Category: field notes

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Just sitting here snowscrolling

▰ I’d like a word with your manager.

▰ Hyperlocal news by my usual liminal-adjacent standards, but this great local Vietnamese restaurant, Kim Son (Richmond District, San Francisco), is coming back after a fire, and that’s something to be celebrated.

▰ RIP, composer Éliane Radigue (1932–2026), master of sound

▰ Those who don’t read (or who, as a friend added, don’t understand) science fiction condemn the rest of us to live it.

▰ I love how reviewers of (typing) keyboards don’t just take care to record the sounds of the keyboards for their videos. They also show that they have taken such care, as with the dual audio devices seen here to the left and right.

And I also love there is such a thing as “reviewers of keyboards.”

▰ I finished reading two novels this week, after taking a pause on a tiresomely flamboyant and exceedingly coy one, by a Nobel prize winner, I’d been making steady progress on. When a schedule change of the related book club meant I could no longer attend, I felt a loosening of the deadline, if not entirely the desire, to finish. I’ll get around to it. I keep putting aside canonical books (Middlemarch) or finishing but not particularly appreciating them (Moby Dick, Blood Meridian), and now I feel like my accumulated notes would take the form of a book titled The Emperor’s Old Clothes.

Meanwhile, I did complete Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin (2019), the sequel to his Children of Time (2015). At first it felt quite overly similar to its predecessor, muting the original’s considerable strangeness, but the themes eventually expand fruitfully, and I’ll definitely be reading the next book in the series. There’s an eternal debate about whether science fiction is “about” “the future,” as prognostication, or “the present,” as metaphor. I don’t believe this question is an either/or one, and I would say a counterpoint to both those prominent options is a third way: as with much science fiction, these books are about “unintended consequences.” Here the matter plays out over significant stretches of time in the form of technologically enabled evolution: of arachnids in the first book, and of octopuses (and something else entirely) in the second, and of computer-embedded intelligence in both. Kim Stanley Robinson has written a lot of science fiction without engaging much at all with alien life. In Robinson’s books, we humans sometimes become the aliens as we spread out across space and time. In these two Tchaikovsky books, there’s more going on than “just” humans becoming alien, but the centrality of our presence to the development of alien-to-us intelligence is paramount to what does occur. I could go on, but I think I’ll stop there, at least for now.

I also read Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night (originally published in 2011, translated in 2022), and I’ll be following it up with another one, for sure. It’s the story of a book proofreader living very much alone in modern Tokyo and dealing with personal and professional pressures, which sometimes overlap. Though comparisons to Sayaka Murata seem inevitable, it reminded me primarily of Joan Didion, as well as Laurie Colwin, whose Goodbye Without Leaving (1990) is one of my favorite books I read last year.