GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Encouragement to Quit Facebook

    A note for a friend and for everyone else, including me.

    I popped on to Facebook and saw a post that you had just returned from being stuck in FB purgatory for a few days.  I doubt you did anything that deserved punishment from their idiotic moderation, so I’m not writing about that.

    Instead, I wanted to drop some unsolicited advice about social media cause this shit is a parasitic a brain suck. I don’t think I’ll ever fully delete my account, cause I enjoy visiting once a month to skim quick updates…and occasionally find some cool stuff.

    However, I’m really happy that I’ve made a concerted effort to severely restrict FB’s reach into my life. Quitting social has saved me a bunch of time and more importantly it’s freed me to be present with the kids. I didn’t realize how these addictive algorithms were constantly sucking a brain tax until I drastically cut myself out of their system. Seriously, quitting Facebook last summer was as difficult as quitting smoking ten years ago. 

    I fully admit childcare is fucking boring. It isn’t fun to have an adult’s Ferrari brain stuck pushing tricycles around the house. But infecting oneself with social media isn’t a good answer. This is my one regret from my daughter’s early years – I feel that I half assed the childcare and got even less out of the experience.

    One of the best quips about parenting is “the days are long, but the years are short”. Next thing I know, she’s finishing first grade. Soon she’ll be off hanging out with her friends.

    Normally I would have kept these opinions to myself, but you’re a good buddy and I hope you’ll avoid my mistake. In the end, everybody gotta figure out how to run their own lives and decide how the internet will support such goals. I’m not going to judge anyone on how they use social media, but I thought I’d offer a little perspective for your consideration.

    Be intentional however you choose to use these sites.  Make sure you’re using the tool, not the one being used.

    Take care, and when this goddamn pandemic settles down, I hope we’ll get a chance to break some bread.

  • Detention Basin

    It was a lovely day, so we drove out to a local detention basin at the western foothills near our house. There wasn’t any good parking. All the nearby developments were gated communities, and we didn’t want to take our Odyssey up a gravel utility road.

    So we drove back down a long suburban block to the closest elementary school. Fortunately, this extremely upscale development had created a linear park along the thoroughfare. This was no mere sidewalk. It wound back and forth and looped under itself (twice!) with unnecessary pedestrian bridges buttressed by gabion walls. Along the route, there was a large lawns which was populated with little mounds. The kids loved running up and down this bumpy plain.

    At the end of this luxurious walk, we turned up the gravel utility road, slipped through a gap in the guard rail at the storm channel, and suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the desert.

    At the upper rim of the basin you could look all the way out to the Strip.

    In the bowl, you could only see the hills and sky.

    A few months ago, I had hiked alone to this detention basin via a decidedly less bourgeois route, coming down from the hills via an arroyo, following the storm channel into this space. I already knew this was a pretty cool spot, and it was nice to share this place with the rest of the family.

    Admittedly, the gratuitous walk with fancy trashcans that looks like planters is also enjoyable, but the pleasure of the linear park is dampened by its artifice. In contrast, the detention basin is real, a piece of infrastructure that exists because we insist on occupying this desert valley.

    Unlike the linear park that tries to be something, this basin just is.

  • The Philosopher’s Cookbook, Martin Versfeld, 2005

    You are what you eat. Not a novel assertion, but this book was enjoyable because of the many ways that Versfeld explored this concept.

    He advocates for a simple and earthy enjoyment of food via a refined book liberally seasoned with references and allusions from all throughout literate history. My intimate understanding of the Bible, a working familiarity with Greek and Roman mythology, generic feel for the contours of Western philosophy, and recent forays into ancient Chinese thought, all turned out to be surprisingly useful for enjoying this book.

    As I grow older (and disillusioned with the gift of the internet) I find myself becoming more curmudgeonly concerning my information consumption. I have always been skeptical about fads that valorize a classical “great-books” education, but I have to admit that such a rarified syllabus is obviously better fare than a constant barrage of opinion pieces (such as this post) that are indiscriminately published on the web.

    In these days of easy edutainment, it is difficult to slow down and read a book. A book is a journey that takes time and mental effort to inhabit. It is much harder to develop understanding than to collect trophies. Unfortunately, social media is all about collecting trophies to satisfy our basest emotional instincts. The quick hit of a hot take is a fleeting pleasure that have been weaponized by our favorite tech companies. The only way I’ve been able to sidestep this dilemma has to cut social media out my life.

    I’ve uninstalled all the apps and am logged out on my browsers. I haven’t deleted my accounts, because I will occasionally reference old posts and keep contacts alive in private messages. I’m not perfect, so I’ll sometimes slip into surfing these feeds, but the more I stay away from the addiction, the easier it’s been to avoid mindlessly returning to these infinite pages.

    In reading about habits, you will come across the trope of “never skip two days”. It’s bad enough to miss one day, but you’re in real danger if you miss two in a row. My advice for cutting out social media is the inverse. The hardest step in avoiding a site is the second day. Once you get past that point, it is relatively easy to avoid such sites for multiple weeks.

    Breaking the social media habit was most among my greatest accomplishments over the past year, along with losing weight, and getting myself back on a regular schedule of posting self-righteous puffery on this little platform of my own.

    In all, I quite enjoyed the book. I don’t think it will be in the regular rotation, but I think this will be a book that I will happily rediscover on my shelves every few years. Kind of like finding an old friend on Facebook.

  • Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene, Tim Dee, 2019

    What struck me was the foreignness of it all.

    Is the jungle in Madagascar truly more exotic than a dump in England? What is stranger: the birds who fly the seas eating any scrap of edible looking trash or the people who obsessively chase them?

    I have no interest in bird watching, but this book was a compelling read.

    Any endeavor fully pursued begins to weave together the entire world. A singular focus on one subject becomes a window on the universe. Though they come from the sea and the air, these gulls are now intertwined with our human world, inhabiting our cities and farms. The landfill is a record of our activities, a living testament of who we were yesterday. The categorizations of these birds highlight our scientific era’s obsession with creating ever finer distinctions of specificity.

    Tim Dee’s anecdotes in the field and interviews with experts transforms this niche subject into a exploration of humanity. The book is an example of how a deftly managed lens becomes a mirror that reveals our other selves.

    The world is rich, we just need to truly look.

  • The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz, 2012

    This is an ambitious endeavor, covering fermentation in all its forms, all over the world.

    After getting into sourdough baking, I developed a preference for “scientific” cookbooks, using weight measurements (metric) with page layouts that are clearly formatted for ease of visual discrimination as one skims the the work. However, all these books invariably ended up being messy and touchy feely when describing how to develop a starter.

    Fermentation is the art of a collecting things, shoving them into a favorable environment, and letting time do its thing.

    As modern humans, we are given an illusion of control. However, choosing to ferment is a leap of faith, especially at the idiosyncratic home-brew level and especially in one’s first attempts.

    But one should start simply, with the a basic sauerkraut. The first batch I made was with some almost-wilted purple cabbage that had been abandoned in the fridge. I chopped it up, squeezed the leaves as I added salt, shoved it all into a jar. A couple days later I had the best sauerkraut I’ve ever tasted in my life.

    Absolute magic.

    My sourdough starter is also magical, but it took two long weeks of feeding and discarding before she came to life. It then took another three weeks before I figured out how to bake properly to draw out her full capabilities.

    In contrast, sauerkraut was so simple. Just two ingredients shoved into a jar for a couple days. Fermentation happens, and this book is a lovely mix of folksy wisdom, extensive experience, and authoritative research that wrestles with this unruly topic.

    This book is an encyclopedic and magisterial work. I wonder what it’s like to work on such a project. Writing is a lonely task and any ambitious project is fraught with insecurity. With this grand title, it’s clear that Sandor Katz knew this was going to be his magnum opus. I also wonder how it feels when such a project achieves the author’s dreams of grandeur, winning a James Beard award and being generally regarded as a in instant classic in the field.

    This book is victorious, but whatever brilliance earned from the previous project is fleeting. There’s always the next project. Life (and fermentation) marches on, and I look forward to reading Sandor’s newest book, Fermentation as Metaphor.

    Postscript
    I really like the following quote, but I couldn’t fit them into the post above.

    Professor Kosikowski won over Kindstedt and his fellow graduate students. “He understood that traditional cheesemaking was not simply about food, or even gastronomic delight, but rather carried with it the weight of the culture and local identity that are so essential for providing context and meaning to our lives.” Indeed, all food exists in a broad context, and centralized mass produced food diminishes that context.

    page 206

  • I Ching Flashcards for Pleco

    I was working through my Quizlet flashcards and decided to also learn the Chinese titles, so I made some flashcards on Pleco, the Chinese-English Dictionary App.

    Unfortunately Pleco doesn’t render the hexagrams on iOS, which would have been really slick.

    In the end, I produced two flashcard sets, both exported as txt files.

    Flashcards-Pleco-YIJING-Richter-210423Download

    This first set includes the King Wen hexagram number, the Trigrams, and Judgement (Gregory Richter translation), as well as the (modern) Dictionary Definition of the words. (If you open it up, you’ll notice an odd character peppered throughout the file – this character is used by Pleco to designate line breaks on the card.)

    Flashcards-Pleco-YIJING-DictionaryOnlyDownload

    The second is just a list of all the Chinese words that was used for these titles. This is intended to tie into the Pleco dictionary and does not include its own definitions. I produced this set because making custom cards by adding I Ching info took out the formatting that made the standard cards more readable.

    Have fun!

  • Kitchens and Dining Rooms, Mary Gilliatt, 1970

    A few months ago I wanted to read some lighter fare, and it doesn’t get much lighter than an interior decoration guide.

    However, a style guide that is half a century old has it’s own gravitas.

    The anachronistic use of “Mr. and Mrs. John Doe” was a amusing and cringe worthy, and the author seemed overly fond of Marimekko cloth. But it was really quite intriguing to see the true variety of kitchens in this book. Not merely finishes, but substantive differences in arrangements, equipment, and shelving. I strongly suspect that the past five decades of mass standardization made our modern kitchens quite banal.

    1970 doesn’t feel that long ago, but frankly, aside from some of the newest kitchens in the book, most of the photos felt completely foreign even though most of them were located in America. Unlike books and magazines today, the photographs were primarily black and white, which wasn’t ideal – except for the modernist kitchens (such as the one in our own house) that didn’t have much color.

    Purist kitchens pay no homage to rusticity or prettiness. Uncompromisingly they use twentieth-century units and ingredients. They are inevitably spare of line, extremely well planned and easy to work in. This does not preclude color, but they are often pure white and beautifully detailed. Most purist kitchens are designed by architects – usually for themselves.

    page 65

    I picked up this book of the side of the road on trash day, and it is regrettable to think of what other books are being tossed out around town without second thought. Even though I wouldn’t have paid money to buy a copy, this book is now safe on my shelves.

  • I Ching, Feb-Mar, 2021

    Notes on my new practice of conducting I Ching readings.

    I started my exploration of I Ching by reading the pocket edition translated by Thomas Cleary. Even though I did not enjoy Cleary’s prose and most of these ancient allusions were utterly impenetrable, reading the basic text without commentary was a great introduction to the structure of the book.

    That said, I did not conduct readings until my copy of the John Minford translation arrived in the mail, which has an extensive commentary to shed light for personal readings. Minford made a quirky choice to toss in a few Latin phrases in the readings, which I find atmospheric (but is certainly a YMMV preference).

    The first readings were sparse because I was asking indeterminate questions. However, I’ve been stumbling into better insight, due to increasing familiarity and learning to ask sharper questions. As with much in life, the most important step for obtaining a useful answer is finding the right question. Hopefully this practice will continue to be more insightful as I improve at this skill.

    None of the answers are earth shattering – I am usually reminded of well trod aphorisms that I’ve said many times – but the applications are sometimes unique and novel. For better or worse, I suspect this practice may be an exercise in self confirmation bias. To be sacrilegious for a moment, the base text of the I Ching is an impenetrable word salad (at least for a beginner), so there is an obvious danger of reading what one wants. One ought to consider the warnings of S. J. Marshall and remember dire lessons of history when someone overly-enthusiastically embrace the ambiguous pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle.

    I jot notes of all my readings in a notebook. If past experience with sketchbooks are an indication, I won’t ever refer these old notes in the future but the most important aspect of writing things down is that it focuses the mind at the moment.

    That said, I did come across an interesting coincidence between a consecutive readings the other day. It’s both easy to dismiss as just chance, but the animal spirit inside of me still wants to put special significance on the moment.

    A week after after starting this ritual, I added two extra steps to each session. After the I Ching reading, I read a section of the Dao De Jing. I’m just marching through it front to back, jotting a couple notes along the way, and I plan on rotating through various books of wisdom (such as the Analects or Art of War) with this practice. Finally, I close with writing down a Chinese proverb from the ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs, (referenced via an addon in Pleco). This last step gives me a chance to write and read a little (non-archaic) Chinese, and I think an earthy aphorism is a necessary benediction after drinking the heady stuff of the other two books.

    The other day, I researched the yarrow stalk method of divination (a much longer process than throwing three-coins six times method). In the process I found out that I had been calculating my coin throwing incorrectly. It was a minor error since overall probabilities were still consistent, but the actual results were “incorrect”. However, I had been getting good insight for the past couple weeks. This early error is a good reminder that divination is a self-conducted mind game. The key is to allow chance put fresh unexpected input into your brain. I suspect you could practice bibliomancy and just flip the book open at random.

