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The Society of the Double Dagger
is hereby convened—
Cloud Shadow With Red Diffusion Light, Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, 1884
I suspect many of the people receiving this message have paused, in recent nights, to look toward the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I bought a telescope a while back, and this week I’ve pointed it toward the two planets huddled in their conference.
Excuse the self-quotation but, in Sourdough, I wrote
It’s always new and astonishing when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.
to which we can add: seeing the pinprick Galilean moons for the first time with your naked eye. This is old science, old magic; it remains astonishing.
The key, for me, is the unbroken line of light. If my telescope was some kind of digital device with an image sensor and a high-resolution display, the view would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be astonishing, because the astonishment is: that these photons erupted out of the sun, leapt across the solar system, bounced off those moons—those worlds—then crossed the chasm back to Earth and caromed between two mirrors to strike some cells waiting in the back of my eyeball. A direct link; a silver thread.
And, just as astonishing: there are enough photons for all of us. We can all look up and receive our allotment, fresh from Ganymede!
There are really just SO many photons.
You’re reading this email because, long ago, when solar system was a giant dusty frisbee, you signed up to hear from me, Robin Sloan, author of the novels Sourdough and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. You can easily unsubscribe, always.
A reminder, once more, that on New Year’s Day, I’ll present my annual reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight using Simon Armitage’s terrific translation of the tale. The stream will be here and, while you are certainly free to sit and watch me enunciate, the best approach is probably to let it play while you putter in the kitchen or look out the window.
The reading starts at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. GMT.
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Violet Twilight Glow at the Time of the Grass Fires, Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, 1876
I want to end this year by going back to the basics. The Society of the Double Dagger’s interests are wide-ranging—an understatement—but/and this newsletter was founded because of books, and it is always to that preoccupation that we will return.
What IS a book?
I’m fond of Craig Mod’s argument that what makes a book is its edges, and to that I will add: a book requires collimation.
I mean that in the optical sense; a beam of light is said to be collimated when all its photons are pointing in the same direction.
Most light on Earth is uncollimated, because most light is produced by big radiant objects made up of a huge number of particles, each tossing off photons at different times, in different directions. The writhing glow of a campfire is textbook uncollimated.
Here I unfurl my analogy, muhuha: I think the kind of writing and thinking people do on the internet—on news websites, on social media, in email newsletters—is like campfire light, or the light of an inscandescent bulb. And that’s great! Who doesn’t like a campfire? Who doesn’t want a light in their kitchen?
That kind of light blooms wide… and fades fast.
Collimated light is different. It doesn’t scatter and diffuse into darkness.
The light that reaches us from stars is collimated, but only by accident; we see such a narrow needle of any star’s roaring output that the photons are effectively coasting parallel.
The more illustrative example is the laser, which manufactures collimated light. Most lasers (all?) have two mirrors inside, and only photons that have bounced straight between them are permitted to exit and become part of the laser’s beam.
This kind of light can make its way through the gulf of space, or burn a hole in the wall.
So, I think writing a book requires collimation: getting your material pointed in the same direction, filtering out the bits that wander elsewhere. I don’t mean to suggest that a book, fiction or nonfiction, ought to be just one thing; some of the very best feel polyphonic, full to bursting. But I’d argue that, in those cases, it is full-to-bursting-ness that provides the axis of collimation. The material has been aimed at that objective.
A book is a laser beam.
The ecology of publishers and bookstores and libraries all assist in this collimation, by the way. Maybe they’re like the mirrors in the laser, bouncing a book back and forth, back and forth, powering it up…
There is a sense I think a lot of people share: that their contributions to social media, even if they are bit-by-bit rewarding, don’t really add up to much. A sense of all those words just… burning away, like morning mist over a pond. And: I think that sense is correct!
Collimation is available whenever you sit down to clarify your intentions and organize your material, in any medium, including, like, wood. I don’t know that the internet resists these processes, exactly… but it sure does reward the bonfires.
For as much as I enjoy sending this newsletter—and I enjoy it a LOT—its satisfactions do not compare to my books, which are, if not quite laser beams… well, they point in a direction. They have been my first glimpse of a longer game.
And this is why I do the Gawain thing, too. It’s a chance to align myself, astonishingly, with all this poem’s other readers, ten years ago and fifty and four hundred; to sit inside the beam of the book.
The key, for me, is the unbroken line of light ;)
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Here’s a laser blast for you!
I’ve been reading The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated by Troy Tice. It’s fantastic, totally unexpected; a modular treasury of scenes and events from the African Middle Ages, each with a gorgeous woodcut illustration by Roland Sárkány. Like this:
And this:
The book reads almost like a collection of fables, but it’s all real, rigorous history.
The Golden Rhinoceros also boasts one of the best introductions I’ve read in a long time, covering not only the “what” but the “how” and “why” of the book, which is challenging and thrilling, especially for people who have read a lot—or think they have—about the Middle Ages.
Troy Tice’s translation is muscular and inviting; in the acknowledgements, Fauvelle thanks him for conversations that improved the book in both languages. Now, if only Tice’s name was on the cover, too…!
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I had the thought, breezing past the long lines at the post office this season: everyone should sign up for PirateShip!
It’s a simple, streamlined website that allows you to purchase and print USPS postage at home. No subscription required; you can buy one label for $6 and never return. I became acquainted with the site while shipping olive oil, but now I use it for everything else, too.
This reads like a podcast ad, but seriously, I just want you to know about PirateShip.
I think the thing that holds a lot of people back is the perceived hassle of weighing things. Well, you can buy a little digital kitchen scale, or, even better, you can just make your best guess, and let USPS charge (or reimburse) you for the difference! Yes, they do that!
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The Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp has put its huge collection of woodcuts online, thousands and thousands of them, all photographed at very high resolution and released into the public domain. Basically: perfect.
My favorites are the ornamental capitals, like this killer R:
Or this… uh… what IS this?
Go find out :)
Earlier this month, the Museum Plantin-Moretus streamed a presentation explaining how they documented all these woodcuts; if you’re interested in printing and/or archives, it’s worthwhile.
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What is an individual? An introduction to some head-spinning work:
At the core of that working definition was the idea that an individual should not be considered in spatial terms but in temporal ones: as something that persists stably but dynamically through time. “It’s a different way of thinking about individuals,” said Mitchell, who was not involved in the work. “As kind of a verb, instead of a noun.”
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A soundboard of Alex Trebek affirmations by Rex Sorgatz.
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My friend Nathan Taylor recently taught a university course on the dark magick of the command line, and one of his slide decks provides a perfect potted history of Unix. It’s fascinating and inspiring.
The year was 1969. Bell Labs had ordered a PDP-11 mainframe for the team working on what would become Unix, but the computer didn’t arrive all at once:
So, the software was written for the hardware as the hardware arrived, rather than designing the entire system in advance; for instance, no disk drive was supported until it actually showed up in the lab!
Here is Nathan’s entire syllabus, with links to slides. There’s some wonderful material here.
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Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese video game industry. The website Video Game Densetsu is up to something really interesting: a kind of feral history, powered by social media assemblage. If you’re interested in video game history, you’ll want to go explore.
Related, vibewise: Fictional Videogame Stills, Suzanne Treister’s beautiful art project from 1991. Another laser beam.
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Sara Hendren on “areas of moral clarity,” and what it means to actually argue over tough questions in public:
Perhaps it’s little wonder that the hand-wringing stance—how complicated—is the most we can hope for in our thinking spaces and our best journalism.
But: I’m dissatisfied with the wringing of hands.
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There’s a poem tucked into this newsletter from Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, and it’s a stunner. I know “follow this link and read a poem” is sort of a tough sell, but WOW this one—titled “Legal Fiction,” by William Empson—struck me powerfully. And it resonates with the celestial discussion above…
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This is your recurring reminder that many ubiquitous punctuation marks began as “critical symbols” used to annotate manuscripts… at… the Library of Alexandria:
The asterisk, in turn, was created by one of Zenodotus’s successors. In the second century bce, Aristarchus of Samothrace introduced an array of new critical symbols: the diple (>) called out noteworthy features in the text; the diple periestigmene (⸖) marked lines where Aristarchus disagreed with Zenodotus’s edits; and, finally, the asteriskos (※), or “little star”, denoted duplicate lines.
The link above will take you to Shady Characters, surely one of the world’s loveliest websites. Also, I am way overdue for a re-recommendation of Keith Houston’s book by the same name: one of the truly great reads on the scaffolding of reading itself.
(Fun fact: the antagonist in an early draft of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was named Zenodotus, after the great librarian of antiquity.)
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What a stunning moment. We are always, at all times, the people we were and the people we are going to be.
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Inside the Secret Math Society Known as Nicolas Bourbaki!
