a writer's notebook
This writer only uses Field Notes notebooks, and has a lot of them.
The notebooks of architect Alberto Kalach.
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As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called “cat’s meat men”. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honor, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.
I keep forgetting to do this. Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
It’s not that 39-year-old Mina Tran wants a life completely devoid of bright colours. She just doesn’t want them anywhere near her home or her children’s wardrobes. “You can’t avoid them,” says the doctor and mother of three from Texas. “They creep into areas of my life that I can’t control. You go outside and the grass is green.”Comments closed
Author Austin Kleon’s breakdown of his notebooking practise.
Before I get started, I want to say that this is my system, and I do not necessarily recommend it to others! Writing is my job, so it would make sense that I’d have a bunch of notebooks. My intention with this letter is to be descriptive not prescriptive.
A lot of it seems to be behind a paywall, but the stuff up top is a big chunk and interesting.
The multiple-books thing is why I went to a fauxdori Passport-size – I have four different notebooks stuffed into one cover, so that I’m not constantly scrabbling through a bag for the notebook I need right at that moment.
And he makes a point I’ve tried to make before:
I think all the time about how we emphasize the importance of keeping notebooks and sketchbooks but we almost never talk about the importance of revisiting them and re-reading them. I have found a weekly review hugely helpful: just once a week, sit down and re-read your notebooks and see if there’s anything you can use.
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Comments closedIn futurist terms, it’s the black swan and the pink flamingo, right? I mean, the black swan is something you just can’t see because you can’t imagine such a thing even being possible, whereas the pink flamingo is just like this hideous vulgar thing right in the middle of the lawn that all the locals ignore because they’re completely used to it. They just don’t see it at all.
Bruce Sterling interviewed by Paul Graham Raven.
Comments closedAnyone who reads small press work will cite their own favorites. And because the world is so wide, and publishing so specific, and distribution so complicated, you may or may not have heard of them. It’ll take more work to find their books, maybe. But it’s also kind of fun. If you have a certain kind of temperament—the kind that liked hunting down obscure albums in the pre-internet age, say—it may be a familiar sort of work. It is the work of trying to find art outside the larger corporate sphere.
Small Press SFF Might Sometimes Be Harder to Find — But It’s More Than Worth the Effort
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Comments closedThe novel was a dominant art form last century
https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/12/12/the-novel-was-a-dominant-art-form-last-century
from The Economist
This century’s novelists will need to grapple with this shift. Writers in the last century benefited from increased literacy rates, cheap mass production and the rise of chain bookstores, which all helped create a culture more receptive to their works. Novels could also easily hold their own against films; it is harder now that people have a giant film and TV library in their pockets.
Comments closedWhat might a book written in 2124, looking back at the 21st-century literary novel, argue? That the novel continued to expand its focus outward, by engaging with genre fiction, for instance, as Colson Whitehead and Haruki Murakami do brilliantly; or with nature and science, as Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson do. Novel-reading will become even more of a niche, worthy hobby, like going to a classical-music concert or ballet today.
The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism | AI & SOCIETY
“The purpose of the Nooscope map is to secularize AI from the ideological status of ‘intelligent machine’ to one of knowledge instruments. Rather than evoking legends of alien cognition, it is more reasonable to consider machine learning as an instrument of knowledge magnification that helps to perceive features, patterns, and correlations through vast spaces of data beyond human reach. In the history of science and technology, this is no news; it has already been pursued by optical instruments throughout the histories of astronomy and medicine.Footnote3 In the tradition of science, machine learning is just a Nooscope, an instrument to see and navigate the space of knowledge (from the Greek skopein ‘to examine, look’ and noos ‘knowledge’).”
December 04, 2024 at 01:02PM
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