engineering, human souls

I’ve been feeling really upside down, right now I am wearing a stained Mayakovsky shirt and having a mild panic attack about everything but here are some cultural activities which have steadied me somewhat. The shirt stains are all directly on Mayakovsky’s beautiful face, like he has an outbreak of acne on his forehead.

I’ve never been a fan of engineering, until I read about Roman engineering, but there is a major feat of engineering happening in the Edinburgh port, which is a discussion topic of much admiration with friends, because they are semi sublime to look at, massive wind turbines from China which will be part of an offshore Scottish wind farm. From most parts of Leith you can see the giant yellow structures, but I walked closer to them yesterday, sat on a ship in Newhaven. They are huge, colossal .I felt pleasantly small, almost like a manga character, and listened to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony while admiring them. They are worth seeing up close. I call this a cultural experience because of my Beethoven, but also feeling ‘the sublime’. Also for once, it feels like humans doing something useful and productive.

The 7th symphony is the most important piece of art to me right now, I think its playing at the edinburgh festival this year annoyingly billed with some contemporary composer as a lot of classical concerts are now, but I’d rather listen to my favourite orchestral version alone staring at the sea and I can’t afford festival tickets anyway! I would definitely like to listen to it on my deathbed.

I went to a Scottish town gala day. Usually I go on a ride, but I need something in-between neckbreakingly scary and tea cup, and there was no between one this year, just extremes. I always admire the airbrushed ride art but I noticed this time that there was a lot new painted stuff which looked quite cannily perfect and AI. Another great art lost to the machine . Angela Carter made a really good doc on carnival art here:

I particularly like her definitions of ‘fun’ vs ‘pleasure’ : fun isn’t relaxing or dignified

Here is some of the good old stuff I saw:

There was a Victorian style illusionist who we watched breaking out of a straitjacket to some Vivaldi, it felt pleasantly 90s, Jonathan Creekish.

There were two acrobats in shoddy looking Spiderman costumes walking on the outer part of what is called ‘a wheel of Destiny’ and looks like the skeleton of a stick person or a pair of handcuffs. One had what I would call a ‘dutch haircut’. They kept having to stop because of the rain which makes it too slippery, a considerable problem travelling around the UK and performing at outdoor fairs. I am hoping the Leith fair this week has better rides. There is always a sausage stand with an elaborate apparatus of hanging, upside down bottles of ketchup and mustard for dispensing on sausages, which reminds me of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.

In The Times, they published an article by an idiot justifying AI help by comparing it to Ezra Pound editing T.S. Eliot. Incredibly disturbing and diminishing of the intellectual relationships between humans. It made me quite upset, it’s monstrous. In Fife, there are plans for an AI data centre, you can see the insane water and energy use statistics here:

I am quite happy Edinburgh banned building any more in the city for environmental concerns.

I’m reading Tolstoy’s religious writings and I quite like this, here translated by Jane Kentish, it sums up my AI feelings.

“during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the precariousness of my superstition in progress. When I saw the heads being separated from the bodies and heard them thump, one after the next, into the box I understood, and not just with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence and progress could justify this crime. I realised that even if every single person since the day of creation had, according to whatever theory, found this necessary I knew that it was unnecessary and wrong, and therefore that judgements on what is good and necessary must not be based on what other people say and do, or on progress, but on the instincts of my own soul.”

Some books out June which I recommend out of the trucks full of books published each month.

The End of Everything - M.John Harrison ( my next substack will be about this)

A Sense of Occasion- Brodie Crellin

Sail Away Land- Ben Pester