Category: Uncategorized

Tram, bus, and hike up Kahlenberg. Walked in the sun among vineyards overlooking the city. The top of the hill offers cafes, restaurants, concession stands, and Catholicism. It’s a Sunday morning and there was mass. A long line of cars trundled past to accept the Eucharist drive-thru style. Holy water was flung across the windshield. Shame they didn’t offer the sign of the cross with a squeegee.

On the way back there was an issue with our tram. We vacated to the platform to watch some kind of logic puzzle play out in from of us involving a small loop of track as one tram was brought in to replace another.

I recently had an hour or two free in Madison, Wisconsin and was able to visit the Chazen Museum of Art. They had an exhibition of contemporary African art, which was interesting, but as I often find, rather undermined by the commentary given to the work. It was all rather overdetermined; paintings are doing things like making an argument for liberation. Maybe they are, but the writing certainly doesn’t help me see that.

In the permanent collection I found the following painting, presented without commentary, that I found compelling enough to go to the Wikipedia to work out what was going on:

The Fall of Novgorod is a striking scene of dispossession. The woman, just off to the right center, garbed in rich red, stares right at the viewer, as if to convict the viewer. She is among those being dispossessed, yet in her bearing remains dignified and above the humiliation. There is the bell in the background being dragged away on a sled. Men sit tied in the snow. Others watch on. The sky is darker than the snow.

I find a painting like this powerful in ways that photographs aren’t. In part, it’s because there simply aren’t photographs of the time being depicted. But also there is a craft in the richness of the painting, its composition, it’s saturation that is quite different from what you’d get in a photograph. They are multi-character dramas, rich in detail and expression.

Consulting the Wikipedia to understand the painting misled me. Googling “The Fall of Novgorod” led me to the Massacre of Novgorod in 1570, instigated by a paranoid Ivan the Terrible. This seemed reasonable to me, until I realized that the museum webpage put the scene almost 100 years prior:

The Fall of Novgorod depicts the capture of the City of Novgorod by Ivan III in 1478. Ivan had the city bell—a symbol of self-governance by the citizens—taken down and transported to Moscow. In the painting Marfa Boretskaya, the mayor’s widow and leader of the resistance, stands in silent outrage as Ivan’s troops remove the bell and shackle her partisans.

The Fall of Novgorod

Back in Vienna I was reading The Radetzky March by Joeseph Roth, which was about the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Habsburgs ruled a multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-religious entity, which was the case for many of these large European empires. The painting I saw in Madison depicts the dawn of this era. This is the forcible adoption of an independent city state into a nascent Russian empire; an empire that — like the Austro-Hungarian — would last until the beginning of the 20th century and the outbreak of World War One.

It is time for a year in review list. Unfortunately, I have been very far from comprehensive in my cultural consumption. For me this has not been the year of the Eras tour, or Barbie, or Oppenheimer. It has been a year of other things.

1) Ctrl-w. This has been the year of keyboard shortcuts. I am engaged in professional development, and there is nothing more professional in my line of work than staying the hell away from the mouse or trackpad — tools that are really crutches in disguise. Does that sound like a little much? Just be glad that I’m not going to talk about editing config files. There are so many keyboard shortcuts to choose from, but there is only one which I can say will transform your computer usage, Marie Kondo style.

Ctrl-w is a statement about how you mean to live your life, if we accept that how you operate your web browser is a statement about how you live. Ctrl-w is a statement about how you think, how you learn, how you make sense of this world. Ctrl-w will close the current tab.

Nothing is more basic than having a thousand tabs open on your browser. Once you are done with a tab, and lets face it, you are probably already done with it, press that keybinding and it will be gone. Are you truly afraid of losing that webpage? Are you going to let that fear dominate your life? Are you going to let that fear dominate your computer’s RAM? Learn the bookmark shortcut, learn to open a new tab and start typing to search through your bookmarks. Satisfy yourself will find whatever it was you were looking for. The only way you’ll internalize a shortcut is through use, and this year was the year I started putting that shortcut to use.
Do it right now. I fucking dare you. After you have bookmarked this page.

2) Goodreads.
An objectively bad app and site. But nowhere else can I find readers like me, reading the books I am interested in hearing about, giving their thoughts. Book Twitter, while it existed was good. Writers were there, but like Substack now, it was always in danger of being ruined by the tiresome talk of craft, as if we were all doing a mfa on the side. Forget the review aggregation; its all about reviews written by those freaks who read relentlessly. Some strange books have been published in the last century or so and we’re on a grand voyage together to sort through it all.
But, again, the app and site are deeply deficient.
(It’s possible to download your data, so a future project, whenever I get the time, will be to write a little script that can generate a nice static webpage that allows you to navigate your various books and reviews, in the sytle of The Complete Review.)

