Ran Prieur

April 22.

2019-04-22T22:20:15Z

April 22. So I've been letting Firefox give me "recommended by Pocket" links on my start page. Sometimes they're pretty good, and there's a lot of self-help stuff, often by Mark Manson. He writes in a breezy, edgy style like cracked.com, and he says a lot of really obvious stuff to cover his ass, but he has some useful ideas. In this 2017 piece, What's the Point of Self-Improvement Anyway? he makes a distinction between self-improvement "junkies" and self-improvement "tourists". The junkies are never satisfied no matter how much improvement they do, while the tourists only improve themselves when there's a serious problem that needs fixing.

I would frame it like this: a lot of highly successful people have yet to learn an important life skill. That skill is to step back and say, "I've won." It's the mental shift, from holding tension between where you are and where you want to be, to just relaxing into where you are. And it takes practice to get good at it.

On the same subject, What if there's nothing wrong with you? I like that phrasing. If you just say "there's nothing wrong with me," it sounds like denial. But if you ask "What if there's nothing wrong with me?" you're admitting there's probably something wrong with you, but also seriously considering that there might not be. And if so, what next?

New subject. My favorite sport is women's soccer, and the top American league, the NWSL, recently started its 2019 season. In last night's game, Alanna Kennedy made a bicycle kick goal, something that only happens maybe once a year in the NWSL. There was also a magnificent save by Michelle Betos.

The game's other goal was scored by a rookie, Bethany Balcer, who went undrafted because she played in the NAIA. I'd never heard of her, but after the goal, I started watching her off the ball, and was amazed by her calmness. Against opponents two levels higher than she faced in college, she not only makes the plays, she almost looks like she's bored.

April 19.

2019-04-19T19:50:16Z

April 19. I've got no ideas this week, or maybe there's just less stuff that I think is worth writing about. Here's a pretty good article about people living in cars in beach parking lots.

And a really interesting article about nightingales, who now prefer Berlin to London and we don't know why. It might be that Berlin's parks are more wild, because they "haven't been managed properly for years," which really means that other cities' parks haven't been managed properly. Other cities manage their parks to satisfy the human urge to impose control, rather than for ecology, or even aesthetics.

How weird is it, that the kind of landscapes we put on our walls as art, or choose to go hiking in, are so different from the kind of landscapes we create, when we have power over land? It makes me wonder if the same thing is happening with the landscapes of our minds.

Anyway, the article also has some cool stuff about what nightingales actually sound like:

Nightingale songs are made up of an impressive variety of trills, gurgles, whistles and rapid "beats". During the latter, Schneider said, "the tones don't just come out rapid and hard, but almost mechanically precise -- it's almost like techno."

April 16.

2019-04-16T16:20:02Z

April 16. On Sunday, Gene Wolfe died. He was the best living science fiction author, and he really raised the bar for how much intelligence a sci-fi author could demand of readers. I met him once, in the 90's, at a book signing in Seattle, and I asked him about a mystery in The Shadow of the Torturer: Why is Agilus, after taking off his mask, still wearing a mask? He said, "I just write 'em, I don't explain 'em." Last year I reread the series and poked around online, and I still don't know the answer.

Wolfe is best known for the Book of the New Sun series, but I want to write about two lesser known works. One is a little novel called Castleview. I've read a lot of books on the paranormal, and I only know two pieces of fiction that really capture the strangeness of actual paranormal experience. One is the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," and the other is Castleview. The ending baffles me -- I think it requires knowledge of Arthurian myth that only a few people in the world have.

Some of Wolfe's best stuff is in his collections of stories. My favorite is the Book of Days, which includes a weird Kafkaesque novella called "Forlesen", and a three page story called Against the Lafayette Escadrille. The narrator has built an almost-perfect replica of a German WWI plane, and one day, in the sky, he encounters an incredible replica of a Confederate hot air balloon, sewn from silk dresses, and circles it, waving to the woman in the basket.

Has he actually traveled through time and seen the original balloon? Or glimpsed some in-between universe where replicas and originals blur? Or is it a metaphor, about all of us in this dim physical world, seeking the Divine? No answer is offered, but this is the final paragraph:

I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.

April 15.

2019-04-15T15:10:59Z

April 15. Over the weekend there was a subreddit thread quoting a comment from that interview, where someone got really mad at me for not supporting a revolution to bring down industrial civilization. My comment was, I find it strange that that guy even cares what I think. But when I think more about it, it's a good illustration of infighting. For example, it often happens that two nearly identical sects of some religion will hate each other more than they hate anyone else.

Infighting is about identity signaling. People like to have a well-defined identity, and to communicate it to other people. If I say I don't like Donald Trump, that's low-quality information -- I've just uselessly lumped myself with six billion other people. But if a Republican senator says it, it's interesting. So as someone who agrees with the critique of industrial society, but doesn't support its violent overthrow, I'm a useful navigational beacon for other people in the same general idea-space, to say where they are.

If I can indulge in my own identity signaling, I'll say that Thomas Kuhn is just Charles Fort watered down for academics, and that my three favorite albums of the 2010's had a combined release of 850 physical copies.

On a completely new subject, coincidentally cross-posted to the DepthHub subreddit by a frequent contributor to the ranprieur subreddit, here's a fascinating comment about the diet of medieval nobles. They ate almost nothing but meat, white bread, and wine. So obesity and gout were common. Meanwhile, lower classes were much more likely to eat fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and dairy, but they also lived on the edge of starvation and had diseases of malnourishment. And nobody ate salad, because they thought raw vegetables were unhealthy.

April 12.

2019-04-12T12:40:56Z

April 12. Earlier this year I answered some questions for an email interview, and it's just been posted, on the Wild Will Project, Conversation with Ran Prieur.

Music for the weekend. I've been listening to a band from Adelaide, Australia, called Wireheads. Their sound is basically garage space rock, and their great album is Country Space Junk (2014). Sonic Spaces Blues is the best space rock song since classic Hawkwind. Their most recent album, Lightning Ears, is also pretty good, and deepened by Calvin Johnson's production. I love The Overview Effect.

April 10.

2019-04-10T22:20:06Z

April 10. I'm not feeling smart this week, so I'll just mention that my town had a flood last night. Here's a short video on Twitter. It's funny because of the three streams that come into town, this one is normally the smallest. In September you could walk in it and barely get your ankles wet. But that means its channel is not big enough to hold the water that came through when we got two hours of heavy rain on top of normal spring runoff.

April 8.

2019-04-08T20:00:59Z

April 8. Continuing from last week, I've been trying to figure out exactly what I mean by emotional or psychological pain. Physical pain is pretty clear-cut. If the doctor asks where it hurts, you can point right to the spot, and we can assume that other people's pain feels basically the same as ours. But emotional pain might turn out to be several different things, with different people feeling one or another more strongly.

For me, pain is all about attention. It usually happens like this: my mind is focused on something that I like focusing my mind on, it could be writing, or music, or a game, or just daydreaming. And then something else demands my attention: the phone rings, or someone wants me to do something, or I just have to do some chore of daily life like washing dishes or going to the store.

Every time that happens, it's like a punch to the face, and I want to get angry, but that's not helpful. The best move is just to absorb the blow, and fully feel the pain of shifting my attention from something pleasant to something unpleasant. The quicker I can get my attention completely focused on the new thing, the better. A great trick here is curiosity, because the more unpleasant something is, the more opportunity there is to investigate that unpleasantness.

Now I'm wondering if all pain can be defined in terms of attention. Grief is when there's something you want to give your attention to, but it's gone. Physical pain is mentally painful because you want to ignore it, but the stronger it is, the more attention you have to give it. Fear is the anticipation of having to shift your attention to something you don't like.

There are at least two things I still can't explain. One is why we get so much pleasure and pain from watching sports -- because whoever wins, our attention is on the same stuff. I'm guessing this goes deep into our ancestral memory, when a win by the enemy monkey tribe meant real-life suffering.

Another mystery is why we fear death -- because nobody expects that after death they'll have to give their attention to terrible stuff. Everyone either expects a pleasant afterlife, or total oblivion. I'm not qualified to answer this, because I'm not much afraid of death -- on a bad day, it feels like a relief. But I'm guessing that when we get really close to dying, we remember all the stuff in our lives that we like giving our attention to, and that we've been taking for granted.

April 5.

2019-04-05T17:30:49Z

April 5. A couple weeks ago, in my first post about Kevin Kelly's piece on inevitable technology, I mentioned music, and now I want to say a little more. The broad outlines of popular music do seem inevitable. Given classical music, there was going to be something like prog rock. Given blues, there was going to be heavy blues. Once you have electronic music, electronic dance music will not be far behind. Any kind of creative work can pile on unsatisfying complexity, and then something fresh and raw comes along, like punk, and strips it down, and then it gets more complex in new directions.

I don't think the sounds of particular artists are at all inevitable. But sometimes there's musical synchronicity, where the same ideas pop up independently. I have three examples, and I can't prove that the second artist wasn't influenced by the first, but in all three cases it seems unlikely.

A little-known song from 1991, Screaming Trees - Bed Of Roses. And from last year, strangely similar in vocals, melody, and title: El Radio Fantastique - Chain of Roses.

Two acoustic guitar instrumentals from 1973, which might have both been recorded before either was released: Bob Dylan's Main Title Theme from Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and from Lula Cortes & Lailson, better known as Satwa, Valsa Dos Cogumelos.

Finally, two songs that are musically very different, post-punk from 1981, and dreamy folk from 2004. But they have the same uncommon theme, the conflict between the world of spirit and the money economy; they use the same meaning of the word "flesh" for how your body chains you to an unpleasant material world; and they use basically the same riff! In Joanna Newsom's En Gallop it starts at 21 seconds, and in Wall of Voodoo's Back In Flesh it comes in, much faster, at 2:09.

April 3.

2019-04-03T15:10:28Z

April 3. Continuing on personal stuff, years ago a friend told me he was having trouble dealing constructively with his emotions. I said, I don't know what that means. To me, emotions were not something you could deal with. They were like clouds in the sky. If they're good, appreciate them; if they're bad, ignore them. Also, do what feels good, and don't do what feels bad. It was that simple.

Somewhere in this decade, that strategy stopped working for me. Now, more of the things that feel good make me feel bad later, and more of the things that feel bad are impossible to avoid. And it turns out that ignored bad feelings don't actually go away.

The thing I'm getting better at, that I didn't want to get better at, is absorbing emotional pain. I understand now that pain is a muscle: to completely feel the pain, as it happens, is like lifting weights, and the more you practice, the more you can lift. But it still feels bad. And I'm paranoid, that the better I get at absorbing pain, the more pain the world will give me.

April 2.

2019-04-02T14:00:10Z

April 2. I was in bed with the flu on Saturday, and my brain still hasn't recovered enough to do a good post. Here's a pretty good article, The Disease of More. It has some interesting details, but the main message, to stop trying to improve yourself for the sake of improvement, is not something I need to hear. I have the opposite problem. I fight and fight to make my life easy and boring, and I keep losing. All I want to do is play games and get high and do creative work, but things keep going wrong and forcing me to get better at stuff I don't want to get better at.

I wonder if this is a class thing. Young urban elites are highly driven, and they can pay other people to do the grind work of modern life, so they have excess energy to put into dumb stuff like mountain climbing and clean eating. The rest of us just want to chill, but we have to keep solving the problems that appear as the system slowly collapses.