Good afternoon, beloved -
Those of us who knew him were kicked in the teeth, just into the new year, by hearing that our friend and colleague Nicolas Nova had died — of cardiac arrest, evidently, at the ludicrous age of 47. The world is suddenly colder and so much less interesting for his loss.
Somewhere there’s a photograph of Nicolas, me and our mutual friend Younghee on top of the Lingotto test track in Turin, during one or another of the events at which we'd cross paths in those years. That photograph perfectly sums up an entire epoch of our lives: that long-drawn-out summer of urgent-seeming design conferences and rambling conversations at long-tabled speakers’ dinners, each time in a new city. "That era has passed," to be sure. "Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore," and I carry not the slightest nostalgia for it. But my recollections of Nicolas stand out from my other memories of that time for their warmth.
Nicolas always seemed to be curious about some odd detail of the circumstances we'd encounter, in our explorations of whatever city happened to be at hand. Not simply "curious," actually, though that remains a word I strongly associate with him, but actively intrigued by the unexpected ways in which things fit together, and above all perpetually amused by the vagaries of human behavior that his inquisitiveness raised to the surface of attention. I understand that in more recent years these qualities made him something of a public intellectual to reckon with in the Francophone world, and a broadly recognized expert in what we might call the sociotechnical interface, but what I will never forget is how much pleasure he seemed to derive from the sheer idiosyncrasy of our negotiations with the material world.
I was trying to explain the Nicolas I knew then to a friend, and mentioned the particular gift he had for doing absolutely deadpan pratfalls, out of nowhere. I used to beg him to pull this trick at whatever event we happened to be at, as it would invariably reduce me to peals of the most helpless laughter whenever he did. It's certainly in questionable taste, but what I'm consoling myself with today is the thought of him having pulled one final, utterly unmatchable pratfall. I'm so grateful to have spent those happy, curious hours with Nicolas, wandering the alleys and loading bays and deserted lobbies of a unfamiliar city, and gutted to think I'll never get to do so again. My love and condolences to all of those whose life was enriched by having known him.
§ Right now I'm reading In Praise of Nothing, Ellen M. Chen's investigation of Taoist ontology; this reflection on Ursula Le Guin's turn toward Taoist fundamentals, in a psychoemotional moment not a million miles from the one in which we now find ourselves; "Yank" Levy's 1941 classic Guerrilla Warfare, available in just about legible PDF here; the British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's wiiiiiildly overambitious two-volume book about recent findings in neurocognitive science and their epistemic and metaphysical implications; and, oddly enough, this generous-to-a-fault consideration of Nick Land's "weird libertarianism." Uh, let's see...I'm listening to an incoherent grab bag of stuff (old Dirty Three on heaviest repetition recently, but also Ethel Cain and the ferocious Phyllomedusa); watching a gorgeous Australian neo-noir called Limbo; and, for the past week or so, using an elegant little app called Dropset to track my workouts, which I'm enjoying to the extent that I'm actually considering subscribing when my free trial runs out.
§ If you should happen to be in or around Amsterdam or Rotterdam toward the end of the month, I want to give you a heads up about two events I'm doing: Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam on the evening of January 30th, and School for the New City in Rotterdam the next night. I hope to see you at one or both! I'm also on the Beautiful Idea podcast week after next, which is a solid stoke.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 135 of Sunday, 12 January 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