Fly slightly less casual: My second X-WING tournament.

Alright, enough effusion. I went to the weekly Pandemonium tournament, had a wonderful time, but screwed up: grabbed the currently popular Dengar/Nym Scum list and copied the cards manually into an online squad builder, but left Guidance Chips off both ships — yeah, I know. Always check your work!

Anyhow, that probably gave away 12-15hp over the course of the night. Can you goddamn believe?

I crushed a new player, drew even with a superior player (flying his own ordnance-laden Firespray/Nym list) in a match that ended with a genuinely dramatic nose-to-nose Nym joust, and got tabled by a Chewie/Leebo tank list. Here’s how bad that last match was: Leebo had a Range 1 donut, and I didn’t get inside it even once. Afterward Ian (the pilot) gave me good advice (I forgot I had Glitterstim, failed to set up an alpha strike, and sacrificed my most potent weapon by not keeping Dengar’s arc trained on the bad guys at all times) and nicely complimented my maneuvering, which made my evening despite how pissed off I was at my poor final-match performance.

In short: a fantastic night out, which was only possible because my wife handled childcare and housecare duties for the evening. Thanks love! May the Force beNEVERMIND

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Important pennies.

Michiko Kakutani is retiring. I didn’t realize she was still working.

Ten years ago I’d have said ‘Good riddance’ — I thought she was dull on literature and embarrassing on politics, and I wrote in 2006 (on this blog’s forerunner) that I couldn’t remember ever learning anything from her reviews — but now I feel a little twinge of ohisthat…? sadness. My teacher said she was a fine interviewer in the 1970s at Yale, and the words ‘the 1970s at Yale’ remind me of the nearness of history: there’s another America within living memory, one where books mattered directly to the ‘average Joe’ and the idea of intellectual life wasn’t a sad joke.

My editor at Bloomsbury (yes I do enjoy typing those words) told me only the NYTimes could meaningfully drive sales with a review anymore, though I suppose she wasn’t counting Oprah Winfrey. Kakutani won’t be remembered as an intellectual, but she was part of a world that prized intellectual discourse even if only as fashion. The sadness I feel is for the passing of a world where not just ideas but contemplation itself mattered.

Ritual and control (systems): freewrite.

The word ‘ritual’ is overloaded w/judgment because the 20th century was horrible. We have a screwy notion of what time is — the body’s relationship to time, and the mind’s.

Neonates’ hearts have to be taught to beat in time. Ever wonder why they respond so well to bouncing at ~80bpm? Their hearts are learning how to keep a beat. They’re learning how to live.

Technologies collapse space and time, can we agree? One major effect of the Internet is that all libraries are local. My car lets me be 60 miles away in an hour; traveling five miles takes ‘no time at all,’ a unit of time so small I don’t notice it unless I’m in a hurry. Benedict Anderson wrote about this already — the psychic effects of 19C mass media. James Scott as well, in another register. Manovich, Kittler — yr Media Studies 101 reading list, basically.

(The Language of New Media put me off when I read it in grad school; I wonder how I’d feel about it today, where my almost unreadably marked-up copy is…)

What’s ritual? Programmatic action to imbue a moment with meaning: to change the relationship of the mind/body to spacetime. Ritual differs from habit by intention. It differs from ‘process’ in its metaphoricity — rituals aren’t always representational but the action/effect mapping passes through metaphor, which isn’t true of a functional process. How do you make scrambled eggs? Crack, whisk, milk, heat, scramble, no need to pour a ring of salt around yourself in the kitchen. Each step of the process accomplishes something physical, obvious; each step in the ritual (the crimson shawl, the ring of salt, the prayer to Pelor) accomplishes psychotropism.

Psycho+tropism: mind+changing. ‘Learning.’ I’ve been making this point (well it’s not a ‘point’ exactly) in writing for 15 years now.

Science — or no not ‘science’ but whatever hip idiots mean when they say ‘Yay, let’s do science!‘ — is supposed by now to’ve freed us from the Terrible Shackles of ritual. We no longer evoke or imbue or incant or call down the ______ but rather we ‘boot up’ and ‘lifehack’ and oh God it’s too stupid to write down. Point being we’ve replaced magical metaphors with technological ones and have failed to register the implied insult, i.e. that you and I are the same kinds of machines as the ones we serve all day. (On the other hand, given this subservience, maybe calling ourselves ‘computers’ is meant as a compliment? Well: I don’t take it as one.) The idea that you can pop a nootropic or microdose and unlock the awesome power of the human mind isn’t even wrong, it’s a betrayal on another conceptual register altogether — of dignity. The idea, I mean, that there’s nothing else to be gained by taking human time: time at a biological scale.

What am I angry about now. What am I going on about. Please, please look: Western minds have shifted over the last few decades toward a resentment/rejection of ritual, languor, symbol, secret, time as pleasure, mind as space — magic, basically. Magical thought. I mean even the phrase ‘magical thinking’ is a denigration now, as if magic hasn’t been a way of working (in) the world since the dawn of the species, as if ‘magic’ referred simply to the incorrect belief that a fingersnap can make a hated enemy feel pain and not to, oh, the years-long process of careful ego-thinning and -reshaping by which minds open up to an ecstatically imaginative (sur)reality.

Or from another angle: if you drink your stupid burnt Dunkin Donuts coffee-sludge in a hurry on the drive into work, the caffeine will make you somewhat more productive for a short time. There are better habits and worse ones. But you should know that in another world, that drink was part of an inexpressibly more potent behavioural psychotropic, a (don’t tell the boss) ritual of movement from hanging-at-home mode to whatever mode you need to get into to work for those predators at the top of the org chart — and billions of dollars are spent every year to convince you that you don’t need it, that there’s no time for that sort of New Age frippery. For those five minutes of generative peace and wonder and focused consciousness.

So: life gets faster and worse. And the other world, which was only ever within you, a metaphor of unspeakable power, gets smaller and emptier and harder to find.