Glorious, Joyful Waste

What a week, right? Lemon it's.... Friday morning, actually

Usually when I deliver one major project, let alone three in quick succession, I fall into a post-novel stupor of the kind described in Edward Gorey’s inimitable The Unstrung Harp, the only entirely true and accurate story of publishing.

The next day Mr Earbrass is conscious but very little more. He wanders through the house, leaving doors open and empty tea-cups on the floor. From time to time the thought occurs to him that he really ought to go and dress, and he gets up several minutes later, only to sit down again in the first chair he comes to. The better part of a week will have elapsed before he has recovered enough to do anything more helpful.

Last Friday, however, submission coincided with an illness in the house (not serious but demoralizing and highly contagious), plus February vacation week. Kid-home-from-school is a hallucinatory scenario in its own right but it does require parents to be, in the words of Mr Earbrass’ narrator, “helpful.” Thank heavens for visiting family. I scraped together some hours to work on an essay but it ended up being the kind of wrestling-with-an-angel project that felt too important to jot off half-cocked and bigger than I could chew in the time I had. This often happens to me in the wake of a major project. The gravity/discipline invested in a single book sproings loose (technical term) and the brain goes roaming in wild, chewy directions. Fallow time isn’t quite it. Get lost in the woods time, more like. Sometimes you come home emptyhanded, sometimes you come home with an elk. Sometimes the elk comes home with you?

I accidentally committed a bit of a thread to Bluesky a few days back. It seemed to strike a chord, and I enjoyed writing it—a rarity for me on social media these days—I found myself sinking into the poetry of the microblog format more than I have in a while. It’s about efficiency vs. resilience / capacity / effectiveness, & was prompted by a post by

Katie Mack

(and owes a debt to reasoning I’ve encountered in many places, most recently on Robin Sloan’s newsletter).

Strong, resilient systems are not efficient systems, and vice versa.

When you seek to develop any capacity, you're preparing for exceptions. How often does the average gymgoer need, IRL, to deadlift their bodyweight? How often do I need to run a 5k or fight a guy? Chasing "efficiency" tailors capacity to ranges that apply 99% of the time but you're fucked that 1%.

Not even talking about any kind of Die Hard wish-a-sucker-would edge case. Every year, I'm told, many people die shoveling out their driveways. That's a lot of moderately strenuous exercise if you haven't built that 1% capacity.

Strong, resilient systems are profligate. Profuse! Abundant! Folk used to demonstrate wealth by having *flesh*. We still do, sort of: that muscle-with-5%-body-fat aesthetic is a peacock signifier of how much time & money you can gloriously, joyfully waste.

Of course it takes effort, and also: calories to build muscle you almost certainly won't need & fat you'll waste rather than require. Time and resources to cut. Time and resources to train. And an *ironclad confidence* in the always-availability of food, so you don't need those fat reserves.

A marker of a society's strength, not neopuritan auto-sumptuary-law nonsense but: how much utter absurd profligacy it will support, because /these things are trailing indicators of abundance, resilience, & strength.

Love Brett Devereaux article about the Fremen Mirage, pointing out that contra nerd storytelling, Conan-Fremen "edge of survival" types are worse point-for-point at fighting than the "decadent" city-dweller militaries because the decadent have spare time to train acoup.blog/category/col...

Like what do I know I'm just a cave man who's been frozen in ice for 10,000 years but, I do think this would work even in its silly extremes: rate a society's success by asking how many underwater basket-weaving majors it produces

not because underwater basketmaking is some super secret social tech, but because it's a sign that the bases are *covered*, man. Your planes are all coming home.

Okay that's what I've got. The spirit moved me and I spoke.

A few readers raised interesting points in reply: one observed that “underwater basket-weaving” is in fact a good manual basket-weaving technique, since weaving underwater makes the slats pliable, and it makes sense to study as a craft and as a piece of physical anthropology—that it’s been unfairly maligned by comedians since the 80s. On the Brett Devereaux point, Charlie Stross observed that in WW1, the average officer was substantially taller than the average enlisted thanks to nutrition disparities, and that American troops arrived in Europe notably taller, better-fed. Of course, in WW2 so many Americans were ineligible for service for reasons of malnutrition and poor health (often in early childhood) that the USA actually passed major child-health legislation, under Johnson.

Take care of yourselves, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

---

Recent reading: Higher Magic, by Courtney Floyd - out in October, and now there’s a cover. I loved this book—it’s a magical grad school story that leans into the grad school: teaching students, wrestling with your dissertation project, facing administrative corruption and evil magic. Reader, I blurbed it! “Higher Magic is my catnip. By what dark arts I know not, Floyd has summoned up a wonderful wizard-grad-school slice-of-life, replete with organizing, romance, anxiety, camaraderie, and courage. More please!”