Doing the most, in the best way.
– Nathan Zed
Hype music yo.
Category: Thinkers
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there’s the sheer beauty of it for athet, you know know all the sports have great athletes but for sheer grace and speed, for for, the combination of power and grace there’s nothing like what happens say in the infield when a beautiful double play is turned to see Ozzie Smith made plays at short stop that that were balletic in a way that nothing, and I mean nothing that happens in those other games matches
– David Bentley Hart
No one. And I mean no one, speaks baseball the way David Bentley Hart does. The details, the passion, the reverence.
All in time for Spring Training.
That from the new documentary DBH: Cutting Forms from Mystery:
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I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.
– Charlie Munger
Second time this week an Adam Smith reference has found it’s way to me.
I need to make him my friend. First up The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Munger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp37
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Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?
Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.
It is hard.
Worth it.
As heard on the latest Art of Manliness podcast: The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper
McKay, Brett. “Podcast #1057: The Power of the Notebook—The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper.” Art of Manliness, [Date of Publication]. https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/podcast-1057-the-power-of-the-notebook-the-history-and-practice-of-thinking-on-paper/.
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Newton observed that if others would think as hard as he did, then they would be able to do the same things. Edison said genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It is hard work, applied for long years, which leads to the creative act, and it is rarely just handed to you without any serious effort on your part. Yes, sometimes it just happens, and then it is pure luck. It seems to me to be folly for you to depend solely on luck for the outcome of this one life you have to lead.
– Richard Hamming
As read from the transcript You and Your Research.
H/T Gwern
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Presents are unwrapped. Chocolates munched. A giant turkey dinner with all the trimmings devoured. The queen’s Christmas address is watched, and the national anthem emotionally hummed to. Then I usher the kids out to get some fresh air, which none of them want, but they are nicer for it. They all have to do some jobs every day and Christmas is no different. This way they learn about duties and responsibilities. Working makes the food and family times later in the day more meaningful: we have earned the rest through work, not idleness. I’d hate not to work at Christmas.
Part of savoring Christmas is learning about other people’s Christmas traditions, whether at the dinner table or through a book.
Rebanks, James. The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. United States, Flatiron Books, 2015. pg 228, 229
How many blogs make it to 900 posts? Thank you dear readers.
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“It is Christmas and a fine day,” “I sleep well, appetite is good, work hard, conscience is neat and easy. Content to live and willing to die. . . . Hoping to do a little good.”
– John adamsMerry Christmas everyone!
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 520
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Bath, inspiration in; Bible, knowledge of; critical spirit; Edwardian; emotion at war with intellect; family feeling; fearlessness; foreign travel, distrust of; games, love of inventing rules for; generosity; honesty; intellectual severity; love, need for; pipe speaking; poetry, love of; rhyming, skill at; speaking ability; temper, loss of; tender-heartedness; transport, passion for forms of (railways, trams, bicycles, motor-bikes); understatement, tendency to.
As read from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life
Writer Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote a biography on her father and his three brothers. Fathers and uncles aren’t the typical biographical portrait.
The structure of this index could be something to replicate. Quick notes on a new topic or city. Similar to Jack Kerouac’s sketches.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. pg10
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As the sketches tell us, anything Jack saw was important. Anything that caught his eye and that he wrote about became priceless. Because in the way that an artist like Picasso could see with a brush, Jack could see with his pen. He was able to capture the spirit of his time without making things up. And as it came to us from nowhere it certainly was astounding how concrete it all is now. It is as if the only true picture of humanity we will ever have was given to us by Jack Kerouac. All else is false and dressed up. Only Jack and Vincent van Gogh told the inner truth.
–George Condo
As read from the introduction of Book of Sketches.
Disagree with the last two sentences, uh Shakespeare.
Lovely book to dip into, also a great practice for writers, taking down quick prose “sketches” in a pocket notebook.
Notice. Notice. Notice
Kerouac, Jack. Book of Sketches. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2006. pg xi,xii
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It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before. Flourishing industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was hard working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode it. My own generation identifies it with Youth, with its gaudy, irretrievable excitements; before it fades into the mist, I would like to pay it the tribute of the sigh that is not a sob, and set down random entries in a shape somewhat less cumbersome than a Sears Roebuck catalogue.
E.B. White
That from the essay Farewell, My Lovely!
I’d argue the miracle is happening twice. Watch this space.
Also, can you imagine living in an age where the 1909 Model T Ford was a symbol of Youth?
White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 202
Floodlights and Goalposts 