article
- Beckett, Chris. Dark Eden. Corvus, 2012.
- Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harvest Book / Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.
- Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others, Small Beer Press, 2002, pp. 91-140.
- Hachemi, Munir. Living Things. Translated by Julai Sanches. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024.
- Hachemi, Munir. The Mulai. Translated by Julia Sanches, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 2014.
- Libertella, Héctor. El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000.
- Miéville, China. Embassytown. Del Rey, 2012.
- Morrissey, John. Bird Deity. Text Publishing, 2026.
- Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1985.
-
A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
In this article I examine two opposing worldviews when it comes to collections and the environment: viewing the world as something to exploit instrumentally, versus recognising its intrinsic value. I guess I’m interested in whether our systems of gathering and keeping serve to honour the world or merely extract value from it.
-
How to decide what to include in your notes
This article explores commonplace books, personal collections of information, and the deliberate choices behind what we collect (and what we discard).
-
How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
Here I warn against building a “magnificent but useless encyclopaedia” and I champion active, meaningful engagement over passive hoarding. Easier said than done, but I’m trying.
-
This is where I reflect on how personal notes construct a library of interpretations, and I ask how we decide what’s worth preserving.
-
The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book
This article looks at the mechanics of commonplace collecting and reflects on the risk of collecting quotes without genuinely digesting them. And yes, there’s a poem about the toe of the year.
I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club
The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.
Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.
You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.
I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.
Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.
*You can follow along with the continuing adventures of Writing Slowly by means of the RSS feed, or if you prefer, you can subscribe to good old email. *
Thoughts on The Mulai, a novel by Munir Hachemi
The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).
I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.
This is the kind of intellectual science fiction that intrigues me: lost or unknown ‘alien’ civilisations, or the remnants of failed attempts at planetary colonisation, clinging on to what they remember of ‘civilisation’, or perhaps abandoning it for something stranger and more adaptive.
Familiar tropes are hard at work here. The mysterious nearly-human culture with its almost-but-not-quite-indecipherable language. The unreliable anthropologist, who reports on their observations and is both repelled and strangely attracted to what they encounter. The sudden reversals of expectation and the uncomfortable presentiment of doom.
I’ve enjoyed several books that work with and extend these ideas. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time asks whether it’s possible to work for a better future without succumbing to Utopian fantasies. China Miéville’s Embassytown addresses the near impossibilities of translation across incommensurable cultures and physiologies, as does Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life”. Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden explores the travails of the descendants of human colonists, abandoned on an inhospitable planet. Bird Deity by John Morrissey depicts the stark brutality of planetary colonisation that exploits everything it touches while understanding almost nothing of the indigenous inhabitants it depends on (Here’s a review). And hovering behind all these works is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, that “ambiguous utopia.”
I make this litany to mark out the familiar territory, but as Chris Beckett said of his novel, “it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.”
And indeed these recurring themes remain vital. How are we to encounter the strange, the radically different, the inexplicably other? It’s something people seem to be terrible at. In her review of Embassytown for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin observed:
“There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?”
The eponymous Mulai of Hachemi’s novel are definitely not familiar. They aren’t aliens, but for Dr. Nahum Cordovero, the “archaeologist” who comes to study them in their 159th year of isolation, they might as well be. They are the survivors of a failed attempt at planetary colonisation, terraforming pioneers, abandoned when their distant sponsors became preoccupied with a war.
After generations of abandonment the Mulai have forgotten almost everything about the advanced technology that still keeps them alive. They have long sublimated their hope of rescue into a more abstract eschatology: “The tree comes.” This mantra comforts them, perhaps especially due to its lack of any connection to reality.
Since arriving on this barely inhabitable planet they have rapidly and comprehensively transformed almost every aspect of their previous way of life. To Dr. Cordovero, everything about them is tantalisingly hard to understand.
As he comes to terms with the language of the Mulai, it both clarifies the culture and renders it harder to interpret. His status as an outsider is tested to breaking point. By learning the language, the culture it represents begins to interpret him.
Meanwhile, Faida, one of the Mulai, is also finding it hard to understand life. Having embarked on a quite different quest, she has encountered a book hidden by one of the original colonists. The reader may recognise it almost at once as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but to Faida it’s a deep enigma. She resolves to attempt the impossible: to break with taboos in order to translate this strange artifact into the Mulai language.
From these different angles, then, questions of language, culture, and interpretation are problematised rather than reaching a clear resolution.
Hachemi’s previous novel, Living Things, observed that nuances and misunderstandings “are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence”.
The reader is deeply implicated in this process. How to make sense of this fragmented narrative? What do these strange words mean? What is the actual purpose of Cordovero’s mission and what are the implications of his heavily censored conclusions (censorship presumably being a condition of their existence)?
“El árbol viene” — “The Tree Comes” — is the original Spanish title of the novel. This is the meaning of mu lai, 木来 in Chinese. It’s part of a sign at the entrance to the dome under which the Mulai live, which, if it wasn’t for the weathering of the planet’s fierce seasons, would still read 未来, wei lai. The now missing extra stroke would signify, “Future”, the official, long-forgotten name of the original mission.
