Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. ...
This post was first sent to my newsletter on August 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) *Clouds sailing across [Pangong Tso][wpt]. Click to enlarge* New month, new letter! As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being … ...
My homepage lists my new career shift as “This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)” I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different. Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programs though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly. Here’s his take … ...
This post was first sent to my newsletter on July 23rd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) New month, new work letter. Before I begin though, please hit reply to these letters and let me know what you think, whether you like them or not and if there is anything you’d want me to write / hunt & research about! Like I wrote in the introduction to April’s letter, both the letter and the website have zero tracking. So I have no way of knowing, whether you like stuff or not, whether it resonates or not, whether I am preaching to throngs or shouting into the void, unless you tell me! Let’s dig into it. As usual, click the headers, to wander off to the orginal articles :) ...
I kept reading books and articles about solitude and discomfort and boredom. This Michael Easter book covers all of it, succinctly in the frame of a journey to the Alaskan wilderness. Worth a read. Highlights from the book follow … “When our ancestors weren’t searching for food or getting pummeled by mastodons, they had long moments of downtime, lounging around for hours a day. They had to make something out of their boredom. ...
This post was first sent to my newsletter on July 4th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Abby calls it Chinese Gulab, while I, in honour of all the hard work Abby puts in (and the natural pot she’s made for it), call it my coconut flower. It’s a Moss Rose, (Portulaca grandiflora.) ...