books
- What is the real work of serendipity?
- A library of good neighbours
- The Dewey Decimal System pigeonholes all knowledge, like cells in a prison
A System for Writing by Bob Doto
“The note you just took has yet to realize its potential.” - Bob Doto.
Another ‘Zettelkasten primer’ won’t be needed for some time, since this one is direct, concise, thorough and strongly practical. A System for Writing by Bob Doto is out!
💻 Ebook
Why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Yes indeed, why not let your reading be a smorgasbord of serendipity?
Here’s Anna Funder, author of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, on working at the University of Melbourne English Department library as a student:
“It sounds prehistoric now, but I sat at the front desk, typing out index cards for new acquisitions or requests from staff for books or journals — anything from the latest novel, to psychoanalysis, poetry or medieval studies. I read things that had nothing to do with my studies: a smorgasbord of serendipity. Despite my time there, I have never understood the Dewey decimal system: how can numbers tell you what a book is, to a decimal point?” - Every book you could want and many more
My take on this?
HEAJ:Mundaneum by Marc Wathieu is licensed under CC BY 2.0
🐙 Octopus intelligence is intriguing. Having read Ray Naylor’s The Mountain in the Sea 📚, I now want to try Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith. I’d also like to read Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which has a somewhat similar theme.
Finished reading: Ian Gentle: The Found Line, edited by David Roach 📚
I’ve posted about this interesting artist previously, because I loved The Gentle Project.
Finished reading: Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders 📚
These short stories are set entirely in Australia’s Tweed region, but they range over a vast time-frame: from the more-or-less present to the far distant future. I loved the tough optimism. Always will be Aboriginal land - an ideal sci-fi theme.
Finished reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey 📚
This reads curiously well alongside To be Taught, if Fortunate. Both describe spaceflight in mundane but compelling detail. Harvey is the stronger writer, but Chambers has the stronger story. Both are writing, for want of a better term, space pastoral.
Finished reading: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers 📚My backlog of sci-fi reading is getting a little smaller.
Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚I seem to be getting through the pile of sci-fi books that never shrinks but only grows.
At last, writing slowly is back in fashion!
Cal Newport, author of the forthcoming book, 📚Slow Productivity, has finally latched on to the premise of this website: you can get a lot done by writing slowly.
Speeding up in pursuit of fleeting moments of hyper-visibility is not necessarily the path to impact. It’s in slowing down that the real magic happens.
I didn’t even know they could drive.
See also:
Thinking nothing of walking long distances
How far is too far to walk?
Author Charlie Stross observed that British people in the early nineteenth century, prior to train travel, walked a lot further than people today think of as reasonable.
I’ve noticed a couple of literary examples of this seemingly extreme walking behaviour, both of which took place in North Wales.
Headlong Hall
In chapter 7 of Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical novel, 📚Headlong Hall (1816), a group of the main characters takes a morning walk to admire the land drainage scheme around the newly industrial village of Tremadoc, and they walk halfway across Eryri to do so, traversing two valleys and two mountain passes. The main object of their interest is The Cob, a land reclamation project that was later to become a railway causeway. Having seen it, and having taken some refreshment in the village, they walk straight back again.
Image: The Moelwyn range, viewed from the Cob. Wikipedia CC sharealike 2.0
Wild Wales
You’d think the invention of the railways would have put people off walking such long distances, but apparently not so much. In his travel account, 📚Wild Wales (1862), George Borrow walks from Chester 18 miles to Llangollen, then walks another 11 miles to Wrexham just to fetch a book. Interestingly, he was writing after the railways had arrived. He was happy to put his wife and children on the train - but still walk the journey himself.
Real life
I would have believed these feats of everyday walking were improbable, except for the fact that when I was a child, a man in our village, Mr Large, walked every day to and from Chester, a round trip of 26 miles. He didn’t need to do it. He was in his eighties and well retired, and he could just have walked two miles to the bus stop. But apparently you don’t break the habits of a lifetime. Everyone in the village must have offered him a lift at one time or another, but he’d made it known that he preferred to walk. So having observed Mr Large regularly tramping the back lanes with determination, I already knew a long utility walk is more than possible.
These days, people rarely get out of their cars, convinced as they are that progress has been made. Walking is a problem, it seems, not a solution. And yet, on holiday, some people do long walks or even very long walks. For fun.
Oh brave new world that has such people in it!