Sebastian Abbott

The Pleasure of Concentration
I finally - probably not for the last time - started reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder. That may sound suspicious: admitting two authors is generally a bad sign for a book, but here it was a necessary conceit. Tony Judt was an eminent moral historian who was struck down with ALS (the illness made famous / trivialised by 2014’s ice bucket challenge fad): Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who faded in and out of Judt’s comet trail over the years and who decided that Judt’s own history, views and development over the decades needed to be captured before the inevitable, swift, end.

So this is a “spoken book”, a conversation between two colleagues speaking and discussing at eye level, rather than an interview between a professional journalist and a professional of something else entirely. Judt and Snyder by necessity follow in the Eastern European tradition of such transcribed conversations. I’m looking forward to discovering the thoughts and philosophies that they discuss, and to daring to measure their theories and histories against my own reality and recollections: in short, I’m looking forward to the challenge of reading it.

As I say, I’ve only started. In fact, I have just finished the introduction - where a single sentence made me sit up straight and realise what I’ve been trying and dismally failing to achieve lately, especially at work. It is a single sentence that could become my standard for the next few years; a sentence that got me blogging again. It comes from Timothy Snyder as he describes how the conversations with Tony Judt came to be and how, in essence, they were. This is it:

...the conversation was also a great source of intellectual sustenance, bringing the pleasure of concentration, the harmony of communication and the gratification of good work achieved.

Those three points that combined give intellectual sustenance seem so obvious now that they have been written: perhaps they come more clearly from acknowledging something that went right - indeed, I couldn’t crystallise my dissatisfaction - at work, especially - into the negatives of those points. So let’s stick to the positives, and see if we can also achieve…
- the pleasure of concentration
- the harmony of communication
- the gratification of good work achieved
…in all of our endeavours.
→ 10:35 PM, Jan 11

Swimming in the rain

This morning, another relaxed, family- and work-free morning, I pottered about getting up, making breakfast and checking the weather. Finally, the rain was due - but only later in the afternoon.

So, I packed my bag, plopped in my contact lenses, had a cup of tea, read more of “Teach us to sit still” by Tim Parks - an amazing account of his battle to find his balance, in order to alleviate his pain - and then finally hopped on my bike to the Tiergarten swimming pool.

It was the perfect time to go. I was ready to swim at 11:45 and there were three people in the play pool (the readout showed that was 22 °C - and it really took my breath away when I plunged in), though there was a flurry of wet-suited triathletes taking up a third of the olympic pool (which was a balmy 24 °C). The rest of the place was practically deserted, and I had a lane to myself.

Without the stress of having to watch out for other swimmers, I realised what really stresses me about swimming - it’s bloody noisy! Whether swimming breast stroke or crawl, breathing out under water creates a barrage of bubbles streaming past my face and my ears. It’s not a dainty little “bubble bubble” - goodness me, no - it’s a cacophony of cavitation, each bubble shrieking and shouting as loudly as possible “BANG! BLUB! BUBBLE!” as each CO2-filled echo chamber flops and gloops its way on by.

Once I realised that the noise was a key contributor to my emfrazzlement, I couldn’t ignore it, but I could work around it. I started to swim more slowly, more efficiently. I started to glide with each kick, only sweeping with my arms when I felt the legs float up in the stream behind me. Finally, I felt that I had arrived at an acceptable breast stroke style.

Hopefully this will mean that I’ll be able to move on from the second perennial stress-factor of swimming, which is that I think about it too much, from an engineering perspective: which angle should my hands have? Where is the most effective point to impart the largest impulse with either hands or feet? How’s my streamline angle in the water? And so on ad infinitum, for each swimming style that I try to take on.

After about half an hour, it started raining. The triathletes all left (to give them credit, I think that was more for lunch than to escape the rain), and slowly and surely the pool emptied. Finally, for a glorious couple of lengths, I was the only person in the pool.

I finished off with a victorious fast crawl - then topped that by finally trying out the water slide into the play pool.

→ 1:11 PM, Aug 13

Wikileaks - a history?

Staatsfeind Wikileaks - "Wikileaks - Enemy of the State" - published in January 2011 by two journalists (Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark from Der Spiegel) who followed Julian Assange during the tumultuous year of Wikileaks "revelations" and exposures throughout 2010 is one of those perplexing "history of now" books

Reading the book (a Christmas present from my brother in law) now, especially the introductory paragraphs, feels strangely hollow, as if there's a large, NSA and Edward Snowden-sized gap in the story being told. Conversely, today there seems to be a Wikileaks and Assange-sized gap in the news - though it's a gap nobody appears to miss very much.

I'm only at the beginning of Staatsfeind Wikileaks and, despite a noticeable editorial miss (unless I've missed a large Australian city called "Syndey"), it's shaping up to be an interesting read. It has flowed fairly chronologically so far, describing an unusual, unsettled and unsettling person in his youth. Assange's early life on the run - from society, from an aggressive step-father, from security administrators, from the police - and his unfurling into the world of computer geekery and hacking is efficiently told - though I'm not sure if we really needed to know the various unproven theories as to why his hair turned white in his early twenties. Assange is certainly an uncomfortable main character (but then, would a pipe-and-slippers type have set up Wikileaks and have been worthy of a mountain of journalism?). His early hacker activities, whilst no doubt skillful, an art unto themselves, come across as merely petulant. His early activism is rather teenaged - one-sided and immature.

It is this question about "maturity", "common sense", "protecting us from ourselves and other undesirables" that promises to form a large part of the book, with questions running permanently alongside Assange's actions. How much transparency can we handle? How useful is / has been / will be Wikileaks as a forerunner of a potential open-source future? Have any of the revelations from Wikileaks been of any service, other than to highlight the stinking underside of war and diplomacy which we don't really need to know about?

What the book certainly won't be able to answer is - is Wikileaks relevant now? With Assange trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, unwilling to face trial in Sweden for alleged sexual assault - presumably since that would be a gateway to his extradition to his bestest friends in the USA - there seems to be a hiatus in the development of this enforced openness. And there doesn't seem to be much in the way of open arms waiting for even more sordid truth to out.

The Snowden question has blown open the door to discussion about spying. The Assange question is - the way I perceive it - at least slumbering: how much do we and should we know about the political world around us?

I'll post a review once I'm through...

→ 8:05 PM, Feb 12

Spectroscopic sensibilities - The Secret of Scent and rediscovering my nose

Writing about smelling things makes me feel remarkably uneasy. It seems to be more acceptable somehow to write about music or noise, photography or fashion, even about its food and drink counterpart than it is about odour itself. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Developing the sense of smell is, after all, a skill, a talent, an art, just like learning to listen and to see. And, standing as I do at the very bottom of the olfactory learning curve, I’m very bad at it.

Unless I had a cold and I couldn’t breathe or taste properly, I took my sense of smell totally for granted. I would pay great heed to it in potentially negative scenarios, like sniffing for food or clothes that were a bit off - until recently, when a book opened my nose to that most chemical of arts, perfume.

That book was The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin. I unexpectedly found this alluring accord of olfactory geekery and scientific erudition on my bookshelf at home, where it had been left by my father who, as a consulting chemist, works with fragrance firms from time to time. His basic book on the science became my gateway to experiencing this sense afresh.

Luca Turin is a biophysicist blessed with an evident passion for perfume and a deft turn of phrase. His effervescent enthusiasm for the art is infectious, and drew me into a mysterious world of chypres, fougères, coumarin, aldehydes and patchouli, into a world of Chanel No. 5 and Poison. These strange and wondrous terms made me realise how sparse my vocabulary is for the nose. Not merely in terms of having heard of the words, but in terms of associating them with a meaning, that meaning being a smell.

Like a conjouror with a red-inlined cape, Dr. Turin suddenly yet elegantly swirls context from the artful to the scientific. He begins by describing each of the key scent types in words and with diagrams of their molecular structures, which play such a key role in the theories of scent. Then he constructs the narrative surrounding their discovery and their relationship with our brains.

How these molecules are translated into scent signals has always been something of a mystery to science, but it was always something of a brackish backwater to science, not appealing to many, being confounded as it was with biology. In the meantime everybody else continued with their business of smelling things and making things smell as nice as possible regardless, just as footballers blithely make use of some of the most complex physics imaginable without them troubling their bank balances or intellects.

The presence of unique molecular receptors in the nose was confirmed in the early 1990s, but how those receptors were activated, in what amounted to a lock and key theory remained unexplained.
Luca Turin’s idea was a synthesis and development of disparate ideas from the past, with a fine story of book shops in Moscow and in Portugal, of fundamental research made at Ford Motor Company, of all places - but in essence, it centres on the idea of the nose being an exquisitely finely tuned spectroscope operating on the principal of molecular resonance. Like odorous instruments, each molecule has its own set of harmonics, which set the timbre of that instrument, of that smell.

The theory still has its opponents and its inherent difficulties in validation - the critical tests still rely on peoples’ noses: according to the theory, two identically shaped but differently massed molecules (e.g. through isotopes) should smell different. Equally, two completely dissimilar molecules with the same frequency spectra should smell the same. The evidence seems to be stacking up in favour of this theory - but its detractors and some counterevidence remain.

But for now I personally don’t really care how the theory is getting along*. I’m too busy rediscovering my nose and the whole sensory apparatus associated with it. I want to try out some of the unique, individual scents in a fragrance. I want to know if I can “imagine” roast chicken in the same way that I can visualise a car or hear music. Can I learn to remember a smell, or a taste? That’s something that I’m remarkably poor at doing.

The main thing is that there’s a part of me that has been active only in the background for so many years - it’s time to give it some room to breathe!

*Neither, apparently, does Dr. Turin.. He does, however, care that his theory is getting results. He founded a company dedicated to designing scents based on their spectral profiles and has had some notable successes, including a replacement for the natural yet carcinogenic coumarin. This company, alongside his books, is how he makes his money...

You can find out more about Luca Turin via his 2005 TED talk and from a BBC Horizon programme from 1995 when the theory was very fresh and very controversial.

→ 10:00 PM, Feb 10