Hello from Oklahoma. The second edition of Septology covers topics including mail bombs in Greece, the phrase “Smiley is world champion,” Mr. Gospel and his associate Mr. Holy Spirit, all the ships sent to Troy to show the magnitude and magnificence of the Trojan War, reading, comparing, annotating, cross-referring, running, and being absolved of all desire.

The System

Imagine you're getting a new CEO at your job, and you get an email that says "Please welcome our new CEO, who denies breaking into our competitors' warehouse and destroying its merchandise with hammers at his last company." I think I would have two responses:

“Yikes! Maybe I would have wanted someone a little more stable here. Sounds like there's a real risk he gets in trouble over that kind of behavior.” and/or 

“You know he's got that dog in him. It's good for business if our competitors' merchandise gets destroyed by hammers.”

Now imagine a different scenario: instead of this happening to a company you already work at, you get hired seven years later. The firm has risen to success not seen in decades. You ask your coworkers about the CEO and they say "Well I mean, look at us. It's been a great few years." And you know what, they're right.

Anyway here’s this headline I read:

In 2022, Nottingham Forest Football Club returned to the Premier League for the first time this millennium, and I decided to be a fan of it. For a few years before that, I’d been a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, which were one of the better teams in the league, and I thought it would enjoy cheering for an underdog instead. Nottingham had enjoyed a brief stint in glory as champions of Europe in 1979 and 1980 and I liked the history. I also thought that the Robin Hood associations were fun. Nottingham would also have the relative population of like Cincinnati or Kansas City in the US, and I’ve always been a fan of smaller cities. If a fan from the UK decided to get into baseball and start with the Reds, instead of a more famous team, I think I’d appreciate that.

At the time I knew nothing about the team’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, or his many controversies. I saw a few things here or there, but nothing of substance until last week:

Marinakis has accused a rival of accusing him of match fixing, dodging sanctions around Russian oil sales, being "deeply and actively involved in international heroin trafficking," sending "a postal bomb to the bakery owned by the family of a Greek referee who refused to change a call during a game," and being “the leader of a criminal organisation known as ‘The System.’"

I don’t know if those accusations are true (Marinakis seems confident enough they’re not to countersue for libel) but the photo really doesn’t do him any favors, does it? I don’t look at that and say “No…him? A drug lord? Surely not!”

But what I do know is true is that Marinakis has been fined and suspended for five Forest games because he spat toward an official. Nottingham’s head coach, Nuno Espirito Santo, was also fined and suspended for an outburst directed toward officials a few games ago. Both men appealed and lost. [1]

So you may look at that and think “Wow. Rough days for Nottingham Forest. Let me offer Tim my sympathy.”

Thanks! Don’t need it. Nottingham Forest are having their best season in decades. They’re third in the league for the first time since 1998.

Last week was the first time since May 1999 that Forest have won three Premier League games in a row. Striker Chris Wood has scored eight goals in nine appearances on 18 shots. That total is second in the league behind Erling Haaland, who is considered perhaps the best player in the world. Only Liverpool have conceded fewer goals and kept more clean sheets (shutouts) than Nottingham this year. And in September, Forest beat them for the first time since 1969.

And the success seems poised to continue long-term: this week Marinakis recruited a man named Edu, who had been sporting director at Arsenal and had helped lead them to an FA cup victory and two 2nd-place finishes in the Premiership.

All this has been a little dizzying for me. My first two years as a Forest fan were spent hoping they didn’t get relegated out of the league again, and it was close both times. Now we’re in position, for now, to play Champions league football next year.

My favorite sports team is American football’s Green Bay Packers, and they are notable for two things: consistent success since the mid-90s (as well as the all-time championships record), and also by being publicly owned. It would be literally impossible for the owner to be accused of heroin smuggling or match fixing or spitting simply because there is no single owner. We have shareholders (like my dad, and my brother, and my grandpa) and a board of directors. And they have managed the team very responsibly and very well and with very little drama at all.

So being a Forest fan is a rush. Are we top three or bottom three? It’s a rollercoaster, and a suspicious-looking Greek shipping magnate is in the control booth. I feel like Oliver Twist after he fell in with Fagin and the Artful Dodger and all those criminals. This feels wrong, doesn’t it? It’s dangerous to be associated with these people who break the rules? But it’s so exciting. I’m having so much fun.

[1] Finally, as an aside: I also think it's funny that these punishments and accusations of wrongdoing involve men named Evangelos and Espirito Santo. I know it's just because I'm unfamiliar with these European names, it would be like looking at the name "Christopher" and seeing "Christ," but it remains funny that Mr. Gospel and his associate Mr. Holy Spirit are mired in controversy. Reminds me of this old Tumblr post:

Turn Every Page

There comes a time (I think) in every young man’s life when he puts together that there’s an important difference between spying and the type of adventuring that James Bond and Ethan Hunt do. The latter would be more along the lines of military special operations. Actual spying is about collecting information, often referred to as intelligence. (And at this point the boy thinks “oh! Right. Like the Central Intelligence Agency.” Yeah man you’ve got it!) It’s not unlike research in the library; the trick, for a spy, is going to the right library.

The novels of John le Carré emphasize this drudgery as a crucial part of the intelligence-gathering process. In Tinker Tailor Tailor Spy, the best novel of espionage around, our hero George Smiley solves the case like this, without the slightest hint of glamour.

Through the remainder of that same night, the light in the dormer window of [Smiley’s] attic room at the Islay Hotel burned uninterrupted. Unchanged, unshaven, George Smiley remained bowed at the Major’s card table, reading, comparing, annotating, cross-referring…

And then he had it.

No explosive revelation, no flash of light, no cry of “Eureka,” phone calls to Guillam, Lacon, “Smiley is a world champion.” Merely that here before him, in the records he had examined and the notes he had compiled, was the corroboration of a theory.

The information is the key, and the spy’s crucial job is to collect as much as they can in order to make the right connections between everything they know.

John le Carré was a spy but he was also a writer, and the connections between those two professions were not lost on him. I have a lecture of his where he says “a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of the secret agent.” When you’re researching, collecting what’s valuable and discarding what isn’t, and then putting it down on paper to explain to someone else, maybe that could be spying, but it sounds an awful lot like the writing process.

The modern hero of Learning Everything You Can About Something And Then Writing It Down is named Robert Caro. He has spent over sixty years writing about two men, Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, and I am not alone in saying if he dies before finishing the last Johnson book I’ll kill him. Robert Caro is 89 years old.

He was scheduled to speak at one of my classes in school before there was a global pandemic and we excused all the 85-year-olds from any unnecessary extra work. But it’s been at least that long since I’ve understood that he is a more famously thorough researcher than anybody else currently living, perhaps of all time, and now it’s difficult for me to establish exactly why, or how. He’s been writing about one man since 1975, if that’s any indication? He moved, actually established residence, in the Hill Country of Texas to understand what type of place it is, because Lyndon Johnson was born there? He cut 300,000 words (about 800 pages) from his book The Power Broker so that it could print at 1,200 pages?

I have his book about writing (it’s called Working) but he’s too humble there to say anything useful about how impressive he is. Instead he says “I always liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people.” He got his start when an editor said “From now on, you do investigative work.” And young Bob said “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.” and the editor says “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

I am reading The Power Broker now, learning about “Robert Moses and The Fall of New York.” I am 345 pages in and hoping—optimistic but not confident—that I will finish by the end of the year. The amount of information on display is dazzling. This one took seven years, before he started on the Johnson stuff, and I’m surprised he got it done that fast.

Robert Caro really despises what his subject, Robert Moses, did to New York. Moses spent his life collecting power for his own benefit and enabling powers greater than himself, all at the expense of people who had very little power whatsoever, the very people who would have benefitted from Moses’ assistance the most. That’s a highfalutin way of saying he tore down a bunch of neighborhoods to build highways, and that he bullied his way to the top. And Caro spends twelve hundred pages understanding why and how that happened, and Moses comes out of it not looking so good a lot of the time. The navigation of his Wikipedia page leads you down the line of “Legacy > Appraisal > Criticism and The Power Broker > Racism.”

One of the only critiques you can level against The Power Broker and Caro is that it sometimes seems pretty flattering toward someone it’s meant to
denigrate. Admittedly, I’m in the first section of the book, before the power has really gotten to Moses’ head, but some of the things he’s able to build, the roads, the bridges, the parks—it’s hugely impressive work. His time working as staff in the legislature was marked by his own long nights of researching law and precedent, and he eventually became known as “The best bill-drafter in Albany.” (p. 32) The introduction to The Power Broker starts with a list of roads and bridges Moses built, a litany that rolls off the tongue like a poem, and Caro says that section was inspired by The Iliad, which lists “all the ships that are sent to Troy to show the magnitude and magnificence of the Trojan War.”

“Magnitude and magnificence” are tricky ideas when you think the person who inspired them was weird and mean and bad. But you can’t spend 1,200 pages and years of your life devoted to studying one man and not be at least a little impressed when you walk away.

But maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. Robert Moses stayed in power for sixty years because people liked having someone around who was able to get so much done. Caro might not be immune to his charm, but neither am I, the reader. And that could be the most impressive part of Moses’ legacy: he was terrible, and racist, and power-hungry, but you do, under the circumstances, gotta hand it to him. Why else would you spend 1,200 pages reading his story?

I was thinking about all last week when I read another spy novel, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Two moments struck me.

First, the narrator has been sent to infiltrate a commune in France, and there’s this one annoying neighbor who hates the commune so much and she sees the narrator (spy) walking back one day and says “So you’ve gone to see them, have you? I’ve got some things to say about them!” and the narrator is like “Oh, word? That would be great” and the neighbor says “what” and the spy says “Yeah I would love to listen to you. Will you move the stuff off your front seat and give me a lift into town so you can tell me.” And the way that looks—especially from the neighbor’s perspective—is “Wow! This sweet woman actually wants to listen to me and hear what I have to say.” Which is a nice thing to do.

