Things Become Other Things is a book by Craig Mod which was published by Random House this month. Craig is someone I have been following for many years — I was one of the first subscribers to his Special Projects membership program which has been going for over six years now, and he is a huge inspiration for me.
Craig is a writer and photographer who grew up in the United States but has been living in Japan for more than twenty years. The book is a sort of memoir about his childhood in a working class post-industrial town in America in the 90s, which he frames through a long walk through the Kii peninsula in Japan during the COVID lockdowns. The peninsula is itself a post-industrial part of Japan, albeit surrounded by a stunningful beautiful natural landscape, so there are plenty of visual parallels that spark Craig’s memory.
I don’t know of another creative person whose work and process and life I am more intimately familiar with than Craig’s. He shares a lot with his Special Projects members, and I have been watching the slow and steady process that resulted in the creation of this book over several years. The Random House publication was actually preceeded by a “fine art edition” that Craig published himself, using a custom printing process, beautiful paper and inks, and a gorgeous screen-printed cover. I own a copy of the first book he produced this way, Kissa by Kissa, but didn’t get around to buying the fine art edition of Things Become Other Things, so waited for the “major label” version: a reworked, more “mass-market” friendly version of the original text, with black and white photos instead of colour (though some of them still “full-bleed”, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a mass-market book, and they look fantastic here), and a lot more text added, but still true to the original vignette-heavy flow of the original book.
Craig wrestled with his memory and his past during this walk and managed to commit to page a poignant description of so many things at the same time: communion with nature and humanity at large, confronting the death of a childhood best friend who you lost touch with, the meaning of being adopted, asceticism and its impact on the body and the mind, addiction. And all the while you slowly feel these things becoming other things: without the pain and scarcity of his formative years, he reckons he would not be who he is today.
I really recognise and relate to the feeling of drive born of scarcity and an urgent desire to leave where you came from for somewhere where you can more fully achieve the vision of who you want to be, which is all over this book. “Becoming another thing” is a uniquely human and humbling experience, that sadly so few people manage to have. Anyone who is interested in walking, in art, in beauty and in becoming the best version of themselves should read this wonderful book.
Photograph: Things Become Other Things resting on the windowsill of my home office.
The biggest news of the last couple of weeks of course was the passing of Pope Francis, an interesting figure whose legacy will presumably be debated for some time. In slightly less significant news, the kerning of the lettering on his tomb was extremely substandard. A sign of the wave of enshittification that has now reached the highest echelons of the world and will live on forever here as a marker of our shitty era. Compare this to something from the 19th century and you’ll see what I mean.
My cousin informed me of a little-known fact about Apple Music: there are thousands of spoken word poetry readings available on the platform. So I have been listening to quite a bit of that recently.
In rare moments of idle time during my paternity leave (now finished: I started back at work last week), I discovered Balatro, an extremely addictive and fun deck-building poker-themed roguelike game which is available on pretty much every platform there is, including iOS. This feels like a much better way to waste time than doomscrolling.
Lana Del Rey performed several new tracks at a festival in Portugal over the weekend including this tongue-in-cheek number called 57.5. The whole set is available on YouTube and is worth checking out. Lana is looking and sounding amazing, very excited for this new album which seems to have a bit of a country vibe (very in-trend at the moment).
Much less cool than Lana, but “Britpop” veterans Pulp also returned with new music lately — in their case their first new tracks in over twenty years — in anticipation of a new album later this year called More. The lead single Spike Island (AM / S) is classic Pulp, and I’ve been really enjoying it this week.
Photograph: A field of wheat near Chichester, England.
I have been keeping a journal pretty religiously for over six years now, and have written one on and off for much of my adult life. It’s a very interesting record to have, but in recent years when I go back over old entries I find a lot of repetition, a lot of focus on the negative: “tough day”, “tough night”, “not feeling great today”, “today was hard/overwhelming”. Et cetera.
So I had the idea the other day to spend more time focussing on cataloguing moments of “joy” in my life, which are certainly as numerous as the moments of frustration and anxiety, but for some reason do not seem to make it into the Hansard of my life as frequently.
This is not a unique idea — “gratitude” journalling is certainly a fad I have heard of, and “joy journalling”, obviously shortenable to “joynalling”, is fairly similar to that. But it felt like a bit of an ephipany to me: a small but extremely meaningful change in focus and state of mind that can have a tremendous impact.
I will finish with a brief list of some small moments of joy from the last few days and encourage anyone who finds value in their journal to dwell a little more frequently on moments that inspire joy.
Posting about my love of reading plaques and signs in various places around the world to Craig Mod’s “The Good Place” social network and getting great responses that made me feel less like a weirdo — in particular I was turned onto this episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast called “always read the plaque”.
Wearing shorts for the first time this year and drinking an iced americano.
Rocking up to school dropoff with a takeaway flat white in my Birkenstocks.
Understanding some of the profound corollaries of Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz which had eluded me when I studied algebraic geometry at university.
Making a proper penne carbonara with a really well emulsified sauce.
Realising that any damage I do to myself can stop right now forever and it only depends on me.
I recently read this piece from February’s New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus about plummeting fertility rates worldwide and what that might mean about humanity’s collective future.
I thought it was overall a fairly good sketch of our impending collective childlessness which was ultimately unwilling to take a side in that particular battle of the culture wars. Rather than harp on about the statistics that everyone has surely heard by now (South Korea’s total fertility rate is 0.7; every single Western country is below replacement; fertility is falling even in developing countries; world population will probably peak in the next fifty years or so), the article paints a picture of life in South Korea, where childlessness is the norm, mixes it with a few parallels to the dystopian film Children of Men, and then tries to wrap up the whole thing without passing a judgement either way, other to seemingly say that both groups of people (those who decide to have children and those who don’t) seem to enjoy frowning on the others’ choices more than just living with the consequences of their own.
I have three children so clearly I have fallen on the “having children is a good thing” side of the argument, but I often have trouble articulating why when thinking on the humanity-wide scale of thinkpieces like this. The thing that closest approximates my feeling, I suppose, is a sort of natural skepticism towards a sort of end of history fallacy. I am scared of the times we live in, desperately afraid of the future, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough evidence to conclude that this is in any way exceptional on an evolutionary timescale. The future has always been scary. Unprecendented things have always been happening. But the one thing that has always, unfailingly continued, by definition since the first cell rose from the primordial sludge, is reproduction. So it feels a little disingenuous to me to use “the state of the modern world” as a reason not to have children. In the same sense, are our modern psyches so much more advanced and fragile and important than they have been for the rest of our collective history, that their caprices should trump our biological raison d’être? Could it be that having children is a highly disruptive event for the individual’s ego, which is given more and more prominence in our culture?
My kids seem pretty good at adapting to whatever we have thrown at them so far. I’m pretty confident that they and their generation will be as adequate keepers of the human torch as we have been: indeed, it’s a pretty low bar we’ve set really, isn’t it.
Photograph: Deer on the hills near Brasted, England.
Henry, come on (AM / S) is the new track by Lana Del Rey, released this week, from her upcoming tenth studio album which will presumably be released later this year. It’s a quiet acoustic ballad with country elements: country is really big at the moment with everyone from Lana to Beyonce trying to squeeze its influence into their pop music. What a time to be alive.
Author Robin Sloan’s newsletter was particularly great this month, packed full of links to interesting things. Sloan has a huge variety of interests and can seemingly write about absolutely anything. Will need to pick up one of his books.
This week I learnt about the Indie Web carnival, which is an effort across the independent web to choose a writing prompt each month to give independent writers inspiration around a common theme. This year April’s theme is renewal, which I also read about on Sacha Chua’s wonderful blog, and which I feel like I have also written about a bunch on this site since I started it a month ago. Anyway, a very welcome intitiative. Considering putting my name down to “host” a future month.
Because of new web searching capabilities, ChatGPT is now capable of answering the questions “Who is Clinton Boys?” and “Write a small post in the style of Clinton Boys” for the first time. I can only imagine the directions this kind of “SEO” for LLMs is going to go in the coming years. I desperately wish there was a way to ensure AI scrapers can’t touch a site and make it only accessible to human beings.
Photograph: Close up of a butterfly on a leaf at the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, London, 2023.
I have been living in London for almost two years and there are still huge parts of the city I have never even been to, let alone explored. But I have been keeping a list of the bits of the city I really like: some are touristy, some are just boring residential places, but all are full of “soul” in the architectural and human sense. I also of course keep an orthogonal list of soulless places that I really don’t enjoy being in.
I am really enjoying the new album Patience, Moonbeam by indie pop band Great Grandpa this week (AM / S). It feels like a throwback to the melodic, ambitiously arranged sort of indie pop music that I loved as a teenager. Thoroughly recommended.
I started reading Proofs and Refutations by Imre Latakos (a PDF is available here). It’s a great look at how mathematicians think and in particular how mathematical arguments, known as proofs, are devised. It’s interesting to read this book in the age of artificial intelligence where the current trend in mathematics is “formal verification”: using formal languages to allow computers to verify mathematical statements. The philosophy in this book makes me a little sad that we may be losing something when we do this.
This poem by Charles Bukowski was new to me and really resonated.
I enjoyed reading about this town in Japan where Pokemon-like trading cards based on old men in the local community have gone viral among young people.
Photograph: Cats in the grass in spring at my old apartment in Tel Aviv, 2018.
My son turned three weeks old yesterday. The sense of ease and rest that comes with a newborn in the house is slowly waking into the reality of another soul coming into existence. In those first three weeks a baby transforms from a fetus to a tiny human being, its digestive system engages for the first time, its lungs, its airways, all begin to spring into action.
I find it beautiful and tragic at the same time. The world is of course simultaneously a beautiful and a tragic place and here is someone new who needs to learn both sides of it. Fallen from the garden of the womb, where there is no sound too loud or stimulus too overwhelming, no such thing as air entering the stomach together with the milk, no light to signal the beginning or end of the day, there is an irrevertible loss of peace and innocence and quiet that must be on some level traumatic.
But the eyes also begin to reflect wonder. They can see now: that new and terrifying light is also responsible for reflecting back the faces of family, the colours of the universe. Sounds now enter the ear directly, unmuffled by amniotic fluid. There is every experience before you, awaiting.
It has been an intense few weeks. I am on paternity leave for another couple of weeks and have been experiencing the tremendously meaningful experience of watching my son emerge from his cocoon, interspersed with moments of boredom that I have not experienced for a very long time. The baby sleeps, the house is in order, and there is nothing for me to do but sit with my own thoughts. Of course I decided to take on ambitious projects: this new blog, reading several books at the same time, purchasing a house. It has all felt a bit too much for the last couple of days, and I have not been able to find the time for my morning walks which have grounded me for the past few months.
This morning I did manage to get out for a walk though, only a week since last time but the whole landscape had changed. Blossoms have given way to vibrant greenery. I felt the urge to write something for the first time in a few days and hurried home quickly to get it down. Three weeks is really no time at all.
Photograph: The tree in Pool River linear park which was covered with blossoms a few weeks ago.
When I was eleven or twelve, as a birthday present, my Mum bought me a two-day writing workshop at a beautiful English-style country house in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, where I grew up. I attended with my friend Lily, who also had her mind set on a career as an author.
The instructor was a lady in her sixties who seemed perfectly happy hosting two precocious youngsters at her writing retreat which was otherwise attended by ‘Mountains folks in their forties and fifties. I remember sitting around a large wooden table reading aloud something I had written and feeling exquisitely adult and literate. We had writing sessions in the sun-drenched garden where I sat with a notebook and a pen, and began almost immediately to experience the unnerving combination of intense excitement, invited by the unlimited possibility of a blank page and a pen, and the overwhelming fear and anxiety that inevitably accompanies it.
The instructor sat with me and offered me consolation and advice. This is a natural feeling, she tried to explain, and you must sit with it. Pass through it. “If you sit long enough, the fire of inspiration will come”, she said.
It’s true, of course, that if you sit long enough with a piece of paper and a pen, you will find something to say (though you may not much like what you do end up saying). This is particularly true if you are sitting somewhere beautiful, like a garden or a world heritage national park, or in the case of my eleven- or twelve-year old self, a garden inside a world heritage national park. But it is tough advice to hear when you’re young and full of the desire to be a writer, but none of the experience of having actually written anything.
I don’t think anything interesting came out of that workshop, but I still remember that advice and those words, and I still hear them every time I sit down at my computer and feel that swelling feeling of infinity radiating at me from the vastness of the empty page.
It is intimidating, and it is much easier to do nothing, to be silent, to read what others have written but only synthesise it in our minds, and to ourselves, than it is to write. Writing it down is the next step, if you are lucky enough that the “fires of inspiration” catch your pen and coax something out before they devour all the oxygen, you will then have something for your efforts, like a lump of carbon left in a calorimeter. Probably you will hate it, and will have to decide: was it better to stay silent than to create this?
Photographs
Graffiti at Sydney University, 2014.
Looking up at the sandstone escarpment from National Pass, near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains, 2019.
The same cliff, from the top.
Leura Station, a few hundred metres from the location of my writing retreat, at sunset in 2022.
Absolutely is an album by R&B artist Dijon; I hadn’t heard the album until this week when I found this incredible live performance of the whole album on YouTube. It’s an incredible performance, only 25 minutes long, but filled with a real presence and connection between all of the performers.
Continuing the theme of Scott Alexander’s article I linked to in Tuesdays’s post is this thought-provoking piece from Nolan Lawson which very nicely captures the nail-biting ambiguity and anxiety I feel around using AI tools for software development.
In a similar vein is this note from lauded Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, whose algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph is probably one of the most-used in the world, about how natural language will always fall short of capturing the full complexity and precision of problems in engineering, science and mathematics. It rings very true in our current age of AI slop, and it was written in 1978. It’s number 667 of Dijkstra’s “EWD” series of technical notes, on a huge variety of subjects, that he wrote throughout the course of his life, mostly as correspondence with his friends and colleagues: you can find a lot of them here — he wrote 1318 such manuscripts between 1961 and 2002. EWDs are another great inspiration of mine.
This site contains a huge amount of free-to-air television stations to stream from all around the world. Could easily lose many hours with this, something I wish I had had access to as a teenager with time to kill.