This is a sign that we’re firmly in the territory of metafiction. It is also a reference to one of the works quoted in the epigraph to the novel, Argentinian author Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. This work declares “the future is over” at the same time as it pulls apart the famous claims of the Swiss linguist of the tenuous relationship between the word “tree” and the living tree it signifies.
The metafiction deepens as the reader is led to wonder about the importance of de Saussure’s linguistic theories and their appropriation by Jacques Lacan via Libertella’s satire. The same applies to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with two fictional works repeatedly alluded to as the narrative progresses: the Libertarian Codex, and its “first amendment”, the Teachings of Flukeh.
All is puzzling fragments in this tale told through a multi-authored collection of papers, disjointed in time and of often dubious perspective. This sense of spatial, cultural and literary estrangement is surely appropriate for a novel fundamentally about estrangement. I found it deeply compelling and finished the book in two intense sittings. No sooner had I read the last page than I found myself turning straight back to the first page to re-read with a new, if still very incomplete understanding. “The future is over,” begins Dr. Cordovero. But that’s just the start.
There’s a great review of The Mulai by Xiao Yue Shan in Asymptote Journal. It’s worth reading even if you don’t read the novel.
And from an interview with the author (in Spanish) I discovered he seems to have a Mulai glyph tattooed on his forearm. Now that’s commitment to your art.
See more on the IndieWeb Book Club
Now read:
César Aira on the constant flight forward
Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.
References
Collecting notes is just the start
“The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument. Will the museum use it to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? Or will it continue to project the power of colonial gain and corporate indemnity?” — Ahdaf Soueif, On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees Soueif2019resigning
As a resigning member of the board of trustees of the British Museum, novelist Ahdaf Soueif was in a strong position to understand the point of collecting. His words, written in 2019, stand for any form of collecting, from world-leading to extremely modest.
Soueif reminds us that any collection is only “a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument”.
His resignation follows what I take to be an increasing realisation that in spite of the PR, through its collection and curation the British Museum really does perpetuate a colonial worldview, and is an instrument of destructive power. In particular he calls out the Museum’s continued sponsorship by oil multinational BP, its lack of leadership on the issue of the repatriation of looted artefacts, and its reluctance to support fair work conditions for ancillary staff in the wake of the collapse of service provider Carillion.
He asked of the Museum, not entirely rhetorically, it is to be hoped,
“will it be involved in making a world that is habitable, just, interconnected and open for the next generation; or will it continue to collaborate with those who are unmaking the world before our eyes?”
I think that this might apply as a test of any collection, at least in the following sense: Is the act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
In some very small way, even my collection of notes must play its part. Is my act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
Hence: publishing is important. It’s not enough to keep collecting. The aim is to make something and to share it with others.
Further Reading
I wrote a book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning. It’s available now.
Living questions
Living questions
Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?
“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?
Learning to tell a bright cow from a dull one
You might be wondering how anyone can grow from being an advanced learner to becoming an expert. It might seem like an impossible step to climb.
According to the traditional Japanese approach of Shu Ha Ri, a vital step in the learning process is to so absorb the rules that the student transcends them. The rules and conventions become second nature. But what does that look like in practice?
Here’s a great example from the world of veterinary medicine, where veterinary students were trained to identify whether an animal is bright (i.e healthy) or dull (i.e. sickening):
“Eventually, the students get good enough at evaluating bright vs. dull. What’s interesting is that, by then, they’ve lost the rules. What was once effortful and algorithmic is now perceptual and automatic. They can see things you and I do not.” – Oddly-Influenced
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which you might prefer. But this site does of course have an RSS feed.
Odysseus: A name that spells trouble
Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:
The heart of the craft: an encounter with the spirit of Shokunin
“There’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn.” – Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973.
I read this quote in the epilogue to Matt Alt’s book, Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. (London: Constable, 2021).
It could be a summary of shokunin kishitsu (職人気質), the spirit of traditional Japanese artesanal culture.
In fact, Jiro Ono the consummate master of sushi, featured in the acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and who was still going strong at the age of 100, says something very similar in the movie:
Atomic notes have a long history
Did previous generations ever think much about atomicity of ideas in their notes? After all, if most people were using notebooks, surely they didn’t need to consider how long their notes should be – they could just keep writing till they were done.
It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell’s ’logical atomism’ was very influential. Russell said:
“you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ 1918: 270).
A similar positivism (where the universe is made of discrete entities rather than one great holism) was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world’s knowledge centered on Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ into the 1930s.
Otlet inspired the ‘documentalists’ to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the ‘Memex’, which was a precursor to the desktop computer.
Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as ’thought kernels’, ‘concept packets’ and ‘kernel statements (cards)’ but the established concept behind this was the ‘unit record system’. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey’s Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. Engelbart said:
“Mainly what is new is the use of the smaller units of information in restricted-subject sets (notedecks) so that I gain considerable flexibility in the manipulations of my thought products at the level at which I actually work in my minute-by-minute struggle with analytical and formulative thought. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion but when I digest the writings of another person I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably–the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted…” (Engelbart, 1962: 57)
The features Engelbart found he couldn’t get from his use of cards – that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity – more even than I had realised!
Now read: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Note: This post started life on Reddit
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which masks how they were all created one by one like little atoms.
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes?