Hello hello 👋
A fresh batch of percolated Noticing for y’all. Warning: since I’ve been off Twitter, I’m noticing a) my head is clearer! 1 But alas b) there’s a noticeable drop-off in, like, fun stuff in the flotsam I gather for The Notices. Guess we’ll all just have to deal with that2. Anyway, here’s fourteen things.3
Greebling. Now, there’s a lovely word. It’s the act of sticking random bits of model kits onto something until it credibly resembles a spaceship or similar retro-futurist thing. (Think: the Death Star). Robin Sloan’s4 walkthrough of how he greebled for the album cover of The Cotton Modules’ The Greatest Remaining Hits is a joyful reminder of the pleasures of analog fiddling about (‘isn’t it cool that that thing is this thing! Doesn’t the gap between the real and the imaginary produce a tremendous crackle of energy?’ Yes and very much yes.)
Also: ‘The Greatest Remaining Hits’ is a concept album that comes with possibly the best story set-up for a musical project I’ve ever read. Check it out at https://ooo.ghostbows.ooo/. (URL posted in full cos it looks v cool.) It put me in mind of the Douglas Adams riff about Golgafrincham B and the telephone sanitizers.
(Yes, I am well aware that ‘sci-fi’ and ‘concept album’ and ‘model-making’ are practically anti-clickbait. Hey ho.)
The letters of Utrecht. A beautiful slow art project. A poem is growing in the stones of the streets of Utrecht. One character per stone. One stone per week. The poem is now over 100 metres long (they did a big batch to get it started) and is open-ended. Reminds me of the Clock of the Long Now – projects that are deliberate commitments across generations. We all need more of these kinds of slow, connective rituals. Know of any more? Hit me up.
If you like it you better put a bike on it. Vanmoof’s e-bikes kept getting damaged while being couriered. So, they put a picture of a flat-screen TV on the box. Yeah yeah, it’s an old thing and is probs all over Twitter but I wouldn’t know etc.
How much is a smidgen? More than a pinch? Less than a dash? These are the important questions. Makes me realise just how joyous the language of ‘small inexact amounts’ is.
Smidge. Smattering. Smudge.
Take the ‘I’ out of ‘AI’. What if we prevented AIs like Chat-GPT from talking in the first person? Would that help us all keep the technology in its place as a tool? (My take: nope! We love anthropomorphizing things!) But an interesting mulling over nonetheless. Also, way down in the comments is a reminder that those hyping AI now are also the ones who said that by 2025 we’d all be whizzing everywhere in self-driving cars that we’d bought with Bitcoin…
Professional. Love this from Anna Havron. On noticing some birds nesting in a seemingly precarious nook on her property, she’s reminded of the naturalist Pete Dunne, who said of a similar situation: ‘Don’t worry, these are professional wild birds’.
‘He’s the sort of person who…’ Today’s Why is This Interesting newsletter is an excellent primer on Marshall ‘Medium is the massage’ McLuhan. The big ideas are worth your time, but tbh I was tickled by this aside: by way of introducing McLuhan’s unshakeably authoritative tone, Stephanie Balzer describes McLuhan as the sort of person who ‘probably would have squashed a wayward spider with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet rather than gingerly relocating it to the backyard.’5
Dollop. Glug. Splodge.
Martin Amis. Speaking of unshakeable authority. I worked in a bookshop in the early 90s when Amis got paid a reputed million quid advance for his novel The Information, which basically meant I only ever knew him as the rich and entitled old-guard writer (Ha! He’d have only been in his mid-40s then!) who it was cool to affect to hate. The outpouring of good feelings towards him – and especially this thoughtful ‘growing up reading Amis’ post from Ian Leslie – has me blowing the dust off London Fields.
‘If the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form.’
That’s all, folks! See you next time. 👋
It genuinely felt like leaving a we-know-it’s-both-over-really relationship. That queasy sense of separateness. A nagging desire to know what they’re doing combined with the hope that they’re not having too much fun without you. Then suddenly you rediscover a lightness in your step and a sense that the world is bigger and brighter and freer. (I thought I was exaggerating for comic effect as I embarked on this extended metaphor, but it’s actually pretty accurate.)
Well, I’ll have to deal with it. You can just unsubscribe.
For those of you who are new: the ‘list of 14 things’ comes from a) my love of the convening power of lists generally, and b) Sherman Alexei’s poem ‘Sonnet, With Bird’, which I featured a few years back then borrowed the format from.
I first came across Robin Sloan cos of his Fish essay. It’s a sort of App that’s sort of a book but more sort of like a PowerPoint presentation that you keep in your phone, about ‘what does it mean to love something on the internet?’ and the whole idea of how one might ‘keep’ digital things you like to re-visit.
My youngest son once described a man we’d just met as ‘he’d probably choose a manual toothbrush over an electric one’. I think about that a lot.