop from one of distant acceptance towards real affection.

I was indifferent to many aspects of the book. The plot, the prose, the fantasy elements, even the characterization: it all felt flat and plodding.

But I adored the depiction of queer-poly families, both chosen and biological. There’s a moment, for instance, where a woman gets to know her wife’s metamour. It was spot-on, and also something I don’t remember having encountered in fiction before.