Forbidden symmetry

The Future Is Like Pie #9

Lisa Maria Marquis
February 15, 2019

I have an ISBN. I’ve seen a mockup of my cover. The final draft of Everyday Information Architecture is coming back from the copyeditor today, while three of my industry heroes read it, hopefully to offer kind words for promotion.

The book is nearly done. The book is nearly done.

And yet, there’s so much to do. Blog posts to write, websites to prepare, people to thank. The marketing work—the work of making sure people know and want and buy—is ramping up. After a planning call last week, I put a sticky note on my monitor: “THIS BOOK IS YOUR CLIENT NOW.” That’s true now, forever.

Meanwhile, there’s been so much interesting writing going on in other necks of other woods:

I cannot wrap my brain around this: nonrepeating pentagonal patterns that ultimately forced us to redefine crystals. It’s math, real math, and it’s fascinating:

Penrose had created a mathematical novelty, something intriguing precisely because it didn’t seem to work the way nature does. It was as if he wrote a work of fiction about a new animal species, only to have a zoologist discover that very species living on Earth. In fact, Penrose tiles bridged the golden ratio, the math we invent, and the math in the world around us.

One of my favorite poets, Ilya Kaminsky, published new work in the New Yorker this week, which is notable for three reasons: 1, it’s his first new work since his book Dancing in Odessa fifteen years ago; 2, it’s accompanied by gorgeously illustrated sign language gifs; and 3, it’s damn good. From “And Yet, On Some Nights”:

Our country has surrendered.

Years later, some will say none of this happened; the shops were open, we were happy and went to see puppet shows in the park.

And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign. Our country is the stage: when patrols march, we sit on our hands. Don’t be afraid, a child signs to a tree, a door.

This essay—“What exactly do we want from the author of ‘Cat Person’?”—stuck with me, not because I have any strong feelings about the original story or its larger collection, but because I care about the question of what women “can” write about, and how that writing is received by society:

When a writer who has been cast as the anti-ingenue turns out to have her own ideas about what she’s doing…her audience begins to turn. The point of an ingenue, even a rebel one, is not that she has goals. The point is that she’s a blank slate to project on; that she has potential, not that she realizes it; that she’s fresh and unspoiled, not that she is working in a tradition or honing a craft.

I haven’t read much formal feminist theory, so, I admit, I don’t know much about Andrea Dworkin. But Moira Donegan’s “Sex During Wartime” is less review and more portrait, thorough and compelling and even-handed, acknowledging both Dworkin’s prescient thinking and considerable flaws:

This, I think, is part of why Dworkin remains so unpopular. She wants us to do what she did for the women who spoke with her after her college lectures: to look dead into the fact of what it means to be a woman in this world, into the pain and violence visited on women because they are women. It requires us to know more than we can stand to know.

Architecture writer Darran Anderson muses on the practical-but-audacious changes in urban design that climate change will require:

Designing for the actual world, as it will unfold for the vast majority of people, is a task best approached with what philosopher Antonio Gramsci called “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”… To survive, cities will have to embrace their environmental aspect while the countryside will have to be increasingly engineered in concentrated spaces, in order to save the wider environment.

After reading this thorough (and thoroughly upsetting) thread from Dr. Sarah Taber about the racist, underhanded ways that agricultural financial systems conspire to drive black farmers out of the industry, I was motivated to donate to save Provost Farms. They’re just one family in a situation that mirrors thousands more, but if we can help them fight against a very suspicious disclosure, that’s one family that can keep their home, land, and livelihood.