The outdoors has frozen solid again. I’ve been out there for 45 minutes and still can’t feel my fingers properly.
ON DECK: finishing WRITTLE 2 105 and then clearing email.
INBOX: 74. Doing most of my email after this draft is locked.
LISTENING:
:Onwards!
Scientists have steered lightning bolts with lasers for the first time in the field, according to a demonstration performed during heavy storms at the top of a Swiss mountain.
Now that’s some proper 21st Century.
The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon’s epileptic half brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter.
PALE FIRE, Vladimir Nabokov (link)
If you read my newsletter yesterday, then you know what this photo means.
ON DECK: WRITTLE 2 episode 105. I need to hustle a bit: filed a rough outline over the weekend, and I need to finish WRITTLE 2 before I go into the scripting on that project. Looking ahead, I need to plan space to do my polishes on the DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT scripts before we record.
INBOX: 71
LISTENING:
READING: I got sent some proofs from the next issue of INTERZONE that I’m working my way through with great pleasure.
Clusters of galaxies do not appear in an instant. Instead they gradually form through the accumulation of many galaxies. But when galaxies fall in they don’t just stop moving. Instead, they keep moving around. These are called backsplash galaxies, and astronomers are using them to help understand the formation history of their home clusters.
A fallen 88-ton Buddha statue on a South Korean mountain will be set back in place by 2025, in an effort that some officials in the country are calling unprecedented.
The statue is located on the Namsan peak in Gyeongju and is believed to be around 1,300 years old. Known as a Maaebul, the statue was discovered in 2007 by a research group in the area.
An earthquake in 1430 may have caused the Maaebul’s tumble, meaning that it could have spent centuries in its current position. But that all will soon change, the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism said this week when it announced the project.
people did you not watch MONSTROUS
The Black on Gray paintings bear witness to the tireless effort with which Rothko kept pushing the boundaries of his practice; which may also explain why one evening in late 1969 he opened his studio to select members of the New York art world to view his latest paintings, the first and only time he presented a series as such.
As mentioned in my notes on THE MENU, food as invention and art has been something I’ve enjoyed observing and reading about – NOMA head Rene Redzepi’s books are excellent. I learned today that NOMA is closing down:
The Copenhagen restaurant Noma, one of the world’s top eateries, with three Michelin stars, will close at the end of 2024 to reinvent itself as a food laboratory.
“To continue being Noma, we must change … Winter 2024 will be the last season of Noma as we know it,” the restaurant’s representatives wrote in a post on Instagram.
“We are beginning a new chapter,” they said.
“In 2025, our restaurant is transforming into a giant lab, a pioneering test kitchen dedicated to the work of food innovation and the development of new flavours, one that will share the fruits of our efforts more widely than ever before.”
In doing so, Redzepi and his crew seem to be following the path of Ferran Adria’s El Bulli, which also became a food lab.
I only ever had two restaurants on my “would love to see” list. The other was Faviken. Both gone now. Ah, well.
ON DECK: wrapping up a draft, waiting on final casting, clearing the deck so I can spend the weekend in an outstanding outline document. Things be speeding up.
INBOX: 67. Waiting on a few things.
I just noticed it’s Friday the 13th. Huh.
This popped into my head just before sleep, and I could not for the life of me remember the proper title and artist name, so I’m putting it up here so I don’t lose it again:
Gallery: Zachary Friedberg.
Roald Dahl’s writing routine. Terribly cosy.
In the dystopian play “The Ventriloquists’ School” by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a ‘free man’ falls into a deserted street and, panicked, takes refuge in a non-place populated by slaves and masters where puppets and manoeuvres live under the control of the feared Sacred Director. Whether it’s a representation of a personal journey, the conscious renunciation of one’s will or a way to vent on some of the more uncomfortable aspects of the self, is up to the audience to interpret.
Sean Bonner on decentralising social media. A good read, possibly useful for others, and Sean tells me it no longer costs hundreds and thousands for the gas fees to mint NFTs, putting it more in the zone of a micro-transaction that recalls Jaron Lanier’s early insistence that emails should cost money to send. But this does also connect to a tendency I’ve seen among indieweb bloggers: working really hard to make sure they can reply to stuff on the internet. I’m not convinced that the value proposition to focus on is ensuring that your instant opinion gets shoved in someone else’s face.
