Snowden's Globe is Rebuilding, Every 20 Years
Are books Precogs? Are Shinto shrines a living knowledge? Teamsters Look: flawless? Your week's cool reads n' sees, and a brief detour into the history of подводная лодка.
Howdy, y’all! Back in the inbox with essays that can tend on the long-ish, but there’s some fairly hopeful ideas embedded inside them. Maybe I’m just trying to find some sparks of hope in a really dark time in the pandemic, but there’s a future to think of, dangit!
Anyways, I’ve been crushing Anika’s new solo album, Change, this week, and it’s been on nonstop while putting this together. Let’s do this.
CompLit in the War Room
In an attempt to predict future wars or global conflicts, the German defense ministry worked with a professor of comparative literature to study contemporary works in various regions. The underpinning logic is not as kooky as you may think:
“But Wertheimer says great writers have a “sensory talent”. Literature, he reasons, has a tendency to channel social trends, moods and especially conflicts that politicians prefer to remain undiscussed until they break out into the open.
“Writers represent reality in such a way that their readers can instantly visualize a world and recognize themselves inside it. They operate on a plane that is both objective and subjective, creating inventories of the emotional interiors of individual lives throughout history.”"
The profile of Professor Wertheimer is very endearing (if you have a soft spot for curmudgeons, like I do), and the project is a fertile idea. Project Kassandra was shuttered, but it sounds like the early results were more promising than the skeptics would have granted, especially in places that are outside the typical myopic Western gaze of global art.
The Joys of Being Polite
I had a chance to revisit Paul Ford’s 2014 essay “How To Be Polite” this week, courtesy of Austin Kleon’s blog. As a certified Polite Fella, I know that I’m probably more than a bit biased in favor of politeness, but this piece does a great job of laying out reasons why polite people tend to enjoy doing it, and why we think it’s a useful way to navigate the world. I would love for someone to write about the politics of Politeness in the 2020s. To be honest, I think we’ve all encountered enough writing from people who seem to thrill in conflict and in antagonizing, and at this point it doesn’t only ring hollow, but it clearly doesn’t seem to be moving the needle much. Perhaps* I’ve been on here too long, that all attempts at rudeness seem like poses or attempts to gain clout, but I’d love something new.
There are many interesting questions (who is required to be polite, whose politeness is disregarded, whose rudeness is rewarded, etc.) about how the Internet, social media, rising authoritarianism, and global climate crises have impacted politeness in our times, and how we think about other people. Furthermore, there are entire subcultures that have formalized politeness to an extent that it becomes a baroque dance of judginess and passive-aggressive positioning (looking at you Minne-sconsin), so I should be clear: this is focused authentic politeness, the kind that is felt at a personal level of engagement with reality. Maybe it’s just a fact, that people who can practice politeness in hard times are fated to be a sidelined minority, but as Ford’s essay lays out, there are deeper rewards to politeness than accruing the majority.
*no “perhaps” about it
Overcoming Despair, Finding Hope
In a somewhat related vein to politeness, and the felt sensation of making meaning as a caring person in this fallen world, Marcello Tari’s essay, “I Saved The World Today:” Eurythmics and Communism, was an inspiring read:
Communism is many things, but among them, there is at least one that relates to this fable. In addition to its more well-known definitions, communism also means a disciplined attention towards changes in the world: developing an awareness of what might save it, an appreciation of the work and many hours that have been given by and for justice, the art of sharing them, in the magic of their composition. The more profound the awareness, the deeper the sharing, the more the awful world weakens.
This kind of political writing, so vague and aspirational that it ascends to a level of secular prayer, doesn’t seem to disappoint me as much as the harder and more activistic radicals, who always seem to want writing that comes across like manuals to a revolution. We are in a fragmented world, however, and an attempt to strenuously force it all into a single line or theory seems like adolescent grandiosity. The world fragments us, and sometimes we need fragmented paths of hope.
I wish that more political writers were interested in fungi. The world of mycelium and mushrooms has so many useful analogies, and much of the political imagery we currently use is based on apocalyptic visions of brokenness, and death (which mushrooms are made for). For example: Tari uses the language of “fragmentation” based on geological decay, erosions, or brittle art. This, to me, seems a bit of a bummer. On the other hand, a fungal body is incredibly variant and multivalent (like in the fragment analogy), but still shares a common source, expanding out of millions of tubes, responding to the environment as it goes. This seems like a valid way to describe how humanity is encountering new environmental and social challenges, and isn’t burdened with the disastrous tones of “fragmenting” or “broken.”
Flawless Labor Union Vibes
This 80s Teamsters video, y’all. The fits alone!
A Brief Diversion to Russian Submarines
As the Cold War seems to be slowly creeping back into the Baltic, I was reminded of one of the older historical trends in the modern world, and a personal hobbyhorse, which is: Russian naval shenanigans in the Baltic.
How old? Well, almost 30 years before the USS Monitor appeared on the scene at the Battle of Hampton Roads, a Russian military engineer, K.A. Schilder, was already unveiling an ironclad rocket-armed submarine, complete with submerged launch. It didn’t really do much (top speed of 0.3 knots will do that to a boat), but the culture was born.
I love this Oddworld-ass Lil’ Sub
Russia has been dominant in the submarine world for quite awhile, and most of that starts out of their ports in the Baltic. You can find stories every few years of some Swedish kid witnessing a sub breach somewhere in the Stockholm archipelago, or when one of their subs gets stuck a few miles from Swedish military headquarters, or when a Soviet sub literally surfaces up into the bottom of a US submarine. Honestly, there’s not-a-little charming oafishness behind Russia’s fascination with underwater military work. They don’t give up!
To be clear: I don’t think anyone seriously considers it is only the Russians who are into underwater craft. NATO has long been involved in the Baltic as well, and the Swedish military has been known to overreact or totally whiff* on mirages.
*The Hårsfjärden Incident has alot of “Iannucci-farce” energy to it.
Social Technology and 8th Century Japanese Carpentry
Brian Potter’s “Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies” has been sitting with me for a few weeks now. He looks at the incredible amount of detail and particular technologies involved in rebuilding the Jingu shrine in exacting fashion, using ancient Japanese carpentry methods.
But the most important technology at Jingu is social- it’s the transfer of skills and techniques from one generation to the next, ensuring the temples and artifacts can continue to be reproduced accurately. This sort of knowledge is difficult to document - it exists as reflexes and muscle movements that are beyond the reach of language, or as decisions that are so context and environment dependent that it’s infeasible to explain them. The techniques used to build Jingu depend on experience and expertise; learning them requires practice and feedback. Transferring the knowledge required to build the shrines can’t be done with words or text. The only way to pass it on is to create the conditions for someone to acquire it.
In particular, I think that the “every 20 year” periodization of renewal for the temple is an ingenious and useful framework for building any continuous social activity. Starting again every 20 years will give each person (roughly) a chance to learn, to use, and to teach the technology, all within a single life time. Even pushing it out to every 25 years would have likely made the continuation impossible to preserve.
What a cool essay, one of my favorite things I’ve read this year.
Have a great weekend, everyone! Happy Virgo Season!
Snow