A home to endangered pied oystercatchers. The city is just visible in the distance.
What I saw on my bike ride this moring - a view through the bird-hide window.
Footnotes
Finished reading Cold Enough for Snow
Finished reading: Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au 📚 This was a quite mezmerising read. It reminded me of the writing of Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. He wrote a novel called Snow Country. Both these snowy books are set in an unnamed Japanese onsen resort in the winter, a train journey away from Tokyo. The Wikipedia entry for Kawabata’s work says:
Through many of Kawabata’s works the sense of distance in his life is represented. He often gives the impression that his characters have built up a wall around them that moves them into isolation… Kawabata left many of his stories apparently unfinished, sometimes to the annoyance of readers and reviewers, but this goes hand to hand with his aesthetics of art for art’s sake, leaving outside any sentimentalism, or morality, that an ending would give to any book. This was done intentionally, as Kawabata felt that vignettes of incidents along the way were far more important than conclusions.
All this qualities strongly apply to Jennifer Au’s book, too. But she writes about quite different themes, such as the relationship between mother and daughter, and the distance that accrues between second generation migrants and their parental place of origin.
I found the prose to be so understated as to be almost tedious, but then I found the narrator’s ‘vignettes of incidents along the way’ strangely engaging.
The coming ellipsis eclipse
Eclipse of the ellipsis: should you be worried?
Apparently, using an ellipsis marks you out as old-fashioned. I don’t know why. I suppose this is just the way fashions change. A newer, younger generation does things differently, and before you know it, that’s how things are done. The older people can’t keep up, or else don’t want to change, arguing that things were better in the old days.
So why not use an ellipsis? Well, what about the obvious reason: there’s no need to. Any sentence that previously would have ended with an ellipsis can now end with a full stop.
But here I should also mention that ending your sentences with a full stop is nowadays thought to be rude and abrupt, so I shouldn’t do it. Of course, all this punctuation advice is for ‘informal’ phone based writing like messaging and social media posts. Traditional writing can keep its traditional forms of punctuation. Except that people are decreasingly using anything other than phones, so traditional writing may be an endangered species.
So are we devolving into two forms of written speech? One for formal correspondence and long-form prose, the other for everything else? This may seem novel, but surely several languages have been quite successful with varying forms of writing depending on the circumstances. A famous example of a language that has multiple forms of written speech might be written Japanese, which has several different alphabets, to be used in different contexts. Another is Serbo-Croat (and maybe some other Slavic languages), which can be written in either the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets. (Or should I be referring to two distinct languages, Croatian and Serbian?) And then we rarely notice that in English we already use two fairly different character sets, depending on the context. Capital letters are written differently from minuscules, and you need to know both sets in order to write correct English. You might get away with only using capitals, but to the reader it usuallly comes across as too emphatic, or even ‘shouty’.
NO ENTRY. Works well in all-capitals.
I’M FEELING SAD. Doesn’t really work, it seems, except perhaps on Tumblr.
Nevertheless, we English speakers already use these two different forms of written speech, almost without noticing that we’re doing so. Must be horrible to learn, if this Latin script isn’t that of your first language.
Perhaps in future we’ll all become fluent in both writing and texting. Another possibility in the future, though, is that voice controlled text will become even more prevalent and writing will turn into nothing more than a transcript of spoken words. At this point, punctuation will become fully or mostly automated and we won’t need to worry about it. If this becomes the case, I expect the ellipsis to die out, and full stops at the end of sentences to continue, but automatically. When punctuation is automatic there are unanticipated consequences, though. For example, people now know whether you’re texting from the office (no automatic punctuation on the lap-top computer) or on the go (your mobile phone gives you punctuation by default).
It doesn’t bear thinking about…
Here’s a photo of where I live. It wasn’t sunny today though. Today we had nearly 10cm of rain. In American units, that’s bucketloads.
Why I'm writing slowly
There’s an emerging movement in favour of ‘slow productivity’.
And writing is one of the best examples of the many benefits of hurrying slowly.
Successful writing doesn’t result from Herculean efforts to tally up mammoth word-counts, often at the last minute (although, if that’s your chosen path, good luck). The best and most sustainable writing takes place slowly and methodically. This is so despite the many voices telling you how you can ‘write a book in a month’, ‘write a book in a week’, or even ‘write a book in a day’. You can only do this if you write a lot, but without haste.
What works is to write slowly and consistently, so that the writing accumulates over time into larger and ever more meaningful pieces.
The English author of the Victorian age, Anthony Trollope, epitomised a slow but steady approach to writing. He produced a very significant output, including 47 novels, and is best known for a long series of novels centred upon the fictional county of Barsetshire. Yet he claimed never to write for more than three hours a day. In fact, while becoming one of the period’s most popular novelists, he maintained a full-time job with the Post Office. Because he had a workable method, he didn’t need more time.
And without developing a writing method that works, no amount of extra time will ever be enough.
☞ You can get a lot done by writing slowly
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Want to read: Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber 📚
I’ve long been fascinated by the idea that piracy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries included various forms of political experimentation. If piracy was a kind of organised crime, as Peter Leeson claims pdf, we might ask what the organisation entailed. Surely there’s more to it than a simply a series of experiments in contract theory (the ‘pirate code’). But calling piracy organised crime is a circular argument. Of course it was illegal, but very often pirates were doing what nations themselves sanctioned: comandeering enemy ships. The line between privateer and pirate was a faint one.
But for many of the poorest people, leaving home and joining up with the pirates would have been an attractive opportunity - the least bad option in some cases. Since there was nowhere in Europe that people could live free of despotic regimes, the high seas must have presented quite a few possibilites.
Certainly I’ve been suspicious of the designation ‘pirate’. It seems as much an excuse to torture and murder people who ask questions as the designation ‘witch’ has been. If you doubt that piracy might have been a convenient category to condemn your opponents, rather than an accurate description of their activities, consider this: the entire state of Texas was once condemned for piracy, having declared a republic independent from Mexico.
Besides the Republic of Texas, there were other experiments in nation-building, such as the Nassau pirate republic in the Carribean. But David Graeber writes of the fabled Liberalia, a semi-mythical location on the East coast of Madagascar, where pirates set up their own rule on land.
I think this matters because contemporary democracies are really nation states first, and only secondarily are they democratic. This priority, in my opinion, should be placed the other way round. Otherwise, state power tends to be defended, at the expense of democratic checks and balances. We need more democracy, not less. and this is difficult when the state sees itself as self-evidently right, whether or not it promotes democracy. As imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan says:
“Our idea of a democratic nation is not defined by flags and borders. Our idea of a democratic nation embraces a model based on democracy instead of a model based on state structures and ethnic origins.”
The thing about advice is that people do what they want with it
Currently reading: Dancing with the Gods by Kent Nerburn 📚
I know nothing at all about Kent Nerburn, so it’s interesting to read this book of reflections on creative work.
I did notice, though, that the US version of this book has been re-named to: The Artist’s Journey: On Making Art and Being an Artist. This alternative title reminds me of the format of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, in the sense that both authors offer reflections on their creative experience, having been prompted by a letter from a younger person, wondering about setting out on a career as an artist. The difference is that Rilke was rather young to be dishing out such ‘wisdom’, whereas Nerburn has lived a bit.
To be fair to Rilke, though, he didn’t seek out Franz Xaver Kappus, the nineteen year old military cadet who first wrote for advice when Rilke was only twenty seven. Nor did Rilke publish his letters of advice. They were only collected and published after his death, by Kappus. Nor finally was Rilke’s advice in any way arrogant. He said:
“Nobody can advise you and help you. Nobody. There is only one way—Go into yourself.”
Rilke’s advice didn’t make Kappus a poet. It didn’t make him abandon his military career. He was an officer for 15 years and fought in WW1. But Rilke surely helped make him a writer. Kappus wrote novels and screenplays and was a newspaper editor for many years.
That’s the thing about advice. People receive it and then they do what they want with it. Oscar Wilde said:
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
Though given his legal difficulties, perhaps he should have listened, just once.
More:
I finished Dancing with the Gods.
Can Rilke change your life?
Finished reading: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout 📚 This was an intriguing character study. Lucy Barton, a successful but quite damaged author, really doesn’t know herself. And then just occasionally, there comes a flash of brilliant, sensitive insight. This novel builds on two previous books about Lucy and her family. It feels as though we’re circling back and learning more and more about her. The past is very present for Lucy. She’s unable to shake off the imprint of her impoverished childhood, her feelings of invisibility, and her lack of self-esteem. Throughout this novel runs the question of whether we can really make choices in our lives or whether we just ‘do things’, as Lucy’s ex-husband, William, claims. I felt William had made plenty of choices in his life, and was using philosophy to avoid taking responsibility for them. Lucy, on the other hand, struggles to make her own choices, and seems to settle for letting others make them for her. It’s all very poignant.