Journal

Who is the target audience for JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA?

This is often asked in the contemporary book world but, when you stop and consider, the question is a strange one. For a start, it assumes that you had a target audience in mind—that is, you were writing not to gratify yourself or perhaps an inner compulsion but instead to appeal to some imagined group of other people. One wonders how Cervantes would have answered such a question, or the gloomy Jonathan Swift. How would Joyce have responded? Perhaps “Displaced Irishmen, exiled by disposition, paying back the English by dismembering their language” (which would have comprised a target audience of two: himself and Samuel Beckett). Maybe Nabokov would have found the answer easier: “Pedophiles.”

Nevertheless, that’s how it goes now—authors are expected to write for a target audience. I suppose that books might be produced this way, but not literature. This helps explain the desert that is the contemporary book world, at least in fiction. Here’s a practical demonstration: quick, name a current author. Don’t dwell, just note down the first one you think of.

A generation ago, some great writers would have instantly sprung to mind: Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney. A generation before that, even better: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger. And before that, better still: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner. And these are just Americans, and just novelists, but even with those twin limitations the line goes back unbroken to colonial times: Sinclair Lewis, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Edgar Alan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many others.

Now, be honest: is whoever you thought of in the same league? Hard to think of any contemporary fiction writers at all, other than producers of formulaic pulp—books whose only purpose is to serve as predigested pap for the intellectually toothless, and whose authors no doubt do have a target audience.

When I was a kid I once walked into a bookstore and discovered a new (to me) novel by John Fowles. I was delighted by this find and soon had the volume at home, reading it from cover to cover straight through. That book was DANIEL MARTIN and I reread it multiple times over the years, enough to break the spine. What author of today would engender such excitement? Their spines would certainly be safe; hard enough to get through them even once. In fact, these days it would be difficult to find a bookstore in the first place.

How to account for this current dearth of readable books? I think the “Who is the target audience?” question is an important clue. It implies more than just the assumption that authors write not in consequence of some inner desire or need. It also implies that the proper purpose of authorship is not to write at all; it is simply to sell—in other words, we’re not really talking about books anymore; we’re talking about commerce. That commerce happens to be in books, but it could be any product: clothing, cars, cosmetics, whatever.

This wasn’t always the case. When publishing companies in America were privately or narrowly held, and there were dozens of them, the book world was a vibrant hothouse of talent and ideas, but the days when a Max Perkins would take a chance on Fitzgerald or a Sylvia Beach would publish the unpublishable Joyce are long gone; neither GATSBY nor ULYSSES would ever reach print today. The business aim then was to sell books—preferably but not always profitably; it was the books that mattered. Now, just a small handful of very large corporations control American publishing. And—as with any publicly-listed corporation—there is a single overriding business imperative: to maximize return on equity. A book’s merit in this context is reduced solely to its marketability; beyond that, whatever’s between the covers is irrelevant. So it is that genuinely good books—the ones you were actually excited to find—disappeared when the publishers were consolidated into a few corporate behemoths. In other words, the current economic forces that shape the industry are the reason why there are no longer towering literary figures whose names are household.

The people who run these companies don’t read books themselves; they have books pitched to them. The only things they read are spreadsheets. If quizzed about the questionable quality of their product, they would no doubt claim to be just catering to the public. This assertion—a common defense used by corporate-controlled media companies to paper over the deterioration under their ownership; think of the fate of the Times under Murdoch, or CNN under Time Warner, or Twitter under Musk—was best answered long ago by perhaps the greatest of modern English-language writers, T.S. Eliot (incidentally, like the protagonist in JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA, both an American and Englishman): “Those who claim to give the public what they want,” he stated, “begin by underestimating the public taste; they end by debauching it” (T.S. Eliot,1961, verbal testimony investigating BBC broadcasting, as quoted in ELIOT AFTER THE WASTE LAND by Robert Crawford, p. 473).

Take that, Murdoch and Musk!

By the author, ago

Is Kang Youwei a genuine historical figure?

Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was indeed a famous calligrapher and revolutionary, sentenced to death by the Dowager Empress, as Claiborne Lorenz states. More famous still is Tu Fu (pronounced and now more commonly transliterated as Du Fu), the T’ang dynasty poet quoted in the Kang forgery.

Lorenz chose a profitable sideline: in 2022 the small example of Kang’s calligraphy pictured sold at auction in Hong Kong for $15,000. Interestingly, it translates as “One Requires Tranquility to Reach One’s Far-reaching Goal,” a sentiment that sums up the quiet patience with which the Chinese state proceeded in Ash Wednesday.

By the author, ago

Is there a Chinese version of a Rolls-Royce, like Tang Tang’s limousine?

The automobile company Hongqi (“red flag”) has a long history of producing Chinese versions of Western vehicles, sometimes licensed (Audi, Toyota, Lincoln) and sometimes not (see accompanying photograph of the Hongqi H9, eerily similar to a Rolls-Royce Ghost, even down to the characteristic two-tone paint scheme). However, unlike with sensitive Western technologies as varied as the W-88 nuclear warhead and the 7-nm 5G silicon chip, this was not necessarily the result of illicit espionage—in 2018, Hongqi hired Rolls-Royce’s former chief of design.

But the similarities with R-R are only skin deep: Jeremy Clarkson, testing a Hongqi for the British television program “Top Gear,” noted that the power-to-weight ratio was only equal to that of the lowly Peugeot 308 diesel, and that there was no official 0-60 timebecause the car probably couldn’t make it that fast.

By the author, ago

Are there off-road Harley-Davidsons like the one Zara leaves for Jarrow to escape to Mexico?

Until recently Harley-Davidson was, and had been since WWII, strictly a builder of street bikes. However, custom Harley conversions of the type Jarrow rode are common, not just in the U.S. but globally, usually using the H-D Sportster as a base model since the Sportster is, for a Harley at least, relatively light. The accompanying photo shows one of these conversions by an Australian customizer, Purpose Built Moto, dubbed the “Signature Series Harley Sportster Scrambler,” and instantly identifiable as genuinely off-road capable.

Lately, Harley-Davidson has dipped a tentative toe into the off-road market with the introduction of the Pan America—not as hard-core as PBM’s Scrambler, but no longer confined to asphalt alone.

By the author, ago

Do CIPHER keys exist?

At the time Ash Wednesday was written there was no practical application of optical refraction as a means of secure encryption that the author is aware of. So it remains today, although there has certainly been research on the subject, notably in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, April 7, 2023. That paper can be accessed here.

The fictional CIPHER key (Commercial & Industrial Phased Energy Refraction) is imagined as a molded crystal-like structure (like quartz crystals, pictured) but with a randomized internal density matrix (so not a true crystal). After manufacture, the refracted laser pulse’s properties would be empirically matched to a receiver responding to that precise output alone which, when coupled with the key, would form a secure mechanism. Since the proposed density matrix would be infinitely variable (instead of a finite combination of 0s and 1s), the coming of quantum computing would not be the threat to encryption by light refraction that it is to existing digital encryption.

In the CIPHER key, the only things being ‘encrypted’ are the laser pulse’s properties post-refraction—it is just a lock. Zhang et al.’s Nature Communications paper proposes to encrypt data, something much more ambitious and applicable broadly in computer network and telecommunications traffic. But the underlying principle is, like the CIPHER key, an “…optical security strategy…which fully exploits the abundant degrees of freedom of light as well as the spatial dislocation as key parameters“

Given the overarching theme of Ash Wednesday, it is interesting to note that all the authors of this paper are members of research institutions operating under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

By the author, ago

Are the Firedrake technologies real?

The storage of energy generated by solar or wind power is usually done in banks of batteries: expensive to build and whose capacities diminish with use, plus toxic as trash but difficult to recycle. An alternative arrangement that instead stores the energy as mechanical potential which can be converted back to electricity whenever required, such as the Firedrake mercury turbine, has obvious advantages but is not much done in practice. As far as the author is aware, the idea of turbines driven by ambient-temperature mercury—a non-reactive liquid metal whose heft, rendering the driving impulse proportionally higher, could potentially result in a compact, low-maintenance, and long-lasting alternative—is original to ASH WEDNESDAY. “Mercury turbines” as understood today are something different: not part of a mechanical energy storage system but instead components of a thermodynamic power cycle, with the mercury vaporized. The Firedrake system is to employ electricity from solar cells to pump mercury up which is released as needed to flow down again through a power-generating turbine, analogous to hydroelectric plants.

The other Firedrake technology—heat sinks for thermal energy storage, as in the Devil’s Dance Canyon—has been implemented on a minor scale in a handful of locations, although usually the energy is delivered to the storage as electricity from solar panels. In the fictitious Firedrake system, it is instead delivered directly as solar heat, without the complexity, expense, and inefficiency of conversion to electricity for transport and then reconversion back to heat for storage. We tend to underestimate the power of the Sun because its heat is quickly dissipated in the surrounding atmosphere. Consider a car left out on a clear day, too hot to touch, and then imagine that if instead of surrounded by air it was surrounded by a transparent insulator: the heat would keep going in but little would be released, and so it would get ever hotter. This is the idea of the Firedrake heat system: the exposed surface is heated, then transfers that heat by conduction to a high-specific-heat storage medium that is insulated: the heat streams in but little is released, concentrating it to the point that it can melt rock, as in ASH WEDNESDAY. But how to turn it into a practical system?

There is a hundred-and-forty-year-old operating template for how this could be achieved: the steam system that underlies Manhattan. This grid, paralleling the electrical grid, carries energy in the form of heat, as steam (this is why steam is so often seen rising from curbs and gratings in New York City, as in the accompanying photograph taken by the author of the Queensboro Bridge approaches, where it mysteriously emerges from an otherwise apparently purposeless pipe). The use of steam as a relatively safe heating system (virtually fireproof) is plain enough, but what is less intuitive is that many apartment buildings also use steam to power their central air-conditioning. Some buildings even have their own electricity generators, driven by steam, and are completely off Consolidated Edison’s electrical grid.

In New York City, the steam is generated in fossil fuel-fired plants, but this could at least be augmented, if not wholly replaced, with heat sinks of suitable design.

By the author, ago

Is Isola della Piselli a real island?

Isola della Piselli, and the anatomatoria buried beneath it, are fictional. The subtle linguistic distinction between bìsi (with an accent, meaning peas) and bisi (without the accent, meaning snakes) is accurate, and both terms are specific to the Venetian dialect—neither of them would mean anything to a non-Venetian Italian, who understands peas to be piselli and snakes to be serpenti.

Poveglia is real, as is Isola di San Giorgio in Alga, including its history as a former lazaretto and lunatic asylum run by a sadistic physician who committed suicide by flinging himself from the tower. The Napoleonic ottagoni also exist, although none are named Ottagono Barberoni.

The reference to the papal bull De Sepulturis, issued by Boniface VIII in 1299 to prevent atrocities of the type that occurred in the anatomatoria, is historically accurate.

By the author, ago