Susanna Clarke on Fantasy and the Landscape

An essay in The Observer:

It is a given in children’s literature that the world is alive. The world has a face; in fact it has lots of faces. Animals talk and think and have intentions: bears wear hats and secrete marmalade sandwiches in unexpected places; mice carry rapiers and think about their honour. The aliveness goes further: railway engines have friends; sticks have wives and children; scarecrows summon other scarecrows to come and regulate the seasons.

Of course there is still a sort of feeling that we are supposed to put stories like this aside as we grow up. But I was never very good, at any stage of my life, at putting away childish things. I hung on to toys, teddy bears and soft toy animals in particular, and they seem just as resonant with kindness and love today as they ever did. I have read and reread childhood books. I still keep company with magicians and giants, fairies and fauns. . . .

All stories are a response to the world in some way, but fantasy is very often a response to landscape. In an essay written in the 1940s, CS Lewis wrote: “I have seen landscapes (notably in the Mourne Mountains) which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do.”

Some fantasy creatures are so closely knit into their native soil that they barely manage to extract themselves from it. In Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy there is one sleeping dragon under the South Downs and another under Wales; both can be seen in the shape of long hills and rows of mountains. Whether the dragons are just beneath the earth or whether the hills and mountains actually are dragons is never quite resolved. In Lewis’s The Silver Chair, when the giants of Ettinsmoor are first sighted, the travellers initially mistake them for funny-shaped rocks. 

The natural landscape is part of what drives my writing, but for me the human element of the landscape is equally important. I brood on ruined castles, abandoned villages, roads going nowhere, fallow winter fields, distant glimpses of gray stone cities, the light of a single candle seen from across a night-darkened pond. 

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

A. E. Housman, 1896

Oddly this reminds me of my late wife, who died at 61, before old age could sap her strength or wither her body.

French Riots and the European Doldrums

France has been consumed by protests for weeks, and these have now devolved into riots. This is about, allegedly, the poor state of French schools. And French schools do have problems, especially with the poor state of buildings constructed during the baby boom years.

But really this is just another example of a theme that has dominated French politics for years: people think their government is not doing enough for them. This shows up mainly in fights over old age pensions, a battle which has led to the fall of several governments. And even more it stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of the world. What French protesters want, it seems to me, is a better, easier life, the sort of future that they feel was promised to them in the expansive, optimistic past. That their government cannot afford this does not ever enter into the protesters' minds. They demand what they feel entitled to, and paying for it is someone else's problem.

The economic situation in Britain is even worse; there, output per worker has not risen at all in 25 years, and pensions consume an ever larger percentage of the budget. 

The one serious attempt European authorities have made to fix this mess is by allowing large-scale immigration. This may be demographically essential, but on the other hand migrants from Africa and the Middle East commit many more crimes than native-born French or Germans, and fights over immigration have become the other big, ugly issue the continent faces.

I don't want to suggest that things in Europe are awful; after all, millions of peole from around the world are desperate to get there. But they seem stuck between the rock of economic and demographic decline and the hard place of immigration battles and a sense that nations are losing their cultures.

Why are things better in the US? I see three reasons: soaring energy production, driven largely by fracking but now spreading into solar and geothermal power; our globally dominant tech industry; and better immigration.

What do I mean by better immigration? To me this has two poles. Our low-skill, largely illegal immigration mostly comes from Latin America, and whatever certain white racists like to think, Hispanics have lived in the US for 200 years, with states like Texas and Arizona having large, well-established Hispanic populations. Mexican food has been part of American culture for my whole lifetime. Almost all Hispanic migrants are Christians. Obviously there are political issues surrounding this immigration, but on the whole these migrants fit better into our society than Africans do into Germany or Italy. And they thrive economically, largely because they are entrenched in certain industries like agriculture and construction, making it easy for them to get jobs with little English skill.

The other is America's unique ability to draw elite people from Asia and slot them quickly into the top of our economic system. It is hard to overestimate the role of immigrants from China and India in the American economy, or the harm we would suffer if the groypers are ever able to block this flow of talent.

Links 16 October 2026

Wooden figurine found melting from an Alpine glacier 

Smuggling forbidden literature through the Iron Curtain.

The contradictions, and continued relevance, of H.L. Mencken.

The datacenter war: Russia and Ukraine are both targeting each others digital infrastructure. Experts suspect this escalation will turn out badly for Russia, because Ukraine has uploaded all of its essential IT stuff the cloud services based in the west, whereas Russia has instead emphasized digital sovereignty. Twitter thread, BBC. Anti-datacenter activists must be getting off on these videos.

Russian milbloggers are nervous about Ukrainian advances in multiple areas; thread from ChrisO.

Here's AI having an impact on employment: call center jobs are declining.

Interesting new visitor center for Twelve Apostles in Australia, by Grimshaw.

Cremieux on the bizarre rise and stunning fall of homicide in El Salvador, and the future of its economy.

2,000-year-old warship found in the Black Sea.

AI agents and Manchurian Candidates.

Noah Smith investigates the comparison between the current AI investment boom and the previous record-holder for American infrastructure spending, the railroad boom of 1870-1890. He finds that according to some estimates, spending on datacenters, chips, etc. is already a larger percentage of US GDP than the railroads were.

A claim that China is overstating its population by more than 100 million people.

New York Times piece on the problems with the Watergate prosecutions: "By fabricating witness testimony, suppressing exculpatory evidence and colluding with the presiding judge, the Watergate prosecutors railroaded the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and the former domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman." That doesn't mean they weren't guilty, but.

Restoring the "Tondo of the Two Brothers," a striking mummy portrait from Roman Egypt.

Situating Tennyson's poetry at the intersection of science and Romanticism.

Spanish archaeologists find a Roman military camp likely associated with the siege of a nearby hillfort.

Military satellites and long-range weapons.

Because of their fragile egos, authors are easy to scam. So far I have easily resisted the scammers who have reached out to be, probably because I have, my late wife used to say, "an ego the size of a planet."

Because they are relying on fancy salts (like Himalayan pink), many Americans are not getting enough iodine.

A Neanderthal who lived 75,000 years ago may have been killed by a spear thrust.

The ongoing dream of solar power from space. I personally think this is crazy, since the untapped potential of solar down here on earth is so enormous.

Human Detritus of the Ukraine War

On Twitter/X, ChrisO passes on a Russian account of deserters who live for months or years amidst the horrors of the battlefild, surviving as best they can:

Regarding the search for those missing in action. In short: In Toretsk, evacuation—to put it mildly—is difficult. It’s not happening.

The chances that the people we’ve been searching for for over a year are still alive are extremely slim. But there is still a chance. At least a small percentage. Over in the Pokrovsk direction, at Lyman, there are still many survivors. They’re hiding there among the trees.

His family has already buried him at home, the compensation payments have already arrived, but he’s sitting in an abandoned dugout, his face overgrown with a beard, and he knows nothing.

There are those who decide from the start to desert the assault and go AWOL; informants sell them escape routes (this happens, too). There are people who are completely broken, and they’re truly to be pitied.

There are scum—hardened criminals—who might attack supply convoys. Those are being mopped up. It’s the end of the earth—anything can happen.

Many simply lose contact while hopping from plantation to plantation, get wounded, and then survive, alone or in pairs, however they can. Some latch onto their allies and fight alongside them. And some, after spending half a year AWOL, return to their unit on their own.

We treat them normally. What’s the point of all this? It's about hope. As long as there’s no body, we keep searching for the living. By every means available.

It's the end of the earth—anything can happen.

Matt Yglesias against Land Acknowledgements

Matt Yglesias attended a big "Power to the People" concert last week:

At the climax, everyone came up on stage and the Boss led this whole crowd of musicians in a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s classic leftist folk song “This Land Is Your Land.” Morello made a big deal about how they were going to sing the full version of the song, including the verses suppressed in many schools for their unduly leftist lyrics. (I was raised by weird leftists and taught this song at a very left-wing Ethical Culture day camp, so I had no idea there was any other version!)

Morello, at any rate, interrupted the song at one point to argue that Guthrie knew “that every inch of this land was stolen from the Indigenous people, so this land is actually their land.”

I don’t think this is factually correct about Guthrie’s politics. He and this song have long been a target of Native activists and intellectuals precisely because the rhetorical power of the song comes from denying the stolen land accusation. The point is that the American people (“you and me”) have a collective claim on American prosperity.

Exactly. The basic point of the American leftist tradition is to say that all Americans, just by virtue of being American, have a right to a decent life, and to a share of the nation's growing wealth. If you think that the United States is a fundamentally illegitmate project based on theft, what basis could you possibly have for assigning moral value to American citizenship?

After a long tour through some of the worst sins of Trump and MAGA, Yglesias comes back to this:

Yet to return to Power to the People, I don’t think you can defend American democracy or the rule of law or the basic humane interest in not seeing Medicaid and SNAP slashed while the administration cuts taxes for the rich and loots the Treasury for propaganda ads if you also accept the premise that the whole country is an illegitimate enterprise founded on theft.

It doesn’t make sense logically. It doesn’t work politically. It on some level fuels a kind of cynicism that just enables Trump and his gang of crooks.

We seem to be torn between a group of people who want to tear down the substance of all of our ideals and a group who want to tear down the notion that these ideals are worth having.

If you want to make America better, you MUST believe that America is worthy of being made great. If you start from the premise that this is stolen land, or that the sin of slavery cancels out all the noble ideals of the founding, you have made the nation fundamentally not worth saving, and effectively handed it over the Trump or even worse fascists.

Mythic Visions from Cristophe Charbonnel

Cristophe Charbonnel is a French sculptor born in 1967. He got his start as a costume designer and modeler for Disney. He seems to have sold his first solo works around 2006, when he was nearly 40. What drew me is a series of mythic bronzes he executed in the 2010s. Above, Poseidon, 2018.

Head of a Pilot, 2010. Many of these are incomplete, as if part had been lost to the ravages of time.

Forest Guardian, 2019.

Lug, 2019.

Gaia, 2019

Theseus and the Amazon, 2019

Gallery views. More at his web site.

The Datacenter War

Russia and Ukraine have moved on to a new target set in their long-range strike campaigns: datacenters. It appears that Russia started this a few weeks ago, but now Ukraine has reciprocated with strikes on at least two Yandex facilities.

I suppose western datacenter haters are loving these images, and are actively fantasizing about doing this to our own facilities.

But Russian commentators have pointed out that this may be a bad move for Russia. This is Artjockey, via ChrisO:

Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war—and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.

Immediately after the war began, Amazon allocated 10 petabytes of free cloud storage to Kyiv; data from registries, ministries, universities, and schools was migrated there, ensuring their operations never ceased.

Subsequently, Microsoft and European data centres also provided assistance to Ukraine. The protection of digital infrastructure was spearheaded by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, led by Mykhailo Fedorov — the very same person who, not long ago, briefly held the post of Minister of Defence. Consequently, since 2022, Ukrainian government services have either operated entirely from overseas cloud platforms or maintained redundant infrastructure there, allowing for an immediate switchover following an attack on the primary systems.

Plus, Ukraine relies more on small servers than the enormous ones Russia's Yandex has constructed. And:

In its pursuit of a "sovereign internet," the government has effectively blocked Russian companies from using infrastructure even in friendly nations, while "unfriendly" countries have blocked access via sanctions anyway. Due to restrictions imposed by Federal Laws No. 152-FZ and No. 187-FZ, it is virtually impossible to replicate Russian IT infrastructure in places like Belarus or Kazakhstan — though, in any case, the necessary capacity simply isn't there.

So this little datacenter war is likely to hurt Russians much more than Ukrainians, and Russians with any knowledge of the issue already understand this. Which makes one wonder once again about the quality of decision-making in the Kremlin.

A Visit to Glenstone

Andy Goldsworthy, Holes

Glenstone is a private art museum in Potomac, Maryland, within the DC suburbs. It still belongs to, and is controlled by, its founders, Emily Wei Rales and Mitch Rales. It opened in 2006 so is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary. The collection focuses on post-World War II art, and the Rales like to get to know living artists and collect their stuff or commission special works from them. So you know you're in for a weird ride.

I went there yesterday with two of my children and a friend. The main word that comes to my mind is "interesting": there were things I found strange and offputting, but on the whole it was a good experience and I am glad I went. I find that the key to enjoying modern art is to go in the right frame of mind, equally open to being awed, amused, or annoyed, and quick to put the last piece out of your mind so as to approach the next in the same open state.

The place is large and seeing everything involved walking around a lot. Much of the terrain is a native wildflower meadow, which I suppose is lovely at some times of the year, less so on a gray day in October. (Online photo above, and all the others that show sunshine.)

Various sculptures dot the grounds, including three little houses by Andy Goldsworthy and this rocking horse head by Jeff Koons, made of flowers growing on a frame.

There are multiple large sculptures by Richard Serra; my daughter liked this one, Four Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, 2017,

But I was somewhat puzzled.

I enjoyed this Richard Serra sprial. 

This (Tony Smith, Smug) is one of those sculptures that mainly frustrates because you can't climb on it.

There are two interior spaces. The first one you come to is called The Pavilions. The massive rectangles, made of concrete block, rise from the rolling meadows in an interesting way, making a stark and completely intentional contrast. In the center is this lovely pool. 

Shown here on a better day.

As modern art museums go, I liked the space. (The architect was Thomas Phifer). But the art here is mostly by living artists and mostly political – environmental, anti-racist, pro-immigrant, pro-abortion – and I had the same "meh" reaction I have to post overtly political art. These are room-sized installations, so you can walk a long way and see only a few works, only one of which really grabbed me.

The gems of the collection are in another building called The Gallery. Here you get the famous masters of twentieth-century American art: Clyfford Still (above), Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin,

Jackson Pollock, 

Gordon Parks,

And so on and so on. I loved a lot of this. I think my favorite work was this, When Frustration Threatens Desire by Kerry James Marshall. Perusing their web site I see they own a lot of work that isn't on display, and if you ask me that should clear some of the contemporary political stuff out of the Pavilions and show more of it.

On the whole it was a really good day, sometimes frustrating but generally thought-provoking, and sometimes mind-expanding, just what modern art should be.

Early Fall

Links 9 October 2026

Head of a goddess from Ptolemaic Egypt

A wikipedia gem: "John Murray Spear (1804 – 1887) was an American spiritualist minister who was most known for his attempts to construct an electrically powered Messiah which he referred to as the New Motive Power." 

A Facebook reel with a cool visualization of water flow through the Niagra River.

Twitter thread on how hard it has proved for both Russia and Ukraine to actually destroy major bridges.

Last May a document appeared that was said to be a leaked slide deck prepared by a Kremlin insider about how to spin the inevitably disappointing end of the Ukraine War. (The Spectator; Extracts and Translations)

Noah Smith: maybe the Great Filter is smartphones and short-form video.

Why was the elite of Victorian Britain so effective, despite their heavy drinking and strange educational system?

How might we regulate democracy to improve it?

The enduring influence of the film Excalibur.

Old European masking traditions.

Charles Darwin dealt with all problems by throwing himself into work, in particular minutely detailed studies of barnacles and earthworms.

Traditional brickmaking still endures in Britain.

Newly discovered Hittite royal archive.

Summary of the science Nobels for this year.

The modernization of Meiji Japan, 15-minute video from Sarah Paine.

Pages from the Sketchbook of Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was a French artist allied to the Symbolist movement; many of his works look like dreams, or nightmares.  I just discovered that the Art Institute of Chicago has one of his sketchbooks, and they have some images online.

I love seeing what artists doodle. Some of these are preparatory sketches for finished works I recognize, but others are just doodles.

Immigration and Science

So Donald Trump is awarding National Medals of Science/Technology to six people, five of whom are immigrants:

Elon Musk: South Africa

Sergey Brin: Russia

Jensen Huang: Taiwan

Lisa Su: Taiwan

Satya Nadella: India

Immigration is the main reason this remains the world's most dynamic nation, and limiting it the worst thing we could do to our future.

Medieval Keys

Modern Social Media

Reported cases of plague in Irkutsk, Russia have produced the predictable response: massive sales of plague doctor masks and an explosion of plague-related memes.

John McWhorter on White Women Passing as Black

In the NY Times:

Rachel Dolezal never surprised me in the slightest. A white woman who masqueraded as Black while leading an N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State about 12 years ago, she was an almost inevitable sign of our times.

So Hannah Gann needn’t surprise us either. Gann is a 34-year-old public-school teacher and activist in Philadelphia who grew up white, Jewish and affluent but for years has falsely claimed to be of Black (Tunisian) and Palestinian descent. She was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, so forceful as to have been accused of antisemitism. Fellow activists outed her last month, and she has acknowledged lying.

Gann is an ideological descendant of Dolezal, who grew up white in Montana in the 1980s and ’90s and started “identifying” as Black some years after completing a master’s degree at Howard University, a historically Black school. Wearing her hair in Black American styles and sporting a spray tan or using bronzer, she claimed to have a Black father. Her parents outed her as white in 2015, but she dug in her heels. She now goes by the name Nkechi Diallo and has said that she is “not white” but “transracial.”

There have been other such cases . . . 

These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege.

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive.

I am also struck by this phenomenon: for a certain sort of American, to be white is to besome combination of "agent of colonialism and oppression" and "just plain boring." Both are horrible to a certain sort of person; hence, these frauds.

These cases also brings me back to one of my favorite questions: if people can change their sex, why can't they change their race? Is it is really absurd to be "transracial"? I mean, the genetic difference between the races is a rounding error compared to the enormous genetic difference between men and women. I have been asking this question for a decade now and nobody has ever given me an answer that is even halfway convincing.

Wooden Plates Painted with Scenes from Aesop's Fables

English, c. 1600. In the Art Institute of Chicago. For an archaeologist it is always a bit disconcerting to contemplate how much of European material culture was made of wood and leather.