“Home is not where you are born, it’s where all your attempts to escape come to an end.”
Edited and updated version of Spring 2022 post.
I doubt this is useful to anyone but me, so I can see it in front of me, or those people like me who are generally interested in process and knowledge work. But, as of right now, this is how my days go:
I rise at the entirely arbitrary time of 10am. I immediately extract a double ristretto from a machine and sit in my back garden with my phone. I have already glanced at my lock screen to see if there are any emergency messages, and flicked it open to the home page to look at the weather, but that’s all.
I sit outside for the duration of two double ristrettos, with noise-cancelling earbuds in (we keep loud chickens who want to be fed), playing ambient music. I have to start the day softly and gently, scanning the overnight email and messages, and reading a topslice of the news on the phone.
Current news apps: BBC News, The Guardian, The Economist, Foreign Policy, Reuters, BreakingNews, AP, France24, DeutcheWelle, EuroNews and Deadline. Need to experiment with more, maybe take some off rotation.
I was telling someone the other year: I have become the old man who reads the papers in the morning and then watches the news analysis show on tv at night. The phone is now “the papers.” Alternately, I grab the Kindle and read some of a book. Sometimes I’ll just ignore the email. If I don’t get this quiet time to wake up properly and centre myself, the whole day is fucked.
After the coffee, the chickens are fed, and after that, the clock is ticking. I fill a water bottle, make another coffee, grab a jar of overnight oats (made with oat milk, a handful of frozen blueberries, plant-based protein powder and cacao powder) and go to the office.
First, I put music on: podcast, BBC Sounds, something from my CD collection, something I’ve been educating myself with on Amazon Music, whatever. Something I don’t need to fully focus on. I go through the overnight email and messages properly, and mark up the boards: Pending, Status, To-Do, Calls and the big one is whatever is immediately on deck to write. The two paintings were done by my daughter when she was very little, and the print is by Lordess Foudre.
I go through the RSS feeds and newsletters, and compose a morningcomputer post here to condense what I’ve learned that morning that I consider worth retaining and processing. So some days there isn’t one. And usually that’s the end of my news/novelty input for a while.
There’s no social media patrol or use here, no engagement with or management of the outside world. No intrusions. Organisation is simple and physical – marks on whiteboards and paper, as you can see. I put some visual noise on the big screen if I’m not using it for work, usually an art film or a landscape documentary, muted. I play music over the top.
No news. Once I’m done with the morningcomputer post, no new news enters my space. This has become very important to me. I’m no longer on social media, so I don’t have any intrusion from that whole thing, and access to my email is limited.
Organisation is simple and physical – marks on whiteboards and paper.
I work until I get hungry. I’ll watch something – a tv episode, part of a film – while eating lunch, which is either cold meats and flatbreads or salmon with vegetables or something with eggs. I keep it simple and repeatable. Also I have constant access to eggs, as mentioned above. At some point in the afternoon I’ll have an apple with walnuts and cheese. Eight espressos a day, two litres of water. I mention the food because the one thing productivity notes tend to forget is that thinking burns calories, and the first things to kill thinking are thirst and having no calories available to burn.
I do leave email on in the background at this point, and it pops the occasional notification in the bottom right hand of the screen. (Hi there, The Bloomberg Close.) I treat it like a stray thought in meditation – acknowledge it happened, let it pass, go back to what I was doing. It’s probably not ideal? But I’m still me, and still working on it.
Around 5pm, I down tools, go downstairs, pour a drink, and that’s it for a few hours. I’ll catch up with news, spend time with some of the longer articles, cook dinner and generally do nothing except make a few notes if I have a brainwave. Creating a hard break with work posture for a period.
But at 8pm I pick up tools – the notebook, the iPad, the ultralight ThinkPad Carbon X1 on a lapboard, and get back to it. Never continuing what I was doing in the office, but working on something different, thinking of something new or just emptying my head. If that’s not working, I’ll pick up the Kindle and read a book. Never wasted time. I’ll generally watch as much of Newsnight or Peston as I can stand, but I’m still writing. At midnight, I airplane and DND the phone, go to bed and read on the Kindle, making notes and highlights as I go, until 2am tops. I usually get through a book a week like that.
And that’s it. Sixteen hours on, eight hours off.