May 2021 – Books and Coffee

May 23, 2021

Film: World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt

I don’t often write about video media, but I enthusiastically recommend the lovely, bittersweet animated series Don Hertzfeldt has been building, currently up to three episodes.

My synopsis of the first episode (2015): a woman from the future visits her toddler self, to explain that someday she will be cloned, and her memories will be transferred to her future clones. The toddler and her future self explore the beautiful, colorful, abstract, terrifyingly glitchy future, in which time travel tourism sometimes gets you killed.

To prevent spoilers, I will not share a synopsis of World of Tomorrow, Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (2017)(vimeo.com), but the sense of risk and quest to find a meaning in life that you can accept continues, and the toddler’s future woman clones become more adventurous!

World of Tomorrow, Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020)(also vimeo.com) is a painful, funny, complex adventure in which the woman clone from the future leaves clues to a man clone of the future so they can connect somewhere in time, though the effort seems increasingly likely to get him and his future clones killed.

These short, poignant, funny, philosophical films earned all the awards they have been given and deserve even more. The simple stick figures make the characters feel innocent and universal; the abstract backgrounds and art are great; the use of his toddler relative’s voice is brilliant; and the way all of these stories reflect a human struggle to find meaning makes these emotionally moving. I recommend these zealously, regardless of your tastes!

May 23, 2021

Book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
published by Crown; audiobook published by Penguin Random House
2010

OH MY GOODNESS, THIS BOOK. This book is several books in one. At least.

This is a book about the dawn of cell culture, and the scientific beginnings of being able to keep human cells alive outside the body. This ties directly to the biotechnology industry I work in, and provides a history of early techniques and advances that I didn’t know I needed to know!

This is a book about the lives of American Blacks in or from the 1950s American South, the struggles of people too poor to leave the lands on which their ancestors were slaves, the burdens on women who lived with older male cousins who molested them, and the social hierarchies that followed those who left to the north, where no one questioned doctors. (I have never been more grateful that my Black ancestors fled to the midwest… Thank you, grandma!)

(Please note that I am bi-racial, and my family uses Black more than African-American in our self-descriptions; you’ll see me switch between these terms, and sometimes switch cases (Black or black) in my writing.)

This is also a book about remarkable scientific advances that occurred in during an ethically horrific era, in which studies were performed on people, especially African-Americans and institutionalized people, without their consent.

And of a highly ethical, profoundly curious, deeply committed biologist who wanted to know where HeLa cells REALLY came from, and worked for years with the family of Henrietta Lacks to learn the human story behind the cells.

This book is an emotional roller coaster! From scientific research challenges, to scientists sharing technology freely, to religious Lacks family members who feared their relative was being cloned and that her soul would never rest, to disabled children suffering through medical experiments their families didn’t consent to, to temperamental collaborators, this isn’t the story I was expecting, but it was a remarkable tale, and the audio books was produced to be an amazing ‘listen.’

I recommend this book highly for anyone interested in cell culture, biotechnology, genetic rights, the horrors of mental institutions for the poor, informed consent, being black in the 1950s in the US, and science sleuthing! Sloot does an amazing job of telling the story of writing the book within the book, which is a true adventure. What an author! What a researcher!

May 23, 2021

San Francisco: New Historic Streetcar Locator

I’m a huge fan of San Francisco’s collection of antique, operational streetcars from many cities with similar rail sizes, and now I have an ADORABLE new way for tracking them! I can just go to streetcar.live and see cute icons of the trains on the F-Market and E-Embarcadero lines, and click into the image for more details about that particular streetcar.

Market Street Railway’s Real-Time Streetcar Guide

With this live, interactive map, track San Francisco’s vintage streetcars and find them near you.

(Yes, you can buy stickers or pins of those cute icons at the Market Street Railway online store, or at their museum near the Ferry Building.)

May 23, 2021May 23, 2021

Book: Lena by qntm

Lena
by qntm
published online at Things of Interest (qntm.org/mmacevedo)
2021

I’m going to classify this as a book, because I am using that classification for novellas, and I make the rules here. [ahem]

This story gave me the CREEPS. The best way I can think to describe it is as ethical horror for the Amazon.com age.

If technology was available to image your brain and make an AI copy of your mind and personality, how would others want to use that copy of you? How would scientists want to use it? How would your EMPLOYER want to use it?

See how dark your thoughts just went?

It’s somehow all the more creepy by the matter-of-fact, research-abstract tone.

I would have found this relatable for many reasons, including some geeky ones relating to emotional responsibility I felt over my clones in a 1990s role playing game. (You don’t need to know more about that.) But it also feels… appropriate to the moment in late stage capitalism that we are in.

Just go read it. It’s concise and remarkable. (The author moderates the comments, so the comments are readable!)

May 23, 2021May 23, 2021

Life: I don’t have a monotype printing blog (yet)

However, I have a smartphone photo blog, where I sometimes post photos of monotype prints. (Pretend that is meta.)

This is just a reminder that I post images at mobilelene.blogspot.com more frequently than I post book reviews and rambles about coffee here. I’ve been posting there since 2008 with my fancy new iPhone 1, exported my Google+ posts there (buggily) when that service shut down, and then kept on keeping on.

You may already know that I like skies, flowers, and buildings, but that blog provides PROOF.

Monotype morning in yellow (31 January 2021)

Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

May 23, 2021

Book: Ugly Belgian Houses by Hannes Coudenys

A great title which accurately reflects the book’s contents! I was laughing aloud in a museum when I encountered this.

Ugly Belgian Houses
by Hannes Coudenys
published by Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, Gent, Belgium
2015

I came across this book in an architecture museum, and it had me laughing out loud. My friend, who joined me in appreciating these aesthetic horrors, later found the book elsewhere and purchased it for me as a present, so I could enjoy it all over again!

It provides EXACTLY what it says it will.

These houses are hilarious.

This is a blog-to-book project, where the author started out anonymously posting photos of subjectively aesthetic disasters on tumblr, and wound up developing quite a following. What makes this more than just a greatest hits collection from his blog is the introductory essay, where he explains how Belgian copyright laws means you can’t publish images of buildings without getting permission from the designer and/or owner, and this means he had to contact the people whose homes he mocked online. Often, in person. Often, ALONE.

It’s a fun read!

I took delight in this book, and recommend it to anyone who has ever looked at a very ugly building and laughed. I also recommend the blog, which I’ll link to below.

uglybelgianhouses

May 23, 2021

Life: Emerging from health order isolation

I’m writing after having some exciting experiences. I’ve dined with friends in a tent! I’ve visited an art museum!! I’ve eaten INDOORS, as the only customer at a restaurant! I’ve ridden INSIDE A STREETCAR! I’ve tested a camera! I’ve been outside without a mask!

These experiences are not what have kept me from posting here: exhaustion did that. I have been reading and drinking coffee, thankfully, so I do have books to write about, but my work schedule (unhealthy) plus a controlled experiment to determine if wheat is safe to eat again (IT IS NOT) laid me low for a few weeks, and I’m just emerging again now. Like the cicadas! Like my fellow SF residents, whose health order was updated on May 20th (sfdph.org).

I work in law, so I like the “redline” of the health order, which shows what changed:

C19-07-Shelter-in-Place-Health-Order-REDLINE.pdf

It’s as if I finally exhaled some of the stress of ambient world conditions, but didn’t stop exhaling, and partly deflated.

~~~

My parents are both fully vaccinated. (Hooray!) I am fully vaccinated. (Hooray!) My local public hospital went a day without COVID patients for the first time since last spring. (Hooray!) My local public health department is celebrating ONE MILLION DOSES of vaccine successfully administered within our county. (Wow!) Even the national averages for new infections are dropping, despite strangely partisan resistance to disease prevention.

Locally (at least), we’ve turned a corner. I can exhale a little. I can hope a bit more.

~~~

The pandemic isn’t over, but I’m already looking at some elements of it retrospectively. I’ve formed some new habits that I will continue, like:

I will keep having a box of ‘environmentally responsible’ groceries delivered each week. (These are from an anti-food-waste business I’ve previously written of, which manages safe surplus and off-spec produce, such as potatoes that are too big, carrots that have two points, or tri-color quinoa that has too much of one color. NOTE: it takes a while to adjust their recommended orders until they really work for you: modify it actively until it makes sense! )
I continue to support my local, independent bookstores with my subscription to audiobook service Libro.fm, and will order from those same local bookstores at their websites (first choice) or through bookshop.org (second choice) when I can’t get across town to browse in person, rather than put those purchases off indefinitely, as I used to.
I may still mail film to my professional photo lab, rather than waiting until I have free weekends to visit them.
I will surely have dinner delivered twice a week, too, now that the delivery ranges expanded.
I’ll keep up these new pen pal relationships I’ve started, even though writing in German is more challenging than I’d expected. (See postage image, somewhere below.)
I learned to save some time for myself, rather than ALWAYS be available to others by phone or video call. (This sounds absurd – I live alone at the moment! – but you’d be surprised. Especially since some of my friends’ coping mechanisms involve very long contact, and/or working evenings and weekends to avoid dealing with pandemic news, and needing my help with things at odd hours, so that every evening and weekend day is interrupted by some work item…)
If I can arrange to work remotely, I’ll certainly do so: I get more sleep, enjoy more hot meals, and get more done with the time I’ve reclaimed from commuting, even though my commute wasn’t bad.

Fancy Dutch postage

Weblog by A. Elizabeth Graves. iPhone photography and links to science-y and foodie topics.

Staying indoors for a year has been hugely detrimental to my physical health, however, and resuming my sensible old habits may not be enough to correct that. I’m trying to ‘ramp up’ to at least the levels of activity I engaged in before the health orders took effect, and will need to adjust from there. How long does it take to undo a year’s worth of sedentary-yet-high-stress life? I’ll find out!