Hello from Oklahoma, where the highs are in the 80s and 90s and summer is proceeding as if nothing had ever happened. This place will simply be hot forever until one day it isn’t, which reoccurs every year but it always surprises me. I keep meaning to let it happen gracefully, take one day at a time until one day it’s cold, but instead I keep checking the weather.

This is the first issue of Septology. This month is about my beautiful bookshelves, Tanzania, John Wick, a decline in the labor force participation rate, getting offline, and music: “Let’s talk about it.”

Library Science

Everything has a home.

The writer Austin Kleon has advocated for not organizing your bookshelves in any way. When you're rummaging through your whole collection looking for something, you'll probably find something else that's even more interesting. This also promotes slowness, rather than hyper-efficiency: a more human search. It's an evocative, touching idea, and I completely reject it because I love the process of organizing information.

I have new bookshelves and I have been stretching that muscle. I cannot stop talking about how much I enjoy having these shelves in my house.

My wife Becky deserves the credit for this: it was her vision to craft the shelves. They were the simple Billy ones from IKEA, but then we framed them and attached them together with wood from Home Depot, then caulked and spackled all the seams so they look fully built in.

When we put up moulding around the rest of the room, we’ll frame the shelves in, too. Then we’ll really be in business.

They look beautiful. I feel like storage and furniture that had been spread throughout the room flew upward onto the shelves like a magnet, and now the rest of the space is cleaner and more open. It’s an easier room to spend time in.

It was not very long ago that I got married to my wife Becky Hatton and as a result I moved house. For those four months, my nonfiction has been in my office, my fiction has been in our bedroom, her fiction has been in the guest bedroom, and her nonfiction has been in the front room, which functions as both her office and also another living room. Children's books and cool coffee table books and zines were already on a shelf in the den. A few special sets (including Becky's vintage Ray Bradbury collection) were on another shelf in the den. Some coffee table books were on coffee tables.

The disadvantage there is that I have to lay out that whole paragraph—lots of books are in lots of different places. This is the problem that the new den shelves were meant to solve. We had enough shelf space, and the advantage of a blank slate, to do exactly what we wanted. But the inevitable question came up: what did we want?

Books can be organized by the name of the author, or the title, or the color of the spine, or by the Dewey Decimal System, or by the Library of Congress system, or by date of publication, or by a more general vibes-based approach to subject matter, or by height, or by the physical material of the pages, or by whether it's mostly words inside or mostly pictures. We considered all of these and integrated most of them.

You've lived with other people, you know what it's like. If my way is not your way, then we need to work together to come up with a secret third way that works for us. Our house became the School of Athens, full of philosophies.

The author's last name is the simplest category, so we might want to apply that as broadly as possible, but it doesn't make sense for comic books or coffee table books. The kids' books should stay together, but at what point to you cut them off and switch to YA? Do we, two 28-year-olds, have enough YA to merit separating them from general fiction?

Twice I've worked in university libraries, and I'm nostalgically fond of the Library of Congress organizational system, a fondness formed in dense stacks that crackled with potential knowledge in Oklahoma and New York. But is that enough of a reason to inflict that the Library of Congress categorization system on somebody else?

My taste for organization formed the base of my skepticism toward the rainbow wall: I don't think about books by the colors of their spines, I think about them based on their content. But, especially on a large enough scale, organizing books by color is an immense accomplishment and a beautiful thing to look at. What is the point of living in a home if you can’t fill it without beautiful things to look at?

Here's what we ultimately came up with. There are two sheets embedded here.

The big color-coded wall is intact with Becky’s nonfiction in the other room. My nonfiction is organized alphabetical by last name of the author in the guest bedroom, for now. Vinyl records A through Jepsen are on the console with the record player. Cookbooks are in the kitchen.

All spelled out, I'll acknowledge there’s a lot going on. I can imagine a flow chart, or a bit of computer code.

It’s a complicated system, but it works. Every book has a place where it goes.

