Scree

noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.

Do more than just take the photo

1 Day Ago

I’ve given a lot of birthday gifts in my years. (I’m sure you have too!) But this photo is a gift I’m particularly proud of.

First, a map: My mother is one of 27 first-cousins. (Her mother was one of eight children.) My mother is one of the youngest of those first cousins (perhaps the youngest, I forget.) Two of my mother’s first-cousins are the man seated center (in the front row, his wife’s arm interlocked) and next to him is his sister, Cocetta (who everyone called Connie).

Several years ago, Connie had a birthday party. An enormous party. An enormous party of boisterous people. At one point, I started going around and forcefully demanding family members proceed into the other room. This wasn’t appreciated by many in the moment, but once I got a dozen people moving, it caught on. And then many people passed their phones to a few volunteers to start snapping. I expect you’ve experienced being corralled into a group photo such as I’m describing. It’s not the greatest family photo ever taken. But it was taken.

Then—and this is the part that few do—after the party I hounded several people until I found the best photo and I ordered professionally printed and framed versions of this photo. I ordered one, quite large version of this photo which was given to Connie for her home. Several smaller versions were given to her closest relatives (like the one in my hallway, shown above.)

Don’t just take those photos, considering gifting them as physical mementos too.

ɕ

What’s our five-paragraph essay?

5 Days Ago

The article I’m linking to below is about AI — wait don’t run away. It made me actually think about: What is the purpose of the five-paragraph essay? How does one write such a thing—what exactly am I doing when I go through the soul-sucking process of doing it?

So you don’t have to read the short, linked article… but I recommend it.

The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It’s literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.

~ Emma Camp, from Rethinking the 5-Paragraph Essay in the Age of AI

Back to the question in my title:

In podcasting, what is our five-paragraph essay?

The five-paragraph essay is a blunt tool, sure. But it is clearly one, important but small, piece of a large puzzle called “learning to write well.” You do it very early in “learning to write well” and then you leave it behind.

What is our five-paragraph essay?

Any one of the following could be our five-paragraph essay…

  • Write a terrific, single, “hook sentence” from a podcast episode.
  • Write a paragraph of 3-5 sentences from a podcast episode.
  • Find at least one quotable portion from a podcast episode.
  • Write a list of takeaways in a specific style and with specific formatting.

Why do I say those things? Because once I understood how to do them by hand, turning to tools like AI is not cheating. The AI does a solid B+ (ref article above) job, which I can then finish to my A-level.

ɕ

Good questions

18 Days Ago

You can’t say that it’s a question of national peculiarities or even entirely political peculiarities. I mean, I think when the technological and applied scientific means are developed they just tend to be used. I mean, I think one can say that the whole history of recent times […] shows that if you plant the seed […] it grows and it tends to grow according to the law of its own being, and the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.

~ Aldous Huxley, from 1961: Aldous Huxley on the power of TECHNOLOGY!

It’s interesting to hear an author speak about his own ideas. I’ve read Brave New World and a selection of his essays (Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow). That short video—I’m linking to YouTube, I hope I don’t regret that in another decade ¯\_(ツ)_/¯—contains a few questions; Huxley presents more questions than answers. And they’re just as relevant more than half a century later.

ɕ

100 issues of my “7 for Sunday” email

22 Days Ago

As some of you know, I write a weekly email that isn’t related to my podcasting efforts. On Sunday, Sept 1, issue 100 of 7 for Sunday will go out. (See https://7forsunday.com to sign up or to simply read any issue.)

From the first issue of 7 for Sunday, I’ve always wondered if I’d make it to 100, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Some weeks it was a right struggle to get it done. In a very real sense, knowing there were readers out there gave me a goal to get through some dark days. Yes, external validation is not a great idea. But also, the life preserver that saves you is necessarily thrown by another.

Thanks to a suggestion from 7 for Sunday reader Wayne, the centennial issue is about books. 7 books, of course. Each book is presented with bibliofervor (the urge to leap out of one’s chair, race to find a friend, and press a book into their hands, see Issue № 60.)

Sometimes people express amazement at all that I get done—

Please realize that I struggle just as much as everyone does to create. And, boy howdy!, do I hope that any part of anything I ever do somehow helps you, in even the slightest way, to move forward!

I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted.

ɕ

Benevolence

28 Days Ago

Benevolence and self-direction (described below) are usually near the top of the values we all share. Each of us also has an internal hierarchy of values, where we rank our values based on those we find extremely important to those that don’t really motivate us at all.

~ Chris Bailey, from There are just 10 basic values

slip:4ucite3.

Benevolence—in my opinion—only pops up on our radar once we have enough time, energy and resources. Whether or not it’s clear in that moment, that’s because we, for the first time, manage an honest look back and actually realize all the places where we’ve received help from others. So that’s nice for ourselves, but also for the entire human race.

ɕ

Victims of our own technology

30 Days Ago

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

slip:4uoeao1.

Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part. I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity?

Because it doesn’t seem to make sense to me why a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. It’s the mind of the person that does the creativity part… and so: What are symbols of creativity?

ɕ

I wish

August 18

I wish when I was younger I knew what I know today, what I feel like today, a kind of ease with myself. Because when you’re younger you are much more intense and everything’s much more important and you look back and you think, “Oh what was that all about?” Nothing is that important, just live your life because we’re here so briefly.

~ Anthony Hopkins, from Anthony Hopkins

slip:4uteie16.

Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks this. Because, if I could take that knowledge with me, I’d really like to again be the age I was, when I thought I’d surely have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now.

ɕ

Tic-toc?

August 16

When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.

~ Shayla Love, from Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?

slip:4upyie7.

This feels closely related to my point above about shifting my focus to longer time frames. I definitely use clock-time a lot. How would I go about being intentional about choosing one style over the other? I suppose simply asking myself: Is this thing better done in clock-time or event time? Because my default is clock-time.

ɕ

What will change your mind?

August 14

What are you working on? When will you change your mind? What can you learn, what can you challenge?

~ Seth Godin, from https://seths.blog/2024/07/what-are-you-thinking-about/

slip:4usewa1.

As is often the case, Godin asks really good rhetorical questions. Me? In recent weeks I’ve been challenging myself to shift my focus to longer timeframes. I’ve reached a level of sophistication where—give or take—what I do on any given day does not matter; I don’t go off the rails. What I do, is get anxious about “all the things” when I get lost thinking about too many things.

Instead of hyper-focusing on the right-now, I need to zoom out. What I just accomplished moves me towards a goal. Yes, even if I just blew off some scheduled thing to go play outside; That moves my health forward energizing me for another day. And each day making some progress is just exactly the right thing to be doing.

ɕ

Filed and lost

August 12

Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.

I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.

~ Tiago Forte, from The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books

Has anyone noticed that’s what I’m attempting to do with all my blogging and writing? Shirley, that’s obvious. (It’s not obvious, and don’t call me Shirley.)

I’ve always deeply loved movies. I was raised (on hose water and neglect) in the era when going to a movie was special. Remember when you had to use the phone (with a rotary dial, mounted on the wall) to call the theatre and listen to a looooong recording detailing what was playing and when? I could tell you so so so many stories about going to the movies. In more recent issues of 7 for Sunday, I’m feeling less inclined to stomp down the inside-joke movie references. If you find them even half as enjoyable to read, as I do to write them, then we’re both better off. I’m pretty sure that my recalling and retelling of all those stories about and around movies makes the entire movie experience more fun; yes the experience during the movie, but also all the stuff around it too.

No, I’ve not lost my own plot. Forte’s point about how to benefit from what one reads is the same thing. If you want to hold on to whatever it was that you’ve gotten from a book… you have to integrate it with the rest of your ongoing, lived experience. You have to go around telling the story of who gave you the book, what the book means to you in the context of your entire life, and what you think your interlocutor might get from it (like this, this, this, this, this, this or… you get my point.)

And as soon as you realize that’s fun for movies, and great for books, you should wonder if it could be a super-power for self-improvement if you could share the contents of your mind, with yourself, in that same fashion. Two suggestions: Start journaling immediately after reading this issue of 7 for Sunday, so you can then begin in a year, to regularly review your journals.

ɕ

Bullshit

August 10

I bullshitted everybody and told them all my dreams and things I was going to do. And what happened afterwards? I became a total failure. I was full of shit and that’s the end of it.

~ Dennis Hopper, from Dennis Hopper

slip:4uteie13.

How many years ago did Dennis Hopper die?

In that brief conversation there are at least 5 things which impressed me, all unrelated to the movie Easy Rider. Regardless what you think about Hopper (or even if you’ve never heard of him) it certainly takes guts, and perspective, to be able to be that clear about yourself.

ɕ

Meta on distraction

August 9

This is the moment that ruins our focus. It’s the moment that causes our procrastination and avoidance. It’s the moment that ruins our best habits and our best intentions.

~ Leo Babauta, from https://zenhabits.net/moment-to-focus/

slip:4uzemo2.

Picture me looking slowly, suspiciously around… because I’ve been deep in the procrastination on writing recently. And finding a quote-and-bookmark like the above, while you’re wrestling with your own procrastination is textbook meta.

In this specific case, Babauta is talking about email, and that’s never a problem for me.

But when it comes to writing, what am I actually running from? How do I let go of the feeling that I should be writing? I’ve built this trap where I now need to put together one of these issues, every week. Apparently, forever. I’m not sure that’s good. I’m not sure that’s bad.

ɕ

Thucydides

August 8

If many of these parallels seem self-evident, one recurring point of reference does not: Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general and author of History of the Peloponnesian War. Though hardly a household name, he has been a favorite of those intent on doom-scrolling the historical record for relevant exempla.

~ Mark Fisher, from https://aeon.co/essays/what-thucydides-really-thought-about-historical-analogies

slip:4uaeea27.

Before working on this blog post I couldn’t even type his name (I do have a quote about manliness) let alone pull from memory any of his writing. I’m not sure if that means I’ve escaped the trap described in this article.

It’s often said—including by me—that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But what does study really mean? My first reaction to find out about Thucydides was to consider reading something he wrote. But, now it seems clear that simply going and reading some history isn’t help me not repeat it.

ɕ

There are no miracles

August 7

These reassurances did not particularly help me make my life better, though. They helped me tolerate the bad place I was in, which is a mixed blessing. Self-sympathy and coping strategies make it easier to stay where you are, but that’s not where you want to be.

~ David Cain, from Discipline is Underrated

slip:4uradi1.

Discipline is the pixie-dust that enables everything I do. (“You might have seen a housefly, maybe even a superfly, but I bet you ain’t never seen a donkey fly!”) I’ve had a single, hot-pink, sticky note on the edge of my monitor since April 2023: “There are NO MIRACLES, there is only DISCIPLINE.” Here on the ‘ol blog, discipline comes up often.

Cain’s article is about his experiences with having ADHD, and the bit I quoted is really important. I use a lot of self-sympathy and coping when I need it… and then—knowing there’s somewhere I want to be—I start walking. I use a lot of discipline, and the magic-multiplier is knowing not to try to make every waking moment involve discipline. Instead, I deploy the discipline pixie-dust when things are important; not “oh no this is now important” but “oh yes, this is something important to me that I want to accomplish.”

ɕ

Why someone else writes

August 6

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

~ George Orwell, from Why I write

slip:4uoete1.

Back in 2021 I added this quote to my collection. (I have an ever-growing collection of ~1,500 quotes, which are available as a daily, random, quote-by-email from https://littleboxofquotes.com.) Anyway.

I found it interesting that here I am, 3 years later and my instinct was to pick this exact same bit of text to quote. It feels reassuring that my “what should I pick?” process is reproducible. Also interesting: What I’ve quoted are Orwell’s opening words. For most things I quote, it’s something in the middle that leaps out at me. So perhaps, in addition to showing us why he’s also making a point about how he writes: Start with the good stuff, and then get on to the even better stuff.

ɕ

Racing thoughts

August 5

Rather than try to escape these thoughts, you can begin by trying to understand them differently, which could change how you react to them. […] Have you ever paused to wonder why certain thoughts tend to grab your attention when you’re in bed? The reasons might seem obvious on the surface (eg, ‘Work is important, so I worry about work’), but Ehrnstrom suggests it can be helpful to give this some deeper consideration. You can do that while you’re having the thoughts at night, or during the day.

~ Matt Huston, from What to do when racing thoughts keep you up at night

slip:4upyie6.

Sometimes my over-wrought processes for how I find things, read them, queue them for inclusion on my blog or 7 for Sunday pays off a bonus. In this article’s case, I read the advice given back in April (it now being late July if you don’t want to scroll for the date) and set about trying to use it: For me at least, it really does work. Trying to escape the racing thoughts has never worked for me, but getting all meta about those thoughts has worked on several occasions. Often, my thoughts are racing because I care about whatever-it-is, and being clear then about what (if anything) I can do, and when I can do it, shifts my thinking enough that I… wake up the next morning.

And sometimes I don’t actually care. Here too, being clear about what I should do (nothing) and when I should do it (never), has been enough that I… wake up the next morning.

ɕ

Human imagination

August 4

The world, for all its failings, is an extraordinary experiment in rampant human imagination. At its best, it exists because there were people who had the courage to follow through on an idea – who resisted the inner voice that said, “You are worthless. Why bother?”

~ Nick Cave, from Did you ever want to give up?

slip:4utedi1.

This small piece by Cave demonstrates such a broad view; awareness of abysmal darkness and blinding brightness held at once in one mind.

ɕ

Writer’s voice

August 2

The writer’s voice casts a spell. The right voice makes the work accessible; it gives us the tone and point of view that best illuminate the material and make it shine. The magic of Hemingway’s prose is that it describes events the way the human eye sees them. He taught himself this technique as a journalist and he used it very consciously and deliberately.

~ Steven Pressfield, from https://stevenpressfield.com/2024/04/the-writers-voice/

slip:4usete17.

The question I’m left with, not specifically from this piece from Pressfield but just in general, is: Is it better to simply write what one feels drawn to write, and to then literally discover—as in, “oh, surprise, so that’s my writer’s voice”—or intentionally seek it out through planned discovery? Because it sure seems that different writers find their voices in different ways. Unfortunately, all I have here is the question. I’m not even sure if it’s really a dichotomy. Maybe it only seems to me, to be a choice. I’m on the “I dunno I’ll just try writing” discovery path. Maybe the other path wouldn’t work for me… maybe if I tried to be more intentional about finding my voice . . . maybe I’d just end up realizing that’s not actually a path to finding my voice.

ɕ

A way of seeing

July 31

As a filmmaker, you have a way of seeing things that is inherent in any telling of a story. You read a book, and images form in your mind, and as a director, you explain those images to the crew members. That’s what directing is, that’s what they mean when they say explaining your vision. So for me, it’s really not about any conscious desire to imprint a style. It’s simply: here’s how I see it. This is my understanding of the material. This is what affected me, here’s when I cried, we need to make sure that this moment is real, we need to make sure that your your heart is broken like I felt when I read the script. It’s about communicating exactly what you feel. And that’s the art of directing.

~ Sam Rami, from https://the-talks.com/interview/sam-raimi

slip:4uteie14.

I find I’m often confused by having too many options. I can get far into the weeds exploring all the possible way to do something. Instead, I truly believe that after enough time practicing some creative endeavor, it’s more important to simply follow your own feeling. Follow your own inspiration. “This is what I feel I want to do,” becomes the correct compass to follow. It’s simply: Here’s how I see it.

ɕ