chip carving of sunflowers

Sunflowers and sameness

Impressions
chip carving of sunflowers
“Sunflowers,” 2025. Chip carving in basswood.

Recently, inspired by a woodcut of a field of sunflowers, I went looking for reference photos to do a carving. What interests me aesthetically about sunflowers—about any flowers, really—is their motion, the aliveness of the blossoms, the variation in form within a single species. That fits well, I find, with my chosen medium, chip carving, which allows me only crisp lines and a limited range of textures to work with. No fields of gold and green, no variation in tone, no cross-hatching, no broad swaths of anything except uncarved wood. If I don’t vary the forms, I wind up with something that looks flat.

What that means in practice is that while one perfect thing may be aesthetically pleasing, if I’m going to put several of them together, it’s their imperfections that make them visually distinct, and therefore interesting. Consider Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which as he continued to paint them grew less round, less consistently formed, their oddities and uniquenesses more exaggerated.

Now, ideally, I’d go out and find a field of sunflowers to draw. Somewhat less ideally I’d buy a bunch and stick them in a vase, as Van Gogh did. But I’m jumping the season a bit, so I went out on the internet.

Most of the photographs I found of sunflowers were remarkably similar. Even the flowers within individual photographs were remarkably similar: round, large-headed, even-petalled, face-forward. Granted that sunflowers do notoriously face the sun, granted that a photographer is likely to capture them with the sun at his back, I was unlikely to see them from multiple angles in the same shot. But why are they all so perfect?

Pangloss Teaches Geometry

Poems

We begin, dear boy, by defining a point—
σημεῖον, in Euclid’s Greek.
Zero length and zero width, zero
height, zero dimension. Zero substance,
mere indication, indistinguishable
from nonexistence—yet distinct.
On this invisible foundation
by surest logic we construct
our world. What is a line but points,
a plane but lines? What is a circle
but a set of points—of zeroes
equidistant from a zero? Thus
from nothing we derive perfection.
All else follows. Segments, angles,
polygons and polyhedra, Pythagoras
and Ptolemy and Plato, the five regular solids,
the heavenly spheres, sweet music
of the spheres, the earth a sphere revolving
round a sphere. Picture the sun as a basketball…
Yes, spheres and globes and basketballs,
and cylinders, mere circles piled on circles, holding
oatmeal, pots and pans and spooned brown
sugar, molasses, island plantations,
slavery and conquest, caravels with triangles for
sails that circumnavigate the globe, triangle
trade and revolutions, as of spheres, and civil
war and politics. Elections. Electric
light and darkness, Zippo lighters, candelabras,
Liberace, Lawrence Welk and Lady Gaga,
Laurie Grossman, making out backstage
in high school, lips like honey-
lemon Halls, and lace-trimmed panties.
Men have fought wars for less—
for nothing, come to think, which was my
point. All comes ex nihilo.
All comes to naught. Our sweetest
loves are cruel, and sense made mere excuse
for madness. Thus senselessness
is made our surest sense! The only firm
foundation’s nothing, and the light
of reason emanates from shadows. If
we stand upon the shoulders of a giant,
where does the giant stand? Best not look down.
Any questions? Excellent. Now
onto lesson two: the queue.

But what’s a conspiracy theory?

Impressions

The New York Times reports on a new chatbot intended to combat conspiracy theories:

DebunkBot, an A.I. chatbot designed by researchers to “very effectively persuade” users to stop believing unfounded conspiracy theories, made significant and long-lasting progress at changing people’s convictions, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The bot uses “facts and logic” to combat conspiracy theories, and in the study had some success in arguing people out of beliefs that, for example, the CIA killed JFK or 9/11 was an inside job. I do believe that most people, if guided onto a field of factual argument, can be convinced by facts and logic; the trouble is that people who hold opinions dearly may take any attempt to guide them as a personal attack. It may be that a bot, by seeming neutral and objective, may have more success.

Ah, but is the bot, in fact, neutral and objective? Specifically, what counts as a conspiracy theory? The invitation to participate in the study defines a conspiracy theory as a belief that “certain significant events or situations are the result of secret plans by individuals or groups.” But this is literally and incontrovertibly true of, for example, the JFK assassination, not to mention 9/11. Had the plans for those events not been secret, they would have been prevented! People who say 9/11 was an inside job are just arguing about which individuals or groups did the secret planning. They may be wrong, they may be nuts — but not, by this definition, because they’re conspiracy theorists.

Some thoughts on (alleged) cultural stasis

Impressions

So, this “stuck culture” thing that people keep talking about. People’s notion of normal is deeply screwed up.

The baseline—what “culture” seems to be “stuck” by comparison with—is a rapid turnover of fashions made possible by wealth and mass media. Wealth to afford new stuff all the time, mass media to disseminate fashions quickly. In one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, I believe (though can’t recall which one) he observes that while London fashions turned over every year, his rural characters wore essentially the same clothes as their 16th-century ancestors. Many folk songs recorded in 1920s Appalachia had roots traceable to the Elizabethan era. Even the “Classical Era” of music lasted nearly a century. Before the 19th century, even for the relatively wealthy, fashion turned far more slowly; for the 99% it turned on a scale of centuries.

Then came mass production, of course. But also magazines, made possible by cheaper printing, and with them the need to continually think up new stuff to publish. New dress patterns. New recipes. New stories. New ideas. The wheel of fashion accelerated. The possibilities of music publishing and the mass manufacture of pianos brought a continual demand for new music to play, and an industry that stoked that demand. Then came records, and radio, movies, and television. Each new invention disseminated new ideas faster; each required a greater source of new ideas to disseminate. The wheel spun ever faster. So that now, we are surprised to find that everybody is wearing pretty much the same clothes and listening to more or less the same music as they were ten or twenty years ago.

But that sort of rapid cultural change—which we now think of as normal—is a product of particular dominant technologies. Technologies that both enabled rapid change <i>and required it, in order to exist—which is to say, to continue to make money for the people that created them. All were, in their way, building blocks of what is now sometimes called the attention economy.

Totality

Poems

Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, 21 August 2017

On the beach, the waves
break over laughing children
as on any afternoon.
“It’s only one thing passing
in front of another,” I say, and you laugh
though we both know better. Anxiously
we scan the heavens.

We know what to expect. We’ve seen
the pictures, timed it to the second.
We’ve planned this trip for months.
We bought our paper optics early.
We wear our commemorative t-shirts.

Along the shore, the upturned faces
measure shadow’s progress, check
the time. Mothers adjust their children’s
glasses. Amateur professors
lecture barefoot. A girl in a bikini
and a welder’s helmet like a
naked stormtrooper stalks
the sand. The man beside us
with elaborate equipment films
the cosmos, as if heaven might be rewound.

We have not gathered here for mere mechanics.
What do we seek, we scientific pilgrims?
Our eyes blacked out
admit only the brightest marvels.

Now gray like age
descends without the royal
tones of nightfall. Only the sun
still wears its crown, revealed
in death. The birds, uneducated,
fly for unbuilt dunes, and safety.

Reluctantly the day
resumes. Neighbors disengage,
settle into chairs. The birds
turn to their fishing.
You open your novel, I
my crossword, and a beer. Time slips
by once more unseen, and we,
baptized by darkness, go on living.

Cheap Sonnet No. 28F. In Which the Poet Observes a Child Behaving Disgustingly

Poems

Make y’all of winter what you will:
The pine trees, tufted like old men’s ears,
The disappearing footprints of a sparrow,
Tire-tread slush translucent in the sun.
Global warming? Honey, it’s the South.
One good sled run wears the track to mud,
But dogs and children, mittenless and yelping,
Wear it regardless, gravelled snowballs pelting.
And if the wide-eyed wondering girl
Fat and frosty fingers in her mouth
Slurped her skyfall from a grimy fender
Bird-shat, bug-splattered beneath its sparkly splendor—
Let her father shrug, and drink his beer.
It isn’t much. It will be gone tomorrow.

Dekay's brown snake

Say hello to my little friend: or, contra myself on reference works and conviviality

Impressions

Yesterday, out walking, I saw this little guy sunning himself on the sidewalk:

Dekay's brown snake

Apologies for the poor focus: I didn’t want to get too close until I was sure it wasn’t a copperhead. But I had to get sorta close, and even then I wasn’t sure of myself. The head was wrong, the pattern was wrong, it was quite small. But it might have been a baby.

So I pulled out my phone and opened one of the few apps that I would really miss if I switched back to a flip phone: Seek by iNaturalist. Point your camera at a living thing and it will tell you, given a reasonably good view, what species you are looking at. I got it when I was hiking out in the mountains a few years ago; it’s great for identifying wildflowers and trees in unfamiliar ecosystems. But it’s also great for figuring out what’s going on in the square mile I live in.

Earlier this year, having had my front yard ripped up to lay a new sewer line and finding myself on the cusp of summer, I tossed out a couple packets of mixed flower seed and figured whatever happened, happened. Now something is happening, but I don’t know what. I think I kept the seed packets, but where? And which flower is which? Sheepishly I pulled out my phone and resorted to using an app to tell me what I was growing myself. (Answer so far: Borage, two colors of garden balsam, pot marigolds, and some sort of blanket flower.)

Really, I ought to know this stuff. I ought to know all my local trees and flowers, and I ought to know my snakes. In fact I know an awful lot of them, but I’ve had to learn the hard way, by using field guides and websites, because nobody educated me properly when I was a kid. (That was in a different part of the country anyway, but nobody educated me properly there either.) I say this in all seriousness despite twenty years of formal schooling. Half the time I don’t know what’s going on under my nose, and I need an app to figure it out. My education was bullshit.

Reference works as tools, “convivial” or not

Impressions

On Micro.Blog @jabel (Jeremy) has been writing about so-called “artificial intelligence” (SCAI for short, my abbreviation) through the lens of Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. It’s a matter worth taking seriously, and I always appreciate anybody reaching for Ivan Illich, even if I find his work equal parts useful and maddening. For economy, and because it has been awhile since I read Illich, I’ll borrow Jeremy’s quotes from Illich defining conviviality. In a convivial society there is “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and intercourse of persons with their environment. … [Conviviality is] individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.” Convivial tools therefore afford people “the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.”

By contrast, as Jeremy explains,

the failure of the industrial model of tools is rooted in a key error: namely, that we could make tools that work n behalf of humanity. That, in fact, we could replace human slaves with tool slaves. But we have found that when we replace human slaves with tool slaves, we become enslaved to the tools. Once tools grow beyond their natural scale, they begin shaping their users. The bounds of the possible become defined by the capabilities of the tools.

On one use of SCAI, Jeremy writes:

I think everyone would agree that old-fashioned encyclopedias are convivial tools, i.e., they facilitate autonomous human creativity; they can be picked up and put down at will; they make very few demands upon humans, etc. Search engines, as such, can also be convivial tools in that they are faster, digitized versions of encyclopedias. AI-assisted search might also be convivial in some ways.

The question of whether something like SCAI can be convivial is tempting, but I think it’s a mistake to address it head-on. Instead I want to respond to the first sentence in this paragraph, about “old-fashioned encyclopedias.” In part I want to do this because I am incapable of reading the phrase “I think we can all agree that” without instantly, unconsciously searching for a way to disagree. But in part it may be a useful way of nibbling up to the actual problem of SCAI.

Anarchy, technology, and community: Some thoughts on The Dawn of Everything

ImpressionsReviews

A year or so ago I read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. At the time I jotted down a few notes, and it has taken me this long, I’m afraid, to beat them into something like coherence. Hey, it’s about 40,000 years of human history: what’s another thirteen months?

I won’t attempt a summary or a proper review; for an overview of the work I recommend this review from Science News.

The authors observe, from archaeological and historical evidence, that humans long ago constituted their societies in a dazzling variety of ways, and indeed reconstituted themselves thoughtfully, deliberately, and relatively often, perhaps to ward off inequality or escape an authoritarian system. As my own study of history goes back only a few hundred years professionally and at most a thousand years in amateur terms, I’m not in a position to disagree with anyone’s meta-analysis of archaeological evidence. I do worry that it reads like a book heavily informed by, and perhaps at least partly driven by, present political concerns, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, only that I’m wary.

I do, however, want to dissent from the authors’ optimism—that is, their belief that if our ancestors thought creatively about politics and radically changed their situations, we ought to be able to do the same. We are limited, structurally, in ways our ancestors could not. They could pack up and leave a society they didn’t like: we can’t, for there are no longer any margins to speak of. They could play with agriculture for millennia without domesticating their crops and inducing mutual dependence, but that genie is out of the bottle now. I could go on.

Maybe the simplest objection is that what looks like a rapid change in deep history or the archaeological record may have seemed a terribly long time to those who lived through it. Reading about the sundry ways people have thoughtfully organized themselves in the past (and about how deliberately and thoughtfully they seem to have done so) gives me hope that, when this civilization falls and 99 percent of the people on the planet die, the remaining few will be able to come up with something better than Mad Max, indeed to lay a foundation for a far better future. But I’m not sure most people would consider that statement optimistic.

In any case, quibbling about hope and hopelessness is boring. So let’s talk about something else.

book cover

Now in print! The Pirate Panther Princess

Admin

My long-awaited novel The Pirate Panther Princess is now available in print! For the time being, you can buy the softcover via print-on-demand. You can also read a free preview of the first six chapters.

book cover

A seaside civilization emerging from a long dark age…

Rough but noble traders who ply the coastal waters…

Brilliant makers renewing the world with their craft…

Black-hearted pirates with a ship that sails itself…

An evil prince who would rule the known world…

And a runaway girl lost at sea and struggling to survive who becomes a character in a folk tale and the unwitting hero of a revolution.

Though it will especially interest younger readers, there is much that will appeal to adults. The first six chapters will be available free at www.piratepantherprincess.com, so you can decide for yourself!

I’ll have more to say about the novel in January. A global edition available through retail booksellers may also be available early next year… if printing and paper costs don’t go up again.