week 34 / 2024

Would you believe I still haven't taken a photo, with the exception of receipts to be sent to my bookkeeping software?! I must make an effort to fix that... it's The Conference next week, and I'll be doing some organisational runnings-around this weekend, so hopefully a bit of time away from my desk will result in a bit more attention to the world.

In the meantime, you can have an image from this day in 2022, when I was passing through Oslo on my way to Stavanger for the Petrocultures conference. It's a pretty cute city all the time, but Oslo sunsets toward the end of the summer? That's the real stuff, right there.

ticked off

• Still cranking hard on the book editing job, with 16.5 hours on the clock this week. (We're past the halfway point, too, at least in terms of raw wordcount... and feedback on the chapters already done and sent back to the authors seems very positive, so on we go.)
• One meeting with my accountant. (Dealing mostly with matters pertaining to This Very Website, actually.)
• One meeting about the prospective PROJECT HORNIMAN. (Looks very likely to go ahead, this one, but the scope—and, as such, the costing—remains to be nailed down, with the ball in the client's court at present.)
• One meeting about the bid-writing for PROJECT HOTPLATE. (Challenging, because my presence necessitated all the other players speaking in English rather than Swedish, as my grasp of the lingo is still a long way from being sufficient to discussing work stuff.)
• Thought up, outlined, hammer-drafted and published an essay for This Very Website. (I've got about eight hours marked in the schedule as having been related to this process, which is interesting, because it felt like fewer. But it takes time to do good material... which is why I've been coming to terms with the occasional necessity of breaking the self-imposed publishing schedule here.)
• Three hours of explicit, direct admyn. (But probably another two or three hours of interstitial faffing and popcorn tasks poked in between other stuff.)

Not a bad week, considering how many plates are currently a-spin... and considering that I basically lost most of this morning to a dentist appointment.

(My first in nearly twenty years, would you believe? And apparently all I need is one filling and a very vigorous scale'n'polish... so I guess avoiding sugar has paid off after all.)

reading

The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw. Genuinely can't remember who or what prompted me to wish-list and then order this. It's an odd book, in a good way: a collection of what Greenlaw calls "exploded essays", which one might decide instead to call mosaic non-fiction. Really the whole book is one essay, of which the sub-essays are merely interlinked fragments; a myopic poet raised in a family of scientists and doctors, Greenlaw is quite obsessed with seeing and sight, which is the thematic here (and, I gather, in much of her work). She has a very declarative prose style, which feels quite unusual in someone from the humanities side of the epistemological fence—as if all that time among devotees of The Other Episteme has trained her to an unusual willingness to say that something is uncomplicatedly and definitely so.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I don't even know how many re-reads I've given this novel over the years, in the two decades since I bought it. I usually re-read the whole Gibson oeuvre in a chronological-by-publication run every few years, but I've started here because good buddy Jay Springett was recently re-reading Pattern Recognition for a podcast discussion, and talking with him about it reminded me not only of how good a book it is, but how formative it was for me and for many other members of what was once sometimes colloquially known as the Weird Futures Gang (but more officially as the Institute for Atemporal Studies). Even after twenty years, the edge-of-the-now vibe still lingers in this book, as does the uncanny prescience and gloomy foresight of its author. So much more to say, so maybe I'll try to write some of it down over the weekend...

kinmaking

It's just as good to talk to old friends as new one, and it was very nice—as always—to catch up with Johannes Kleske.

Topics discussed included Pattern Recognition (Johannes was very much a part of the IAS), the US presidential election cycle being to the political libido what edging is to the physical libido (sorry, not sorry), and good-cop-bad-cop teamwork in the foresight field.

If you're based in Germany and need some really thoughtful critical futures thinking, you could do a whole lot worse than drop Johannes a line.

a clipping

I came to futures work from science fiction—as author and critic, as well as reader—and that distinctly narratological perspective on the field is, I think, pretty clear to see in my published work.

I'm always looking for new ideas, though—and sometimes all it takes is a particularly fine turn of phrase in a piece that doesn't initially seem to be about futures at all. The last line of this paragraph is just such a doozy:

Such is the nature of the frame tale, the most indispensable of modes, genres, narrative structures (what have you), whereby accounts, parables, fables, discourses, verse, dialogues, and travelogs, fairy and folk tales—all manner of stories—are nestled within a larger narrative. The frame tale, as a means of telling multiple stories through one larger overreaching story, not only prefigures the polyvocal complexity of the novel as a form content to dwell within ambivalence and ambiguity, narrative complexity and negative capability, but also is intimately concerned with the idea of telling stories themselves. Frame tales are about the tale: the telling of tales and what it means to hear tales. “The narrative constructs the identity of the character,” writes the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, “what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told.” Narratologists are fascinated by frame tales, with their complex structures of stories within stories, sometimes resembling a Russian nesting doll, but beyond the engineering marvels from One Thousand and One Nights to Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), the frame tale is the great mechanism for examining precisely what Ricoeur describes, the way in which narrative and identity are inextricably connected, how the telling of a tale constitutes the teller.

"How the telling of the tale constitutes the teller"! What a wonderful phrase—concise, precise, a sequence of words that makes a door open inside your head. One for the folder of quotables.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 34 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment—you'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content ™️, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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Have a good weekend.