My plan was to dive into PROJECT HOURGLASS by May 1st, but I'm not yet done with PROJECT ROSEWATER or KILLJOY, partly because getting anything built and/or installed in Cairo demands undivided micromanagement.
Kitchen is now a hair away from final-final completion (whenever you think you're done, a new loose thread seems to reveal itself). Renovation on the unit upstairs is finally finished (exceeeept for a minor plumbing thing and some woodwork that needs mending). Today I try to get mirrors installed on a big unfinished wall in the building entrance (the original plan was to create an original mural for it, but I'm learning to take things off my plate when the pile gets too high. and the mirrors will be a good fix).
Other things needed for the studio are: – Closet – Storage Unit for Works on Paper – Shelves and Cabinets for the washroom/storage room – Sofa (in an effort to make my life more difficult, there's a particular design for it I'm looking to get made). – Rocking chair (which will serve as my reading chair—settling into my old age with acceptance). – Side table (to go with said rocking chair—already have the marble slab that will serve as the tabletop, cut out of the kitchen counter to make way for the electric stove top, which means said table will need to be custom-built). – Floor lamp (for the reading/rocking chair) – Additional table on casters (also have a design in mind for it 🙃) – 3 Assorted table lamps – 1 wall-light fixture – Assorted mirrors (to reflect the light around the eerily dark corner of the studio) – 2 floating shelves
And then and only then will I finally feel situated in my new digs. Which puts me at... what? 50 years from now at this rate?
One of the highlights of the Manshur event I participated in a few days ago was the discovery of Zeina Maasari's stellar research project: Decolonizing the Page, which includes a superbly curated archive of gorgeously illustrated and/or designed Arabic books from the 1950s to 1980s, many of which I had never seen or even heard of before.
Looks like drawing endless waste and debris is becoming something of an accidental specialty of mine since embarking on THE SOLAR GRID.
The above image is from the concept art for PROJECT ROSEWATER, which I need to wrap up in less than one week. PROJECT REVERSE-EXODUS must also finish around the same time, and a couple days after that I'm due to partake in a public panel discussion in downtown Cairo. This, in addition to all the home renovation stuff. Busy few days.
Should try to squeeze in a break after that before embarking on the 10-month stretch for PROJECT HOURGLASS, during which I'm hoping all the home-reno stuff will be well behind me. 🤞
August will see six academics at the top of their game come together in Dresden for Petrocultures 2026 to discuss THE SOLAR GRID and “its many affordances for thinking through techno-optimism, energy, colonization, etc.” as associate professor Stacey Balkan recently put it in an email. The panel discussion is set to include:
- Dominic Boyer, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University (author of No More Fossils, Energopolitics: Winds and Power in the Anthropocene, and Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy).
- Stacey Balkan, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University (author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India and Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice).
- Frederic Caille, Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (author of L'invention de l'énergie solaire and La figure du sauveteur: Naissance du citoyen secoureur en France, 1780-1914).
- Swaralipi Nandi, Associate Professor of English at Loyola Academy (co-editor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction, and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films).
- Imre Szeman, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough (author of Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life, Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, and Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond).
- Brianna Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas in El Paso (creator of The Environmental Comics Digital Database).
I too will be in Dresden for this meeting of minds, which I am very much looking forward to and immensely humbled by.
Anything you might be seeing on the news about the U.S. government's effect on the operational capacity of TSA (Transportational Security Administration) is an understatement. I just made it through what may just be the longest queue in human history; 7 hours. That is not a 7-hour standstill, but rather a 7-hour moving line. It was a very very long line. It snaked in and out of the terminal, and back in again and all through it and around it, and down in the tunnel underneath it and circled back again, then up... this must be the type of thing purgatory is made of.
Once I'd finally made it through security, I had already missed my flight by a good 3 hours. It was after 10:00pm, and all the restaurants at George Bush Intercontinental Airport had already closed (a completely alien concept at, say, Istanbul International Airport (as an aside, isn't it funny how they like to point to the autocratic nature of certain “Eastern” nations that only ever name their airports after cities, but it's countries of the “West” that almost exclusively name their airports after their political figures? Never mind the wholly unnecessary confusion it brings upon international travelers).
