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The Secret to Ursula’s Success

According to Open Culture, Ursula K. Le Guin had the best work schedule:

I don’t know the degree to which this routine “fueled her imagination” so much as it simply afforded her nearly five hours of uninterrupted time every day to actually write. And that’s not nothing.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with my own work schedule, which I’ll be submitting to the suits upstairs for approval and immediate implementation.

5:30 a.m.—wake up and lie there and think.
6:15 a.m.—get up and drink coffee (lots).
7:15 a.m.—arrive at the office and get to work writing, writing, writing.
Noon—constitutional.
1:00-3:00 p.m.—reading, music.
3:00-5:00 p.m.—email correspondence, tea, maybe meetings.
5:00-8:00 p.m.—Netflix and chill dinner.
After 8:00 p.m.—walk the dog and retire with a good book.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this schedule will increase my productivity by a factor of 3 and the quality of my output by a factor of, well…it’s already pretty much optimal, so I don’t want to make any promises.

Local Boy Does Good

Speaking of music (see yesterday’s post for some of the year’s notable recordings), winners of the 2019–20 Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music have been announced. First place in the college/university ensemble division went to William B. Drury and the New England Conservatory Symphonic Winds for their performance of Whitman Tropes by Richard Toensing.

Sharp-eyed readers will no doubt recognize that piece as part of the album Night Songs: The Music of Richard Toensing, which I recommended back in 2018 (I received an advance copy) promising “not only satisfaction and edification, but also spiritual fulfillment.”

The reason I mention this today is not to say “I told you so”—even though I most certainly did—but to point out that, in addition to being a long-time friend and former bandmate, Bill is a proud Hillyard native, Rogers High School grad, and Gonzaga University alum. And because, well…I told you so.

The Glass Is Half…Something

I think we can all agree that, by and large, 2020 has sucked wet dog fur.

BUT.

There’s been some brilliant music released so far this year, so it’s not all bad. I mean…yet. It could always get worse, right?

Herewith, then, ten recommended albums—released over the last eight months or so—to remind you that beauty and creativity still exist. Or, if nothing else, to help take your mind off the coming hellstorm.

• Ambrose Akinmusire, on the tender spot of every calloused moment
• Mino Cinelu & Nils Petter Molvær, SulaMadiana
• Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
• Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson, Emanate
• Roger Eno & Brian Eno, Mixing Colours
The Necks, Three
• Pantha du Prince, Conference of Trees
• The Pineapple Thief, Versions of the Truth
• Max Richter, Voices
Gil Scott-Heron, We’re New Again: A Re-Imagining by Makaya McCraven

Quote of the Day

“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”

Rebecca Solnit
from Wanderlust (2001)

Long Reads for the Long Weekend

“Rather than a neat evolutionary line,” writes Florence Hazrat, “imagine punctuation developing as a rhizome, a horizontal mesh of practices, explorations and loosely understood conventions whose overlapping branches sometimes do the same thing but look different.”

Turns out Francis Fukuyama was right all along, argues Aris Roussinos: “Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders,” he writes, “Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment.”

Speaking of “weak points within,” Graeme Wood has some thoughts on Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. “Easily my favorite line in the book,” he notes, “was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: ‘The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,’ it says. ‘Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.'”

Christopher Bray reminds us that now has no objective meaning: “If you’re talking to a friend across the room, you see him not as he is at this precise point in time but as he was a moment ago — to be precise, at that moment when the light you are seeing bounce off him began travelling from him towards you. However infinitesimally different, that is, your ‘now’ is his ‘then.'”

Stop! Grammar Time!

My brother-in-law sent this, from Wikipedia, via email this morning…

…with a question: “Is Donald Campbell the son of Malcom and Dorothy,” he writes, “or does Donald hold speed records in cars and boats and also in his second wife?”

I understand the confusion. Apart from the clumsy writing, there exists a rather large dangling modifier (that’s what she said!). And it’s all the result of the writer trying to communicate too much information in a single sentence. Here’s what I would recommend instead:

Donald Campbell was born at Canbury House, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, to Malcolm Campbell and Dorothy Evelyn née Whittall. Donald’s father Malcolm, later Sir Malcolm Campbell, held 13 world speed records in the Bluebird cars and boats in the 1920s and 1930s.

By breaking the original up into two sentences, deleting extraneous information, and ensuring clarity at the risk of repetition, we now have a description that’s actually useful—and a whole lot less risqué.

It Was Always Thus

Sure, things are weird right now. But it wasn’t all that long ago that they were—arguably, I suppose—even weirder. I’m speaking of the 1970s in general, and Synanon in particular. Hillel Aron has the details on the “drug rehab-turned-violent cult.” (Fun fact: I’m precisely three degrees of separation from one of the dudes who put the rattlesnake in Morantz’s mailbox. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you all about it.)

Monday Afternoon Diversion

Not sure how I landed on this video—Twitter, maybe?—but after watching it I found myself on the Ant Lab YouTube channel and under the spell of the charmingly nerdy Dr. Adrian Smith.

Which, of course, led me to still more videos about hopping, flying, attacking, slime-eating, stinging, fighting, foraging, squirming, hatching, hunting, biting critters. Next thing I knew it was time to punch out for the day.

Side note: Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get the kookier this world becomes. When I was a kid, bugs were just…bugs. Now, I can’t help but wonder at the weirdness of it all.

Forget What We Said Two Days Ago. This Is the BEST Year Ever.

According to the fine folks at the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 English words currently in use. And not one of them is sufficient to describe this:

But wait! There’s more. Check out another track from Shatner’s forthcoming album—somewhat optimistically titled The Blues—featuring the great Harvey Mandel and Canned Heat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DR8V2I9SZg

The Blues is set to drop October 2.

Only 127 Days Left in This Godforsaken Year

From Scientific American, folks: “‘Oumuamua—a mysterious, interstellar object that crashed through our solar system two years ago—might in fact be alien technology.”

I dunno, man. First a pandemic, then a plague of locusts, then a hurricane lands in—of all places—Iowa. Now a real-life Harvard astrophysicist is suggesting that the best explanation for the sudden appearance of a “cigar-shaped” object “tumbling end over end” and, um, accelerating “as if something were pushing on it” is…aliens?

Think I’ll just tap out now. You know, before the probing commences.

We’re Doomed (part 763,842)

Just when I was starting to think that maybe—just maybe—millennials have been unfairly maligned, more evidence emerges that this generation is quite possibly the worst that has ever inhabited our planet.

At the very least, any cohort that truly believes that a period at the end of a sentence is “a triggering form of aggression” has successfully unseated boomers as the most self-absorbed in history.

So…congratulations, I guess?

“Will you type curse words?”

From Wesley McNair’s wonderful piece about the late poet Donald Hall and his assistant Kendel Currier, three things are abundantly clear.

First, Donald Hall was a truly delightful man.

Second, The Paris Review is one of a handful of must-read literary magazines still publishing. I need to quit reading it online and purchase a subscription. You should, too.

Third—and perhaps most obvious—I should definitely get an amanuensis. Pretty sure the lack of one is all that’s keeping me from the literary fame and fortune I so richly deserve.

Miscellany

Before you take this advice seriously, ask yourself one question: Has the federal government ever—and I do mean ever—been right about dietary guidelines?

The best case I’ve yet seen for bringing back the monarchy:

Look, I’m more than willing to concede that I’m an asshole. I just don’t see what it has to do with my (unimpeachable) tastes in music.

Speaking of music, a recommendation: All the Good Times, by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, released last month.

Behold! The flying train—er…suspension monorail—of Wuppertal, Germany, filmed in 1902:

Pretending to Be Adults

“Not quite a cliché, not quite a term of art,” writes Olga Khazan, “a buzzword is a profound-seeming phrase devised by someone important to make something sound better than it is.”

That’s a pretty good description—and if that were the end of it, we wouldn’t have a problem. But it’s far more insidious than that, Khazan alludes. “Typically, the buzzword develops a shibboleth status in a given field…to the point where everyone is saying it and everyone feels as if they must say it.”

The thing is, everyone also knows it’s BS. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have, courtesy of the Atlantic, a March Madness-style bracket enabling Twitter voters to decide on “the most nauseating of them all.”

Again, I’m not opposed to buzzwords qua buzzwords.* If your job is such that you feel the need to “dress up [your] otherwise pointless tasks with fancier phrases,” that’s on you. It’s when jargon’s purported benefit—saving time—does more harm than good. To this day, in fact, I have no idea what value added actually means. And I’m guessing the vast majority of those who use it are just as ignorant.

But according to Copenhagen Business School professor Mary Yoko Brannen, it’s not in pursuit of clarity or efficiency. No, it’s all about fitting in with the other office drones. So we blithely go about our business, day in and day out, repeating meaningless phrases in order to blend in? That’s depressing.

*Except for lean in, obviously. I swear to God if I hear that steaming pile uttered even one more time I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

Tuesday Musings

The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read “It’s Not Hard to Be Nice.”

At first blush, it’s awfully hard to argue with that. But then you think about it a little and realize that, in fact, the opposite is true. To be nice is to think first of the other person; to set aside, however briefly, any ill will you might be harboring; to make a concerted effort to turn bitterness into…betterness. (Get it? Get it?)

Being a dick is SO much easier.

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