This process was special and sweet not because we found The Perfect Organization System, but because we were able to lay the foundation for what our house is going to look like in the short term and the long term. Right now the space just functions really well: I feel like storage that had been spread throughout the room flew upward onto the shelves like a magnet, and now the rest of the space is cleaner and more open. It’s an easier room to spend time in.

But looking ahead, we know where we’ll put more books and records as we build those collections. We know where the toys go. We’re more and more ready to spend years and years together.

It’s Going To Be Okay. But It’s Going To Be Different.

Message Not Received

At work this summer I wrote a big long research report called The Rising Storm: Building a Future-Ready Workforce to Withstand the Looming Labor Shortage, and that came out last month. My company studies labor economics, and the way the report worked was that two economists wrote it and did all the research, and then I rewrote it to smooth out the language and make sure the order made sense.

Here’s the short version of what we said: the US got used to having a ton of workers around when the Baby Boomers were on the job, but now they're retiring and fewer workers are taking their place, so we're going to run out of people.

The long version is 70 pages. The design is excellent, which is a credit to my friend Daniel.

Two things I want to say about this. First, my favorite part was the first chapter, laying out the Boomers' labor market. Competition was very high when these millions of people joined the workforce, and that produced a certain mindset: "I need to work long hours to stand out," or "I need to get a college degree to stand out," or "We better not let any immigrants in because they'll take our jobs." And that all made a certain amount of sense! Hard to fault them for thinking in their own economic best interest.

But that's not where we are anymore. There used to be a surplus of workers but now there's a deficit. A college degree doesn't help you stand out, and/so not everyone needs to get one. There's more time for work-life balance. Foreign-born workers make up a huge percentage of workers in the most important industries, like healthcare, agriculture, and construction. So even though the Boomers’ anti-competition perspective made sense in the '80s and '90s, that doesn’t mean you should hold the same views if conditions change.

All that's in the report. The other point I want to raise is more behind-the-scenes: this thing is super unwieldy to understand. The main author, Ron, he presents on this stuff just about every day, and he's deep in the sauce. He knows birth rates and retirement ages and looking at all those statistics, he really understands that there are problems ahead, and he can talk to you about those numbers for hours. Many organizations pay him handsomely to do so.

The problem is that all of those numbers are very complex. Our report came out with conclusions like “If the Bureau of Labor Statistics workforce projections from 2022-2032 are true, and x amount of growth has already happened, and the Congressional Budget Office population projections are also true, then population growth will outpace workforce growth by percentage y over the next eight years.” And “If everyone joined the workforce as soon as they turned 16 (and we know they don’t) and everyone left as soon as they turned 65 (even though we just said they retire earlier), and we subtract all the 65-year-olds from the 16-year-olds, that will give us the net change in the workforce every year. It's always been a positive number, but in 2027 we get a negative number.“

Those statistics are true, but they're so, so complicated. I believe the underlying premise of the report, that there's a worker shortage coming, but it takes the full 70 pages to get there. Even though the truth is simple—an aging workforce produces worker shortages—the explanations are not.

And I think that's my fault. Now that I've gotten a little bit of space from the writing, I think it's a failure of clarity that we couldn't hone in on some really interesting stories in the data. I spent so much time smoothing out the paragraphs and the order of the content that I didn't spend enough time revising what I was actually given and trying to find some more interesting numbers or some clearer messaging.

Our ultimate conclusion was that the future in the US looks similar to Japan right now. The businesses with enough money to pay higher wages are going to. Maybe there's some urbanization if some of the smaller towns don't have enough electricians or plumbers to go around. Automation goes up. Some industries struggle. Not all.

I love this picture I’ve seen on Tumblr. Maybe this should have been our big takeaway.

Magic vs. God

The Bright Sword

In the circles I run in, it would not be controversial to say that the great works of fantasy fiction are steeped in Christian theology. Since nearly every fantasy author has spent time in Narnia and Middle Earth, the entire genre shows evidence of their influence. But this presents a paradox: fantasy is full of magic and non-human creatures in such a way that feels at odds with the doctrine of the Bible. I'm old enough to remember the controversy when Harry Potter first came out, because it celebrates witchcraft, which the Bible explicitly condemns in Deuteronomy 18. The divine and the magical contradict one another.

Usually the right thing to do with this paradox is ignore it, because who cares. Fantasy stories are make-believe and pretend. The God of the Bible and stories about magic don't have to coexist.

In The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, they do coexist, he makes a point of it. The premise of the book is that a young knight gets to Camelot right after King Arthur has died and just about all the other knights along with him. There are like six people left at the Round Table. Tough break for the fellas.

Arthur, in Grossman's telling, was a Christian king who ruled with God on his side. If he weren't, he wouldn't be interested in the Holy Grail, for instance. This is in contrast to the wild magic of Britain, home of Merlin and the druids, where every breeze and brook has a name and can be bargained with. Now that the Christian king is dead, the dark woodsy forces of magic would love to avoid another. By contrast, the ragtag leftover knights of the Round Table are trying to restore what they just lost.

If Grossman were interested in resolving that fundamental conflict (big if), I think he would lean more on the magic side; the most Christian character ultimately falls to pride and power and does not acquit himself well. But what I found especially sweet and surprising about the book is how tenderly and honestly the Christian characters express what it means to be devoted to God, even though he seems completely uninterested in helping them. Read some:

"People thought I wanted to be a perfect knight, and I told myself that, too, but I see now that what I was really trying to do was to control God. I knew that if I was perfect then God could deny me nothing, not even if He wanted to. He would have to love me. I would force His hand."

A man made of lesser steel would've collapsed, or gone mad, but God's love had pounded Lancelot like a red-hot sword on an anvil till he was sharp and unbreakable.

"God is terrible, and He is merciful, and the really hard thing is that you never know which you're going to get. Sometimes it actually made me angry, because I knew He shouldn't love me anymore. I was unworthy, and contaminated with sin, and I knew God knew, but He loved me anyway."

"Do you feel God's love here?" Collum asked. "In the monastery?"
"Not yet. But I will pray and honor God until He returns or until I die."

Dagonet had no physical wounds to heal, but he had spiritual ones, grievous and profound, and the Grail made them better. He looked around at the world and instead of a wasteland of empty signs he saw for the first time that paradise of order and meaning that other people saw.

How could he never have seen it before, when it was all around him and always had been? He was blind, but now he saw. Tears of joy flowed freely down his face. He supposed it was what people meant by grace.

Once the Grail was gone the clouds gathered again, and his thoughts dove back down into the depths where they habitually resided. But he remembered what it was like to feel at peace. He would do anything, anything, to feel that again.

And here's Collum at the end of a quest:

Now he understood he had been wrong to worry about the Holy Lance, or anything else. Whatever would happen would happen. No more questions; in this place there were only answers...Collum felt weightless, enveloped in God's will, drowned in it like a bee in honey.

There would be no more fighting or struggling or hoping; only what He willed, and whatever He willed would be right. It always had been, if only he'd been able to feel it like he did now. Like a child dancing with his father.

A weaker book, drawing on the same foundation, would draw the contrast between the tangible magic evident in Britain to an abstract loyalty to an invisible God, in order to highlight the Christians’ naïveté. But that doesn't happen in The Bright Sword, because Grossman treats both sides fairly. When God is present, it matters. And reading the book, I felt it.

Two footnotes to this. I bought The Bright Sword on a trip to Colorado after finishing the others I'd brought with me, but it's so big (678 pages) that I couldn't fit it in either of my bags and I had to carry it with me in my hands all the way back to Tulsa. It was a risky bet, that the story would be worth the logistical hassle, but it paid off.

Second, Lev Grossman has been writing his own newsletter about creating The Bright Sword called "A Season In Hell," which is a perfect name and a treat for those of us who enjoy reading about the writing process. The latest edition came out over the weekend.

Did you know the locals pronounce it Tan-ZAN-ia, not Tan-zan-EE-a?

Air Traffic Control

My dad flies from Minnesota to Africa probably four or five times a year. He usually goes direct from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Accra, Ghana, or to Johannesburg, South Africa. Those connections are built on the foundations first laid in 1621 (in Ghana) and 1652 (in South Africa) when the Dutch West India Company established the Gold Coast and Cape colonies.

It is very easy to get from Minnesota to those countries because the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport is a hub for Delta Air Lines, and Delta is part of the Skyteam alliance with the Dutch flagship airline KLM, which connects Amsterdam to western and southern Africa through a history of colonialism.

So when we had friends over for dinner last week and one couple said they were flying into Tanzania (southeastern Africa), I asked them where they were connecting, and they said Paris, I thought, “This must be because Tanzania was a French colony.”

Then I looked it up and found out Tanzania was not a French colony. The Ottoman Empire ruled there for a short time, and Turkish Airlines offers reasonable fares, but France never came close [1].

Here's what I found out while I was investigating this mystery and learning facts about Tanzania: it is the largest country, by population, fully south of the equator. Its population is three times larger than Australia. So when I looked up "why is Air France offering Tanzania flights" the answer, very simply, is that there are a lot of people in Tanzania and also there are beautiful beaches there.

Sometimes decisions of business and logistics are rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation. Sometimes there are many people who would like to go to the beach.

[1] Those fares were for main cabin. No telling what business class on Turkish Airlines will cost you these days.

Music.

Let’s talk about it.

I’ve pulled my top 50 most-listened-to songs off Spotify for the past month, and you’ll notice that the album In Waves by Jamie xx takes up 12 of the top 15 spots, and the first two songs on the album (“Wanna” and “Treat Each Other Right”) are the top two. Becky says that album “sounds like I’m having a stroke.”

The song “Mentos & Coke” by MICHELLE is one I only heard Friday but it’s climbing the rankings very quickly.

Also available is my playlist “Acceptance,” which I curate myself, instead of having it automatically generated. I like to imagine these are the songs I actually have on heavy rotation (even though the evidence above disagrees).

“Acceptance” is named after the third book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. My playlist “Annihilation,” named after the first book, collects all the songs I’ve put on Acceptance over the years.

Two Recommendations

When I listen to the bands Khruangbin or FM Forest, I feel like the music is spilling gracefully out of the speakers on my desk and suspending me in a new sonic world, I feel enveloped from the desk up, kind of like this:

32.3 Miles

is how much I’ve run since September 7. I’m hoping that number gets bigger next issue.

I also watched John Wick Chapter 4 a few weeks ago and it reminded me of the poem “John Wick Is So Tired” by Kyra Wilder. In an interview she talks about how marathon training inspired her to write it: like John Wick in John Wick, your body does not want to do what you’re asking it to, but it needs to, and it’s so good at it. But you’re so tired. Good poem.

Chilling Out And Having Fun On The Computer

I read two other books this month, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer and Offline Matters by Jess Henderson. They approach the same idea from different angles: Comer says we need to follow Jesus’ example and live life more slowly, which means taking the Bible’s teachings on Sabbath seriously, prioritizing rest as something we’re called to, as opposed to constant productivity and connectedness. 

Henderson says all digital marketing is so boring because it’s all being optimized within an inch of its life to succeed online, even though we all know that’s not the content that we find moving and enjoyable. So get offline and stop being inspired by, and creating content for, the same feeds as everybody else. That book is like a shorter, angrier version of the book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka, which came out earlier this year.

I also read an interview with a designer who was on her computer too much so she quit to become a gardener, and she absolutely loves it, which is probably not a surprise and also probably an inspiration.

Rap icon Chuck D would express a similar thought in a shorter format:

(Chuck D is on my mind because Becky organized a conference that he spoke at, so we met. This conference also kept our house very busy, which is partially why I picked up the Sabbath book.)

All the good ideas point in the same direction: rest, longer attention spans, organic creativity instead of optimized content. And those ideas are some of the reasons are why I’m writing 3,500 words over e-mail instead of posting them somewhere else.

Thanks for reading. Expect the next one on November 7, which is a Thursday.

From Tulsa,