3) The Last Samurai by Helen deWitt.
Was this the best book I read this year? Possibly, although this isn’t a best of list. It’s just a list.
In case you haven’t heard, it has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, aside from the fact that the release of the movie coincided with the release of the book, and was part of a long series of misfortunes that the book and its author suffered. The novel itself concerns Sibylla, a single mother in London who has an obsessive interest in languages and culture that she passes on to her son, Ludo. Ludo is an almost supernaturally equipped vessel for her instruction, and soon demonstrates the hallmarks of a child prodigy who demands that his mother teach him Japanese the way most kids I grew up with demanded an Xbox. Somehow The Last Samurai combines deep ideosyncracy with a very conventional aspirational theme: that we should inspire and educate our very youngest children. It wants to be challenge us as a society, yet at the very same time, isn’t this every striving middle class parent’s aspiration to have their infant reading before the reality of child-rearing crashes into reality? Montaigne’s parents were at it back in the 16th Century, raising little Michel as a native Latin speaker in a Francophone world. What elevates the novel is that the book itself is imbued with the love of language that Sibylla embodies, along with the suggestion that perhaps Sibylla’s devotion to her child’s intellectual development isn’t entirely uncomplicated.

4) Punschkrapfen.
And really Vienna itself. I spent a sweltering summer month in the city and if you have been reading this blog you will see that I have very slowly been working my way through a write up of the diary I kept during that time. But for all the art that I saw, the history I absorbed, the books I read, and the streets I walked, it is this sickly stodgy desert that I must place on the pedestal. I imagine that if you condensed Klimt’s gold phase into a cake, but made it pink, this would be the cake. I have an entire diary entry still to come on the subject.

The Freud family were able to flee Austria — and Nazi persecution therewithin — with almost all their possessions, and those possessions have since had little inclination to return. So the rooms of the Freud museum where this family once lived and Sigmund himself worked remain denuded, save one bravely reconstructed room. In the void new kinds of stuff have arrived: museum cabinets crammed with artifacts and reams of museum text offering commentary. I saw the very fountain pen Sigmund used in maintaining his mammoth correspondences. I eyed the pen, envious. How I wish I could be maintaining even a modest correspondence in ink. What I wouldn’t give to be tearing open envelopes each morning. How wonderful to have friends who could write in cursive!

In one cabinet I read a postcard from Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund). Dear Paula, the apple strudel is excellent. I had little idea that my own postcards, bearing their own droll commentary on strudel, were in fact something between a cliche and a tradition.

Would you believe that this LinkedInfluencer’s curiosity does not extend to understanding anything about Ricci flow or Geometrization?

I can’t remember when I first heard about the bacteria that could eat plastic. I now know that they were first discovered in 2004 so it could have been at any point in my adult life. But it was only relatively recently that I began to get impatient. I was reading headlines, and sometime the actual articles, about the mountains of recyclable plastic, the big lie of recyclable plastic, and the pervasive omnipresence of microplastics.

It felt like I was existing in two different worlds. One with plastic eating bacteria, and one without. Thank a higher power (or a commissioning editor) that we have exactly the article I needed to read. Why aren’t they just dumping plastic in a vat full of bacteria? They are! But only in France, and only certain kinds of plastic that has been through a certain kind of preprocessing. Why isn’t all of out plastic rotting away? Because the bacteria aren’t that successful at what they do. When will we have pills we can wash down with a swig of cherry Dr Pepper that will release these bacteria into our guts to clear away the accumulated crust of microplastics? Probably no time soon, based on the dose of reality this article gives.

It is impressive how well the article seemed to anticipate my own questions.

Aside from the market problem, there is also a legal one. Once a microbial species has been genetically engineered, almost every country restricts its release back into the wild without special permission – which is rarely granted. The reasons for this are obvious. In the 1971 science fiction story Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater, a virus with the ability to instantaneously melt plastic spreads across the world, knocking planes out of the air and collapsing houses. It is unlikely any plastic-eating bacteria would become that efficient, but perturbing microbes can have devastating consequences.

‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world by Stephen Buranyi

The Vienna Globe Museum has the pleasing quality of delivering more or less everything of what it promises: globes. It is globes from start to finish, from all across the ages. I learned about celestial globes and then was reminded of lunar globes. My Dad had a lunar globe up on the shelf of his study that predated my arrival in the world. Quite likely it is still there. It was an impressive token of Dad-sophistication to my young eyes, suggesting some tenuous but valid connection in my mind between my father and the men involved in the moon program.

Globes are revealing of our ability to understand the world. There was a time when the globes themselves were used as sophisticated instruments of astronomical calculation, allowing the user to forecast the night sky, and at some point those calculations were done without such globes. There was also a period of time when the general understanding was that California was a peninsula. This understanding became a reality on the surface of many old globes I saw — north America with this additional isle appended to it. A shock to see, like realizing an abstract painting has been hung upside down.

To me, this is pure and uncut contemporary Americana: