John Sheffield West

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Get yer bots right here

I just finished work on Cooper Hewitt Degradebot, a Twitter friend that puts degraded pieces of art from the Cooper Hewitt Museum in your timeline four times a day. I’m able to do this because the Cooper Hewitt has an excellent API.

If you’re curious about the code, here it is. The library I use to ASCII-ize and degrade the images is here.

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Station Identification

Villa #1, John West. Original: Print, Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli, "Le Vedute di Roma" (1748-1778), 1748–78, Designed by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, here.

This is The Long Nothings, working off a tremendous headache. Happy Wednesday.

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Science is not “The Poetry of Reality,” for the love of Mike

Where even to begin.

Maria Bustillos is angry at Popula—elevated pulse rate, seeing red, the whole thing. 

Consider the following proposition, which got Bustillos’s goat:

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

“What is ‘how the world works’? What is ‘the world’ and what is ‘works’? What is ‘best’? What is ‘understand’?,” Bustillos writes, very mad. “How can even a not that smart Skeptic begin to imagine that he ‘understands’ any one of these things, let alone all of them?” Bustillos continues.

There’s real poetry in the real world. And Science is the Poetry of Reality.

There’s utility in reducing the realty down to the parts measurable by scientist. We’ve explored cells. We can take pictures of the stars. I own a smartphone. I get it.

But I can think of few things sadder than paying rapt, exclusive attention to useful shadows on a wall and thinking to yourself, “there’s the poetry of reality.”

Anyway, read the piece.

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Station Identification

Parthenon at Night, Athens #1 by John West, after Frederic E. Church, here.

It’s Monday morning, and last night I dove deeper into Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey, so I’m still feeling like ASCII-izing Greek ruins.

This is The Long Nothings hoping you all find magic in loss.

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Canon Fodder

Where's the country music on Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 1980s?

Needless to say, one list of albums does not have a decisive effect on society. But it isn’t an overstatement to say that there is a force at work that leads us to view the expression of class interests as a neutral expression of taste. It’s the same thing that asks us to consider a hierarchical institution like the university a meritocracy. Social theory has a name for this imaginary relationship to existing conditions: “ideology.” The project of cultural studies was based on the premise that understanding ideology, by investigating how culture is produced and how canons are formed, can help explain how wider social formations operate.

At Popula, Shuja Haider discusses the relationships between country, rap, indie rock (memorably sent up as, and I’m paraphrasing, “wah-wah college rock” by Clueless) and Pitchfork’s criticism and canonization. It’s a great essay. Genre is politics whether it’s in music or books or website design. I don’t know much about contemporary music, but I know the truth off this in books and design.

These days, I feel too busy, too stuck, too old (or crotchety, depending on your perspective) to experience much in the way of new music. I’m set. But, as I type this, I’m listening, for the first time, to Mt. Eerie (née The Microphones), and realizing this particular musical aesthetic still resonates with me, deeply.

Even more interesting, though, Mt. Eerie’s injunction that “Death is real,” that it’s not something to sing about. And yet he’s singing about it. (This is unrelated to canon; I’m just riffing). He’s employing a genre to destroy it. It’s aching and beautiful, and the loss it holds makes the container itself lose coherence. I can’t even.

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The Nevada City Beer Diaries

The Myth of Self-Care & The Power of a 100 IBU 20-Ounce Therapist

Reality-based self-care is brushing your teeth almost every day.

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Station Identification

Twitter #7, John West

It’s Saturday night, I’ve finally put up the bookshelves after living in my new apartment for four months, and I’m ready to finish The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

This is The Long Nothings. I’m reading.

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Group Therapy for the End of the World

Kyle Chayka travels to a workshop in rural Sweden run by a co-founder of a shadowy environmental activist group seeking answers. He found a sense of impending doom, both personal and planet-wide. Photographed by Carolyn Drake.

Dark Mountain is above all a story we tell ourselves: The world is fucked and doing anything more will only make it worse, so we might as well move back to the woods, literally and metaphorically. Changing the story might be a way, or the only way, to change our relationship to the environment. Yet storytelling is, by nature, artificial; it requires the teller to choose a beginning and an end that impose meaning against ambiguity. If I could stop my story right here and leave you to just stay with the trouble, I would. But the Ängelsberg workshop provided its own conclusion.

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Sing a Song for Madeline Miller

In my apparent, though unintentionally, ongoing quest to read every piece of Homer-inspired art from the last decade, I finished Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Yes, I cried on the Amtrak not once but twice. No, I don’t think my row-mate noticed.

I enjoyed her Circe, but I think I enjoyed this more. Miller managed to save the Iliad-ic portion for the last half of the book, and managed, too, to avoid her lyricism standing in the way of the story (my chief complaint with Circe is the way in which Miller very occasionally went for beauty over plot.)

What I’ve enjoyed even more than reading the book, which was a really great joy, was searching “The Song of Achilles” on Tumblr, which reveals a large and vibrant fan-base. Slash-fiction gets a bad rep, but Miller’s work shows we shouldn’t snub it as necessarily low-brow. Literary slash-fiction, my new favorite genre.

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Station Identification

Noli Timere, #2, by John West

I just got back from a short, but intense sojourn in New York. I’ve read a bunch, and I’m ready to post. This is The Long Nothings: brace yourself.

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Since Instagram has no mechanic for reposting (unlike, say, Tumblr), users who want to “regram” an image take a screen capture and post it as a new image. Each reposting introduces generational loss as the image is transcoded from PNG to JPG and optimised by Instagram. While initially irrelevant, the loss adds up and the image degrades.

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Station Identification

Noli Timere, #1 John West

I finished Automating Inequality last night, and I’m here to tell you that it’s good. Especially if you in or around data—a field that moves so fast, it’s easy to mistake it for magic. But Eubanks’s book is a forceful reminder that technology without history or moral clarity is just a witches’ brew. It’s so tempting to mistake technological innovation for societal progress. We can’t afford to be seduced. As Eubanks shows again and again, social injustice—both historical and present—determines who reaps the rewards of our tech and who gets punished by it.

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Triage, defined

Virginia Eubanks gives us this anecdote from Automating Inequality: In The Panoptic Sort, Oscar Gandy notes that, “automated sorting of digital personal information is a kind of triage. ... the term is derived from the French trier, which means to pick over, cull, or grade marketable produce. ‘Although some metaphors speak for themselves, let me be clear,’ he writes. In digital triage, “individuals and groups of people are being sorted according to their presumed economic or political value.”

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Station Identification

Elon #1, by John West.

This is The Long Nothings, saying, “you’re welcome.”

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What Facebook Doesn't Tell Us About Homer's Odyssey

New, STEM-focused approaches to ancient texts have promise to help us better understand the objects of our study, but those new approaches also create their own problems when they fail to be truly interdisciplinary and talk to scholars in the Humanities.

As generations of scholars have shown, Walden continued, the differences between gods and men in Homer's works is precisely the point - the suffering of men meant to be in stark contrast to the petty squabbles of the gods. A student of the Humanities would already know this, would take as a given "the necessity of reading ancient sources carefully: of evaluating agendas and assumptions, situating texts in the context of history and genre, and assessing what sort of questions they might help to answer." But by failing to take into consideration the foundational questions Humanities scholars ask of their sources, these researchers were taken in by the many false things that are like true ones. This particular network analysis did what it was supposed to do. It failed because it didn't answer the question that was asked in the first place. In other words, the ship did what it was supposed to do but the pilot was seduced by the Sirens into the rocks. As others have noted, STEM needs the Humanities - but not as a sort of "Finishing School." STEM needs the Humanities as an equal partner, one that is taken seriously in what questions are being asked about problems, how those questions are investigated, and how the resulting data are analyzed. And there are a generation of scholars in the Humanities out there, eager to share their work with the public, eager to collaborate with scholars in other disciplines.

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Station Identification

After Luxor, vue du temple cote ouest, by Antonio Beato, here.

I started Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey last night, and, folks, it’s good. Borges-esque, but it’s own thing, and so artfully done, the seams just disappear.

This is The Long Nothings, wracked with jealousy.

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Station Identification

[Temple of Jupiter] by Unknown, here.

My library books are overdue, and I’ve got nothing to read. This is The Long Nothings.