Hermenautic Circle blog

• Dwight Macdonald was hilobrow #

I usually don’t listen to abridged audiobooks, but I made an exception for Dreams From My Father, seeing as it was read by the author. I’m following my usual practice of listening mostly at night, falling into and out of consciousness, rousing myself enough to slide the iTunes bar back to an earlier chapter if I wake to an unfamiliar section. And I must say, it’s fascinating to hear a voice that has become so famous talk — thoughtfully, humorously, brilliantly — about the influences that shaped him. Inevitably, it’s also impossible to listen without thinking of what I’m hearing as preface and backstory, and passages stand out:

“The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan, didn’t our self-esteem depend on this?”

“Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we inherited. It would have to come from the messy, contradictory details of our own experience.”

I made the mistake of Googling the title, forgetting that it would be difficult to find sites discussing the book in a reasonable fashion among those awash in vitriol and conspiracy theories. (He didn’t write it! He did, but he got things wrong! Etc.)

The messy, contradictory details.

Fortunately, I knew there was at least one extremely cogent take on the book out there. (I am sure there are many others, but I am, as previously stated, disinclined to seek them out.) I decided to read the book in the first place because I’d seen that Zadie Smith had written about it, and I wanted to read it before I read her essay.

That’s not, as it turns out, strictly necessary. Smith is writing about him, and the phenomenon of being many-voiced, code-switching, more than this book, although the book figures in her argument.

But I’m glad I did.

Number of western themes for this year's festival design: 1.

Number of actual Westerns in this year's festival: 0.

And for comparison . . .

Number of hipster themes for last year's festival design: 1.

Number of actual Hipsters in last year's festival: all of them.

PopKulture has added a photo to the pool:

Nothing good can come of this…

Future Scinece Fiction – November 1953 issue.

Cover listed by Alex Schomberg(sp) (Schomburg).

PopKulture has added a photo to the pool:

Is an alien Mata Hari (with the lower portion of her breasts exposed for good measure) out to start an inter-species, inter-galactic war? Find out inside!

Future Science Fiction – January 1952 issue.

Cover art by Milton Luros.

[Image: The basic platform; design your seastead atop this and win $1000].

The Seasteading Institute is sponsoring a design competition to see who can most interestingly visualize a permanent, microsovereign architectural state at sea.
"A seastead," they write in the competition brief, "is a floating platform that allows people to permanently settle the ocean as they do land. Professional naval engineers have already designed a bare platform – a structure about 400x400 feet, roughly the size of a city block. What you build on the platform is up to you. It may be a hospital, a casino, a residential community, a cricket stadium, or something entirely different."

[Image: The sample design].

There are some basic engineering constraints that participants will have to heed, as explained both in the call-for-entries and in this forum, and a sample design has been supplied (see images above and below).
But I think it'd be absolutely fascinating to annualize this, and launch a kind of eVolo competition for offshore platform design. The skyscraper designs that come out of eVolo might gravitate a bit too strongly toward the biomorphic/diagrid/arbitrary fractal tiling end of contemporary architectural design, but each year's results are always worth checking out.
So if architects were asked to rethink the spatial design of offshore libertarian self-rule, and to do so as part of a high-profile annual competition, what sorts of structures might we see?

[Image: An illustrated variation of the sample design, from Wired magazine].

For a little more background, Wired's Chris Baker covered the Seasteading Institute last month. Baker wrote that the Institute "doesn't just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on," they are "also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app."
Here, architectural design would actually help to catalyze new forms of political sovereignty.
The cultural possibilities for these offshore spaces are effectively without limit – and they would be self-policed, falling outside the bounds of international law. This opens up a number of legal (not to mention moral) quandaries.
Baker reports that Patri Friedman, the Institute's co-founder and executive director, speaking at a Bay Area conference held last fall, "notes that some enterprises – like euthanasia clinics – would incense local authorities, but almost all the ideas attendees [at that conference] come up with would capitalize on activities that skirt existing laws and regulations: Fish farming and aquaculture. Prisons. Med schools. Gold warehouses. Brothels. Cryonics intakes. Gene therapy, cloning, augmentation, and organ sales. Baby farms. Deafeningly loud concerts. Rehab/detox clinics. Zen retreats. Abortion clinics. Ultimate ultimate fighting tournaments."
So what might these platforms look like? Submissions are due by May 1.

Gary Shteyngart—words of wisdom!

Dressing Like a Novelist
"You want to dress down. Sometimes I see dudes in jackets. I think that's trying too hard. You want to look like you spent some money but look distressed, basically. Stuff that's a little not right. You want to match the unhappiness of our time. Everything I wear is somewhat ugly. Plaid is now in for writers. The male writer should probably shop at Odin in New York, on Lafayette, or Opening Ceremony. There's a wonderful jacket I just bought there that looks exactly like a garbage bag. You can't go wrong with that."

When I was a baby poet I wrote lots of things and a very few of them wrote themselves into the rafters of my skull.  One is:

I don't know why, but someone I don't know emailed this to me. It's funny, so I'm sharing it with you!

I've got a piece in this weekend's New York Times Book Review, on Omega the Unknown, All Star Superman and Supermen! The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-41. And I'm in San Francisco for the weekend, for WonderCon. Say hi if you see me. Gave a lecture (about the history and ideology of new wave) and writing workshop on Thursday up at Evergreen College in Olympia. I really, really like talking to students, and they've got some terrific ones.

Crossword puzzle stunt dress time!

Yep, today’s the ACPT tournament, and I’ll be wearing this:

I haven’t sewn down the facings yet in this picture, so they’re a little lumpy. Can you see what else is wrong with it? No?

How about now?

Yep. I cut the ENTIRE THING OUT UPSIDE DOWN. (Insert forehead-slap here.) When I figured this out I was hopping mad for about ten minutes, but I didn’t have enough time OR fabric for a do-over, so then I just laughed. It’s funnier this way, and of course, from MY perspective (that of the WEARER), looking down at the dress, it’s right-side-up! So that’s how I’m going to think about it, anyway.

It’s a Duro Junior (Simplicity 3875), which I think of more as a summer-type dress, but I’m just going to wear it with a black tee underneath it and tights and just hope it’s not as cold as the weatherfolk say it’s supposed to be. I’ll be inside, solving (or, in my case, often NOT-solving) puzzles most of the day anyway.

I found this last stash of Michael Miller crossword fabric at Britex months and months ago — for next year’s dress I think I’m going to get some custom fabric made up at Spoonflower. Probably an easy NYT Monday puzzle solved in red ink and tiled to fill the yardage, or maybe even as a scatter print. What do y’all think?

Oh, and tomorrow — check out my last column filling in for Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe; I’m writing about my inadvertent coining of the word “Duro” (and how cool you all were to use it, making it “real”).

Dear Fonzie,

The plants and steel are all very determined.  They get in the picture.  They look proud.  A clock tires and lets down its hands, forever, lets them clatter to the ground.  Then it is a sundial, and finally alone.

I love to eat.  I'd have been this fellow's feast.  

This is a bat man.  I met him in the Museum of Natural History.  I'm going to post this right away in case something happens.  Like I could die, or have to leave the room.

• “Spirituality” is Middlebrow. Believe the unbelievable; it’s the purest form of irony. #
• HILOBROW prowls ever round the tree at Nemi, sword in hand, waiting for the one who will slay him, steal the golden bough, & take his place. #
• Houdini: THE yellow thread of exposure seems to be inextricably woven into all fabrics whose strength is secrecy… #
• … and experience proves that it is much easier to become fireproof than to become exposure proof. #Houdini #
• Harry Houdini and Sir James Frazer bound by ribands of fire. Houdini’s Miracle Mongers is the hilobrow Golden Bough. #
• Après “Zippy” le déluge! http://www.zippythepinhead.com/chron.htm #
• The hilobrow ironist is a turtle sticking her neck out of the shell: MORE, not less vulnerable. #

finsbry has added a photo to the pool:

finsbry has added a photo to the pool: