Boustrophedon Blog

I’ve been reading a ton of Wikipedia articles about pulp authors for a writing project I assigned myself. I’ll share that project here when it’s done. But in the meantime I’ve come across a lot of fun trivia I want to share.

Jack Williamson was old enough to be born in Arizona Territory, and lived long enough to see some of his science fiction ideas pass into reality. He was one of the very first people to use the term “genetic engineering,” and he was the first science fiction writer to include ion thrusters in a story. He was an early science fiction writer to discuss antimatter (though he referred to it by its older name, contraterrene). And he coined the terms “psionics” and “terraforming”.

Williamson also has one of the best examples of failing upwards that I’ve ever seen. His novel Seetee Ship was negatively reviewed, including a line that said it “ranks only slightly above that of a comic strip adventure.” That review somehow got noticed by The New York Sunday News, which was looking for someone to write a new comic strip for them. They ended up hiring Williamson to write a loose adaptation of his poorly reviewed novel.

Edmond Hamilton wrote for pulp magazines and comic books. He wrote the Batman story that featured the now meme-famous panel of Batman slapping Robin.

The first person to use the term “blaster” to refer to a sci-fi gun was named Nictzin Dyalhis. Or at least that might have been his name. Apparently he was an intensely private man and routinely lied about his biographical details, including on government forms.

The woman who invented dark fantasy, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, was widowed when her husband was caught in a tropical storm while on a treasure hunting expedition. It’s crazy to me that “professional treasure hunter” was a real job someone claimed in 1910. Anyway, Bennett turned to writing as one means of supporting herself and her children, and became very influential in the process. She is probably the first female American author to publish science fiction under her own name.

Bennett is the first (American, female, science fiction) to publish under her own name because she published a single story in 1904 as G. M. Barrows, which was her name at the time. However, her gender wasn’t revealed until four years after her death, and she spent most of her career writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. The first female science fiction author to consistently publish under her own name was Clare Winger Harris.

Greye La Spina was another early female pulp writer. Apparently at her peak she was even more famous than H. P. Lovecraft.

A boy was trying to find a way to deal with bullies at school. He asked his grandfather for advice. His grandfather stated, “Inside you are two wolves.” He paused for a long time, staring off into the middle distance. Just as the boy was about to ask a follow up question, the grandfather continued. “One of them always tells the truth. The other has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night.”

The boy blinked. “What?”

“And when he woke up, his pillow was gone! He- he needed to something to eat the pillow in his tummy. Luckily, the big bad wolf knew that twelve spiders per year would wander into his mouth while he was sleeping. But how could he fall asleep without a pillow? He used one simple trick (doctors hate him!). He waited until midnight and said Bloody Mary into a mirror three times. Then the ghost gave him liquor that made him fall asleep for 20 years. Which was confusing, because he didn’t even notice the American revolution. But a magic frog gave him true love’s kiss, allowing the wolf to wake up. The wolf was now a prince, and he had to go rescue three little pigs. He and the frog tried to cross a river, but there was already a bag of corn on the boat. So the frog swam across the river with the prince on his back. But a scorpion stung both of them halfway across, and they both died.”

The grandfather stared into space again, then said “The moral of the story is that scorpions don’t really live in rivers.” And the boy was enlightened.

(With thanks to my friend JD, who provided the germ that spawned this vignette)

Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto is one of those books that could have been a blog post… almost. Her urgent and important thesis statement is that downtime is essential to human flourishing, and that capitalism systematically opposes both the downtime and the flourishing. But many of her supporting points and implications of her thesis are left undeveloped. This leaves a lot of space for Hersey to restate her main idea with slight changes in phrasing¹. I got the sense her message would have been better suited to a smaller format. Except you could probably argue (and I’d probably believe) that this repetition serves to reinforce her point that learning to rest, or “deprogramming from grind culture” as she puts it, will be a long, slow process.

The idea that rest is critical for human well-being is probably obvious when framed in terms of actual nocturnal sleep. But Hersey suggests, persuasively, that daydreaming, softness, napping, and inactivity are also extremely important. She justifies these ideas with appeals to religious faith, saying that human beings are divine. Naps, she says, are part of our birthright. By contrast, systems that deny our divinity (and our humanity) by treating us like machines are evil.

Hersey doesn’t make any attempt to redress her ideas for secular readers. (If you believe, as I do, that human life is intrinsically valuable then her ideas are pretty easy to take, regardless of your religion.) Her imagined audience appears to be people who already mostly agree with her, but who might have overlooked the importance of rest. In this way, calling her book a manifesto makes sense. It’s a statement of belief rather than a piece of persuasive writing.

That’s disappointing, because there are some ideas I wanted to see explored further. Hersey makes claims like “perfectionism… is a function of white supremacy” and “capitalism was created on plantations.” I’m open to the possibility that there are ways in which these claims are true. But there are also obvious ways in which they’re false, and without further clarification it’s hard to simply accept them and move on.

Hersey is keenly aware of the ways her ideas are likely to be commodified and de-politicized. At times she seems short on practical recommendations about how to incorporate rest. This is at least partially because, as she repeatedly emphasizes, rest is going to look different for everyone and learning how to do it will be lifelong process². These canny predictions of how her message will be misused were some of the things I admired most about Hersey’s writing. In addition to the above, she entreats reads to keep racial justice at the center of the rest movement. She also clarifies that taking naps is absolutely not about returning to work with renewed energy. Napping and resting are things we do only for ourselves, not to become more productive for bosses.

Tricia Hersey’s book grew out of her work creating The Nap Ministry. Check out their website and read a few of their blog posts. If you still feel like you want more, maybe the book is helpful after all.

1. These slight changes in phrasing can still be helpful. For most of the book, Hersey identifies the enemy of rest as jobs, capitalism, and “grind culture.” But a couple times she mentions to-do lists, e.g. ““I know that if I never check another item off my to-do list, I am still worthy.” This shift allowed me to apply her message to productivity mandates I put on myself, and not just those that come from outside. ↩︎
2. At one point she does share a list of 20 suggestions of what “resting can look like.” I was immediately struck by how the list format departed from her thoughtful, generally poetic prose and instead felt like a shallow facebook meme (indeed, she says the list was shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media). ↩︎

At the beginning of this year my family and I decided to play reading bingo. We each submitted various prompts, and then they got sorted onto a bingo card. If we read a book that fulfills a prompt we get to check off that square. It’s fun!

We’re going to do it again in 2026, which means I need to come up with more prompts. Unfortunately my family has rejected a high number of my previous suggestions. Since I can’t do anything else with them, I decided to share them here.

• A book with a robotic cat on the cover but it isn’t about a robotic cat
• A book that nobody has ever read before, including the author
• An English translation of the Voynich Manuscript
• A book that a tree would like if a witch taught it to read but also cursed it with a short attention span
• A cookbook, written in verse
• A book about a woman who drinks a potion that shrinks her down to the size of a mouse and she fights a mouse and then she becomes queen of the mice
• A book you can’t find in the Library of Babel
• A line-by-line refutation of the bible, but not the religious bible
• A book that will be published ten years from now
• A book that would work moderately well as a pair of socks
• A book with more authors than words
• A book about a horse that destroys the universe, written by a guy who’s famous for making surreal GIFs

It’s hard to avoid talking about the news these days. Objectively terrible things are happening across the United States (and in quite a few other places too). These huge, terrible events are shattered across a hundred million headlines, plastered across every megabite of the Internet, and drip fed to us each waking hour, ceaselessly. In marginally saner times, the Internet monster occasionally belches up something frivolous, like arguments about the color of a dress or definition of a sandwich. Maybe that’s still happening, but current events mean it’s easier than ever to have an all-cataclysm media diet.

I’ve been dealing with this by trying to get rooted in my local community. I’m extremely lucky to have a strong radical/leftist/anarchist community where I live, and they have lots of great direct action¹ projects to get involved with. I’ve put some time and energy into the local bail fund. I might not be able to do anything about mass deportation, but I can play a direct role in helping local people get out of cages. It feels good.

While attending bail fund meetings, I started to notice something interesting. Even during the craziest, scariest headlines about Trump’s abuse of power, my friends at the bail fund stayed relatively calm. All of my other conversations and virtually all of my text message threads would be about the latest assault on democracy. After a while, it just became the expected thing to mention, even if just briefly. I might be doing “fine, thanks” but I should probably save a moment to mention how scary the rest of the country is. But the most radical people I knew didn’t seem to be following this script².

From one perspective, this sangfroid from the anarchist set is surprising. Their vision of utopia is already significantly removed from the status quo; under Trump, things are changing such that the anarchist vision is even more distant. Rank and file Democrats might be upset about asylum seekers being thrown in detention camps, but anarchists should be upset about asylum seekers AND all other prisoners.

So why are some of the most radical among us also the best at taking current events in stride? I think there are probably two things that explain this phenomenon. First, I think lots of leftists already have a negative view of the status quo³. Indeed, the thing that often animates their politics is an acute awareness of widespread injustice. Like they said over at the wonderful Live Like the World is Dying podcast, “We’re moving from neoliberal hell to a fascist hell.” This isn’t an excuse to be smug, and the current situation is still bad in new and upsetting ways. Luckily, many of the things we need to do to respond to this fresh new hell are things that leftists are already doing.

This leads into the second point. Leftists (and perhaps anarchists in particular) are are experienced in building support structures that don’t rely on the government. Whether it’s feeding children, producing lifesaving medication, providing disaster relief, giving people Internet access, paving roads, or providing other services, people on the left have practiced myriad ways of supporting each other. Trump and co. decimating the federal government is very bad, for many reasons. But just because the FDA and FEMA aren’t doing their jobs doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get the services they provide.

Obviously anarchists do get ulcers. (The title of this post is just a riff on a Robert Sapolsky book.) This is a very stressful time for anyone who gives a shit about human suffering. There is some solace to be taken from the fact that lots and lots of people are already working on solutions. It’s not going to replace what’s being lost, not yet. But if you help, we can get a little closer.

1. If you’re not familiar with the lingo, “direct action” basically means changing something yourself instead of asking someone else to change it. It generally excludes things things like writing to your representatives or holding demonstrations, and includes things like distributing food to people in need or walking members of marginalized groups to their cars at night. It’s more like “volunteering” than “protesting”. ↩︎
2. I distinctly remember one of them greeting me with the standard “how are you doing?” I responded with something like “Ok, just trying to live with all the crazy stuff going on right now.” In my other interactions, that was an invitation for the other person to go “I know!” and then talk about all the headlines that were stressing them out. In this case, my bail fund friend just smiled politely and then moved on to the next topic. ↩︎
3. I once joked with a friend that being anywhere left of center was a state of knowing bad news about the world. The more bad things you knew, the further left you were. ↩︎

I read this really nice post from the Prisons, Prose, & Protest blog about how important it is to practice imagining a better future.

It reminds me a bit of the “Reading Weird Fiction in An Age of Fascism” article I linked to a while back, in that both are about combining a particular, progressive mindset with creative speculation. Whereas the weird fiction article was more about identifying problems that currently exist, the PPP post is about dreaming out way past those problems. I think the latter is more important, if for no other reason than it’s done less often and so we need more of it.

I’ve been thinking recently on how I’m calmer about all the political shit currently happening than some people around me. What Trump et al. are doing is very, very bad, but it doesn’t have a huge impact on my day to day mental health. A TON of that can be chalked up to my privilege, but some is probably due to the fact that I run “cool” in general.

I want to bottle my equanimity and give it to others. I’ve thought about trying to write about my point of view, but I’m exactly the wrong person to do that. My cool emotional temperature is involuntary, which means I don’t have great insight into how to cultivate it.

But my engagement with imagination and hope is much more deliberate. I’ve noticed that utopian thinking can move me from feeling washed out or glum to feeling fired up. Maybe that’s something I can explore further, and potentially offer to others who are looking for help changing their mood.

Via Ran Prieur (apologies, I don’t know how to link to specific posts on his site), this is a great story about how a particular kind of 3D printing technology using metals recently died and disappeared. There’s no mystery involved- it’s just that it’s a technical and specialized process and private companies threw the technology away so they wouldn’t be bogged down in their race for profits.

I find this a much more likely explanation for the observations underlying the Tartarian Empire conspiracy. That conspiracy, if you’re unfamiliar, says that roughly 150 years ago all the people who knew how to make ornate and decorative architecture died in some sort of secret apocalypse that was hidden from everyday people by governmental elites; now buildings are all flat and boring because we don’t have anyone left who knows how to do anything else.

The conspiracy is obviously false, and so vague that Hitchens’s razor probably says we don’t need to spend any effort debunking it. But luckily people have spent that effort anyway. Turns out architects and historians have been observing the causes behind changing aesthetic tastes for years. And we actually do have ornamented houses, it’s just that they’re less popular among the super wealthy.

So it certainly isn’t the case the a bunch of craftspeople disappeared off the face of the earth. But it’s still possible for hands-on experience to be lost. This sucks if you want want a particular kind of archway or glazed tile for your house, but it’s a much bigger issue when somebody needs to repair a bridge or even make sustainable building materials.

Relevant listicle: 11 Vernacular Building Techniques That Are Disappearing

Where do we get the capacity to imagine eternal paradise and eternal damnation, and why do these ideas have such resonance? For this post, I’m less interested in the cultural history of these ideas (which is certainly important if we want to develop a full understanding) and more interested in cognitive architecture.

Hell is easier for me to conceptualize. When I’m in pain, it’s all I can focus on. It’s very hard for me to step outside that pain and think “Next week I will feel better.” This is especially true of the “positive and active anguish” (to borrow William James’s term) of depression. Aaron Beck’s cognitive triad of depression says, in part, that when we’re depressed we feel like the future is hopeless and the bad times will last forever. Maybe the concept of the eternal suffering of hell resonates with people because we already have experience imaging that our suffering will go on forever¹. I wonder if some of the theologians who helped shape our modern concept of hell struggled with depression.

On the other hand, happiness, pleasure, and joy all feel more fragile to me. I recently read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and this quote captures the notion very well:

Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have
held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be
just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror
stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that
way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively
knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the
lean seasons ahead.

Maybe we can reach into a moment of supreme contentment, seize it, and imagine stretching that moment into infinity. But something about my lived experience keeps such an image from resonating very much. Instead, I think it’s a different kind of imagination that gives the idea of heaven its power.

Over at Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni did some cool research that found that human beings might have a fundamental predisposition to imagining how things could be better. It seems we do this in all sorts of contexts, and we imagine things being better much more often than we imagine things being worse. Maybe heaven, then, is a place to put all of our imagined improvements. Or to put it another way, maybe ideas of a perfect paradise resonate with us because we’re fundamentally wired to imagine how things could be better- and what’s better than perfection?

I think there might actually be instances in which we trigger thoughts akin to heaven and hell at the same time. Imagine having a pity party for yourself where you dwell on all the things you wish were better about your life. The more you think about it, the more perfect this alternate life seems, but also the more out of reach. Things will never improve, because while you can see the alternative clearly in your head, you’ll never be able to get there. You’re doomed to continue your suffering for the rest of your days.

I don’t know the best way to wrap up this post, so let me direct you to the excellent but only tangentially related short story by Ted Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God.

1. It helps to drive home how strong this cognitive tendency is when you consider that many people overcome pain and difficulty with a success rate approaching 100%. I’m currently not in any physical or emotional distress, which means that every single time I’ve imagined my suffering would go on forever, I was wrong. Despite that, I can basically guarantee I will despair about the future many more times in my life. ↩︎

One of my least favorite philosophical tropes, one which most people seem to take for granted, is the notion that we can’t have or appreciate one state of being without also experiencing its opposite.

For example:

Another example:

I’ll concede that there are some theoretical situations where we need both ends of an opposite relationship to make sense of something. “Up” only makes sense if there is some comparable concept of “down”; floating in the void of space, up could be in any direct until you define it against something. But as is often the case, these sorts of purely analytical definitions don’t work well when you map them onto the real world.

When I’m happy, my experience contains all sorts of elements that aren’t strictly related to mood. I can concentrate better. I have more endurance for mental work. I’m more talkative and better at coming up with jokes. I fall asleep more easily. I don’t need to experience sadness to be able to reflect on these elements and decide that I like them. In fact, I don’t even need to experience the opposites of those elements (e.g. distractability, fatigue, social withdrawal, etc.). I have never experienced being dead, but it would be silly to suggest that I can’t appreciate life until after I die.

I suppose someone could say that I can imagine distractability, or death, or whatever, and it is that imagining that provides the necessary contrast that allows me to appreciate their opposite. Fine, that seems plausible. But that’s not the only way these ideas get used in everyday conversation. People often talk about the importance of actually experiencing bad things because they allow us to appreciate good things. Whether or not experiencing bad things (pain, embarrassment, discrimination, injury, etc.) is important, it certainly is not a prerequisite for appreciating good things. Suggesting otherwise is wrong, and lends itself to all sorts of disturbing justifications.

Wow, what an ominous title, huh? What’s the alternative? Ending in a dystopia? But no, it doesn’t end there either. Mostly, it just doesn’t end.

The way people talk about utopia often ends up being a sort of thought-stopping device. If we just do my politics hard enough, eventually we will achieve some sort of everlasting paradise. The end. Maybe this is because even secular notions of utopia borrow heavily from Christian thinking and attendant notions of heaven. (Thomas More, who coined the term utopia, was a devout Catholic.) Or maybe it’s because people don’t like to admit that their pet ideologies contain drawbacks that can eventually lead to their downfall.

Anyway, this view of a one-and-done utopia is highly compatible with how liberals stereotypically view changes in society. They imagine a line moving upwards, with the perfect, utopian society somewhere above where we are now. By contrast, conservatives often imagine a line moving downwards, and the perfect society was fumbled at some point back before the decline started.

I generally don’t want the same things that conservatives want, but I find their view to contain a kernel of truth that’s missing from the progressive view. Namely, it is possible for perfect (or at least very good) conditions to exist and then later go away.

Acknowledging this is important! It can expand where we look for inspiration. It shows us that nice societies take continuous work. And it reminds us that even when things change for the worse, we’ve invented utopia before and we can do it again.