📷 Late afternoon at the ocean baths.
“He’s like Jesus with a plow, and we’ve gotta walk beside him with our hands on that plow if we’re going to learn anything from him.”.
An apprenticeship in writing, with Wendell Berry. | Substack
‘Renaming Lake Ontario’ has the form of a classic mafia loyalty test. The Don sets an absurd, demeaning small task, to learn who’ll accept the subsequent steps. Google keeps passing. They don’t know their boundaries, which for a leading map-making company is ironic.
#Tech #TechEthics #Cartography
There's only make
The consistently inspiring online writer Brennan Brown ‘confesses’ to being a compulsive worker.
“Twenty sheets a day, or 2,000 words, or one essay every single day for eleven straight years… I don’t know if any of it is good, in the way Tellado’s editors meant good or the way Cervantes meant it when he called Lope a prodigy of nature. But I know the not-writing feels worse than the writing, and apparently that’s been true of every obsessive scribbler since at least the Spanish Golden Age, and there’s something comforting in that lineage. We’re not well, certainly. But we’re not alone, either.” — Compulsion – the writers who wrote the most in history
This compulsion to express oneself put me in mind of Coreta Kent’s rule number 6:
“Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.” – Coreta Kent’s Ten Rules for artists
It’s not so much that consistency beats quality. More that consistency is what produces quality. But even before the desire to make good work comes the simple urge to make something.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Thinking about the late Yayoi Kusama today. We remembered our visit to the art gallery in her home town of Matsumoto where we were moved to tears.
#YayoiKusama #JapaneseArt
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.
As Jim Mitchell says, Indieweb is punk, and clearly I like spinning my own threads, but I do have a question: Since you still need to rent a domain name to get on the Web, isn’t there something more indie, like hosting your own server on a mesh network? Did I miss something?
#IndieWeb #Blogging
Watched: The Invite 🍿very funny and quite poignant, with some great performances. I’m now keen to see the Spanish original.
Is your note collection making or unmaking the world? A reflection on institutional collecting, personal note archives, and why output matters more than input.
#Zettelkasten #Writing #NoteTaking #PKM #Blogging