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A magical, brilliant teaching tool. Ableton's education/explanation team have always been top-notch, but this is great, and I am envious of it and them. I love how it starts with sound, and abstract explorations, before breaking those apart into components – amplitude, pitch, timbre – and only later mapping those to synthesizer components – all of which will work with a keyboard plugged in, thanks to webmidi. Grand stuff, and so great to see them investing in this sort of thing.
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"…"there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was *essential*? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?"
So much in this huge essay by Errol Morris – on anxiety, on performance, on the piano, on consciousness, and how we offload our consciousness to small advisors – what a programmer knows as rubberducking. There is so much in here to love, and I probably need to reread it at least once.
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"The things we love create us if we get to them early enough, but when we get to them a little bit later, they show us who we’ve already become, what we’ve accumulated, what we’ve chosen to discard and what we’ve clutched so close to ourselves for so long that its material has leaked into our own." More wonderful writing about The National from Helena Fitzgerald. Wonderfully written, and so on the nose about what loving bands, or people, or things, feels like.
“…meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important”
17 June 2019
Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
Marc Weidenbaum on the value of straight-up blogging, in a place you own yourself. All of this. I’ve been quiet here – less quiet at my work site – but not absent, and knowing that this is mine, and that slowly, what I’m thinking about was always present – even in the Pinboard links – has value.
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Lovely writing from Ruby Tandoh.
From the ready room to the air in a paragraph break.
26 March 2019
How about this for writing, from James Salter’s The Hunters, his 1956 novel about fighter pilots in the Korean war. Cleve is an Air Force captain; he’s taking off on his first mission from his new posting.
Cleve dressed himself slowly to reduce the time he would have to spend standing around and taking little part in the talk. He was not fully at ease. It was still like being a guest at a family reunion, with all the unfamiliar references. He felt relieved when finally they rode out to their ships.
Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the fifth time. It was still all adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. Cleve rejoiced in it.
Salter goes from the ready room to flight inside a paragraph break. And how he describes it! His flying descriptions do become slightly more ‘technical’, in the sense of defining what is happening, when combat occurs, but he’s almost completely uninterested in the technical interactions of flying. He wants to show intent – what Cleve is doing, not what his plane is doing. (His plane, incidentally, is an F-86 Sabre, though it will only ever be referred to as a ‘ship’ throughout the novel, and the MiG-15s of the North Koreans will be reduced to nothing but ‘MIGs’.)
Beautiful; not quite ‘spare’, but stripped down to only that which is necessary to tell the story, about how a man feels in the air. The rest of the book is continuing to be as good.
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"In The Wave in the Mind, one of Le Guin’s many collections of essays, she wrote, ‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.’ When I met Le Guin, I was in outer space, hovering in that darkness. Cast out from my homeworld, I spent my days orbiting a new world, afraid to land." This is great.
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I think last year I mentioned enjoying Justin's year roundup; the same holds true this year.
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First and foremost, a Gross Recipe is an expression of you: of the uniquely briny, spicy, bland, mushy, crunchy things at the core of you, in concentrations that the average person would find actively off-putting. In cooking for others, we are always making compromises—in favor of decorum, preference, presentation, and hard-coded culinary norms that dictate what goes with what and in what quantity. A Gross Recipe throws all of that out of the window; it is one of few chances that any of us get—in a kitchen or elsewhere—to be who we truly are.
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"Silly as it sounds, not being able to figure this out made dad feel more distant. I had thought of us as like minds, and it made the loss easier to accept. His brain wasn’t entirely gone, I still have a partial version of it in my own head. But either this gadget did nothing intelligent at all, which couldn’t be true, or he and I thought so differently that even with unlimited tries, I couldn’t deduce how his interface was ever supposed to work. It was an upsetting thought."
Tom Francis on time, memory, PIDs and parental inventions.
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Cor, this is great stuff from Jenny Odell: a tangly web of dropshipping, fraud, media, and "Bible universities". Great writing, and very hypertexty.