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.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

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

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“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.'”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

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.)

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

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.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(1)

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?

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

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:

Probably the scariest part about working at the MoonPie factory is collecting the the fresh MoonPies each morning from the MoonPie queen as she lays them

— MoonPie (@MoonPie) August 18, 2020

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:

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

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.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment