02024-09-27 | Writing
I listened to a Dan Harris/Happier podcast with Ellen Langer. LINK I so recommend that podcast. Ms. Langer, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, is very smart and feisty and shares a lot of research that confirms what many of us may already have intuited. Some of the things she says about illness and aging is less surprising and more affirming. Have a listen. I bet you will thank me later. ;-)
Gut microbiome disruptions in infancy increase aggression later in life:
Gut bacteria that have been disrupted in infancy can lead to greater aggression later in life, including causing changes to aggression-related genes, according to a new study. The findings warrant more research into the complex interplay between the gut, brain, and aggression.
When we say that everything is connected we can’t overstate that fact.
Until three days ago, I would consider an idea I had and mull it over but not start writing because I thought I needed to learn more. However, it was only on the second day of writing desperately and furiously that I realized that this was the wrong way of approaching things. You need the writing to do the thinking. Plotting might work for the academic essay and for authors who know how to reach the end. But essays are explorations, not itineraries. You don’t know where you’re supposed to go. The only thing you know is that you must start. Which is what I do, every time I look at a sentence or quote that intrigues me or interests me. I can’t wait for it to inspire something in me–that happens too infrequently to be a reliable technique for an essayist who has very many words to write in order to become an essayist. I have to write that other author’s words with my own fingers and then write what comes to mind. Try to figure out what I think. This is how essays are made.
By Ratika Deshpande and found HERE. Thinking with your fingers. Like the Leuchtturm slogan Denken mit der Hand, which means to think with your hand. To think with one’s hand on paper. For me, making music, especially playing guitar, is thinking with your hands… which is why I understand that quote. Too often I make the mistake described above, where I have a thought or an idea and then wait for inspiration instead of simply starting to write, or play guitar. It’s a devilish Western idea that the brain is separate from the body. When we read the word Mind in an English translation from a Chinese text I am told it is always a character that actually means Heart-Mind. Not one and not the other: both. (((in the above linked podcast Ellen Langer says she doesn’t like the term Body Mind Connection because it implies that they are separate but connected. Instead she refers to Body Mind Unity…))) I learn by doing, whether it’s bread-making, guitar-playing, image-making, or writing. Often it feels like the hardest step is simply to get started… once the process is underway it (almost always) feels good. During Covid my partner and I committed to a daily writing session. We would take turns to come up with a word, then take 25 minutes to write anything about that word. A story, an essay, whatever came to mind. There was no time to think about it too much. Just get started and see where it leads. Then we would read to each other whatever we had written. It was an amazing experience and led to useful insights for me. The most important insight was that I need to show up, to get started, to do the time.
The Web Renaissance takes off – Anil Dash
I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.
02023-04-11 | Listening, Music, Writing
Sometimes, after I have read a review, I don’t want to hear the music and want to close my eyes and just imagine it. Here are a few examples, all by the same writer… no need for the names of musicians or the titles of songs.
like listening to an ambient record on headphones at such a low volume that the background noise of the metropolis bleeds through
illuminated by the lens flares of flugelhorn and then slightly darkened by some fragmented guitar figures
washes of melody that drift to the surface before slowly sinking into the depths again
dissolving the sound into a glossy decay, as though a Rothko painting were slowly fading to black
eventually, the curtain is pulled aside to reveal the piano behind the noises
there are sharp bursts that stir these dreamy tracks quickly awake
pulsing minimalism given an acidic tang via tones that sound like a bad mobile phone connection
imagines a repeating four-chord sequence as the blinking eyes of a dozen androids while little flutters of electricity and long pulses flow through the room
it is nearly overwhelmed by the drunken bass notes and fluttering racket going on around it
This only works when the critic has a way with words and has good ears to go along with that… All examples were pulled from the writing of Robert Ham for Pitchfork.
02023-02-26 | Computer, Writing, Zen
I have this idea for a short story and it would be so meta if the short story was itself written by ChatGPT.
Write a short story in the style of Haruki Murakami, about a young man who goes to a zen temple to ask for instruction. He is taught meditation and receives a koan from the zen master. Instead of meditating with the koan, the young person queries ChatGPT and from it he receives a detailed response regarding the solution of the koan. The man represents this solution to the zen teacher as his own, who in turn gives him the next koan. And so on…
02023-02-17 | Book, Computer, Music, Writing
But fundamentally this version of AI can only ever counterfeit insight by being the average, the approximation derived from analysis of the human cloud. It has no judgement, no taste, no self. It’s all stolen grief, stolen love, stolen experience. Maybe that’s good enough, or maybe we’ll become frustrated by its product.
from Nick Harkaway’s Substack
I added the emphasis. That’s at the center of the so-called AI threat, isn’t it. Without lived grief, love, experience, how deep can the poetry or music coming from an AI be. So far, nothing I’ve learned seemed very interesting. Sure, it’s new and will become better. That’s a possibility.
I remember a story from a friend who went to a food exhibition. In one booth he was invited to try a bottle of wine. So he did. He was asked what he thought of it. It’s not very good, he replied. Then he found out that the wine had never been touched by a grape, it was purely chemical. He was told that he was correct, it wasn’t very good… yet. I remember thinking that in the future there will be two kinds of wine. The first might be made by combining chemicals. It could taste very good and would be reasonably cheap. The second will be wine the way we know it. Grown on fields, touched by sunshine and rain, harvested by people, and so on. It will, of course, be more expensive.
Perhaps this is what will happen with stories and music? There will be books and music created by AI. Lots of it. Cheap. Accessible. And there will be books and music by humans. Those will be words and melodies touched by lived grief, joy, love, despair.
Maybe we will use the words of Nietzsche when we investigate a book or piece of music, wondering whether it is human or not: Can it walk? Even more can they dance?
Do check out Harkaway’s above linked post on Substack. I consistently find him very insightful.
02023-02-14 | Brain, Writing
We remember the information contained in handwritten notes better than notes typed into a computer. Perhaps it is the hand motion, perhaps it is because we are actually forming the letters instead of simply selecting them from a keyboard. Writing (vs selecting) is deeper work and therefore more easily remembered.
It would follow that writing on a stone with hammer and chisel would be even more memorable?
I’m going to find me a nice block of stone to carry with me.
02022-12-09 | Lx, Photos, Writing
If you look closely you will see that this ficus tree was not planted at all. It stands above the ground, retaining the shape it had when it was growing inside a pot, in an apartment on the other side of the street.
After she left him, he became morose. Is there a word that combines despair and anger? That’s what he felt, especially late at night, after drinking too much beer. One such night, he noticed that the little tree she had cared for wasn’t doing so well. Maybe that was because of the cigarettes he stubbed out and left in the dirt. Or maybe it was because he didn’t remember to water it. He certainly didn’t sing or speak to it as she had often done. In a fit of despair-rage he picked up the plant by the trunk and flung it from the balcony. The dirt was dry and so the little tree easily slipped out of the pot, which fell and shattered on the balcony, and flew in a glorious arc across the street and landed somewhere in the dark. The root ball, and the dirt it clung to, was the heaviest part of the little tree and thus lead the way, which is why it landed right side up on the sloping meadow. Later that night it rained and by the morning little roots were drilling down into the grass and the dirt below, anchoring the tree to this spot. It had found a place to grow.