- There is a secret math society.
- Its name—the name of the whole society—is Nicolas Bourbaki.
- Yes.
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From Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future:
Then later I looked it up and learned that admirals’ salaries top out at $200,000 a year. No one in the Navy gets paid more than that per year. So they call this the pay differential, it’s sometimes expressed as a ratio from lowest pay to highest. That ratio for the Navy is about one to eight. For one of the most respected and well-run organizations on Earth. Sometimes this gets called wage parity or economic democracy, but let’s just call it fairness, effectiveness, esprit de corps. One to eight. No wonder those admirals seemed so normal—they were!
This respected, mythologized institution… it’s like… pretty socialist 😇
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Circular Twilight Glow at Sunrise, Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, 1884
The word “gossip” is underused. Most news is gossip; I say that with total admiration. Gossip is useful! Practical! Plenty of it is true, or on its way to becoming true.
What are anonymous senior officials quoted in newspapers, if not gossips? Again, that sounds like I am trying to diminish the officials, but it’s the opposite: I am trying to elevate the gossip.
Intelligence, likewise: call it a “gossip briefing,” frame it up right.
In distributed computer systems, there’s something very useful called a gossip protocol. See, the programmers get it.
Next time you hear someone say “he’s such a gossip,” understand the statement to be “he’s such an effective processor of socially-embedded information.”
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I’ve been reading Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, a sort of etymological travelogue (!) celebrating the UK’s storehouse of hyperspecific natural language. He wants us to enjoy words like smeuse,
a Sussex dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal.”
And ammil,
a Devon term for the fine film of silver ice that coats leaves, twigs, and grass when freeze follows thaw, a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name.
There’s the almost painfully beautiful èit, which
refers to “the practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.”
And here we find the resonant root of Darth Vader’s dark order:
a sìth, “a fairy hill or mound,” is a knoll or hillock possessing the qualities which were thought to constitute desirable real estate for fairies—being well-drained, for instance, with a distinctive rise, and crowned by green grass.
I bought the Kindle edition because I was impatient but I regret the choice, because this is a book thick with glossary pages, as much for random access as reading straight through. I’ll definitely acquire a paper copy.
Besides, Landmarks ought to stand on the shelf next to one of my finest finds ever, Word-Hoard by Stephen A. Barney—
—an Old English vocabulary, nothing more, nothing less, slim as a pamphlet. Inside, it’s just a reproduction of a typewritten original; perfect.
Above, you can see the entry for helm, which is of course a helmet. We learn that it’s related to hall and hell—and suddenly, an invisible web blazes to life. On the next page, Stephen A. Barney tells us
HALL, HELL, and HELM are all covered places of a sort; derived from the same root are HOLE, HOLLOW, HULL, and HOLSTER.
Of course; isn’t a helmet just a hall for the head?
Words resonate with each other, and with us, like the strings in a piano. I didn’t always know this: when you play a piano’s key, it strikes one string, but many produce sound, summoned into sympathetic vibration.
Words are spells; there’s no getting around it. There’s a reason glamour (which meant magic spell before it meant glossy allure) shares a root with grammar.
All of this is woven tight with my attraction to what I have called English Midwinter Mode. I love riders in the snow, magic that works only on the longest night of the year, a sprig of holly set above the door as ward against malevolence. I guess what I’m saying is I love The Dark Is Rising, but only because Susan Cooper distills it so well, this Anglophone inheritance.
And it is all just English, of course. Hop over to another linguistic network and you’ll find a whole different set of sounds and spells… but still, I believe, some of the same feelings.
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Purple Light in Regular Development, Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, 1884
The images in this newsletter are watercolor renditions by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche of strange effects witnessed in skies all over the world following the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. (One is from 1876, unrelated, but lovely.) There haven’t been that many events experienced in sync by every person on this planet. The pandemic is surely one. Krakatoa was perhaps another. Eruptions; there’s an etymology for you.
The images are available thanks to the Public Domain Review, one of the truly great websites. Their Instagram account is a dream.
For a while, these newsletters have felt to me like “too much and not enough”:
- “too much” because they are so comically overstuffed, and
- “not enough” because you have no idea how much I cut out!! 😝
I have some remedies for this coming in 2021: a new design and some fresh affordances for me and you both.
In the meantime, happy Christmas, happier New Year. I hope to see you on January 1st; the Green Knight awaits, as freaky as always.
From Oakland, the diffuse glow of a friendly bulb,
Robin
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