“It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days. That was why, despite her disabilities, Virginia was able to produce so very much."—Leonard Woolf. Source.
My take: Choose your own race and finish it. The image is an example of how AI already looks unfashionable.
💬 “Live right up to the last breath and stay positive about the world, your family and the environment you live in.” - Mike Peters, The Alarm.
From tiny drops of writing, great rivers will flow
In his book, 📖 Writing Tools, veteran journalist Roy Peter Clark teaches that writers should break long projects into parts. In fact, that’s how he wrote his book. It started life as a year-long series of online posts, one per week, until finally he’d written fifty of them (I guess he took a couple of weeks off 😁).
It’s an obvious piece of advice that’s surprisingly hard to remember. Conversely it’s easy to feel daunted by big projects, forgetting that they are always made out of smaller pieces.
My working philosophy of creativity is that from fragments you can build a greater whole.
One small part joins up with another and another until soon, like rain, a trickle grows to become a flood. Clark says:
Tiny drops of writing become puddles that become rivulets that become streams that become deep ponds.
This is why I make short notes and join them together to create longer pieces of writing. I’m daunted by the larger task but not at all daunted by the quiet joy of writing one short note followed by another, and another.
This is what I call the shortest writing session that could possibly be useful.
It may be short, but it’s endlessly repeatable. And the results can be quite impressive.
Clark also mentions that he sometimes asks his new writing students to indicate how many of them have run a marathon. Usually only a couple have, but when he asks how many think they could do it, if they were given a much longer period, nearly everyone raises their hands.
This reminded me of the rather lovely short film about the Australian farmer who ran his own marathon, one piece at a time. In this case he did just one mile every hour until the whole distance was run. And he did a whole lot of other work too. Improbably, this guy’s name is Beau Miles.
OK, that’s great and all, but how exactly do you do it, one drop at a time?
Here’s my take on how to write an article from your notes.
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Education will defeat autocracy
The painful and wrenching demise of entire academic departments opens up opportunities for a more radical understanding and practice of higher education, beyond and despite the confines of university funding.
In France, for example, there’s Le Collège international de philosophie, co-founded by philosopher Jacques Derrida, and Le Université populaire de Caen, founded by Michel Onfray, another maverick philosopher.
In the US, meanwhile, there’s Vital Thought, and The Reading Room, sponsored by Pluto Press, in the UK.
I’ve suggested the future of the humanities is wide open. But in these times it’s much more political than that:
Now Karen Attiah says Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I’m Going to Teach It Anyway.
You might want to support her summer school: Race, Media, and International Affairs 101.
As she says:
They can cancel us all they want, but we will create community and share knowledge anyway!
Willful ignorance, of the kind supported by the extremists running the US Government, has a fatal flaw.
Can you guess what it is?
Have you ever read a book by mistake?
Revisiting a backup file of my old notes reminded me of the time I was reading what I assumed to be a novel by Ruth Ozeki, but it turned out to be a novel by Cynthia Ozick, published in 1987, called The Messiah of Stockholm.
Anyone could have made that mistake, I submit.
At least, anyone who, like me, failed to read the cover properly.
And every single page with the author’s name in the footer.
In any case I loved the book, even though it wasn’t written by Ruth Ozeki, which I didn’t realise at the time.
It’s about a man who believes he is the son of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was murdered by Nazis and his magnum opus, The Messiah lost. Although it’s (fairly) clear he can’t really be the great writer’s son, a bookseller, Mrs Eklund, goes along with the man’s story. They strike up a relationship in which she ‘believes’ his paternity claims while he believes, or at least doesn’t question, her repeated claim that her husband, Dr Eklund is inside the flat above the shop.
Is he? Is he really?
And then Adela turns up, claiming to be the daughter of Bruno Schultz, carrying with her the manuscript of the lost book. Are they going to ‘believe’ this too?
So in a way it was appropriate that I should have mistaken Ozick for Ozeki. Displaced identity was the theme. I did wonder, though, why the Ozeki writing style about which I had read was not much in evidence in the novel actually in front of me.
So there is still the genuine Ozeki to be read. Let’s hope I don’t pick up by mistake a novel by Julie Otsuka. Unless that too proves to be excellent, in which case I’ll be happy.
Over to you. Have you ever read a book by mistake? And was it an unforeseen calamity, or an unexpected joy?
Finished reading: The White Ship by Charles Spencer 📚
I knew very little about the rival sons of William the Conquerer, but have now learned some amazing stuff about the Norman dynasty that claimed England. The image of their armies arrayed on the sands beneath Mont Saint Michel is rather vivid.
Writing notes is much more than just writing notes. Done right, it’s a way of working with ideas:
I’m organising my notes right now and stumbled over this quote:
You’re not building a note-taking system, but rather a way to capture, explore, and generate ideas. by Jorge Arango on page 181 Duly Noted
The future of the humanities is wide open
The humanities within universities are facing decline and financial prioritization, yet interest in liberal arts thrives outside academic institutions.
To understand the future of AI, look to the past
The hype about AI isn’t new. In his day, Victor Hugo was breathless about the book.
By rejecting the terms of Trump’s authoritarian bullying, Harvard University may forego $2.3 billion in funding. But they’ll lose much more if they, and we, don’t continue to stand up to it. The stakes, conveniently, are written on the university shield.
Why not publish all your notes online?
Contemplating whether to publish personal notes online reveals both the potential benefits of motivation and community engagement and the drawbacks of self-doubt and privacy concerns.
Time to concede nothing
A reflection on the enduring legacy of thinkers like Erasmus and Castellio, emphasizing the importance of perseverance in upholding values of civility and humanism amid modern strife and polarization.
Why in #Australia are there at least 50 private health insurance options (!) but only two major supermarket options, only two main telecom providers, and pretty much a single major hardware chain? It’s well past time for some serious #antimonopoly action.
In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public edwinwenink.xyz.
These notes are a constant work in progress and not necessarily intended for your reading. Nevertheless, I submit them to your “voyeurism.”
(HT: Annie)
And previously, Andy Matuschak has recommended working with the garage door up.
But where’s the limit?
Some sound advice from a less crazy time (two whole months ago): Write it Down | dansinker.com
Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:
It’s a great time to be writing the future.
Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?
They just innovate harder.
Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.
Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.
So many, many books I really want to read. Here are just a couple on this towering tsundoku pile:
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston 📚
The Best of all Possible Worlds by Michael Kempe
An interesting Zettelkasten discussion.
malikalimoekhamedov.substack.com/p/bob-dot…
See also: my review of A System for Writing.
It's a great time to be writing the future
Writers are worrying about AI taking their livelihoods. But unless you were already writing like a robot, that’s not how it works.
Now is a truly fantastic time to be writing. The future is absolutely wide open for the first time in a more than a century. That’s because the idiom of the whole culture is transforming and it’s up to us to change it.
Just as no one these days writes like Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy or Louisa May Alcott, in ten years time, no one will be writing the way we do now. Large language models (LLMs) have taken our entire idiom and trashed it. And that’s a good thing. Our prose, and therefore the prose of AI, sounds like it’s still living in the Twentieth Century. But it’s well past time for radically new ways of speaking, writing and therefore being.
The key driver is simply fashion. What seems amazingly cutting-edge today will rapidly go stale. AI prose (which imitates our older siblings) is about to taste like last week’s dinner.
But we’re not just dreaming of what comes after content - it’s also time to seize the means of containment.
Since AI is now providing all the ‘content’ the container industry can ever handle (i.e. all the content platforms without exception), we’re now free to make new human-shaped places beyond its reach.
We’re inventing both what AI can’t say, and where it can’t say it, so let’s go!