I ain't never even liked it yet

A guide to Sundman figures it out!, March 20, 2024 through July 7, 2024

A little over a year ago I published I ain’t even liked it yet, an essay that contains capsule summaries of the 17 then-published Sundman figures it out! essays, plus a little bonus story from my days as a long-haul truck driver.

Yesterday I published I still ain't even liked it yet: An updated guide to Sundman figures it out!, July 4 2023 to March 19, 2024, which contains capsule summaries of the 29 Sundman figures it out! essays that I published during that period. This post catches us up.

Sound of Music

Sundman figures it out! is an ongoing braided inquiry with a well-defined starting point and no conclusion (yet). Essays are mostly stand-alone, but themes, incidents, preoccupations come and go, so the more SFIO! posts you read, the more satisfaction you’re likely to get from reading another one. If you want to start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, the do-re-mi of this thing is

SFIO! 1: Figuring it out  (my project initiated)
SFIO! 2: The dark side of the hut, 50 years later (my most popular post, by far)
SFIO! 3: Easy Was (my method laid out)

I do not include a clip of Julie Andrews as Maria Rainer teaching the adorable Trapp Family children to sing solfège while riding bicycles or sitting in a horsedrawn carriage. This is indicative of my abiding affection for all sentient creatures.

Onward

A chronicler of biodigital : How I accidentally became a self-publishing cyber-bio-nanopunk novelist Includes the Acts of the Apostles origin story (the Titanic hidden in the silicon maze of a cache-controller chip), along with observations on fiction, metafiction, prophecy and the meaning of the verb ‘to hack’.

Force Multipliers and the Coming Anarchy: Requiem for a dystopian vision In addition to some depressingly prescient dystopian conjectures, this essay includes the story of how, ~2018, I interviewed for the job of editor-in-chief of the cryptocurrency site Cointelegraph, having been recommended for the job by the indomitable

John Biggs

despite my being manifestly unqualified for it. It’s sorta like a play by Samuel Beckett as performed in a two-minute sketch by Monty Python.

Doom Fiction: Guest post by cyber-weird writer William Pauley III This is the first and so far only time I invited another substacker to guest-post on SFIO. I look forward to doing more cross-posting. If you’re interested in a reciprocal deal, let’s talk.

Synbiobeta Dreaming: Returning to the mecca of biodigital technopotheosis Alas, things happened, and I was not able to attend the 2024 Synbiobeta conference. But in this essay I talk about cool things I’ve seen and done at Synbiobetas past.

Read ‘Synbiobeta Dreaming’ for the story behind this shot glass, plus a lot more synthetic biology & biopunk goodness.

The terror of knowing what this world is about: Under pressure Oh, a storm was threatening my very life one day, and if I didn’t get some shelter, I was going to fade away. (Updated: I weathered that storm with a lot of help from many friends, including several readers of Sundman figures it out! THANK YOU, YOU ROCK STARS!!!)

Entanglement: Ironies and incongruities A deeply entangled essay on many meanings of the word ‘entanglement’ — quantum, alzheimerific, firefighters trapped in wires, emotional —all centered around the dreamlike disorientation I felt upon returning to the Senegal River Valley in January, 1978, after a two-year absence, and the dreamlike disorientation I feel today in looking back on past entanglements.

The purple text, as decoded by the most powerful AI yet devised, running on a secret quantum computer, has been decoded. It reads, “You really should read Sundman’s essay ‘Entanglement'. It’s even smarter than I am.”

A trigonometric proof of Goldbach's Conjecture: 'Great Figures' revisited An post inspired by a recent mathematical proof (not of Goldbach’s Conjecture: there is no proof of that, and perhaps there never will be) devised by two Catholic schoolgirls from New Orleans, with echoes of my Tangerine Sun essay and the molecular biologist with the great figure, and two complimentary ontological proofs, offered 700 years apart) of the existence of God. The molecular biologist with the great figure makes a cameo appearance.

The mathematicians of St. Mary’s Academy, New Orleans. Jackson on the left, Johnson on the right.

My greatest problem, part one and then part two and subsequently the dramatic conclusion. How to say this? Most film critics consider The Godfather, Part 2, superior to The Godfather, while still according the first movie ‘masterpiece’ status. Despite the great performance of Joe Mantegna as Joey “It's true, I make more of a bella figura; that is my nature” Zasa, The Godfather, Part 3 is generally considered by critics to be a lamentable shambles, and best forgotten.

The new Athena. Her zephyr breath directs my Homeric battleship.

It would be hyperbole to say that the 3-part essay is the Summa Theologica of Sundman figures it out!, although it is, in many ways, a summation and stock-taking of the nearly 60 essays that have come before it. Some of the topics that ‘greatest problem’ addresses include Sunset Boulevard reimagined with Donald Trump as Norma Desmond, the concept of fate in Greek plays of the classical era, brains and brainworms and their relation to the theories of the late philosopher-of-mind Daniel Dennett, dazzling camouflage that is not camouflage, literature, Ellis Island, 20th century American poetry, crawling under Carly Simon’s house, and a short explanation of the relationship of French bread to Italian bread offered to me by the octogenarian proprietor of Restucci’s Bakery, in Singac, New Jersey — yes, that proprietor, Mr. Restucci himself — one Saturday evening in the summer of 1969 that has achieved talismanic stature in my own personal mythology.

(I’m still trying to figure out why I included this video in My greatest problem. If I ever figure that out I’ll let you know.)

Is My greatest problem a masterpiece? Many people say that My greatest problem is the greatest work that has ever been written in the English language. Mr. William Shakespeare — you may have heard of him, he wrote some plays, Broadway, a good friend of Joey Zasa, who I also know, by the way, great businessman, well, maybe not that great — Shakespeare came up to me and he said, ‘Sir, I know good writing, some people say I’m the greatest writer ever, but, believe me, sir, nothing I ever wrote is as good as “My greatest problem, part one, part two and the dramatic conclusion”. He really said that.

Joey says it would be a real mistake for you to not read My greatest problem, all three parts. You really wouldn’t want to do that.

So what’s the answer? Is My greatest problem a masterpiece? While it's true, I make more of a bella figura — that is my nature — calling My greatest problem a masterpiece of the essay, the form of expository art perfected in the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, would be a tad presumptuous, even for me. But I do confidently state that there is no falling off in quality from parts one and two to the dramatic conclusion. A ‘lamentable shambles’ My greatest problem, the dramatic conclusion is emphatically not. Part one starts here.

So where will Sundman figures it out! be going next? Who knows. We’ll just have to wait and see in which direction the new Athena choses to exhale.

Cheerio!