An online commonplace book
Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.
Cole, Teju. Known and Strange Things. A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon, pg 86.
I’ve never read Steward Brand‘s book “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built“, but it’s all I could think of after reading this passage.
Whenever it’s bad weather, I draw at home and lend a hand to raise my little boys. They will never know what we are doing to give them everything they need.
The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, pg 192
Paul-Émile Pajot sharing some life secrets.
Work.
Draw.
Help out with the kids.
COWEN: Your brother aside, who is the best rapper of all time?
GREENE: [laughs] The best rapper of all time. Well, it depends on if we’re talking about lyrics or something else. But I’ll go with Black Thought, who my brother would say as well, who’s the lead rapper for the Roots.
COWEN: What makes him especially interesting?
GREENE: He’s prolific. He’s extremely productive. He’s very smart. He’s not lazy in the way in which he constructs his lyrics, and he manages to be both musical and a poet. This is something that my brother has struggled with early in his career. He’s a poet. He’s not a musician, and he had to learn to be a musician. Trying to combine those things is a rare gift.
Jamal Green on Conversations with Tyler Ep.151
It’s not that Jamal Green believes Black Thought is the best rapper, it’s his argument for why:
“he manages to be both musical and a poet“
It’s not a compliment paid to many rappers. The criteria is typically, lyrics, street cred, records sold, etc.
Time to revisit Black Thought and the Roots.
Watch the interview in full:
For many seafarers, therefore, keeping a log or writing journal was not just a case of navigational necessity – to work out where they were, and where they were headed – but a way of locating themselves emotionally in a world turned upside down. A journal could combat loneliness, fear, frustration, even mutiny. For William Bligh of the Bounty, cast adrift in an open boat, keeping an accurate logbook was important testimony. As he navigated his way to safety through little-known Australian reefs, he took care to describe the men who had abandoned him; his pencil notes of the marks on their skin might identify them in a future manhunt. And despite all the hardships he suffered, he also took time to describe the new shores they touched on. Always exploring, he was an immense mariner and a deft artist, not the the sea-monster Hollywood films might suggest. A small journal helped to keep Bligh and his companions alive.
The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks, by Huw Lewis-Jones. Pg 13
One doesn’t need to travel in a Spanish galleon around the Galapagos islands to reap the benefits of keeping a journal.
Documenting life publicly is the modern trend, but I suspect documenting our lives privately is an underrated survival tool.
‘Why not, anywhere for cricket’.
The Commonwealth of Cricket: A Lifelong Love Affair with the Most Subtle and Sophisticated Game Known to Humankind, by Ramachandra Guha. Chapter 5 Handshakes with Heroes, pg 163
Ramachandra Guha’s writing is becoming my entry point to Cricket.
An “irrepressible reformer” (as his biographer, Wayne A. Wiegand, calls him), Dewey devoted most of his life to pressing for social change: railing against alcohol and tobacco, promoting the metric system, and even agitating to simplify English spelling (even going so far as to change the spelling of his own name to the phonetically correct Melvil Dui). Dewey invented his Decimal Classification while still an undergraduate at Amherst College, drawing on the earlier work of important library thinkers like Cutter and William T. Harris, whose cataloging scheme for the St. Louis Library had drawn directly on the concept of Francis Bacon and his division of all learning into three high-level categories: history, poetry, and philosophy.
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Alex Wright. Chapter 1 The Libraries of Babel, pg 37.
Could there have been a librarians version of the PayPal mafia?
Frederick Winslow Taylor inspired Melvil Dewey, who collaborated with Charles Cutter, and both of them were inspired by Francis Bacon’s division of learning.
Dewey didn’t stop after the success of the Dewey Decimal System. He later founded the Library Bureau, the 18th century version of Staples. Which is still in business today!
The forever optimist continues to gift his timely wisdom on his birthday. It’s a tradition that’s become a modern, once-a-year Tolstoy Calendar of Wisdom.
Here’s a few of our favorites from this year:
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
The Technium, https://kk.org/thetechnium/, Kevin Kelly
Read the list in full here.
That last one though. We’re typically told to follow our interests, our natural curiosities. How does one become curious about a subject they care little for?
One approach could be finding someone who is manically obsessed with the subject and have a conversation with them. Say you hate trigonometry. Maybe you approach the best trigonometry professor in your area and straight up ask them, Why is trigonometry so interesting?
Ostwald also believed in using the methods of advertising to propagate scholarly work. Up until then advertising had served primary commercial interests. Ostwald argued that it could be pressed into the service of scholarship and education, helping to provide a platform for popularizing scientific findings and connecting the general public and the scholarly community. “The engineer cannot talk,” he said, advocating that schools should put a special emphasis on ensuring better communication and what today we might call presentation skills.
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Chapter 9, The Collective Brain, pg 207. Alex Wright
Paul Otlet’s contemporary Wilhelm Ostwald understood that to build a “global brain” the general public needed to understand it’s value. It needed to be made, well, popular. And he saw that advertising could be a tool to build public support.
This reminds me of Richard W. Hamming’s idea “The duty of a scientist is not only to research, but to communicate.“
The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience-but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are.
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, In one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Sarah Bakewell. Chapter 2 Pay Attention, pg 37.
This could be a productive writing exercise. 200 words describing the closest object near you.
Go!
Floodlights and Goalposts 