I thought, rather naively, that I'd be able to get on another flight that very same evening or at most next morning, but no, turns out I could only get on the flight heading out a full 24 hours later. No way I was going to leave the terminal after persevering through the 7-hour queue of torment and deal with it all over again the next day, so of course I sent the night on a crappy airport waiting seat (No sleeping pods or convenient terminal hotels, which is shocking to any traveler whose ever flown through Thailand or Istanbul or Mexico City—which most Americans clearly haven't).
Severe failed state feels at George Bush International Airport right now, where in spite of it all, you can still score yourself a bottle of Channel no. 5.
The really crappy part is that all my luggage flew out without me. With a transit in Paris. I have a feeling my bags will be the recipients of their own brand of logistical horrors.
Finished reading Greenblatt's THE SWERVE. It's good, but not as good as it started out. The first half is quite superb, but the second half is far less interesting. Many good historical tidbits in there, but it does suffer from a terribly myopic view of history and scientific development while pretending to possess a grand scope of things. Not so much actually. Still worth the read.
Couple days left in Houston before my return to Cairo. Snatched SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE from my storage unit to reread on the flight (a full decade since I read it), and am abhorred by the sheer quantity of my possessions. Too much of it is stuff I just can't let go of, but I think I can probably—with some effort—do away with half (after having already done away with a lot).
Last day with my kid, “the plan is to do nothing but look at Pokemon cards and eat ice-cream and watch three toons” according to him. Obviously, that's not how things will go down, but it'll wholesome and sweet nonetheless as the world outside grows more insane and stupid and inhumane.
“In 1378, two years before Poggio's birth, the seething resentment of these miserable day laborers, the populo minuto, had boiled over into a full-scale bloody revolt. Gangs of artisans ran through the streets, crying, 'Long live the people and the crafts!' and the uprising briefly toppled the ruling families and installed a democratic government. But the old order was quickly restored, and with it a regime determined to maintain the power of the guilds and the leading families.”
First time for me to hear of the Ciompi revolt in Florence. Also from Stephen Greenblatt's THE SWERVE, which covers so much ground.
“Poggio's way of fashioning letters was a move away from the intricately interwoven and angular writing known as Gothic hand. The demand for more open, legible handwriting had already been voiced earlier in the century by Petrarch (1304-1374). Petrarch complained that the writing then in use in most manuscripts often made it extremely difficult to decipher the text, 'as though it had been designed,' he noted, 'for something other than reading.'”
Extremely my shit on so many levels, this book.
“Ancient Greeks and Romans did not share our idealization of isolated geniuses, working alone to think through the knottiest problems.”
From Stephen Greenblatt's riveting book, THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN.
“Such scenes—Descartes in his secret retreat, calling everything into questions, or the excommunicated Spinoza quietly reasoning to himself while grinding lenses—would eventually become our dominant emblem of the life of the mind. But this vision of proper intellectual pursuits rested on a profound shift in cultural prestige, one that began with the early Christian hermits who deliberately withdrew from whatever it was that pagans valued: St. Anthony (250-356) in the desert or St. Symeon Stylites (390-459) perched on his column. Such figures, modern scholars have shown, characteristically had in fact bands of followers, and though they lived apart, they often played a significant role in the life of large communities. But the dominant cultural image that they fashioned—or that came to be fashioned around them—was of radical isolation.”
I maintain that the very notion of the “isolated genius” today—still prominent in contemporary culture—is an absolute fiction. No man is an island, though certain aspects of one's environment or social makeup may drive a person to feel they are an island, but true and genuine absolute islandhood is bound to spell the death of one's creative life.
“Not so the Greeks and Romans. As thinking and writing generally require quiet and a minimum of distraction, their poets and philosophers must have periodically pulled away from the noise and business of the world in order to accomplish what they did.”
