From a civilization I’ve never heard of

I was immediately drawn to the stele, in a way that I always am but most people aren’t. It’s a flat rectangular slab, totally blank except for some random text on it you can’t read. Why would that be attention drawing, when the rest of the room is filled with a variety of colors, 3D shapes, depictions of animals and human expression? This particular slab is not even decorated. Not the slightest bit. The only thing that saves it from being the monolith from 2001: Space Odyssey is a very slight taper.

But exactly what excites me about it is the nature of writing itself, the intense abstraction it involves, and the motivations people had for inventing and learning such a craft.

When I approach to read the object label, the one part I can understand, it says “Marble stele with a Lydian inscription”. If I’ve ever seen “Lydian” before, I don’t recall it. Sometimes a category will have few enough things in it that one could reasonably learn what they all are, like countries in the world or taxonomic phyla (not that anyone would…). Sometimes a category has unreasonably many, like the number of cities in the world or taxonomic genera. And sometimes it will have just enough that you always feel tantalizingly close to knowing them all but never quite get it. Writing systems are in that third kind of category, for me.

While the Lydian script is understood to be an alphabet similar to Greek, the label goes on to tell me that the Lydian language itself has not been fully deciphered. So not only do I not know that this stele says, but in fact no living person on earth knows.

(It is in this moment that I wonder whether Large Language Models have been trained on this particular inscription, and the Lydian corpus as a whole, and whether, in the vast latent space of the model’s parameters, it has perhaps already arrived at a representation for the text that lies close to its correct semantic meaning in English. I could not myself investigate this question, but those working at frontier AI companies could. Thus it may be that some non-human on earth knows what this stele says.)

I stare at the inscription for a while. It is very cleanly rendered and preserved, such that if I wanted, I could easily identify the character set and transcribe it. I see a few instances of a character that looks like the Chinese character for king, 王. (Their similarity is of course entirely coincidental.) In this inscription it appears doubled, 王王, most of the time, but not always. I see another distinctive character that looks like if a tilde was a three-leaf clover instead of two. And I see another that is likely the ancestor of the letter A. I start searching for repeated sub-strings, to identify words repeated in the text. I find both a repeated word, and words which share a prefix. Maybe they’re different verb tenses or noun declensions. In a short inscription, repeated words are either extremely common like “the”, or they’re what the inscription is about, like a person’s name.

This is all very pointless of course, as academics will certainly have identified all such frequency patterns long ago. But I get the same joy out of it that one does from doodling a frog, even though humanity has mastered the art of depicting frogs. It’s also quite satisfying to know that, if I kept going, and tried with patterns that weren’t just sub-string frequencies, I would in theory converge on a full understanding of the content of the inscription — at least as far as remains objectively present in the corpus.

Almost all writing in the world is incredibly boring, repetitive, distasteful, or inane. This also goes for stelai, which are quite fond of telling you who owns what or how great the current king is. But I still find myself intimately in contact with a level of appreciation beyond what the authors of the inscriptions choose to write. Inventory tablets are brilliant in part because the sheep could never count themselves. And it’s better for the king to declare his greatness by word, thus dissuading potential pretenders, than to be forced to prove his greatness by blows.

This week I am reading the much-anticipated new novel by YouTuber, unpaid intern at Good.Store, and best-selling author, John Green.

Although John is one of my favorite people, he’s not actually one of my favorite authors. I adore The Anthropocene Reviewed, but I’ve felt only lukewarm about his young adult fiction. To be fair, I read them in my 30s. I don’t read his young adult novels to enjoy them, but instead as an act of love for a person who I deeply respect. But Hollywood, Ending is not a young adult novel.

I’m only going to talk about the first chapter here, which is 4 quick pages. If you want, you can listen to John read them to you, as is his pre-release tradition. I did so, but when I got the book I reread them anyway, and somehow noticed several more things.

I’m in a phase of my life where I’m annotating books by default. It’s not very natural for me to annotate — indeed, to write things down. (If I’ve already had a thought, why do I need to write it down? If it was true or useful I’ll probably remember it, or regenerate it next time I read this.) So usually my books end up with just a handful of annotations scattered across three hundred or so pages.

But with Hollywood, Ending (or H,E as the Nerdfighters are calling it) I seem to be doing something closer to Bible study. “If this sentence had a secret message for me, what would it be?” or “Didn’t so-and-so say something that contradicted that earlier?” or “Why did John choose to tell us this detail, in this place?”

