“DOING THE VALVES, TIMING, AND MINOR MAINTENANCE ON YOUR OWN CAR WILL NOT ONLY CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR TRANSPORTATION BUT WILL ALSO CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF!”
– John Muir
and from the comments:
“This is a beautiful point. Many in my generation (millennial) have never experienced this firsthand. You do not know the full meaning of ownership until you have maintained or modified the thing. You cannot buy full ownership; you must participate.”
– LYNDON
There is a bond that forms when you take the time to repair something. Even swapping out the tire on your car. If you do it yourself successfully, you’ll see seams, and bolts, and rivets, the cars personality, will reveal itself a bit.
Like you’re setting her right. And she appreciates the attention.
Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2026), 92.
“The man who lives in this house makes very good orange marmalade. He also breeds orchids. He has never eaten a dish of tripe in his life. And he wishes that his dog could speak to him. And that eccentric sequence of autobiographical irrelevancies may even give you a clue to who he is.“
Cool idea from the living cool idea Stewart Brand. He included a list of software used to help write his book in the book credits. First I’ve ever heard anyone author giving credit to their tools.
Surprised non of the major LLMs hit the list.
Wow. Also Scribbr where have you been the last 24 months?
Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2026), 13.
She took her cheque demurely and made a brief speech, in which she spoke for all those readers who never travel without a novel on the bus, tube or train, picking up each morning where they left off the night before and showing no relief at the end of a book, only anxiety to get lost in yet another novel.
When Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker prize in 1979 many were bemused. Her book Offshore won the honor.
She dedicated the win to her people, the readers.
She was one of them.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 272
I have managed to fill up sixty pages of a new exercise book. I now have in my personal anthology – over 600 poems by some 300 poets. 802 pages written so far. I think that this proves, if proof were needed, that I do not take my vocation lightly.
– J.A. Baker
Baker’s contagious enthusiasm. A young writer, ambitious, looking to master his craft. Not sure where to turn, begins by copying.
At the end of the year, deep in mid-winter, night falls early in Copenhagen. Along with Rosenborggade, lamplight and firelight and candlelight fill the upper windows by four o’clock. Passers-by who brave the cold streets glimpse Christmas trees in glowing rooms, hear snatches of songs and children’s laughter. Kierkegaard’s rooms are quiet, and he is alone. ‘1848 has raised me to another level,’ he writes in his journal: ‘it has shattered me religiously; God has run me ragged.’
How quickly we forget that Christmas day is the first day of Christmas.
Also, Christmas trees in glowing rooms is Christmas maxxing.
An observations on Clare’s style and prose. Love the phrase “snatches of songs.” The word “snatches” here is part verb, part noun. Delightful.
Carlisle, Clare. Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. pg180
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
Scrooge learned.
Dickens knew.
May we all learn to keep Christmas well.
Thank you for a great year everyone, and Merry Christmas.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol: And Other Christmas Books. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. pg85
An Italian, born in Palermo, he brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra’s comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence of life.
– François Truffaut
Spot on Truffaut. Spot on.
Truffaut called Capra “the good doctor”.
Tonight, whether you watch It’s a Wonderful Life, or You Can’t Take it With You, you will leave your sofa (or even better, the theater) heartbroken. Heartbroken but encouraged.
It’s what Frank Capra does.
Merry Christmas Eve.
As read from François Truffaut’s essay Frank Capara, The Healer.
Truffaut, F. (1978). The Films in My Life. United Kingdom: Simon and Schuster. pg69
With sands that will bear your enemies' boats, But suck them up to th'topmast. A kind of conquest Caesar made here, but made not here his brag Of 'came and saw and overcame'. With shame - The first that ever touched him - he was carried From off our coast, twice beaten, and his shipping, Poor ignorant baubles, on our terrible seas Like eggshells moved upon their surges, cracked As easily 'gainst our rocks. For joy whereof, The fame Cassibelan, who was once at point - O giglot Fortune! - to master Caesar's sword, Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright, And Britons strut with courage. - Queen
Cymbeline is often overlooked. It’s a romance, but not a popular one. Denzel Washington isn’t playing Cymbeline in a black and white film adaptation. Tim Chalamet isn’t appearing as Posthumus on Broadway.
There are plenty of “what’s going on here?” passages in Cymbeline, but then, like above, there are sublime bits of oration.
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
Floodlights and Goalposts 