Category: Notes

A few years ago, I borrowed this book from the library only to read a couple pages before returning it. Fortunately, the occasional recommendations of Taleb at rvltr reminded me to pick this book up again.

This time around, I got the audio book and by the time I had reached the place where I had been previously dropped off, I realized this was an absolutely brilliant little book.

What changed?

It wasn’t the format. This book is best as a physical hardcopy, as an object lying around the house to be randomly accessed, to be pondered a couple lines at a time. An audio book is actually the perfectly wrong format for this book.

So what changed? How did I see brilliance after missing it in its best light? Well, my brain is has changed. In the past year, I finally kicked my Facebook addiction and minimized my use of Boardgamegeek. I’ve always had good boundaries around Twitter and Linkedin, but I’ve strangled my use of those services as well. Thank god I never got sucked into Instagram or Tiktok.

Getting control over these digital vices has not only freed up precious free time, it has made a big difference in how my mind processes the world around me.

Can you imagine it? I wasn’t mentally concentrated enough to read a short book of pithy proverbs! We are going to look back at the early 21st century as a dark age of constant distraction from the computers in our pockets.

My twenties had cigarettes, my thirties had social media. At the moment, I regret the latter more than the former. Let’s hope this decade doesn’t come with its own a regrettable addiction.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

Taleb

Back to the book for a moment. It’s fucking brilliant. Not every aphorism will be applicable to you, but when it hits, the punch packs a wallop. I read and listened (at 1.0x speed) to each copy separately, basically reading it twice in quick succession. I did not notice a major difference between the original audiobook and the expanded ebook. Both are fine but neither are ideal formats for full appreciation of this book. I suspect that I will eventually purchase a hardcopy, since it was designed for manual serendipity. However, it is also fair to note that I don’t love it enough to make a stand against my wife’s current campaign against new book physical purchases.

Three months later. Even though I still haven’t purchased a copy, I suspect that this will be my most influential book of the year. It was nice that it spurred me to listen to Anti-Fragile, but more importantly it ignited my recent push towards reading ancient wisdom literature, such as the Havamal, I Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Analects, etc.

One of Taleb’s aphorisms starts “Read no book less than 100 years old…”, It seems that I’ve multiplied that advice by ten or twenty. I wonder how long this personal trend will last.

The first half of the book is an exercise of being seen. Walker Evans pushes his subjects to look into the camera. The subject directly looks at the observer, drawing you into their American experience. The distance of eight decades is inescapable, but it is also impossible to miss universality of our humanity.

The second half of the book is a crisply focused, a clinical series of distant townscapes and cityscapes. Every photograph is empty of humanity aside from our built structures.

Upon reflection Walker Evan’s stance becomes clear. America is both her people and its context.

But it isn’t clear what came first. Maybe it’s an irrelevant question. We shape our environment, and it shapes us. We are its residue as we leave our mark.

This book is rightly a classic, the craft is taut and the voice is clear. The only sour note is the turgid essay at the end of the book, so just skip the afterword. I have no regrets buying this book, primarily because the local library didn’t have its own copy (a damn shame). Even so, of the making of books there is no end, and I haven’t been back to this one over the past couple months.

There is a downside to listening to a ton of Seth Godin interviews – this book was thoroughly trod before I got my turn to borrow the audiobook from Overdrive.

The basic conceit of the Practice is reasonable. Our job is to do the work, but the outcome lies in the hands of the gods….so goddammit go execute your process.

I found it intriguing that Seth structured the book as a numeric series of essays (ending in the 220’s), but I don’t grok what he was trying to get out of such a structure. Maybe I should borrow the ebook to look for the payoff of such a framework, but it is telling I haven’t bothered to do so in the two months since I wrote the first draft of this post.

I’m coming to think that The Dip, with a simple counterintuitive concept written in a brutally concise format, will be Seth’s book that lasts longest in the mind’s eye. Linchpin, Seth’s self acknowledged masterwork, was also great, but I have to admit that it already has a dated aura to it.

In the end, I like the basic premise of The Practice, but I must wonder if it was longer than necessary to drive the point home. I’ll give Seth the benefit of the doubt, but even if the final product is “not bad” did it reach greatness? I guess asking the question is the answer. Seth’s batting average is incredibly high, but not every work can be a masterpiece.

The one concept from the book that has stayed with me over the past few months is Seth’s distinction between “instigating change” versus an “artful hobby”. He believes both routes are viable paths for an endeavor, even though he openly focuses on the former. It’s a stark decision and I’ve become increasingly comfortable with the fact that this is an “artful hobby”, following the model of Scripting.com instead of Seths.blog.

I picked up the book soon after I finally purchased Robert Frank’s The Americans and Walker Evan’s American Photographs. Amazon’s algorithm saw a trend and kept placing this book in front of me until I caved.

Fortunately, the algorithm did right. I fully enjoyed this snapshot of America in the early 90’s.

Kubota is the most sincere photographer I’ve read. He keeps a respectful distance from his subject, presents them without comment, avoids personal flourishes, and maintains the fourth wall between the photograph and the reader.

I was intrigued by his ability to seem so anonymous within his work. Like the dog who didn’t bark, it takes a while before you notice the fact he worked so carefully to stay out of the frame. His only stylistic device is a tendency to go high, whether a step ladder or on a blimp. Even then, this was noticed largely because he admits to it in the introduction.

At a contextual level, it was also interesting to note how many of these three decade old photos would be considered subpar in today’s world. The aerial night shots of Vegas are completely blurred, something you’d expect of a frame capture from a youtube video. Such aerial shots were possibly magnificent in their time, but such technical and logistical feats have lost their punch in an era where my contractor is producing a weekly high definition drone video of my construction site.

Even so, Kubota’s photographs still hold up on the ground and in the crowd. Maybe the reason they’ve stayed fresh because my nostalgia of these years when America was on the ascendency after the fall of the Soviets.

However, I’d like to think they hold up artistically because he scrupulously avoided forcing a stylistic signature in his work. Asian Americans are often frustrated by our invisibility within larger society. In this case, Kubota used it to his great advantage.

This assessment might be an idiosyncratic preference – Kubota’s out of print books are not overpriced in the secondary market. Even so, I can think of no higher compliment than to mention that I’ve purchased two more of his books, China and Out of the East, this time without the insistent prompting of the algorithm.