Puts me in mind of Prynne taking nothing but a science textbook with him to Bangkok,
I arranged and clocked into an hotel, a very modest, cheap hotel in Bangkok, with the sole purpose of writing whatever this composition was going to be. And right up to the last minute I had no idea whether it would be anything at all. I took with me a mountain of paper and pencils, my laptop—in order to verify certain sorts of material I might want to lean on—and one book. The book choice surprised me and it would totally surprise you, because it was a very recently published textbook concerning a particular species of weak molecular forces known as van der Waals forces. When I saw that this book, V. Adrian Parsegian’s Van der Waals Forces: A Handbook for Biologists, Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists, had been published by the Cambridge University Press, I just knew it was going to be an *important book to me. I couldn’t tell you why, but I’d already encountered this phenomenon of molecular forces and I knew I was going to care about it, partly because it was going to support a certain instinct I had about the structure of material things, which was increasingly an important question to me. I’d become a kind of materialist in some abstract sense of the word, more progressively as my thought practises have developed.
