Portrait by Marco Grob

As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way. And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking—it’s real dangerous.

David Lynch in The Guardian, 23 June 2017,

A few years ago on this site, I bade reverb-drenched farewell to Angelo Badalamenti, the inimitable creator of the lush soundscapes of David Lynch films. Last month, Lynch joined Badalamenti in whatever surreal nothingness follows this world. Our world, on the other hand, will be all the poorer for it; the surreal nothingness beyond will find itself dull in comparison to the imagination by its new resident.

Lynch leaves us with a body of work that defies categorization and continues to haunt our collective imagination like a half-remembered dream. Could the hideous be beautiful? The banal, profound? And Lynch excelled at doing cross-hybrids of these questions: Is there hideous banality or beautiful profundity?

In Lynch’s world, absolutely yes: beautiful suburban streets with American flags and fire engines host that one overgrown, weedy lot on the corner that – shockingly and inexplicably – features a human ear, loosed from its owner by unthinkable means.

For the singularity and artistry of his unique visions, film students and cultural theorists will be pondering him and the meaning of his work for years.

I didn’t wake up this year intending to be the guy who reviewed Lisp textbooks, but these are definitely Lovecraftian stranger aeons…

At the apex of my frustration with Land of Lisp, I vented on Mastodon. In response, space-, Lisp-, and Medley-evangelist Paolo Amoroso suggested some well-regarded alternatives. Of them, the option that caught my eye for its considerate and, well, gentle tone, was David Touretzky’s book: COMMON LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation [CLAGISC hereafter].

When some more-experienced Lisp hands called it “too basic,” I was concerned. Having finished the work, I discovered something remarkable: CLAGISC educates beginners, but then – through clever editorial machinery – it bootstraps them into practicing intermediate Lisp programmers. Through a meta-circular process that unites writing, editing, graphic design, and play-testing, it transforms its own readers a second time.

Due to its superior editing and its gentle and practiced and human tone, I recommend starting explorations of Lisp with CLAGISC, a book that — ouroboros-like — seems to have consumed its own tail and unlocked an eternal golden braid in its own reading. Its end is its beginning; its fractal spin into the depths is actually the fractal spin out into the heavens. It is the rung beyond the last rung in Wittgenstein’s ladder.

Let me show you how this remarkable book works.

I don’t remember exactly when I got diagnosed as an asthmatic. Some of my earliest core memories are going to a hospital for pneumonia: trundling into a van in the dark; returning home to Slidell and convalescing while watching “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time, a rubbery “Robbie the Robot” from “Lost in Space” in hand.^{1 2} A few years later, on the cusp of Junior High, I would learn the diagnosis word “asthma,” start allergy shots, and begin a medicine regime (a super start to socially-awkward years!)

Since then, I’ve had a rescue inhaler prescription. I used the device less in Europe, even less in the Bay, and a tad bit more in NYC. Across the years, the brands and the actuator look-and-feel have changed, but I can say this: never have I seen a more beautiful inhaler than my current generic albuterol sulfate.

The design is clean and considered - it’s like Wes Anderson worked in pharma. It is, to quote the Old Man from A Christmas Story, “indescribably beautiful.“³