Craig Constantine

Give people the mess →

Published 1 Hour Ago · All posts on Oct 5 · Podcasting

https://overcast.fm/+AATXlFld6-4/1:12:18

Today in a call with Steve H and friends, I was reminded I’d sat on sharing this…

This is from On Being. Specifically from the unedited version: Krista Tippett releases the whole raw conversation alongside the produced show, and this one is with the poet Ocean Vuong, recorded on stage at On Air Fest in March 2020 — or, as she puts it, right before the world changed. After about an hour they opened the floor, and a producer and professor from Toronto — she uses those raw interviews as a teaching tool in her own classroom — asked Tippett a question about her own work rather than Vuong’s: how do you choose what to cut?

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. Well, so so you know, sometimes people who are younger ask me, “How did you start your podcast? And I say, “Well, we started a public radio show. And they look at me like, “You know, what am I talking about? So because you know, podcast didn’t exist when we started this. So interestingly, I mean, even I had to fight so hard, you know, those years ago. Even to say we’re going to do one conversation for the whole hour-that felt way too long form. People were very uncomfortable with it, and as a result, we’re on not prime time. I want to be quick because I want to get back to you. But at some point before podcasting, maybe right as podcasting came along, Lily’s here. Actually, it wasn’t my idea. One of my producers, Trent Gillis, at the time said that if we really believe in this value, virtue of transparency that we talk about, that the digital world is calling us all to, then we need to walk the talk. And it felt really counterintuitive, having been in media before this digital world. And I think we had this impassioned discussion for a year. I was like, “Why do we do all this work to get it down to 51 minutes if we’re going to give people the mess? And it is messy. I mean, it’s this is less messy. But if I’m in the studio with somebody and I have 90 minutes, I can let them go down some road that I really don’t know if there’s going to be anything there, but it’s okay because there might be, and if not, we can come back. We found with younger people, and we found that it gets used in like high school classes, and because we have they we give the raw, they trust the rest of the media project more. So that it’s been, and it’s huge. It’s hundreds of 1000s. I mean, I don’t know what the numbers are now, but it’s a very large percent, very large numbers of people in every show who listen to the unedited.
~ Krista Tippett

Things shift →

Published August 21 · All posts on Aug 21 · Self-reflection

It’s become clear that I have trouble moving beyond paradigms of thought which no longer serve me.

The example top of mind today is this line from my personal oath: I don’t compare myself to others, only to myself from yesterday. I adopted that oath eleven years ago. (I had to look that up.) In all that time, that line has felt rock solid. Comparing myself to anything has recently felt problematic.

Seeking language large enough →

Published August 18 · All posts on Aug 18 · Podcasting

I really enjoyed this (it’s a rebroadcast from 2016) episode of On Being with David Whyte.

David Whyte is an English poet and philosopher, born to a Yorkshire father and an Irish mother, who trained as a marine zoologist and worked as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos before returning to poetry full time. He is best known for The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, and for Consolations, his book of essays on the underlying meanings of everyday words. In this 2016 conversation, he speaks about what he calls the conversational nature of reality — the frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you — and about loss, vulnerability, aloneness, genius, and the strange work of bringing poetry into corporate leadership. Threaded through is his friendship with the late John O’Donohue and the grief of losing him. He recites four of his poems along the way.

https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-seeking-language-large-enough/

I had to create a Docent →

Published August 17 · All posts on Aug 17 · Cogitants

This is simply how my mind works. If I see a problem or a sharp edge which interests or annoys me… I get “distracted” (I argue that these distractions are actually the real things that I get done) and I go build, fix, repair, or remove entirely . . .

So I started something tiny for myself and it has just grown into — well, I had to create a Docent so when people ask me questions it can explain it in a way that I can’t. So imagine you and I are in a small museum and I brought you in through the employee entrance in the back and I just finished babbling at you about how it all works. So I can say, “…wait, I’m sorry. We have a Docent who can translate my crazy for you . . .”

At which point I woke up the Docent and prompted it with:

Good morning! I have a guest with me who asked me, “what is this project?!” (they’re shocked at its actual scale, confused by the complexity of the room, and don’t understand why the effort…)
~ Me

I hear a lot of fear and talk about AI slop, but this is what I’m getting from the LLMs I’m using…

(more…)

Newfoundland Journey: Van Camping and Adventures with Craig Constantine →

Published August 11 · All posts on Aug 11 · Podcasting

I was recently away for an extended overland trip to Newfoundland. Along the way Christi Cassidy and I made time to record a fun episode for her Moving Along podcast.

Newfoundland Journey: Van Camping and Adventures with Craig Constantine, released August 4 — wherever you normally get your podcasts, of course.

Simply more interesting →

Published July 31 · All posts on Jul 31 · Quotes

[…] I had thought that finding out what was really going on would require a lot of self-denial. Instead, it was more a matter of noticing what I really, really wanted. It was simply more interesting to me than the other options.
~ John Tarrant

Elsewhere, this is 4a1576. — slipbox

Moral deskilling →

Published July 24 · All posts on Jul 24

Deskilling was something we knew from the industrialisation of manufacturing. Rather than artisan work, where the expert (say) baker knew and controlled the entire process of bread making, each step was broken down and put along a factory assembly line. We know from longstanding labour history that this ‘deskilled’ expertise, handed control of the entire process to management (foremen, traditionally) and meant that bosses could reduce wages – and, often enough, job satisfaction.
From the 1980s this happened to professional work, and to virtue specifically.
I called this moral deskilling.
~ Hannah Forsyth, from Moral Deskilling

This neatly unpicked a complex knot that I’d been staring at for some time.

Worth of a person →

Published July 9 · All posts on Jul 9

Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch anime or drink matcha lattes be what defines your identity? Why should I call myself a “writer” rather than a “science fiction fan” or a “rabbit dad”? Just imagining introducing myself as the latter makes me cringe a little. But why?
~ Noah Smith, from You are what you consume

An as-usually great deep dive into the value of a person. Of course, we all known—right?!—that a person is intrinsicly valuable; The challenge I face all the time is feeling like I should do, and in particular create value others would trade with me for… decade after decade, I just can’t seem to shake that.

What does coaching actually transmit? →

Published July 7 · All posts on Jul 7 · Threads

I’ve been around movement coaches for years — fifteen years of Aikido, then parkour and Art du Déplacement — physical practices that bring you into rooms with people who are good at doing the thing they’re trying to teach you to do. The longer I’ve watched, the more interested I’ve become in what coaches can and can’t actually pass on.

This thread mixes Movers Mindset Field Notes — distillations of conversations with coaches and movement teachers — with my own writing as a long-time student. What students need before they can hear anything. What coaches can set up but can’t manufacture. What gets transmitted in the unstructured time between drills. And the part nobody plans for — what can’t be directly taught and has to be coaxed out instead.

The thread is sequenced for someone curious about what teaching actually does.