Second, the narrator has hacked Bruno’s emails and has compiled a dossier of Bruno’s life. She knows he left farming and went to live in a cave after his daughter was killed in a tractor accident. This was years ago. But at one point another character rolls his eyes and says like “Oh, Bruno, he’s so anti-industrial, he hates tractors, like he’s so special, he thinks he’s closer to the land or whatever.” And the narrator wonders: does this person, ostensibly a friend to Bruno, not know about the daughter? Does he not care? Did he know at one point and has forgotten, which is very similar to not caring? The narrator knows about the daughter, and she’s very sympathetic to Bruno—whose emails she hacked! Because she’s spying on all these people!

But even if you’re ultimately trying to undermine someone, listening to them still looks like kindness. If you pay attention to someone and what they say and what’s important to them, they will feel cared for.

Music: What do we think?

I think: good. Here’s the “acceptance” playlist of songs I’m theoretically keeping in rotation. Includes one by Big Payno, may God rest his soul.

And here’s what I’m actually listening to, according to the Spotify data. Joy Oladokun features heavily on it; good record she just put out. When we got married, Becky’s processional was a song by Joy Oladokun and I think that’s very sweet :)

74.55 Miles

is how much I’ve run since October 7. Last month was 32.3 and I said “I hope that number gets bigger next issue” and now look at us!

This past month of running has coincided with a weird quirk in my running life: after eleven years, I switched my tracking from Nike Run Club to Strava. My motivation was mainly social; I want to see what my friends and other runners were up to. There are leaderboards and I want to climb them. The other reason is that the Nike data is also pretty siloed to its own app; I don’t have much control over the data I generated, and for vague intellectual property and privacy reasons I would like to.

In fact, the only way to import my Nike data into Strava is to manually upload a computer file called a .tcx, which stores times and GPS data as text. And the only way to collect my .tcx files is to fill out an obscure form on the Nike website, and then they send you an email with a .zip of stuff four days later. I did that, and now I have a list of 944 runs I’ve gone on since October 2013.

Here’s the problem: when I upload them to Strava there’s a glitch, most of the data is reading incorrectly, and I haven’t figured out how to fix it, so the import is paused and I’ve only been recording new runs I’ve been on over the past few weeks.

This unusual situation is producing some unusual results.

Once a week I try to run a 5k as fast as I can. So far I’ve been able to do that with an average mile pace of about 8:30-8:15. Whenever I improve, Strava says “oh well done Tim, that’s your second-fastest time in the 5k.” But I’ll never reach my actual best time, because the glitches have Strava believing I’m the fastest man alive.

On one level, the primary and most important, I’m running because I enjoy it, and it helps my physical and mental health. But I also have speed and pace goals. When I talk about running with Becky, she asks what pace I would like to be running, and I have two answers. First, I want to keep dropping my 5k time every week: so if I was at an 8:31 mile one week and 8:30 the next and 8:15 the next, that’s great.

But the other answer is I would like to be the best I have ever been. I want to beat my all-time records. So from that perspective, it rankles a little bit that I’ll never actually surpass my inhuman Strava benchmarks.

Theoretically it would be fine to keep chasing my second-fastest 5k time, but Nike would tell me that my record is 21:00 on October 15, 2020; under seven minutes a mile. And it feels foolish to accept 8:15 as my best when I know it’s actually 6:46.

But even then the apps fall short, because I had been running before I downloaded the Nike app in 2013. I wasn’t collecting that data, but other people were, and they will tell you that at the CIML conference cross country meet held on my home course at Fort Dodge on October 13, 2011, I ran five thousand meters in 19:30, for an average mile pace of 6 minutes and 18 seconds.

I don’t have a destination in mind so much as a direction I want to go, and that direction is faster. The first goal would be to go faster this week than I did last week. Next I’d want to be faster than I was four years ago, my Nike record. And then if I follow that path long enough (but before I run a four-second mile), I’ll find this fifteen-year-old. King of the hill. For now.

Two Articles With Very Good Headlines

“The Best Thing About Sci-Fi Movies Is The Corridors”

And who can deny it?

Above: Star Wars (1977), dir. George Lucas. Below: The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), dir Robert Wise.

“Why So Many Successful Professionals Are Quitting Their Jobs and Applying to Harvard Divinity School”

(Pro tip with this: archive.ph is good to use if you’re trying to ensure webpages stay up in an online era that often feels unreliable. The fact that it gets you around paywalls is just a bonus.)

I would also enroll in Harvard Divinity School if I could. Maggie Rogers is one of the people who enrolled at HDS to refocus her life, pretty cool. Her master’s thesis was the full-length LP Surrender which, uh, sometimes sounds like a thesis instead of an album. Her performance at Coachella fulfilled a public presentation requirement for her coursework.

The twist in this article is that this course of study (reflecting on The Big Questions And What Humans Owe To Each Other) is something primarily available to people with a lot of time and money on their hands. Again: would if I could!

That actually reminds me of my three wishes I would ask a genie if the chance ever came up. (I assume we all still do this?) First I would like one billion dollars. Second I would like to be absolved of all desire. Haven’t decided on number three yet.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. Expect the next one on December 7, which is a Saturday. Here’s the Are.na channel with most of the stuff I collected in making this issue.

Good luck out there.