〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

I want to touch the mysterious book

In August, I opened up my non-fiction book proposal again and started poking around. (More on that below.) And one of the things I did was go through the list of artifacts tagged in the British Museum archives as "divination devices." There are 199 objects on that list, including some really interesting pieces. But the one I want to know about most is this book.

The object is described as "Book (divination text) made of bark, with wood covers." They seem to know that it was made by the Batak people of Sumatra in the 19th century. But the curator's notes say: "Found unnumbered in the Department's collections; source unknown."

This is how a fantasy novel begins, right? An unsuspecting curatorial assistant is looking for something in their boss's office, and comes across this ancient, powerful book with a cover made of bark. The book transports them in time, or gives them special powers, or perhaps is what has been keeping their boss alive all these years.

What is inside the book? I don't know! Online, all you can see is the cover of the book, nothing inside. I want to touch the book. I want to open the book! I cannot, so in lieu of that I have emailed the British Museum asking what is inside. I'm sure they will not answer me but I've tried.

Burnadette experiences her first firing

A few months ago I helped to build a wood kiln at Laney College, and this month we fired her for the time. A first firing of any kiln is always a big deal but in particular kilns like this that are big, hand built, and a lot more variable than an electric or gas kiln. By the end of the firing we had learned that Burnadette (our name for the kiln) was a sensitive lady who liked to be fluffed regularly and needed a lot of attention and stoking with the right kind of wood before she was willing to give you what you wanted.

Here are a few images from the loading process:

I'll share photos of the final results in the next 〰️ in 〰️ out post because technically unloading happened in September.

Ruth Asawa always hits

The SFMoMA put on a big Ruth Asawa retrospective and I loved it. This is not a unique or special take. Ruth Asawa is beloved and the exhibit got great reviews and if liking it makes me a normie so be it! (See also: I will never stop loving Calder's work, sue me.)

Asawa is known for her large-scale wire weaving, and there was lots and lots of that there. I'm particularly drawn to her pieces that weave vessels inside of vessels — round shapes that nest and contain. The friend I was with was the opposite, she was drawn to Asawa's open structure work — the pieces that look almost like wings, or DNA, undulating and moving outward.

But what I didn't expect to be so drawn to, was Asawa's other work, in particular her 2D pieces. I mean... look at this watermelon! This is a crappy photo I took on my phone and it is still amazing.

The show also gave a really lovely glimpse into her life as a mother, grandmother, teacher, and general lover of children. And at the very end, they printed a huge photograph of her living room, which is one of the dreamiest spaces I've ever seen.

Fun fact I learned: Buckminster Fuller designed Asawa's wedding rings.

a quick trip to Steep Ravine

One of my favorite places in Northern California is Steep Ravine, in Mount Tamalpais State Park. You can camp there, but there are also a small set of cabins available to rent if you can get lucky with the reservation system. This month, we managed to grab a cancellation and go down for one night. There is nothing like this place to make me feel good. We saw whales, dolphins, hawks, pelicans, and all sorts of coastal creatures. I watched a snail make little swirls in the sand for an hour. I spotted a chiton on the move. The air hugs the sea and the raptors float in the updraft and it's just magical.

Plus I got to make my beloved s'mores innovation: hotdog bun, nutella, potato chips, three toasted marshmallows.

additional excitement and enjoyment included:

• Two Golden State Valkyries games.
• One BayFC game at Oracle Arena.
• Getting to go to Fairyland TWICE, once for their grownups night and once for a feature I'm working on that I'm really excited to share with you all when it's live.
• "i had believed that indifference would be easy. but caring is what gives color to life, and spending most of my waking hours performing labor that didn't matter to me trapped me in a persistent grayness." a new new year
• "After losing his collision repair business in the recession of 2008, Andy took on various odd jobs, but still found himself $200 short of his monthly bills. To make ends meet, he resorted to an old hobby: drawing sexy cartoon characters. “I was a crappy artist, but one thing you can do to bypass that is to draw things naked,” he tells us. “It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s true.”" [How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet](How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet)
• "But I am more than a critic: I am a hater. I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider." I Am An AI Hater

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

I have been feeling self-conscious that I don't have a lot to share with you here in this OUT section this month. Most of what I've been doing has been behind the scenes — thinking, reading, organizing, sending emails, making calls. All the stuff that has to happen before I can share an actual thing with you. But so it goes, and so here we are.

avoiding the book proposal spiral

I'm currently working on a non-fiction book proposal about the future. If I'm honest, I've been "working on" this proposal for years now. It's been a struggle for me, and I've set it aside over and over again to tackle other projects like Tested, Advice for and From the Future, The Future Of, and other things like it. Projects that are clearer, more well defined, where I know exactly what I need to do, and where the scope and shape of the thing is firm.

My book proposal has always felt mushy in my hands. Each time I work on it, it's a bit like trying to pan for gold. There are a few glittery bits in there, but you have to get through a lot of sludge to find them. The book's shape and scope is still really hazy to me. I know I want to write about how we think about the future. I know I want to weave historical narratives into the project, to show you how people have used the tools of futurism through time largely as a form of top down control.

But that's not clear enough. A book with that scope could be about almost anything in human history. And whenever I read my latest draft proposal I can feel that there's something missing. Some link or clarifying idea or narrowing scope. It feels too academic, and too vague. It feels too broad — too much of a Wikipedia-page like survey, and too little like something anybody would actually enjoy reading.

I know that I need really good stories for this book. I need narratives and compelling characters. People doing the work of futurism that we can follow and care about and root for or against. Not just concepts or ideas, but humans, doing stuff. I have a couple of these, but for the book to really work, I need more.

The thing is that in order to figure out which stories are really good and I really want to tell in this book, I have to sift through a lot of stuff. And part of my argument in this book (which long time Flash Forward listeners will be very familiar with) is that futurism isn't just sci-fi and technology. Furutism is a way of talking about and controlling what is considered possible. It's done by politicians, religious leaders, consultants, designers, artists, activists, advertisers. When Donald Trump says "make America great again," that is a form of futurism. So was "we're not going back," from the Harris campaign.

What this means is that I am interested in stories that are what I would call futurism, but that are not going to necessarily be coded as such in the literature. I can't just read scholarship that is tagged "futurism" or look into people who have called themselves futurists. This is my big struggle with the project. Because what this means is that I just wind up kind of... wandering around, reading about things hoping that something will click.

Sometimes it does! Sometimes I discover something really cool and interesting. But for years, my book proposal process has been extremely self defeating and ineffective. It's gone, basically, like this:

1. Read proposal.
2. Feel bad about the proposal and how it's not working.
3. Decide that the only way to know what should go into the book is to read everything about everything so I can figure out what fits and what doesn't.
4. Try to read 10 dense academic books related to the future.
5. Get frustrated that they're not actually helpful and the work is slow.
6. Give up and move onto a more clearly defined project.

In August, I opened the proposal again for the first time in almost a year. It's not that I hadn't been thinking about it — I am, in some ways, always thinking about it (and squirreling potentially useful articles away to read later). But I hadn't actually held the proposal itself in my hands. Unfortunately, time away from the document had not miraculously fixed the problems I have long felt.

But this time I tried to avoid the academic text spiral of doom I had been falling into previously. And instead of trying to cast about for stories, I tried to figure out a way to home in the argument of the book itself. I think I've done that, at least half way. I've got something that I think makes sense to me, in terms of a structure and a frame.

But I still need to find stories to hang on the scaffolding. Which means I need to find better ways of looking for examples and narratives from history, that don't involve me slogging through a bunch of PhD theses from the 1980's that aren't actually helpful to me.

additional things I spent my time on

• I spent a lot of August working diligently behind the scenes to get COYOTE going. We launch September 15th!!!! That is so soon!!!! When it happens I'm going to be quite annoying about it so consider yourselves all warned.
• I went on a tour of Recology and applied for their artist in residence program.
• I fact checked big chunks of this behemoth immigration timeline for Unbreaking. The immigration system in the United States was already so incredibly flawed and dehumanizing, and now with the Trump administration's attacks on immigrants it's just... brutal. But I think documenting what has happened is important, and I'm proud to have played a small part in that.
• I put out a newsletter on the TESTED front explaining the new World Athletics that bring sex testing back for every woman in track and field.

That's all for this one. Shorter than usual! And now instead of apologizing for being too long, I'm feeling self conscious that it's too short. I can never win. Here's an image that made me laugh: