Philip Sugg | Blog

Jacques Ellul on pre-modern European attitudes toward technical progress and the improvement of practical tools:

The deficiency of the tool was to be compensated for by the skill of the worker. Professional know-how, the expert eye were what counted: man’s talents could make his crude tools yield the maximum efficiency. This was a kind of technique, but it had none of the characteristics of instrumental technique. Everything varied from man to man according to his gifts, whereas technique in the modern sense seeks to eliminate such variability. It is understandable that technique in itself played a very feeble role. Everything was done by men who employed the most rudimentary means. The search for the “finished,” for perfection in use, for ingenuity of application, took the place of a search for new tools which would have permitted men to simplify their work, but also would have involved giving up the pursuit of real skill.

Here we have two antithetical orders of inquiry. When there is an abundance of instruments that answer all needs, it is impossible for one man to have a perfect knowledge of each or the skill to use each. This knowledge would be useless in any case; the perfection of the instrument is what is required, and not the perfection of the human being. But, until the eighteenth century, all societies were primarily oriented toward improvement in the use of tools and were little concerned with the tools themselves. No clean-cut division can be made between the two orientations. Human skill, having attained a certain degree of perfection in practice, necessarily entails improvement of the tool itself. The question is one of transcending the stage of total utilization of the tool by improving it. There is, therefore, no doubt that the two phenomena do interpenetrate. But traditionally the accent was on the human being who used the tool and not on the tool he used.

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It is a fairly common idea among those who study the origins of life that the regular pulsations of nature as we know it on earth —the alternation of the seasons, of day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon and the rising and lowering of the tide— may have provided the crucial impetus to abiogenesis. Even if the chemical compounds necessary for life may be found floating, say, in an interstellar cloud, the absence of cyclical alternations in that environment would likely guarantee that no more complex organic system should ever evolve. We need the pulsations, the gentle rocking, that the circadian, the lunar, and the seasonal cycles provide.

–Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The Reckoning of Time”

The whole neigborhood was in an uproar, setting off firecrackers. I lighted sparklers and pinwheels for the children, liked to see in their eyes the fearful wonder that I had seen as a child. Lila persuaded Melina to light the fuse of a Bengal light with her: the jet of flame sprayed with a colorful crackle. They shouted with joy and hugged each other. Rino, Stefano, Pasquale, Enzo, Antonio transported cases and boxes and cartons of explosives, proud of all those supplies they had managed to accumulate. Alfonso also helped, but he did it wearily, reacting to his brother’s pressure with gestures of annoyance. He seemed intimidated by Rino, who was truly frenzied, pushing him rudely, grabbing things away from him, treating him like a child. So finally, rather than get angry, Alfonso withdrew, mingling less and less with the others. Meanwhile the matches flared as the adults lighted cigarettes for each other and cupped hands, speaking seriously and cordially. If there should be a civil war, I thought, like the one between Romulus and Remus, between Marius and Cilla, between Caesar and Pompey, they will have these same faces, these same looks, these same poses.

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There is still a lot of disagreement over how, exactly, photography was received by artists when it first arose as an invention. Along with the general public, many artists took notice when the first daguerreotype appeared in the late 1830s. But they disagreed about what bearing, if any, the technology ought to have on art. I want to consider for a moment the version of this argument that says photography created an existential crisis for art and artists: that when photography emerged, many artists understood their work in primarily representational terms. Furthermore, these same artists saw in photography a supreme representational accomplishment, a challenge to the worth of their work that was all the more grave because it could be achieved with minimal skill by the “artist” (photographer). Then, so the argument goes, art started to move down the road toward modernism, which was essentially a set of post-representational innovations that distinguished the purpose of avant-garde art from photography.

I wonder how an analogous story might play out again with writing, knowledge work, and the recognition of chatbots. Our own moment leads me to reflect back on the situation with art and photography almost 200 years ago now, and makes me think that maybe it wasn’t so much the artists who perceived a threat to their work, as it was the public that (re)interpreted art in terms of photography. If large numbers of people see the artist’s work as essentially about representation, about reproduction of reality or things “as they really are”–then in some sense it doesn’t matter what the artist thinks he or she is doing. You can decide that large numbers of people misunderstand your work and continue on doing the same things, but you can also lose your audience in the process. Even if the reasons for the change are hard to discern, it seems that art underwent a paradigm shift from within a world that could be photographed.

From Ben Smith’s new book Traffic (2023), on the “last, greatest, totally harmless moment of global internet culture” (it happened in 2015):

The Dress was divisive, in the purest sense, dividing (according to a BuzzFeed poll with nearly four million votes) the two thirds of people who saw white and gold from the third who saw blue and black. Facebook’s engineers had been perfecting its engagement metrics…[A]nd the Dress was universal—a form of media that didn’t even require literacy to land. It didn’t spread, like most memes, along a rising viral curve, passed hand to hand. It spread, instead, algorithmically, as Facebook showed the Dress to users whose friends had not yet shared it, confidently predicting that they would find it just as engaging. Within a couple of hours, our traffic rose to seven hundred thousand people simultaneously, seven times our usual peaks. That sent our engineers scrambling to add servers to BuzzFeed’s back end; it was a number not reached before or since by a BuzzFeed post on the web.

That does seem like a moment to remember: when a medium designed to transmit streams of text transcends itself, delivering something “universal—a form of media that didn’t even require literacy to land.”

The novelist Haruki Murakami, on how he demands regular productivity from himself when working on a new piece of long fiction:

That’s not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur—that’s not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist? Who made that rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to you? Moreover, refusing to think of oneself as an artist removes a lot of pressure. More than being artists, novelists should think of themselves as “free”—“free” meaning that we are able to do what we like, when we like, in a way we like without worrying about how the world sees us. This is far better than wearing the stiff and formal robes of the artist.¹

I find something satisfying about a novelist refusing to call himself an artist. And there is a long tradition of writers de-emphasizing their artistry, likely stretching back to before the novel was a major, reputable genre of writing.

Murakami suggests that artistic production might not be a good descriptor of his activity; perhaps many “artists” no longer see themselves in the image. Perhaps what it means to be an artist has become too specific, and it is easier to discard the label. A writer like Murakami could prefer to write under simpler–if less legible–terms. A lot of art today struggles under a romantic burden; to be an artist is to resist the functional and purpose-driven framework of ordinary life. Murakami’s self-definition–that a novelist is someone who is more free, who takes his or her freedom seriously, who makes use of it–also shares this resistance to a reductive functionalism, even as his artistry accepts a regularity more typical of the factory.

The late spring dispersal of cottonwood seeds happened throughout last week–and into this one. I couldn’t find any ready information about variance in seed volume by year, but the amount of seeds in the air seemed greater this year.

A low-hanging catkin in a nearby park with closeups of seeds, mid-release:

Seedpiles could be found everywhere, piling up so high and thick they were like snow on the grass

In less cultivated environments, the eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) is more of a niche species, occurring near rivers and water sources, where the seeds need constant moisture to germinate and grow. These seeds are notably short-lived (the US Department of Agriculture’s Woody Seed Manual reports they stop being viable in as little as two weeks). Unlike some seeds, which can remain dormant for a long time until conditions improve, the cottonwood appears to be a prolific producer of low-odds seeds that travel far. Most will waft off course and die off right away, but the hope is that a few float far enough to hit the right habitat–and take off.

The city of Chicago probably likes to plant them in cultivation because they are fast growers (some sources say one of the fastest, 6 or more feet a year), reaching a mature height in 10-15 years.

Because of a few favorable qualities, this tree with a picky survival strategy gets to live everywhere in the city.

Metra electric, on Chicago’s South Side, has been doing track work lately. I can’t be certain whether these will be added to the tracks or have just been removed, but they look weathered, like they have reached the end of their primary life. If so, they will likely be designated for use in landscaping projects. There is apparently a brisk secondary market for them; even the big-box home improvement stores sell them used, even though there has been some concern in the past that they are treated with creosote, a carbonaceous chemical that can cause cancer.

The railroad tie is one of those technologies that should inspire admiration for its simple persistence. Railroads have been going over 200 years, and this essential part remains mostly unchanged. Arguably it is not valued enough: in the U.S. rail travel and transport are an underutilized technology.

How much discarded technology also finds a second life? Most technological waste goes into landfills or is simply dumped, wherever, into the surroundings. A small part is concentrated in recycling facilities. Almost none of it becomes a simple tool, an ornament, that renaturalizes itself into an everyday object.

Mertensia virginica seedpods after dispersal

I have a standard answer when interviewers ask me about literary prizes—this question invariably comes up, whether in Japan or abroad. “The most important thing,” I tell them, “is good readers. Nothing means as much as the people who dip into their pockets to buy my books—not prizes, or medals, or critical praise.” I repeat this answer over and over ad nauseam, yet it doesn’t seem to sink in. Most often it’s completely ignored.

When I stop to think about it, though, interviewers may simply find my answer boring. There may be something about it that sounds packaged for public consumption. I sometimes get that feeling, too. It certainly isn’t the kind of comment that sparks a journalist’s interest. Nevertheless, since the answer reflects what I see as the honest truth, I can’t really change it, however boring it may be. That’s why I end up saying the same thing time and again. Readers have no ulterior motives when they shell out twenty or thirty dollars for one of my books. “Let’s check this out” is (probably) what they’re thinking, pure and simple. Or they may be full of anticipation. I am eternally grateful to such readers. Compared to them…no, let’s just drop the comparisons.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever. Was Ernest Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner? (He was.) How about Jorge Luis Borges? (Was he? Who gives a damn?) A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.

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