Process Pending: field notes for the office
the vista is 512 cores of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' supercomputer
Here are a list of students detained by ICE in the last few months — all with meager or no justification for their visa revocations or arrests. They could all use your help. Call your reps, protest, strike, refuse donations, support each other and strangers.
On and off since last November, I have been reading Ingrid Kopelman's Molyneux and revisiting her Notes on Representation: Vol. 8. What really draws me in is the precision of her descriptions and a reminder of the presence of body and mind you get during fieldwork, a specific kind of observing that requires and creates an intensely present body and mind. I would like more of this in my day-to-day life, but my day-to-day office is a concrete box from the 1980s, sealed shut and climate-suppressed. I am trying, nevertheless, to keep field notes for the office, where the vista is… the 512 cores I have access to on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts supercomputer? Here are a selection from earlier this year.
2025-01-30
First time back in my building since December 18, 2024. I arrive both damp from the rain and overheating in the same down jacket I wore in Antarctica. I tap into the building door with a blank white piece of plastic straight from the set of Severence. This door has an electronic lock and no door handle, so it is often broken. The lobby’s floor and walls are a chicken yellow on the north side, a nursery orange on the south. I tap my ID card on another device, which I now have to do every 36 hours in order to get unlock my office.
The meeting room is adjacent to the elevators. Inside, incongruously placed on a metal cabinet holding old theses and disintegrating issues of meteorological journals, is an enormous antique vase. No one knows where it came from. It is full of empty soup cartons. The meeting is mild and productive. The master’s student I’m advising is organized, thoughtful, and respectful. I think he is much better suited for scientific research than myself, at least at this institution; he is exceedingly self-actualizing. But I have something to contribute to the direction of his work, and so does my boss, so we all leave satisfied.
I am in my office for the first time in six weeks; it is exactly the same as when I left in December. The only thing to change is the thing that is alive, that is, the office plant is more dead than before, slowly sucked dry by thousands of tiny black bugs. My office building was designed to host lab spaces, which means it is sealed off from the outdoors, e.g., we cannot open our windows. People have been complaining for years of headaches, dry eyes, and exhaustion after full days in the building. I rarely spend a full day here because of this. Perfect climate control is bad for human health, and for writing descriptive sentences. They are beginning construction in a few months to replace the HVAC system one quarter of the building at a time. There are not enough offices or desks to host everyone, and it is unclear where we will go when our quarter comes due.
I plug the extension cord back in that powers my desktop and laptop. Neither of the other two postdocs are in the office. There is an A4 envelope on my desk from “Meteorological Technologies”. I don’t open it. I type things into a browser, into an email, into the terminal. 25 minutes pass. I pack up, because I will leave just after the next meeting.
There are ten of us at this group meeting. My colleague presenting today is very good at showing how he goes about finding questions and seeking answers. I understand the data he shows and the problem he is trying to solve, and I am somewhat envious and fascinated by what seems like his “easy desire”—desire without resentment, with a kind of pure factuality: of course he wants to put in the work required to figure out what’s going on. I lose the thread when more technical questions are asked, existing momentarily but frequently, entirely in my head. Like most days, my ADHD meds are not doing much for me. I write down many emails I should send by the end of the week into my planner. I have used this planner for three weeks now; it is the longest I have ever used one.
2025-02-26
When I was home in California in January, crows flew north at dusk every day, in the hundreds or thousands. At 16.40 today, a large flock of blackbirds swoop and diverge outside my office window, below a fast moving ceiling of thin grey and white clouds, a cross-continental mirroring. Among them are two seagulls1. After a minute, the blackbirds dissipate in all directions like so much fog. One seagull stays, flying languid, smooth switchbacks until I cannot see him[2] anymore.
I’m waiting for files to copy. I’m waiting for the model to run. In the terminal, the HPC keeps hanging, taking ten or twenty seconds to auto-complete when I hit tab to complete a prompt, or try to list files in a directory. This liminal moments can derail my whole day, but today they do not. I keep returning to the task at hand.
2025-02-27
At work I check the runs from last night. They segfaulted and the source and line is unknown unknown unknown unknown…
rabbit holes
While trying to remember C.R.E.A.M. by Wu-Tang Clan i ended up here. the font!!!! the clip art!!!!! let no one say the naughts did nothing for jeesus!!!!
I heard a story that there are some 800 year old oak trees somewhere in the east of the Netherlands, and I wanted to find out if I could visit them. This took me to a list of the oldest trees in Europe, which didn’t have those trees on it, but nevertheless suggest a different way of choosing how and where to visit
This garden in long island reminded me of this documentary from 1992 about a Spanish artist painting a quince tree, which I started watching because it was at the end of the list of the 250 best films, as ranked by the British Film Institute and is freely available on archive.org.
Following traveling through Japan and watching the Last Samurai, Dave and I watched Tampopo last night in a haze of jetlag. It is definitely NSFW, utterly irreverent, and extremely charming. The first (and last?) “ramen western”, supported by a very young Ken Watanabe.
recommendations
The newsletter from extrapractice.space, a rotterdam-based collective. The most recent letter was on how people visualize or sense their internal calendars differently. In the past, they have used different colors to represent different drafts. They are always a thoughtful, person-based, and often structurally interesting. Their archive is excellent.
This profile of Sayaka Murata by Elif Batuman, specifically the most accurate description of writing fiction of all time:
More than once, Murata drew me a diagram illustrating her writing process. It showed a standing figure (“novelist Murata”) at a table in a lab; lying on the table was an identical figure, cut into pieces (“human Murata”). Various boxes contained body parts and organs. At the top of the page was a glass cube: the clean, sanitized aquarium. The way it worked, Murata explained, was that novelist Murata dissected human Murata. Aspects of human Murata “crystalized” in the aquarium, where new characters came to life and interacted.
Aminatou Sow’s recent newsletter on getting flagged for secondary inspection at the U.S. border as a permanent resident.
The Plantasia album for working: “The music on this album was composed specifically for plants to listen to”
Stay upright, spring is here.
Cheers,
Elizabeth