Earlier this year, I read and enjoyed Jessica Andrews’s first novel, Saltwater. I said then that I looked forward to reading her second novel, Milk Teeth, and here we are.

I thought the first novel was particularly good on the sense of ‘otherness’ that people from the North often feel when they are in London. This novel channeled similar feelings but on a bigger canvas: instead of London, our female northern protagonist finds herself in Barcelona and Paris. The slightly disorientating non-chronological structure is back, as is Andrews’s brilliant, lyrical writing. Milk Teeth is both a love story and a coming-of-age story. It examines how relationships can help us grow, but how those same relationships shift as the people within them change.

As with the first book, I found the writing to be superior to the plot—although this time round, the plot was pretty engaging on its own terms. I found the main character’s descriptions of her relationship with food to be interesting and insightful. This relationship was a recurring theme through the book, perhaps reflecting the coming-of-age aspect of the novel.

I really enjoyed this, and won’t hesitate to pick up Andrews’s next novel.

A couple of quotations I noted down:

I bathe my knee carefully with a pan of warm water, wiping away dust. There is a big chunk of grit trapped beneath the skin and I dig it out carefully with a small twist, like a loose milk tooth wrenched from a gum, and it leaves a tiny wet hole. I roll it between my fingers and wonder how long I might have carried it around, if I had not noticed it. I imagine my skin healing, growing over the stone, sealing it inside me. I wonder if it would have got infected, or whether my body would break it down. Maybe I would have just carried it for the rest of my life, without even knowing it was there.

I didn’t know how to explain to you that I want wanted sensation, beauty and chaos but I had to swallow my basic needs so I could meet my wants because they were bigger than I could afford. I wanted to go beyond the borders of the life that was set out for me, to stand on the threshold and see the world beyond it, but stepping off the edge came with a cost I did not anticipate. I want to inhabit a space with ease, somewhere airy and light with room to grow into. I want to be part of the world instead of just skirting the edges, to feel deserving of love and care. I want to hold onto the good things tightly, to learn what it means to stay.

This is a massive exhibition by the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong, including everything from a feature-length film (showing five times daily) to a collection of (I think) twelve computer games, even a shelf of books to sit and read. One could easily spend days in this exhibition and still not see all the work. My brief visit barely scratched the surface.

Achiampong’s work explores our sense of identity. The scope is broad, incorporating everything from the way our identities can entrench inequality through class or cultural displacement, through to digital constructs of identity.

The most immediately arresting bits of work in the exhibition are from Achiampong’s Relic Traveller series, which includes a series of life-size space suits throughout the gallery. The narrative behind these is that they represent African travellers collecting the relics of their colonial past, found in the West.

I was also taken with a video installation in this series, Reliquary 2, which reflects on Achiampong’s separation from his children during the covid lockdowns. It features edited drone footage of Brighton’s ruined pier, among other sites, with cartoon space people overlaid. The audio features Achiampong directly addressing his children.

The installation Detention, shown in the photograph above, also caught my eye. This is partly inspired by the opening titles of The Simpsons, and partly reflects the way that politicians and social media posters repeat certain key phrases endlessly.

Yet, from the whole exhibition, the thing that struck me most was the atmosphere. Achiampong’s work is personal, he features his family in several pieces, and his work invites visitors to sit on beanbags or benches to watch video installations, to play computer games, to sit on maps, to take books from a shelf and read them. Somehow, whether it’s the work or the curation, the impression is unusually inviting, oddly warm-hearted. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit.

Wayfinder continues at The Baltic until 29 October.

On a recent walk, Wendy and I spotted a buzzard. Or rather, we were walking along deep in conversation when somebody came over and said, “excuse me, have you noticed that buzzard over there?”

We hadn’t, and frankly, I wouldn’t have recognised it even if it came and perched on my arm.

This struck me more than it would usually have done, as I’d only recently read a blog post by Richard Smith in which he called himself uneducated:

Recently a group of us walked through the Yorkshire Wolds. One friend knew the name of every bird, and he recognised their songs from just a few notes. He could see them when I couldn’t. He knows the names of flowers and trees. I can tell an oak tree from a beech tree—but not even that with confidence. I marvel at flowers but know the names of few.

My ignorance began to weigh heavily on me as we walked. What is the point of knowing the difference between a mean, median, and mode if I don’t know the names of stars, flowers, trees, and fish? If abandoned on an island like Robinson Crusoe—or even in my own garden after a pandemic had killed everybody else—could I grow anything to eat? I fear not.

I agree with Richard that we need to live as part of nature, but my complete lack of knowledge of stars, flowers, trees, and birds doesn’t weigh heavily on me: I’m perfectly content to simply enjoy them.

This occurred to me on another occasion recently, as Wendy and I were walking under some trees, and she wondered aloud what species they were. Neither of us had a clue. On almost any other topic, I’d have later found myself searching the web, my curiosity driving me to learn a little about it. I don’t have that compulsion at all when it comes to the natural world around us: it’s completely absent.

And I think that’s okay. I think it’s legitimate and healthy to have areas of life that don’t drive me in that way. I think it’s good for my mental health to have things that I see and wondrously appreciate, rather than analysing. It’s nice to have the freedom to appreciate the shade of a tree without being nagged by an awareness that I’ve no idea whether it’s an oak or a beech tree.

Sometimes, being at peace with my ignorance is preferable to forcing self-development.

Wendy took the picture of the buzzard at the top of this post.

Pilita Clark’s column in the FT this week was about being overwhelmed by email.

We have reached the point where the benefits of communication are being outweighed by a dispiriting loss of production.

This was confirmed by a Microsoft report last month that found workers around the world are struggling to keep up with a “crush of data, information and always-on communications”.

The research showed people are spending 57 per cent of their workday on email, meetings and other communication but just 43 per cent on productive creation.

I worry that the solution to this view of the problem actually makes things worse. In my own area of work, there is a constant push—for example—to replace written reports with online ‘dashboards.’ This would, no doubt, shift the classification of the work from being ‘communication’ to something ‘productive’, even though the actual task that is being accomplished is the same thing—just often less efficiently, because dashboards often lack clear commentary and so require lots of people to consider data separately to reach the same conclusion. The communication becomes less efficient, but feels more ‘productive’.

I think the “crush of data” is the bigger problem than the deluge of emails. We’ve reached a strange point where people have concluded that data is transparency, whereas it is often actually obfuscation. I can, in no time at all, produce statistics on the number of notified cases of certain infectious diseases. But this explains very little: declining cases might be a ‘bad thing’ if they are likely to reflect poor access to healthcare or a problem with testing. Increasing cases might be a ‘good thing’ if they reflect work done to target high-risk populations. A dashboard is often much less helpful than an explanatory paragraph, even if one of those things looks ‘productive’ and the other looks like ‘communication’.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

This exhibition aims to show three different approaches to representing nature through painting.

It opens with pre-Raphaelite paintings, showing their highly detailed, almost photo-realistic approach to capturing the world. We move through rustic naturalistic paintings, which are still fairly realistic in style but concentrate more on character and atmosphere than fine detail. And we close with paintings by British Impressionists, who forwent the realistic to concentrate almost entirely on the wider experience of the places featured.

To give you an idea of my level of ignorance, before I went to this exhibition, I couldn’t have told you anything about the Pre-Raphaelite ideals or their approach to representing the world. I therefore felt educated by this exhibition: it was very well-curated, combining clear text with a plethora of well-chosen paintings which underlined each of the points the text made.

As you’d expect, some paintings struck me and others didn’t. I usually enjoy more abstract works, and was particularly taken with Samuel John Peploe’s On the Brittany Coast and Moses Adams’s Harbour Scene at Night, Runswick.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

I’ve never ventured into a branch of Home Bargains (or ‘Home and Bargain’ as it was called when I was growing up in its home county). But this neat fact from Andrew O’Hagan’s latest in The LRB was startling nonetheless:

Sales at Home Bargains (‘Top Brands. Bottom Prices’) have increased by £3.4 billion. Home Bargains has nearly 600 stores throughout Britain and the company’s owner, Tom Morris, enjoys the excellent designation of being the richest Liverpudlian in history. For fans of Paul McCartney, it’s depressing to find that there’s a lot more money in disposable toilet wipes than there is in writing ‘Love Me Do’.

Well, then.

Ever with the zeitgeist, on 7 July 2018 I decided to watch Frasier, a programme which had been out of production for 14 years. I’d only ever seen bits of the highly rated series, and find it easy to squeeze 20-ish minute programmes into my life from time to time, so it seemed like a good match.

Five years and 264 episodes later, I’ve finished it. I mostly enjoyed it: it had a serious dip in quality about two-thirds of the way through the series. The characters began acting in oddly uncharacteristic ways, which made me wonder about the relationship between actors who have played characters for years and writers who come to a series later on. It also seemed to lose its humour. But the final series was worth waiting for, a marked recovery which contained some of my favourite episodes.

Of course, in the time I’ve been watching, a revival has been announced which is scheduled for release later this year. Therefore, my claim to have watched every episode of Frasier is only temporarily true… though I suppose my completionist tendencies will mean I’ll end up watching in any case.

I’ve been wondering today whether I’ve sat through 264 episodes of any other scripted TV series.

In terms of long-running comedies, I watched all the American version of The Office, but that’s only 201 episodes. I’m uncertain whether I’ve seen every episode of Modern Family, but there were only 250 in any case. I gave up on Scrubs when they ditched most of the cast, and it only lasted 182 episodes anyway. It’s possible, but far from certain, that I’ve 264 episodes of The Simpsons, though I haven’t watched it in years.

Dramas are generally more my thing. The West Wing was a paltry 154, though as each episode was twice the length, I guess I’ve spent more time with those characters than Frasier’s. Six Feet Under was, somehow, only 63 episodes. I gave up on 24 after a few series, and even if I’d seen it all, it stopped at 204.

The obvious contenders would be soap operas, but I don’t watch any of them. But I probably watched 264 episodes of Neighbours when I was growing up.

I suppose what I’m trying to confess here is that Frasier probably now occupies a bigger slice of my cultural awareness than it ought to. At least watching it was fun.

Alex Mulholland is a Newcastle-based street artist, known as Mul, who is perhaps best known for his famous ‘running heart’ character. There is a vibrant, cartoonish, playful aspect to his work, which he has coined ‘disco style’. His work is seen in many locations in the North East, and he also has pieces in Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

I’ve been to see his very short-run ‘pop-up takeover’ exhibition, which is as playful as you’d expect from his work. There was a mobile interactive element to the exhibition—one could point one’s phone at pieces, and they would ‘come to life’. I’m afraid I didn’t engage, preferring to look at the work with my eyes rather than through a phone screen.

Perhaps because I didn’t engage with that element, I’ll confess that the whole thing felt a tiny bit flat to me. It’s great to see Mul getting recognition, but seeing a load of his work collected together in a gallery isn’t nearly as fun as happening across it in ‘the real world’.

I did, however, enjoy the video installation showing the creation of one of his street works, and I enjoyed the way he had brought the ephemera of the real world—signs, tyres, etc—into the gallery.

The three-day pop-up of ‘The Art of Disco’ continues at the Baltic, but only until tomorrow.

I’ve previously read Max Porter’s popular book Grief is the Thing With Feathers and not really liked it. But so popular is his writing that I thought I’d give it another go with Shy, a novella covering a few hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

Like the previous book, this just wasn’t up my street. The writing was a bit too abstract and confusing. Some people have described it as poetic, and perhaps it is, but it’s not a style of poetry with which I connect.

I don’t think I’d pick up another of Porter’s books, but mine seems to be a minority opinion, so don’t assume that you won’t like them.

There’s a typically brilliant piece by Liam Shaw on the LRB blog right now about the recent use of an AI tool to assist in the discovery of an antibiotic: abaucin.

There is much important detail in Shaw’s blog which was missing from most of the media coverage on this topic. Most crucially from a health perspective, this antibiotic is likely to be useful only in topical applications (onto the skin) whereas the majority of harm from the single species the antibiotic treats—Acinetobacter baumannii—is from sepsis. It is a significant discovery, but mostly in the sense of being a staging post on the long road of development, rather than as an end in itself.

Shaw is also specific about the techniques used, and their limitations:

As well as powerful neural networks, the machine learning model depends on the existence of carefully collected data from thousands of experiments. It’s still a vast screening project, just not as vast as it would be without the AI component: it uses the data to find the best ‘ready to use’ molecule from the available options.

The discovery of abaucin shows that AI is helpful for the early stage of winnowing down the vast space of chemical possibility, but there’s still a lot to do from that point onwards.

This is useful because it feels like we are in a moment where ‘AI’ is used to refer to myriad things, and using the term on its own is not very helpful. It feels akin to the early 2000s, when a whole group of technologies and applications were referred to as ‘the Internet’ (always capitalised) as though they were a single entity.

It’s notable that the abaucin study didn’t refer even once to ‘artificial intelligence,’¹ but used the somewhat more specific term ‘deep learning.’

When so many technologies, from large language models to recommendation engines to deep learning algorithms to theoretical artificial general intelligence systems are all condensed into two letters—AI—it doesn’t aid understanding. I’ve spoken to people this week who have interpreted the headlines around this to mean that something akin to ChatGPT has synthesised a new antibiotic on request—an understandable misunderstanding.

When scientists are warning about AI threatening the future of humanity, they aren’t talking about chatbots—yet you’d be hard-pressed to discern that from breathless headlines that refer to anything and everything as simply ‘AI’. In just a handful of days, even the well-respected BBC News website has published articles with headlines referencing ‘AI’ about drone aircraft, machine learning, delivery robots and image generation: all entirely different applications of a very broad class of technology.

If we’re to have sensible conversations about the ethics and regulation of AI technologies, I think there’s much to be done to try to help the public understand what exactly is being discussed. That ought to be the job of the news. Currently, it feels like we’re stuck in a cycle of labelling things as ‘AI’ as a strategy to garner attention, leading to conflated ideas and complete misunderstanding.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney, whose idea of the appearance of a human brain seems sketchier that I might have imagined.

1. Though, in fairness, the press release did. ↩