The keyword here, being “periodically.”
“But the image that they projected was social. Poets depicted themselves as shepherds singing to other shepherds; philosophers depicted themselves engaged in long conversations, often stretching out over several days. The pulling away from the distractions of the everyday world was figured not as a retreat to the solitary cell but as a quiet exchange of words among friends in a garden.”
House-sitting for friends now, and spotted the book on one of the shelves. Decided to flip through it a few days ago and haven't been able to put it down since.
“The invention of movable type in the fifteenth century changed the scale of production exponentially, but the book in the ancient world was not a rare commodity: a well-trained slave reading a manuscript aloud to a roomful of well-trained scribes could produce masses of text. Over the course of centuries, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of copies, were made and sold.
“There was a time in the ancient world—a very long time—in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plentitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.”
Call me a pessimist but I kind of foresee an inevitable halt to the plentitude of data (along with “content”) being collectively churned out by present human civilization as well.
“Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.”
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, after all.
“Starting as early as 300 BCE, the Ptolemaic kings who ruled Alexandria had the inspired idea of luring leading scholars, scientists, and poets to their city by offering them life appointments at the Museum, with handsome salaries, tax exemptions, free food and lodging, and the almost limitless resources of the library.”
Take me back to ancient Alexandria please.
“The recipients of this largesse established remarkably high intellectual standards. Euclid developed his geometry in Alexandria; Archimedes discovered pi and laid the foundation for calculus; Eratosthenes posited that the Earth was round and calculated its circumference to within 1 percent; Galen revolutionized medicine. Alexandrian astronomers postulated a heliocentric universe; geometers deduced that the length of a year was 365 ¼ days and proposed adding a “leap day” every fourth year; geographers speculated that it would be possible to reach India by sailing from Spain; engineers developed hydraulics and pneumatics; anatomists first understood clearly that the brain and the nervous system were a unit, studied the function of the heart and the digestive system, and conducted experiments in nutrition. The level of achievement was staggering.”
Let us remind ourselves that what inevitably consigned all that achievement to oblivion and brought it all down was the prejudice exercised by the Roman Empire—some 270 years after Ptolemaic rule—against one of its minority groups/cults concentrated in the eastern provinces, and—as the story goes—charging one member of that minority with treason against the empire before executing him.
Upon reading what I felt was an absolute throwaway book—THE COMMONSENSE OF NUDISM by George Riley Scott—an idea for a most unusual sort-of-sequel to THE SOLAR GRID made its way into my mind. Now, THE SOLAR GRID actually already ends in a way that kind of invites a sequel (though unnecessary, it's a completely self-contained graphic novel), but that sequel if pursued would be too expected, I think. This other sort-of-sequel I can't stop thinking about, wouldn't at all be expected and would likely come off as highly peculiar (I can't help myself apparently). But it would also be so perfect in a way. It wouldn't feature any of the characters from the original THE SOLAR GRID (itself surprising, given how many characters there are in the book—it'd be so easy to pluck any one of those and do something entirely focused on them), but would instead feature a new cast of characters and how they get on in the aftermath of THE SOLAR GRID's destruction. Fertile ground for social friction, and the rise of new ideas and ways of being despite most people at large holding onto the old. Even when the very conditions that created the logic and reasoning for the old has clearly disintegrated before their eyes.
To be clear, THE COMMONSENSE OF NUDISM is a shit book. Published in 1934, it's filled with much quackery, false arguments, and casual racism, but it's sprinkled with a kernel of interesting enough reason throughout, and a handful of passages that are kind-of historically overlooked—like how Hitler cracked down on the rising nudist movement in early 1930s Germany.
Obviously, I will refrain from engaging with this sequel idea or any other ideas concerned with graphic-noveling unless I'm able to land a good enough publishing deal for THE SOLAR GRID. Can't be placing the cart in front of the horse, which is something I have a history of doing but have finally managed to overcome, I think.