week 19 / 2025

“Don’t run alone on the stadium walls ‘cross the river / treacherous beasts walk in pairs hand in hand by the shore / WEEKNOTES forgot them, so they became troubled...”

If you will forgive me a musical metaphor, the week just gone has been a chorus in which pretty much every instrument and voice in the piece were brought in at once, while the week to come is something like a middle eight, where I get the chance to develop a heretofore minor theme before the verse reasserts itself.

Yesterday I finally made a concrete start on the much-deferred art project that I’ll be exhibiting as part of STPLN’s contribution to Southern Sweden Design Days. It felt good to spend four quiet hours on my own upstairs at Kommandanthuset, marking up my back-boards, and starting the slow, careful deconstruction of the old book whose imagery will be the raw material of a set of collages; those hours flew by, in fact, and ended only when my stomach reminded me that I owed it some attention.

Almost all my other commitments are in a lull phase in the week ahead, so I have the pleasure of looking at my schedule and seeing big huge blocks of time marked out for doing more of the same… and not a moment too soon, given the exhibition begins on 22/05! It’s been a bit of a battle to reach this point—and, as noted above, I need to keep counting out the rhythm in order to come back in when it’s time for the verse—but it feels good to have brought a bunch of different melodies and patterns in to land at the right moment.

Let’s have a look at the score, shall we?

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT VIENNETTA, which is to say two full days of workshops up at Media Evolution. (I’m mostly playing observer and facilitatory wing-person in this stage of the project, in order to enable my scenario-to-fiction work later on; as such, the demands on me are probably no greater than those on the participants. But a full day of workshop participation sure ain’t nothing, as I’m sure many of you are well aware!)
• Ten hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Adding to and polishing up process deliverables. Not the most glamorous work, but necessary… and I flatter myself that I’m good at it, too. If you've got reports that need shepherding on their way to a client, drop me a line!)
• Eight hours on PROJECT LOFTY. (Including a bunch of time last week, after the weeknotes went out. The actual prototype went in the mail to the UK around the middle of the week; was nice to get a real physical thing out of the door! Some supplementary stuff still needs doing, though, which is what I’ll be up to this afternoon.)
• Six hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (A bit fits-and-starts, this, because the layout of the week has made keeping a regular rhythm a bit tricky. Still seeing benefits from regular commitment of time, though.)
• Four hours on my SSDD art project. (See above.)
• A couple of hours of admyn, including the timely submission of proposal docs for PROJECT WATERWAY.
• Plus ten hours of undirected writing and reading, som vanligt.

Well, adding all that up has gone a long way to explaining why I slept so hard last night, no?

kinmaking

The still-unnamed Malmö futures’n’foresight meet-up rolled around again this week. A smaller crowd this time—the core of the group is definitely apparent at this point, I think—but it was nice to get some first-hand accounts from those who made their way to Lisbon for Future Days.

reading

I first read Olga Tokarczuk a few years back, after a Polish friend gifted me a copy of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. She keeps cranking them out at a fair rate, I believe—wildly productive, by the standards of most Nobel winners—but the Fitzcarraldo edition of The Empuseum is the first one I’ve actually seen and bought.

(Living in Sweden, the range of literary fiction in English I can browse in person is rather limited to whatever’s selling well enough that a mainstream bookstore will carry it, which ain't often much worth my time. With genre fiction, oddly enough, I probably get exposed to more variety than I would in most UK cities, thanks to SF Bokhandeln importing and shelving all sorts of obscure oddities alongside increasingly indistinguishable genre bestsellers. With “proper” literature, I have to keep a list of stuff I think I might read, and refer to it when I do a batch-buy from Adlibris… and given the prices of English-language books in this country, which necessarily include import VAT, I don’t get to do that as often as I might like to. When people ask me what I miss most about the UK, my answer—much to their consternation—is usually “second-hand bookstores”, though in truth I’d started missing those long before I left the country.)

Subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story, The Empuseum appears to be in part a centennial response to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which I have never read (for shame). Tokarczuk’s thematic project here seems to be an examination of the intellectual milieu of middle-class mittelEuropan males in the period just prior to the first world war, with the resort in question—a retreat for those suffering from tuberculosis and other such ailments—representing the concentrated philosophical and social malaise of a cultural misogyny that stretches back to the ancient Greeks. That misogyny is internalised as much as it is externalised, if not perhaps more so, but Tokarczuk is thankfully far too thoughtful a writer to add yet another novel to the “aren’t men just awful?” shelf. The secondary characters here are awful, yes, and so is their milieu—but much like Claire North, Tokarczuk is alive to the possibility that their awfulness might be significantly socially constructed, and at least as destructive to them as to their world, albeit in very different ways. In other words, there’s a sociological tragedy (in the classical sense of that generic term) hiding behind the more modern horror form—though the horror aspects are pedalled pretty gently, and for me were largely subsumed in the period feel of the thing.

There’s much more to be said about The Empuseum, and in particular its deployment of two different genres, one ancient and one modern, to make an argument against binary thinking of all sorts—a theme that has been understandably common of late, but rarely handled with such subtlety and universalism—but extended bouts of literary criticism are a luxury that my current workload cannot afford. Go read it yourself, and make your own mind up.

no clipping

I’ve done very little reading of internet stuff this week, for reasons which I presume to be obvious—and so rather than offer something sub-par or dig around in the vaults, I’m going to give this section a rest this week.

Perhaps you’d like to send me suggestions of whatever you enjoyed reading in the last seven days or so? It would be nice to hear from you!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 19 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!