“One does not enter into knowledge as if one were getting into a streetcar.” Mies van der Rohe

(Notes for a letter about Berlin:

Doors open into courtyards, courtyards into further doors. Traces of a floral Jugendstil everywhere (“curves full of yearning,” Benjamin called the lines of that style, the extended filaments of a nervous society), and spectacular graffiti, sudden art galleries. Women who really know how to dress, as put together as Parisians but with a great harsh postpunk edge — the zippers of their jackets really have teeth, somehow (men are schlubs, as always, everywhere — though I see a few smart contemporary riding jackets, narrow-shouldered, that somehow recall Young Werther’s blue jacket, so emulated by the young Romantics of Germany that it started a worldwide run on indigo dye). Dusty ivy. Trees — willows flashing gray, black poplars, silver birches.

My bizarre German assembled from tourist guides, bracketed bits in translations of Benjamin and Heidegger, Kraus and Celan, and the memorized lyrics from Bowie’s “Helden” — Ich! Ich bin dann König! All these aesthetic touches that give me a sense of deja-vu & then I realize it’s because I internalized them third hand through Waldorf, where I went to elementary school — that particular Steinerian look, which is actually his version of the Lebensphilosophie look beloved of Theosophists and weirdos consciousness-raising in Berlin on their way to Ascona & California … As well as album covers, old cyberpunk movies … )

Nelson’s Xanadu is the Silicon Valley version of the Monument to the Third International: libertarian rather than communist, expressive of an entire intellectual and social order, an organization of knowledge and human action — and unbuilt, of course, with a legacy of influencing the construction of other buildings, other systems, which inherit certain elements while being different at the roots from anything the original visionaries intended.

Tiantong’s first phrase of winter:
Old plum tree, bent and gnarled,
all at once opens one blossom, two blossoms,
not proud of purity,
not proud of fragrance;
falling, becoming spring,
blowing over grasses and trees,
balding the head of a patched-robe monk.
Whirling, changing into wind, wild rain,
falling, snow, all over the earth.
The old plum tree is boundless.
A hard cold rubs the nostrils.
– Nyojo Zenji

(Notes for letter:

Soured ox-breast and horseradish cabbage; little glasses of crisp Kölsch, which apparently can only be officially called such if you can see the dome of Köln Cathedral unaided from the brewery — how’s that for a zone d’appellation? Amazing baklava, makes you dizzy with honey; creamy Ruhr sausages; delicious pfannkuchen with marmalade, and buchteln, an Austrian speciality, yeasted bread baked with plum jam in cells like packing of soap bubbles. Riesling! Picking blackberries under the willows, which blow silver-gray-green in the wind, down by the Rhine, to the hum of bees and the sound of distant sheep.)

Of the Berghain, the club where you’re not allowed to take pictures (connecting to the cassette labels and 8mm film shows, trying to achieve a deeper communication, rather than mere mediation & publicity): “One is living an eternal feeling of early Sunday morning.”

Part of the dream of this is participation in a kind of parallel, sub-, or secret society. Something that pulls away, centrifugally, from the centripetal forces of modern consumer culture, that creates heterogenous dimensions. And the quotidian rhythm of black markets, solidarity, gift economies, refusals to participate. Parallel microeconomies where knowledge is more valuable than wealth (the fantasy misreading of the otaku).

“If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of the bourgeois models of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities — until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then design must disappear. We can live without architecture.” (Adolfo Natalini of Superstudio, 1971)

Like the whale shark, which can turn its stomach inside out like a glove to expel accidentally swallowed boards or tires — so sometimes you need noise and madness to take the folds of consciousness, like the balled-up sock of Benjamin, and tug it out into just this, plain and ecstatic reality, the body dancing and saturated with sound, no-mind. And when you gather it up again the awful things you’ve taken in over the previous days, weeks, months, have been cast out.

Reconciling contraries: The free and the programmed; the peaceful satoric contemplative light from the drones and patterns of Terry Riley, the Theater of Eternal Music, Tony Conrad’s exquisite and vitally important 1967-68 “Ex-Cathedra,” and the Satanic and pagan volcanos of black metal (the theological concept-album apogee: Deathspell Omega’s Maledicti — and in the deeply pagan landscape worship of Wold); analog and digital, free jazz and the relentless tick of electronic loops; the ecstasy of doom and the bodily pain of industrial.

(I realize that the pleasure, for me, of doom, drone, and other colors of metal, as well as my attraction to serpents, and imaginary creatures like golems and shoggoths, is as figures of a kind of undifferentiated and non-instrumental power, a power beyond good and evil — something which demands to be judged, as Spinoza said, in its perfectness, not for what it can do for us.)

“In the second century, the Sophist Athenaeus spoke of a famous actor of his time named Memphis, whom they called ‘the dancing philosopher’ because he taught Pythagorean philosophy by gestures alone.”

Away from my usual rhythms, suppressed griefs rise to the surface, for lost people and an ended relationship. Nietzsche’s epitaph for his father’s tombstone, a common one in German: Die Liebe höret nimmer auf, love never stops, the love will never end. Which can be true even as love becomes impossible, as we become impossible, as the sea swallows us or those we love.

Mr. Clean’s iconic face belongs to “Meister Proper” in Germany, a hip-hop name if ever there was one.

A brief moment of consciousness, by the shores of the Neuer See in the Tiergarten. I’ve been walking in a strange double exposure, with Benjamin’s memories of this place, as recorded in his letters, notes, and Berlin Childhood Around 1900 appearing as though reflected on the moment’s surface. (Earlier I tried to find the Princess Café, where he wrote most of the Origin of German Tragic Drama, seated quite close to the jazz band.) So strange to be seated here, with a vase-tall glass full of cloudy white beer, sauerkraut with caraway seeds, these pleasures, on the same shore where Karl Liebknecht was shot in the back of the head by proto-fascist Freikorps soldiers in the snow, 15 January 1919, after being interrogated, with Rosa Luxemburg, at the Eden Hotel. The wooden folding tables, the red blankets over the arms of the chairs by the water, as though on the deck of a ship or the terrace of a mountain sanitarium. The strands of lights in the trees threaded through dark green shadows under the lindens and hornbeams and oaks — a profound end-of-summer melancholy over all. Napkins over the glasses when people step away, to keep off wasps.

(So much of this city I know through Benjamin. I can’t believe my utterly primitive German given how much writers in that language mean to me: B, and my hero and icon Musil, & the marvelous Robert Walser (has there been a writer with a greater sense of tenderness?), Nietzsche of course — every time we meet again I realize how badly I read him last time! — and Trakl, Celan, Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power remaining part of my inner constellation, to say nothing of his astonishing notebooks), Lichtenberg, Paul Scheerbart, my idol Karl Kraus — most of his work having never been translated. (God, Kraus: funnier than Oscar Wilde, more politically and lexically astute than Orwell and without the life-hating asceticism, and more intense than the “wall of fire” that stood before his writing-desk.) Goal for the fall: to finally begin to learn to read the language properly.)

Passing a restaurant called Themroc! — after that hilarious, mad atavistic movie of a regular Frenchman who deliberately reverts to a Neolithic existence in his crummy apartment — all the dialog in the movie is inarticulate grunts, howls, and mutterings, whether coming from boss, policeman, or our wall-smashing, cannibalistic hero — and the chalk menu outside all onomatopoeia! “Hurghurglurk” — I deeply regret deciding not to go in, because the rhythm of the city was drawing me on to a steady afternoon motorik pulse, 4/4 “apache-beat” (said Klaus Dinger), that beat that’s a place for the reconciliation of bodies and machines.

(Pro QM (ie, “per square meter”), around the corner from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, an icon of all future bookstores — the staff encourage students to hang out and take notes. There are ladders scattered around, painted hot pink, for the upper shelves. Sections like “Diagrams,” “1970s Techno-Utopia,” “Sound Theory,” “Borders.” All different languages mixed together. And a beautiful music was playing when I visited, like the gentle hiss and melodic crack of ice in sunlight.)

On the mountain over Trento, in the Dolomiti — limestone, and dolomite the pale, pale watered-silk pink of Odette’s day robe. Red firs, whose scent for me is like drinking for a thirst I had not realized. Hot alpine light, cool shadows under beech trees and the Norway spruce. “The Sun,” as Turner said, “is God.” (And John Muir and William Blake saw angels seated on the branches of trees, among the leaves.) Sparrows springing into space and tumbling downslope through the air like drops of rain. In many places the path, never built-up, is held solely by the intertwined roots of the trees. Eating fruit picked further the road, deep indigo figs (when picked, their stems give a bead of white juice that is pure fig taste, without sweetness, the essence of that strange round flavor which is weighted at the bottom with a mustiness) and a bunch of windfall wine grapes.

There are fossils in the limestone cut for the walls of Trento, the shells of creatures from vast Mesozoic seas that rose, silent and teeming, and beat the stones into bibula harena, imbibing sand, and fell back, leaving deserts, and rose again. Lagoons bright with algae two hundred million years ago. Da Vinci speculated as to the age of the Earth from the fossil shells in the stone of the high mountains of Piacenza.

A “Montebianco” — a round of pizza dough, still almost too hot to touch; cherry tomatoes, sweet enough to remind you that tomatoes are a fruit; fresh mozzarella, wet and delicate in texture; a handful of basil leaves; and walnuts and pecans, radiant with heat and oil. Simple, perfect; eaten watching a wedding process through the square, golden-hour light on withered ivy and iron railings, all under the patient gaze of the pantheon: Mercury, Juno, Vulcan with his tools, chaste hunter and poet Minerva with her owl.

How Walser ends one of the most marvelous tiny pieces he ever wrote, “The Robber”:

“The tigers and lions, the polished bootees, dazzling parties, the impeccable suits, the hundreds he was a fair match for, the relationship full of sacrifice, the whistlings, signals, and shaggy hair, are figures of fantasy.

“The person who hatched them now glances at the dial and thinks it is time to get up from his desk and go for a little walk.”

Monday 23 August
10-12h Appropriating Social Media (Though I’m sorry to miss Ji-Hoon Kim’s presentation (“Machines of the Audiovisual: The Development of Synthetic Audiovisual Interfaces in Avant-garde Art Since the 1970s”) which promises to be spectacular)
13-14.30h Building Musical Instruments (Any opportunity to learn more about the Max Brand synthesizer is fine by me — and Hildur Guðnadóttir will be showing the Hilldorophone!)
22h Ei Wada, Monolake, Paul Prudence, others at domicil

Tuesday 24 August
10-12h Sonic Strategies
13-14.30h Media Politics of the Local
15-16.30h Atmospheres and Ecologies
17.30-19h Peter Weibel keynote
20.30h Hildur Guðnadóttir and Keiichiro Shibuya in concert!
(Depending on when it wraps up, Blevin Blechtum is going to be at domicil along with döbereiner & morimoto, Infinite Livesz, others, 22h onwards)

Wednesday 25 August
Touring BALTAN Laboratories

Thursday 26 August
10-12h Variantologia Latina (hosted by the wonderful Siegfried Zielinski)
13-14.30h Augmenting Realities
15-16.30h Press Delete — The Politics and Performance of Spamculture (I’ll be presenting, along with Kristoffer Gansing, Camille Paloque-Bergès, Tony Sampson & Jussi Parikka, and, God willing, Goodiepal)
17.30h Roy Ascott keynote (such a fascinating guy — mentor to Brian Eno, among others)
20.30h Mudboy and Fennesz in concert! (That shrieking you’ll hear will be me, like a bobby-soxer at the arrival of Frank Sinatra)

Friday 27 August
10-12h Recent Histories of Electronic Culture in Latin America
13-14.30h Media Gardens
15-16.30h Algorithmic Topology
17.30-19h Margaret Morse keynote
22-24h & onwards Concert with Momus (Hypnoprism) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara

Saturday 28 August
12-14h Harald Welzer & Marko Peljhan keynote
14.30-17.30h Herbologies/Foraging Networks
17.30-19h David d’Heilly & Fernando García Dory keynote
20.30-22h My beloved Charlemagne Palestine — who brings the holy madness to “resonant music,” the timelessness to minimalism — is giving a concert at St. Maximilian-Kirche!

And when my postdoc ends, or I get hired somewhere else, I press a button to download a tarball of the contents of my cloud box and delete the account. (Of course it would all be open source, and then we could Johnny Appleseed it around to other universities.)

(And of course most people in academia use Powerpoint rather than S5, and in-browser editing is much less likely to be adopted because of the overwhelming predominance of Microsoft Word, an application that is to writing what wobbly clear Lucite heels are to walking. At some point I’ll give vent to my feelings about what word processing does to words, but for now neither you nor I, dearreader, have time for the unfolding of that epic screed.)

There’s an object from the last story Smith wrote, a dream-object. Smith’s names for things are marvelous: the Bezirk, cranching, the Nothing-at-All, stroon, pinlighting, and on — and the object in this last story is something called congohelium. Congohelium, in Smith’s wonderfully absurd plot arc, is a kind of metallic grid in which are suspended matter and antimatter, but it is somehow also a play of lights and a cloud of light and color, and also something which makes utterly compelling music, or at least rhythm, and can be manipulated — but also can affect the universe generally; it keeps the stars in their places, or something like that. It enters the story because this young punk has found it in the depths of Old Earth and has started a kind of ultra-rave, a flurry of color and sharp Expressionist shadows in which people dance to death, so potent are the rhythms of everything in existence fed through this grid.

Something about the allusive descriptions of the congohelium — which in this writing sounds like one of the machines Raymond Roussel scattered around Locus Solus, where a weeping harp feeds a worm with Mozart’s head, or whatever — captured my imagination.

I thought of it as a grid of metal wire, strung with a bead at each intersection like a ferromagnetic core from the ur-days of computation; the beads were in a perfect state of suspension, and bending the frame would warp light around like sinking your hands into a pillow, and summon universal thrums, echoes of the boom of the Big Bang, maybe. But that seemed almost too straightforward.

I thought of it as something like the deep grating on an air conditioning vent, with each gap containing polarities of substance chessboard-style, and if you picked it up it would hum with latent cosmic intensity in your hands like a frame pulled from a beehive. Or perhaps in the intervals of this grid were shimmering things like marbles — shades of Magister Ludi, with the sense that a handful of colored pebbles can reflect the arrangement of the universe, deep formalisms.

But both of these were still too thing-y, still too much an object among others. An infinite Cornell box, perhaps. What I finally arrived at was something like an abacus and something like a lyre, though denser, heavier; but in drawing closer to it you would perceive ghostly lights, the grid like a trellis through which you can see fires on the horizon at night. And the grid also pulses, thrums, like the streets in a city or a Mondrian, Broadway boogie-woogie. To actually stand at the congohelium, touch it, pick it up, is to feel the amniotic pulse deeper and slower than the chime of the grid — the pulse of things propagating slowly through the universe, from star to star and everywhere at once — and to see it as close as it can be seen: as a hissing, whirling movement of bright ribbons in an open empty sky.

Though this was only a childhood fantasy, something about the last image of the congohelium still often comes up when I try to read or think about string theory. A kind of visual synecdoche.

Unlike the congohelium itself, the idea of the congohelium, this story, doesn’t really connect to anything else. It’s one of those many free-floating parts of thinking, I guess, a long-forgotten Mylar balloon let go and sparkling far off from the ground-level business of worrying about money, the streets and plazas of planning and scheduling and being distracted. On some grey nights I reach for it again, for the play of color and the organization of the stars.

Jean Cavaillès was a mathematician who wrote a wonderful history, On Logic and the Theory of Science, a high peak of a book where the air is very thin and the light is amazingly hot and bright. Cavaillès was close to Georges Canguilhem, who was a mentor to Foucault and a fascinating writer and historian, perhaps best known for his essay “Machine and Organism,” about the complex philosophical mistake we make when we analogize technological and biological things. Canguilhem was one of the chroniclers of the history of the idea of “life,” and the tangles and confusions it everywhere manifests — in medicine, in formal science, in philosophy — as it operates in our ideas and our projects. (More useful than ever today, in our moment of crazy computational analogies.) Cavaillès was in a similar situation, although with a sense that there was some deep event taking place within mathematics that was irreducible, even so. Part of their argument, one that passed to some of their readers and pupils, was that (oversimplifying) we get the truth we deserve. Out of the complex aggregation of things that forms a mentalité, an episteme, maybe a Zeitgeist, we fashion our sense of what the truth entails, and how we can arrive at it. (Because of the rarified nature of the mathematical conversation, Cavaillès gave it special dispensation — not that it was “truer,” but that it moved more at its own speed and in its own milieu, less a part of the “system of thought” of an era than many other things. Which is not to say that it couldn’t be adopted, incorporated, or applied within the larger “system of thought,” just that it tended not to adopt much back. “System of thought” here in the sense that Foucault described himself as “a historian of systems of thought.”)

Canguilhem, a practicing medical doctor and historian, saw this in the dense history of how different understandings were developed to describe, for instance, the reflex arc or the “pathological” in medicine.

” … This is why I have argued that theories do not arise from the facts they order — or, to put it more precisely, facts do act as a stimulus to theory, but they neither engender the concepts that provide theories with their internal coherence nor initiate the intellectual ambitions that theories pursue. Such ambitions come to us from long ago, and the number of unifying concepts is small. That is why theoretical themes survive even after critics are pleased to think that the theories associated with them have been refuted.”

(This at the end of a marvelous essay on the deeply weird history of the theory of the cell.) And he did this work — as Cavaillès did in math and logic — because he believed deeply in the efficacy of science, but without any grand positivist claims. In the intensely boring, unglamorous, pain-in-the-ass parts of scientific work, the layers of instruments and procedure, ego-tripping and doubt and iteration, lay ways of brushing against things and talking about things that didn’t change when our mentalité did. And these worked, insofar as they worked at all, because their repetition, unthrilling labor, and lunatic meticulousness provided ways to gradually subtract some of our system of thought from what we’re dealing with. Certainly not all of it, but enough that we can look at different projects on the same thing (the cell, the reflex arc) over a long period and see where each project added its Zeitgeist to the mix, and see what holds constant. So one of the best things the scientific project consistently offers is a way to keep our minds in mind, and to partially correct for the observer effect of our desires, our epoch, our politics and philosophy. (Foucault took this, and some of the analytical tools, and put it to work on the most implicated areas claiming the dispensation of “science”: criminology, psychology, diagnostic medicine, sciences taking “man” as their subject.)

Here is the surprise. These two, so thoughtful and precise and even remorseless on the topic of truth, taking as their object thoughts and theories as contingent and historical objects, were people who didn’t claim truth, or foundational knowledge, or much beyond human conversation (whether between mathematicians or 16th century doctors), which on shallow reading seems to preclude any solid moral conviction, ethical stand, or reason for righteous action. But Cavaillès and Canguilhem were key figures in the Resistance, in situations of great personal danger — and Cavaillès gave his life, in the most horrible and tragic way imaginable. The two of them began by co-founding the Resistance network Libération-sud; Cavaillès formed others in France and Belgium, was arrested, wrote his book on logic in a prison camp, escaped to England and met with de Gaulle, and then returned, tasked with sabotaging and demolishing the storage and radio installations used by the German navy on the coast. He was betrayed from within the Resistance, captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and shot on 17 February 1944, buried in an unmarked grave listed as “Unknown man No. 5.”

Canguilhem dodged a dragnet at the University of Strasbourg in late 1943 and went underground with the Resistance forces in Auvergne, fighting in guerilla operations and organizing field hospitals, including the hospital at Mont Mouchet, which was evacuated during an attack. (When asked what he felt crossing the open field with the wounded under fire, he said “Nothing. A very great serenity.”) He was part of the movement at Saint-Alban to use occupational therapy, working on the land, as a way to insure that psychiatric patients were not simply permitted to starve to death, as 40,000 did during the war. He went as the representative of the Auvergne resistance to Vichy when the Nazis had retreated and the collaborationist government was being dismantled. He was the executor of Cavaillès’s papers, assembling and publishing his work over the next several years; he wrote a book about his friend’s life, Vie et mort de Jean Cavaillès.

Thus the question that Foucault obliquely and sardonically posed: how is it that so many of the philosophers, the politically engagé and morally and ethically ferocious (Sartre coming up in this analysis), end up in Paris during the war years, staging allegorical plays and writing pamphlets on the necessity of direct action, while these historians of science, of all people, are putting their asses on the line? Canguilhem, in his eulogy for Cavaillès, phrased it in a very different way: “A philosopher-mathematician loaded with explosives, lucid and reckless, resolute without optimism. If that is not a hero, what is a hero?” (“Explosives” is no hyperbole: Cavaillès, dressed as a mechanic, carried bombs on his person into the Kreigsmarine’s Lorient submarine base.) The paradoxes: lucid, and reckless; resolute, without being optimistic. The larger paradox: To act, to do the good thing and even the great thing, to fight evil, to protect, to heal, to defend — without a larger abstract structure in which to permanently settle “good,” “great,” “evil.” To act without having to know for certain.

Oh, certainty. I think people like Canguilhem are pretty spot-on when it comes to the process of the sciences — and that any extrapolations from that to our larger human issues should be treated with deep suspicion. We get the truth we deserve, and often the truth we desire. (An egregious case of this being the trivializing use of evolutionary biology to arrive at conclusions about individuality, politics, gender, and economics that line up oddly well with one or another current cultural consensus.) The plodding, collaborative, constructive process of science, in the changeable way that it moves through time — the business of doing science in 1710 or 1910 being obviously a very different matter than 2010 — operating with all fundamental claims in play and nothing wholly outside debate if you run the tape long enough: this is vital, a great achievement. But the very way in which it is worthwhile makes it problematic as a source of moral inference.

And this is where I find something so moving and inspiring, beyond the pure heroism, in the work of people who hold to that project, abstract, gradual and doubting, in situations of profound moral and ethical demand: Lewis Fry Richardson, the Quaker mathematician, working on the nonlinear dynamical structure of weather between shifts driving an ambulance for the Society of Friends on the front lines in WWI; Rita-Levi Montalcini improvising tools with which to continue her work on embryological nerve growth while in hiding from Mussolini’s thugs in Italy; Cavaillès writing his history of logic and the method while plotting his escape in Montpellier; Grothendieck lecturing on category theory in the jungle during the bombing of Hanoi.

In Cavaillès and in Canguilhem and some others I find the idea of thoughtful people for whom the domains of thought and action are not necessarily unified, and do not need to be — but that there is a responsibility to act in both areas, hewing to the particular nature and specificity of each. Activity in one does not necessarily translate into activity in the other and neither involves or starts from permanent and fixed foundations.

I don’t know. I’m still thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. And it ends, appropriately, on a note of uncertainty.

(I should write about the psychic economy of self-hatred sometime. It’s an intricate set of double binds, and laying this stuff out in public is a kind of exorcism, removing feelings from the protective, baroque involution of the mind. Binds: The loop where successfully doing something to your standards is a sign that you’re capable, and therefore all the other times that you’ve failed are a further indictment of your character. It’s interesting that self-hatred seems surprisingly underrepresented in literature but is the motor of so much great standup, that it can be so funny even as it crushes you within the vise whose screw you tighten and tighten. Anyway.)

The issue with stuckness isn’t that it happens but that it can be hard to identify and distinguish as such, and thus address. I call this the Whitehouse problem, after one of my favorite scientists manqué to get something disastrously wrong. The magnificently named Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was a surgeon who became the chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, with the job of figuring out how to get a signal through a poorly insulated cable running at the bottom of the sea. (He wrote some singularly entertaining papers on the subject.) To be clear, poor Whitehouse did quite a lot of interesting work, including developing and patenting his own rollerskates and the Electric Harmoniograph, a system for generating graphic notation from piano keyboards — but for the great bet of his life and his era he bet big, and wrong. The sea is a noisy environment for an electrically transmitted message; Whitehouse’s colleague William Thompson/Lord Kelvin wanted to address this by making the receiver more sensitive, better able to distinguish modulations in the signal. Whitehouse’s solution was the essence of brute force, building bigger and better induction coils to put more power through the line, eventually killing it and effectively melting it into scrap. Then, sadly, he did same thing socially: refusing any failure, he feuded publicly and at length with various parties, using sheer rhetorical bluster in the absence of much evidence to get his message across.

Being stuck, dearreader, is a delicate state. It has distinct forms. And the temptation is to Whitehouse things: pour on the willpower, the coffee, the focus, to make this work, right now, God damn it. Not to lose another hour, another morning, another day. As I get older I realize that my good sense and my willpower are mostly inversely proportional to each other — the more I lose track of my goals, the more I’m adrift, the harder I try, the more force I put into the system. An escalating feedback loop that ends with me as a flake of molten copper on the ocean floor (which is to say lying on the carpet in my office in the middle of the night, crushingly certain that everything I’ve done up to this point that’s been any good was a fluke, a run of luck that’s ended). What if we let things stay delicate, stayed attentive, and parsed out signals with the grace of Kelvin’s mirror galvanometer, a dot of light that can pull a message out of the sea? When I try to notice the stuckness, I see four distinct modes:

1. Physical factors. They can’t be ignored. Heat, cold, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, the café staff playing the same Cure record over and over. An uncomfortable chair. These things seem facile; I always think, as I fret about the jabbing ribs of some Thonet chair, about my beloved Osip Mandelstam, who could write on shirt cardboards with a stolen pencil while facing the Gulag — what am I complaining about? (Oh, dearreader, if you haven’t read Mandelstam: “The Noise of Time,” “Fourth Prose,” the “Journey to Armenia,” the rest of the prose, his poems, to say nothing of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s document of inhumanity Hope Against Hope — there is perhaps no better writer of dreams in the Western tradition, but the dreams he documents are Russia, language, Judaism, history, the coming of the Terror. This reminds me that I need to start my Mandelstam podcast.) But they are real and nontrivial factors, and too many days I’ve ground to dust trying to work in an unworkable place.
2. Out of your control. Like you’re waiting on feedback about an article, the one article you really want to be working on. You can’t do the most important thing, or you’re not sure what that is.
3. Emotional factors. Like I’m scared of a project, or I feel confused, creatively worthless, preoccupied with something else. (This one is hard because I often use work to manage these negative emotions, so having them keep me from working is hard for me to finesse.)
4. The necessary pause. Sometimes the creative process needs a break, a little search time, some listening and staring into space. You need to give the next step, the next idea, a chance to bubble up. Thinking, for me, is a mostly involuntary process; a real idea often happens as an interruption, a chance encounter that comes independent of any diligence on my part. A mentor of mine used to say that truth wasn’t a country you conquer but a cat you coax out from underneath the couch. Give it room, and quiet, to emerge.

I can work with my stuckness, I find, if I just acknowledge that it’s happening. Suddenly I no longer need to fight myself.

And having taken a break to calm down from deadline panic and write this instead, I need to get back to work.

(Noted from Jürgen Born, 1979, Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption zu seinen Lebzeiten, 1912-1924, p. 119.)

“You’ve seen that it is not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.”

FRIDAY
1100 — Light, Color and Perception (B) Everyone will be blogging the State of Global Intelligence talk, anyway
1200 — Content of the Future (L)
1300 — Dan Kaminsky Keynote! (T)
1400 — Examining Costs, Benefits, and Economics in Malware and Carding Markets (B) Will be awesome
1500 — Arse Elektronika (T)
1600 — Cooking for Geeks (B)
1700 — Design of a Wireless EMG (B)
1800 — Tor and Internet Censorship (T)
1900 — Buying Privacy in Digitized Cities (B)
2000 — Towards Open Libraries and Schools (L)
2100 — Introduction to the Chip Scene: Low Bit Music and Visuals (L)
2200 — Electronic Waste: What’s Here and What’s Next (L)
2300 — Interaction with Sensors, Receivers, Haptics, and Augmented Reality (L)

SATURDAY
1000 — T+40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo (L)
1100 — Video Surveillance, Society, and Your Face (T)
1200 — For Its Own Sake and to Build Something Better: A Primer on Neuroscience, Bat Echolocation, and Hacker Bio-inspiration (B)
1300 — Julian Assange Keynote! (T) Not to be missed
1500 — Modern CrimeWare Tools and Techniques: An Analysis of Underground Resources (B)
1600 — Snatch Those Waves: Prometheus Radio and the Fight for Popular Communications (T)
1700 — Privacy is Dead — Get Over It (T) Three hours, will be completely epic
2000 — The Telephone Pioneers of America (B)
2100 — Circuitbending (L)
2200 — PSTN-based Cartography (B)
2300 — A User’s Guide to Lulzy Media, the Pleasure of Trickery, and the Politics of Spectacle: From Luddites to Anonymous (T) Biella and my presentation! Come, critique, enjoy
2400 — Either Robert Steele’s tour of the espionage world, or the Saturday night Hacker Cinema

SUNDAY
1000 — Hacking Terrorist Networks Logically and Emotionally (B)
1100 — From Indymedia to Demand Media: Participation, Surveillance, and the Transformation of Journalism (T)
1200 — Simpsons Already Did It – Where Do You Think the Name “Trojan” Came From Anyway? (L)
1300 — TrackMeNot: Injecting Reasonable Doubt in Everyone’s Queries (B) My colleague Vincent Toubiana presenting on a very interesting project
1400 — Informants: Villains or Heroes? (T) Will be intense
1530 — Hacking the Food Genome (T)
1600 — Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology (L)

And I’ll probably be around for the closing ceremonies. I may have to slip away to do some work though. See you there, droogs.

The moment of shock when, deep inside a knockout whirling solo, you could hear “My Favorite Things,” far down, the way you can see a wonderful simian monkey-trace in the big beautiful face of Jean-Paul Belmondo

(This post is about music and has a bunch of mp3s linked from it. If you’d them all once, download the zip file.)

Early this January, I deleted all the music on my computer and vowed to listen only to music I’d never heard before for the rest of the year. (New albums by bands I already liked were permitted.) Objects, surroundings, sounds, tastes, have a way of helping to sustain the continuity of feeling and self, stringing the days together like pearls — and sometimes you need to stop being who you were. I used to do that by moving to another place, but I like where I’m living now, so: nothing but new music. The longest day seems like a good time to listen back.

“Glossolalia – prophecies, Pentecost community, USA, 1960s”

This was the first thing I listened to, recordings of glossolalia from the astonishing collection Okkulte Stimmung. Divine inspiration and alien tongues was a good starting point (and oddly relaxing). (Seriously, find the collection if you can. Many recordings of things you never imagined someone captured on tape: Séance conversations with various dead worthies? Channeled beings from improbable planets? An astonishing ten minutes from an Egyptian exorcism conducted in جن language? All here. A box of wonders.)

“Arrastao” / Quarteto em Cy

You quickly realize, taking a vow like this, that you’ve kind of eliminated all the low-hanging sonic fruit. If you like a genre of music you’ve probably already heard all the big stuff. So you start digging. Or, if you’re lazy, like me, you jump to genres you know almost nothing about. Like girl-group tropicalia in the 1960s. And you find four sisters (named, perfectly and for real, Cybele, Cylene, Cynara and Cyva) who sing with a precision that could pick the hearts off a falling playing card, and who’ve created something like doo-wop with a wider emotional range, a touch of melancholy.

“Cheshm-e Man” / Dariush

And you find out about Persian psych and folk music from the 1960s, too. (Plus early Algerian raï, but that’s a whole separate blog post full of dancing, public weeping, and trumpets — how can you help but love a form of music whose name translates as “Yeah!”) It’s so beautiful. This song is one piercing moment after another; by that delicate coda we stand like St. Sebastian struck with so many arrows of love and loss, but for once the arrows help us stand; their fletching helps us fly.

“Homesickness” / Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou

And about the tumbling-water piano work of Guèbrou, an Ethiopian-born, Jerusalem-based nun who plays like a collaboration of Scott Joplin and Lubomyr Melnyk — but comparisons don’t quite capture it. A fluttering music like a bird flown into a room and trying to find its way back to the open air, but utterly without panic.

“Essiniya” / Troupe Majidi

And about this (from the AMAZING Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa el Fna) from Marrakesh in 2005. Run off moped batteries through terrible speakers, it’s an explosion of raw joy that acts as a permanent argument in favor of humans being ourselves in all our various ways. From that opening wall of guitar (?) noise, hang out in the Moroccan street until about 1:13, when something starts that’s like what the Velvet Underground might have become in a state of holy and radiant glory.

“A Summer Long Since Passed” / Virginia Astley

Of course you also come across things that are the kind of thing you would have liked, had you known — in my case, Virginia Astley’s curious and utterly dreamy album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, instrumental miniatures played as though in the middle of an English field on a perfect summer’s day. Birds twitter, boats creak with rowing, distant bells sound, and piano phrases cycle like bees going from one flower to the next. (This is the lushest track on the record, with its children’s choir; some of the others are downright dark, with a slight Wicker Man glow from burning August fields.)

“Moon Jam” / White Hinterland

Luckily bands you love keep releasing music, too, like White Hinterland/Casey Dienel — which began with pianos and magnificently detailed, loopy lyrics that told intricate stories about free spirits, old buildings, and the fate of a ladies’ man — who have transformed into something rich and fuzzy, as though a picture of their previous music had been taken and all that came through was the lens flare. And this seems like a good place to stop, in a black and silent sea, in a lake the sun has never seen –

I’m looking forward to the next six months.