Here are some things I noticed in the first chapter. The book is about some actors during the filming of a movie about Andy Warhol. So while the book isn’t about Warhol, he’s a major presence.

• The very first line gives the very first name in the book, Matthew Malone, which is the actor playing Warhol. I noticed that “Matthew Malone” sounds a lot like “Marylin Monroe”, the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous works.
• On the second line, we get the name of the movie; Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Presumably this refers to the fact that Warhol has remained iconic. But (I see from reading Warhol’s wikipedia page) Warhol died at the age of 58. This is arguably before “old age”, so he arguably never got old.
• The introduction of a character on the second page sprinkles the paragraph with color. Andy Warhol’s work is known for being very colorful.
• Two pages in, and I notice that there have been a lot of brand names: Uber, Altoids, Moleskine, AirPods. Warhol’s work is known for bringing branding and consumerism into the realm of art, and causing us to question their presence in our lives. Is Green doing the same?

This is a pretty fun way to read a book. I crank up the pattern-matching, puzzle-solving part of my brain.

I’ll just give you one more; the first-person narrator, Juniper, is not unambiguously gendered. There are plenty of indicators of Juniper’s gender, but no one says a pronoun, nor “girl”, “boy”, etc. But we also don’t get any indication that this book is about transness, or even gender. John tends to do some kind of easter egg thing in each of his books, so I can’t help but wonder if the easter egg for H,E is that Juniper is never gendered.

I’m thrilled to read this book, and I hope you will too. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to participate in a book release as a cultural event.

On the way to the Met, you get a good slice of NYC atmosphere.

Let’s say you take the 4, 5 or 6 train to the 86th street station. Once you find your way up to street level, you’ll be greeted by some sidewalk sheds, and then you’ll have to figure out which way is west. If you can see the super skinny-tall 432 Park Avenue, that’s south. Walk one block west, and you’ll cross Park Avenue itself. It’s a two-way street, and it has a big median down the middle that’s filled with trees. I’ve always loved the way this double-wide canyon opens up to show more of the city in one view.

You’ll know when to turn left, because suddenly in front of you will be all green, with blue sky above. As you walk down 5th Avenue, you have a charcuterie board of Manhattan architecture on your left, and the vast greenery of Central Park on your right. If it struck your fancy, you could step into that park, head down one of the many footpaths, and spend a lovely evening lost among the trees and rocks and fields nestled inside one of the highest population density areas in the world.

But we’re here on a mission, so you keep straight. The sidewalk below your feet is oddly something resembling cobblestone. It’s pretty, and not quite made for walking, and it does a good job indicating that you’re not on just any sidewalk.

As you get closer, the food trucks get louder and more numerous. You’ll find the New York classics like hot dogs and gyros, and plenty of variety besides. You’ll also encounter the rows of people selling their own art. It’s never been clear to me how many of these stalls are genuine hand-made crafts made with love, and how many are tourist traps designed to feel like hand-made art. But I have a fondness for them nonetheless. Long ago, when I lived in New York, I considered spinning up a little art stall myself. I had some clever ideas for making art from wires, combining an aesthetic of industrialization with a feeling of optimism. But I’m not a doer, so I never did.

When you’re almost there, you’ll see a little playground. And wouldn’t you know, it’s a Met-themed playground, complete with pyramid and obelisk. Whenever I see it I think, “I should go check out that playground” before I realize that solo adults aren’t really supposed to do that.

Then you cross the next street. It’s kind of two streets, actually. The first one is just a street into Central Park. But the second one is 30 feet of road that then dives, understatedly, half a floor under ground level, into a dark little cave that is clearly not meant for you. I like to imagine that all the wonders of the museum have passed through this threshold, tucked away in an average-looking van or truck. In reality there are probably several loading areas into the museum. This is probably one of them, but I’ve never investigated; it feels like you’re not supposed to look directly at it. Just mind your business, and cross the street. Nothing to see here, just city stuff.

And now you’re reached the eastern-most cornerstone of the museum. Just on the other side of that limestone are some truly ancient treasures — the Egyptian wing. To get in there, you’ll have to walk a ways further, to the entrance at the top of the steps. But you wanted to do that anyway; they’re a worthy sight of their own.