    I scoured the backyard for twigs and got 50 sticks and have found that I quite enjoy this method of divination. It is a considerably longer route to getting an answer, but noticeably more pleasurable. It seems that sometimes the answer just comes from spending 20 minutes with the question doing a relatively mindless counting task. And for a guy who is as fidgety as me, this is likely the closest I’ll get to a meditative practice.

    The internet has a habit of transmogrifying a passing interest into the only thing in the world. Everybody’s into it now! I’ve joined the I Ching Reddit as well as the OnlineClarity forums, both of which have users who carry themselves with a discomfiting certainty that I recognize from my teenage years as a Reformed Baptist.

    S. J. Marshall’s excellent Biroco.com and Bradford Hatcher’s Hermetica.info are also quite self assured, but they are both comprehensive resources with recommendations from folks seem who really know what they are talking about. Finding these websites spurred me to record these notes. This is a post is a marker of how I started the practice, since I suspect things may shift under his influence.

    A less dogmatic and much more sympathetic take on the I Ching is this lovely essay by Will Buckingham. I might just pick up his book inspired by the I Ching, as well as Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies (any excuse for a Calvino is a good one).

    With only a couple months, I’ve barely started this practice compared to these illustrious students. I’m still on the fresh, exciting part of the learning curve, where new insights are gleaned every few days. I’m curious when the dip will hit, and whether I will drop this like many of my other dustbin hobbies. Ultimately, that’s a problem for another day. At the moment, my intended next steps are:

    1. Keep up the practice.
    2. Incorporate S. J. Marshall’s method of interpreting changing lines.
    3. Play more with the Yarrow Stalk Method.
    4. Print copies of the Nigel Richardson books for use during readings. Also, get a copy of the Wilhelm-Baynes Translation with its Neo Confucian background and Richard Lynn’s Translation with Wang Bi’s (Neo Taoist) commentary.
    5. Learn to memorize the hexagrams. I’ve been using a set of flashcards that I assembled on Quizlet.
    6. Read Minford, Lynn, and Wilhelm-Baynes cover to cover (separately from the readings).

    ䷐

  • Foam Sleeping Pad, Therm-a-Rest

    The summer before my thesis semester, I visited a friend in Pittsburg who was just starting graduate school. As two students, the sleeping accommodation in his spartan apartment was a green foam camping pad on the hardwood floors.

    No problem, I had spent most of my undergraduate career sleeping on the concrete floors of Wurster Hall because I was a bit insane ’bout that studio life.

    This thin inflatable foam pad was a revelation. You’d bottom out if you rolled on to your side, but it was as comfortable as a normal mattress when I stayed on my back.

    A couple years later, we tried camping as a hobby and bought a couple of these pads for ourselves. The camping kick only lasted a few months, but we’ve kept them around for the past decade. At $60 a piece, this was a significant purchase in the middle of the Great Recession and they held nostalgic significance.

    One can thank COVID for their return to prominence. After reading Guts, our daughter wanted to have a slumber party. With no real options, we held a family slumber party in the spare bedroom. She enjoyed it so much that we repeated it every weekend for a couple months, sleeping on these thin air mattresses every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.

    The world has changed a bit from those days as a grad student, but occasionally I catch glimpses that self in the moment.

    Now it’s the four of us, navigating a suddenly claustrophobic world.

  • The Algebra of Happiness, Scott Galloway, 2019

    I’ve always called myself politically liberal but temperamentally conservative. From his podcasts, I sensed that this brash business school professor had the same sentiments. He railed against the COVID stimulus bills prop up the wealthy while minimizing support to the folks who really need the help, and he never misses an opportunity to hammer our tech giants whenever they are stifling the wider economy.

    Given the affinity, I was quite interested in this book but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of handling physical media in a COVID world. After breaking the e-book barrier with BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, I returned to the Libby app and picked up a copy of the audiobook, narrated by Prof G, himself.

    I had been avoiding books on tape because I’ve long felt that books require a certain level of concentration to properly appreciate. However, self help books are the junk food of non-fiction prose. With a run time of less than 4 hours this was barely a nice diversion from my usual slate of podcasts.

    I was right.

    This book is a nice easy listen. It feels like a compilation of blog articles that muse on the importance of hard work and developing meaningful relationships. It is a fragmented memoir focused on his upbringing, personal success and failings, and the joys of raising his boys. As an exercise in confirmation bias, it was a pleasant exercise to nod along with a nominally self aware, almost-obnoxious, rich, influential, white guy speaking truths I already believed.

    The main thing is that I’ve now broken the ebook and audiobook barriers that had limited my intake of this sort non-fiction velvetta. Given everything available in the library catalog, it looks like I’ll be getting all the self help I can handle at 1.5x speed.