I first discovered zhen zhu nai cha, as bubble milk tea, or boba, is known in Chinese, when I was ten. It was the early nineties, and I’d been in the United States only two years, living and going to school in Connecticut towns so uniformly white that soy sauce was still considered exotic there. A few times a year, my mother and I would take the Metro-North an hour south to New York City for the sole purpose of stockpiling Chinese groceries. These were not leisurely shopping trips but carefully strategized plans of attack, during which my mother practiced bargain-hunting as blood sport. Behind her I’d trudge, up Canal and down East Broadway, a weary foot soldier weighed down by growing satchels of fish tofu and Chinese cabbage and hoisin sauce. Invariably, our last stop was Taipan Bakery, which offered an end-of-day discount on goods such as red-bean buns and sponge cake, my favorites. At some point, it also began selling a newfangled drink, served in plastic cups with jumbo straws and what appeared to be shiny marbles piled on the bottom. An order cost about three dollars, half of my mother’s hourly wage cleaning houses. Yet every time she relented and let me buy one, and the victory tasted as sweet as the drink itself.
The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes). But some researchers expect that they just haven’t been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.
Now, various teams are developing new ways to infer exactly how the multiverse bubbles and what happens when those bubble universes collide.
The world of the present is characterized not so much by the omnipresence of noise as by the impossibility of silence. It’s not that we can’t hear the signal, but that the multitude of signals leave us no time to take stock, to reflect, to experience. The news, for example, used to come daily to your door in a little bundle, or set out on a rack at the café, or in measured doses on TV at certain hours of the day. Now it is an incessant stream: noisy chatter — yes — but as heavy and concerning as the world itself, and which draws us in whenever we, inevitably, reach for our smartphones.
Mark C. Taylor’s Seeing Silence is, among many things, a response to this condition, which is connected with, though not the same as, the “postmodern condition.” The postmodern, Taylor suggests, is the “desert of the real,” borrowing the phrase from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulacra and simulations. And the noise of the present is what must happen when the real comes crashing back in through the facade. Baudrillard, Taylor explains, “knew this virtual reality could not last and tried to warn us about the looming disaster.”
In barely a hundred pages, Chris Kelso pulls off an almost migraine-inducingly condensed history of his literary hero’s Scottish visits and lasting impact on its psychic landscape. It does what all good non-fiction does, in that it creates the desire to read or reread the original source material as well as reappraise one’s own thoughts and feelings about the subject. For a first time non-fiction author (at this length anyway) I’d say that’s a job very well done.
on the altered face of an abusive moon
pain feels like the fault of them in pain
local and inevitable
frilled collateral shapes with anguish.