WWCD (What Would Cato Do?)

The article living rent-free in my brain this week is by Ian Leslie (h/t Matt Muir), about the death of the ‘scenius’:

Brian Eno is pretty cool, but that’s a weirdly unpleasant word to say. Scenius. Seee-nee-us. Like Latin for a horrific digestive ailment. The Senate rejoices as Cato is overcome with scenius and cannot speak today. Anyway. Leslie explains cogently that these socio-temporal-collective-moments (ok, ‘scenius’ is a useful word) exist, and have throughout history, and they are birthed by a combination of infrastructural, cultural, and social forces. They also work. Something about lumping all of these creative minds in one place makes for an added level of brilliance. Cafe culture as intellectual cheerleader effect.

But no longer! Those same macro-forces have now pushed the opposite way: space has become expensive, culture has become individualistic, and society has become hostile to the dithering of the creative process. We still have artists, but they are representatives of monocultures or monomovements; transcendent interdisciplinary brilliance is no longer. You can no longer go to Shoreditch simply to sit around and think, y’know?

I’m genuinely torn. There’s a part of Leslie’s take that is indisputably a classic ‘there’s no great ART anymore’ rant. I have to question my own sympathies for the argument: is this really something we’re seeing or nostalgia for the greener fields of my own coffeeshop-lurking days of yore? (Or possibly both?)

Without delving too deeply into my own nostalgia, the early days of Twitter felt pretty sceniusic (scenile?!). It was a cafe where it was easy to flit through a virtual crowd of artists, creators, collectors, entomologists, etc. The call out to #hivemind when you needed, say, to find a cover artist or answer a specific question about ants. Speaking from experience, that level of creative buzziness in my immediate (virtual) surrounding was inspiring and drove me to (relative) creative excesses. It didn’t need a coffee shop or a basement rave or table at the Algonquin. (The online scenius is also more affordable, accessible and teetotal than the offline, which is no bad thing.)

But… That too is in the past. The Twitter scenius has been useless for years. The basement rave is now a Nazi bar. The online world is becoming fragmented and the random contact permitted by these ‘town hall’ sites is no longer pleasurable, or even encouraged. As people retreat to their virtual man-caves and build pillow forts out of their niche interests, the odds of serendipitous collaboration with an adjacent-but-dissimilar creative mind have plummeted.

But… but… Our reality is now augmented. Yes, we’re used to jiving in physical spaces and have the novel experience of jiving in virtual ones, but the future won’t be either - it’ll be both. Our experiences and workflows and conversations shift between worlds; they bob and weave and layer. The future of sceniuses (scenii? scenoda?!) won’t look like either Shoreditch or Twitter, but something very new. But hopefully without steep rent and Nazis.

what I’m reading (online)

Blurbs suck! 99% of them don’t even sell books, making them a rite of pointless self-flagellation. Simon & Schuster have boldly said they won’t be asking their authors to get them any more, which is very nice, and probably sensible. I would, however, like to ask Misters Simon and Schuster the follow-up question which is why were the authors responsible in the first place? Many, if not most, authors do not have access to other authors. All publishers do. Maybe it is different in America’s BOOTSTRAPS marketing scene, but it seems weird that ‘publishers allow authors to stop doing one aspect of their own marketing’ has gone unchallenged. Personally, I’ve been on both ends of this: I’ve had publishers ask me if I could get blurbs for my books; I’ve asked publishers go out and get blurbs for my books. Often the same book! Because - gasp - what works is a) someone has an existing relationship with b) someone else who is c) relevant to the book. What my publishers never did was demand that I spam the universe with requests because that is humiliating and awful. (In full disclosure, I tried to get my publisher to send copies of The Big Book of Cyberpunk to folks like Sir Ridley Scott and AJ Jenkel and I’m fairly sure they were like ‘oh yes, definitely’ and filed that into the overflowing ‘Jared Ideaz’ box.)

Shannon Sharpe welcomes his big brother to the Hall of Fame. Look I don’t even like the Sharpes. Shannon tormented the Chiefs while on (wards off evil eye) Elway’s Broncos. And I have Feelings about the Hall of Fame (in general and also this year’s selections or lack thereof), HOWEVER, this made me get all sorts of misty-eyed and urgh.

I am an East Bank truther (seriously, my passion for the East Bank is … actually rather terrifying, and a running joke at work). I think the joint presence of UAL’s Fashion and UCL’s Mad Science programmes is genuinely glorious (SCENIUS ALERT!). Although I know nothing about dance, Sadler’s Wells East is the first of the public creative institutions to open, and it is awesome. I love that the community connection is woven into every part of it - from cheap tickets to free performance spaces to the actual curated musical selection. It is a famous institution being ‘plonked’ into an East London space, but there’s a real you are what you do ethos to placemaking involved. (And a cafe. I don’t know much about dance, but I do know cafes.)

what I’m reading (offline)

Yonks ago, I was heading to the launch for Irregularity at the National Maritime Museum. This was taking place at one of their ‘Lates’, and one of the other activities there involved the poet Simon Barraclough. We wound up on the DLR together, and were chatting away happily. In my perpetual need to fill conversational silences/eat my own foot, I blurted out ‘I just don’t get poetry’.

Simon, bless him, immediately fired back, “You don’t ever hear people say “they just don’t get prose”.’ And bless him, rather than chucking me into the Thames, he proceeded to encourage me to read more poetry because it is, after all, an entire mode of expression, and not, y’know, one single work.

Which brings me to The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. Josh “Filthy” Bell is a 12-year-old basketball player and vocabulary-lover. He and his twin brother are the stars of their team, with a bright future ahead of them. Everything is great until, of course, it isn’t. It is a tough age and a tough time as Josh ‘crosses over’ (theme alert!) to adulthood. He and his brother are no longer in perfect harmony; his parents have flaws; his life is perhaps not on a perfect arc of progress.

The Crossover goes from moment to moment, in Josh's life. Some of these moments are far apart; some come in rapid-fire batches. And each is told as a single poem. It is incredibly readable, and incredibly powerful. Structurally, it is a perfectly composed coming-of-age narrative, moving from beat to beat with each turn of the page. But by capturing each of those beats as a singular poem, each in its own style, Alexander tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar and deeply powerful way.

Whether or not you ‘get’ poetry, this is a book worth getting.

(Simon Barraclough’s poems are also rather wonderful, btw. Bonjour Tetris is a genuinely beautiful book, and Sunspots is also a personal favourite. Thanks, Simon. You were right.)

what I’m cooking

Ribs. Had to make them for the Superbowl. This time I tested quantities of brown sugar in the rub. Flavour great, but overcooked, and it is easy for an overly-sugar-rubbed rib to burn crispy. My goal is to nail a consistent tasty base and then move on to sauce/rib combos. SCIENCE! Mental note: get new thermometer.

Pork tenderloin. I don’t know why I thought a pork tenderloin would be the same size as beef tenderloin. Mental note: cows are bigger than pigs. Expected lunch for the week, wound up with a tasty snack. These are really lean and easy to overcook. I didn’t, but only through pure luck. See thermometer.

Burgers. Pork mince is lean, so requires a bit of finessing - and also a binder (breadcrumbs, egg, whatever - something to keep it from crumbling). I was out of breadcrumbs so smashed up some stale Polish-origin fake-Ritz crackers that I found in our cabinet. It was ok! But there’s a huge difference between an ‘ok’ burger and a ‘great’ one. Paul has been doing MAD SCIENCE and tested over a dozen different flavours, which is really going the extra mile.

Sauces. Two bangers this week. Went spicy, and tried using nanami togarashi and honey. Anne’s favourite so far. Also went sweet with a sour cherry and chipotle sauce that should be fantastic with ribs.

Academics agree: