Presumably all in reference to this bit of idiocy, but that’s incidental.
Author: Eugene Fischer
- “You Are What You Tweet” – Tony Tulathimutte writes for The New Yorker about the pernicious culture of personal branding with his characteristic intelligence and cutting irony. Mark Zuckerberg, Paula Deen, and Jean Baudrillard all get name-checks.
- “9 Questions About Britain You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” – Overview of Teju Cole’s twitter parody of the current rhetoric around US intervention in the Syrian civil war.
- A petition to name the San Francisco Bay Bridge after Emperor Norton. Come on, San Francisco. If anyplace is cool enough to get this done, it’s you. This particular opportunity is made all the more perfect by Norton himself having called for the construction of that very bridge. Let’s win one for whimsy.
- “The Ecuadorian Library” – Bruce Sterling on Snowden, Assange, and the NSA.
- “Mused: A Day at the Park” – A lovely little comic by Kostas Kiriakakis.
- “Three Gray Fandoms” – Ursula Vernon writes, in the aftermath of WorldCon, about fandoms other than SF that skew old, and how they don’t actively drive away young people as SF does.
I just got back from San Antonio and LoneStarCon 3. It was a delight to have a major convention in my home town; when I was starting to feel conventioned-out on Saturday I was able to take a break and spend a day with my family. I also got to see the Hugo awards for the third time, and continue to find it thrilling. Congratulations to all the winners, and special congratulations to John Scalzi who won Best Novel for his book Redshirts. This was especially exciting for me, as I appear in the book as a minor character. (It’s worth noting that, so far, 100% of novels in which I die have gone on to win Hugo awards. Do with this information what you will.)
New things for you to read!
- The incomparable Ted Chiang has a new story up at Subterranean. This one is titled “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling,” and is about language, writing, and memory.
- My clever friend Ben Mauk wrote an essay on Amazon.com’s entry into online arts sales that was published by The New Yorker.
- Carmen Machado had a story published in Tin House back in July that I neglected to link to. This one is called “Miss Laura’s School for Esquire Men.”
Here’s a YouTube podcast excerpt in which Grant Morrison offers a compelling reading of the end of Alan Moore’s book Batman: The Killing Joke. I think this has permanently changed the way I see the story.
It worked! It totally worked! Joshua Rowan left a comment on my contact page.
And so now we’ve been emailing. Turns out, the top site for Joshua Rowan on Google is his, it just doesn’t have any reference to Gravida on it, so there was no way to tell. There was, sadly, no more torch music, but he’s a photographer and graphic designer now. Turns out I like his visual work too. Here are some examples:
- Edith Margaret Garrud – In one of my most satisfying internet research rabbit hole jaunts ever, I’ve discovered this 4’11” suffragette who spent 14 years studying bartitsu and jiujitsu, starred in the UK’s first martial arts film, and as the head of Emmeline Pankhurst’s bodyguard unit made a career out of training women to beat up cops who tried to disrupt Women’s Suffrage rallies. She’s a featured entry on a website called Badass of the Week, which offers the wonderful quotation, “Physical force seems to be the only thing in which women have not demonstrated their equality to men, and whilst we are waiting for the evolution which is slowly taking place and bringing about that equality, we might just as well take time by the forelock and use ju-jitsu.”
- “As Black As We Want To Be” – Engrossing episode of the fairly new radio show State of the Re:Union, which profiles a pair of towns in Ohio that are subject to deep and abiding racial tensions despite there not being visible racial differentiation between the relevant populations. As stark an example as you could ever need that race is a social construct.
- Rick Bowes on Stonewall at 40 – an account of the Stonewall riot from someone who was there.
- Third Sound – a description of a type of sound that only occurs in superfluids.
- Imgur photo set of less well-known animals.
- Little Nemo – The Internet Archive has a complete set of the 1905-1914 run of Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo comics.
- “This Happens: Sexual Assault Between Queer Women” – Important article on Autostraddle.
- Technique for including the mitochondria of a third party in an in-vitro fertilization.
- Collection of Scrivener Templates – I haven’t looked at these yet, but want to remember to check them out.
- Why Is Kink Fun? – An article by Greta Christina on what people get out of kinky sex.
- How To Use a Hot Spoon to Instantly Relieve Itchy Bug Bites – It works. I tried it, and it works. This article is life-changing. I feel like a great secret of the universe had been kept from me until now.
- I don’t know what this gif is, but I can’t stop watching it.
- The Finkbeiner Test – Like the Bechdel Test, but for articles about female scientists.
- And, finally, a fascinating lecture in which Ken Ono discusses his discovery of a fractal structure for partition numbers, which has allowed him to derive an exact formula for the partition function.
Cover art for “Gravida” by torch (Joshua Rowan), 1999
So I was recently pruning my iTunes library, now hoary with over a decade of divergent file formats, encoding policies, and rating systems, when I came across a singleton mp3 I’d downloaded back in high school, probably after it was linked from the WEF. It was the track “Neptune Drowning,” from the album Gravida by artist “torch.” I discovered I still really, really liked it. It’s a lovely scratchy, electro-industrial thing that builds on itself with measured pace and is bookended with wryly contrasted intros and outros. It would be easy to imagine it as the music over an opening credits sequence heavy with CGI machines building other machines. A great piece of work. I don’t know why I’d let it languish in my library for so many years, but now I wanted to know more.
Unfortunately, the album and the artist seem to have almost fully disappeared from the internet. All I was easily able to find were three copies for sale on Amazon. I paid $4 shipping on a fourteen cent used CD from 1999, and have given it a few listens. It’s a pretty strong piece of work, especially for a self-produced first album. It’s experimental electronica that ranges from ambient droning to trance atmospherics to the heavy industrial sound of the track I linked, with the latter two frequently overlaid. Some of the tracks feel kind of shapeless or insufficiently complicated in their experimentalism, but more often they are quite satisfying. “Neptune Drowning” is the standout, but “Perfect Skin,” “New Religion Test Drive,” and “Blueline” are all songs that I would have happily bought from iTunes, and the whole album (save for a weird moment in the otherwise solid, 11-minute opening track “Pillar Song” where there are suddenly the only lyrics on the album for a minute) runs nicely from start to finish as a good hour of working music. If I’d encountered this disc in ’99, I would have been excited for the next torch offering.
As far as I can tell, though, there was no next torch offering. The liner notes inform me that torch was a guy named Joshua Rowan, and that the album was released by the label Locuna. They used to have a website, Locuna.com, which doesn’t exist anymore. The Internet Archive shows they were active as late as 2006, and the projects page there lists the other artists involved with the label, some of which have cached mp3s you can still download. I’m inferring from their presence on the projects page that the main act was a group called Subsurface, who seem to still exist on Soundcloud under username Locunabpm, listed as Shawn Donoho from St. Louis. I can find nothing else about Joshua Rowan, though. Did he ever make any more music? Maybe under another name? What about the other Locuna artists? Were any of them equally good? I am now extremely curious about this outfit in general, and Joshua Rowan in particular. If you are still out there, vanity googling yourself, and you see this, please leave a comment or get in touch.
I’ve been thinking about and missing my dog lately. This was originally posted on April 24, 2008, on a blog that has since been abandoned. But it’s important to me that I keep the grass around her digital gravestone trimmed, so I’m reposting it here.
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It has taken me a while to write about this.
Muffy. March 15, 1988 – February 28, 2008.
The above is one of the last pictures of her, taken about a week before her death. She is in an oxygen chamber at an animal hospital. Earlier that Friday she was with the groomer whom she had seen weekly for well over a decade, and who noticed that her tongue and gums had turned blue. My mother and I met the groomer at the animal hospital, where Muffy was diagnosed with heart failure. The x-rays showed her heart was swollen and her lungs filled with something I had heard of before on medically-themed television shows but forgot the second after it was told to me. The relevant part was that they were milky white on the image, and were supposed to be black. We were informed that another hour off of oxygen and she would have expired, that her best chance was to be put on a relatively new vasodialator (“I don’t want to say wonder drug, but I’ve seen amazing things.”), and that she would have to stay in the hospital over the weekend.
The following Monday she came off oxygen and had clear lungs on the x-ray. Her blood work was good and her echocardiogram was indistinguishable from that of a dog without heart disease. The veterinarian was sufficiently optimistic that when we took Muffy home he instructed us to schedule a follow-up with our usual vet in three months.
Muffy lived for another week. I came home during her second to last day of life to discover her making strange, convulsive keening noises that sounded more bird-like than canine. When I let her outside she walked out into the grass and remained hunched over, cawing and wheezing, seemingly unable to defecate and making herself bleed in the attempt. The next day she died.
I wasn’t there when she died, and I never saw her dead body. I was at the Trinity University library, working on a story to submit with my Clarion application. I got a phone call from my parents informing me of Muffy’s passing. I thanked them for telling me, and then continued working. I didn’t really feel anything. The day before, when I had discovered her struggling and gasping I felt panicked and impotent, but I didn’t have an emotional response to her death. I think this was because it had been clear for a long time that she was fading. For the past year I had been taking time specifically to sit with her whenever I was at my parents’ house. She had begun to move very gingerly, and her personality had begun to wane away; for the first time since my childhood I was unable to reliably discern her needs from her actions. And she was nearly twenty years old. The average life span for her breed is 12.2. At the time of her death she was the oldest AKC registered bichon frise in the country, and had been for over a year. While I certainly would not have minded Muffy deciding to live forever, she was a part of my life from baby teeth through bachelor’s degree and it is hard to ask for more than that.
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And of course I got into Clarion, and the story I was writing in the library when Muffy died was published in Asimov’s two years later, and then I went and got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where just yesterday I signed a contract to spend some time as an adjunct professor. And through it all, on my keychain, I’ve carried this.
The best new thing on the internet today is this novella by Carmen Machado. I saw a draft of this story in workshop when she wrote it, and have been waiting impatiently ever since for the day when I could share my enthusiasm for it with everyone else. It’s a hypnotic and haunting look at the cultural reception of sexual violence, and structured to make reading it feel like you are on a secret Netflix binge. It’s brilliant. No familiarity with the show is required.
Read “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” at the American Reader.