GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch, 2018

    With the interminable confinement due to the pandemic, I indulged a fair bit for Christmas. Of the games “I gave” my kids, this one as certainly the highlight.

    It is not a children’s game per se, but our six year old daughter picked it up immediately, same with my mother in law.

    And also my wife, who exclaimed it was the dumbest game that I’d ever inflicted on her when I explained the rules to her.

    We take our cards and play them out to a shared pile in the middle, in numerical order. No talking.

    The beauty of The Mind is that it recreates the sensation of dread and anticipation you feel during an opponent’s final turn right at the end of a tight game – for the entire bleeping game!

    I never conceptualized that it was possible for a game could create and maintain this tension. Certainly not a game with such a simple elegant ruleset. Of course, it is most likely works only because it is so simple.

    Ultimately, I suspect this game will end up in Hanabi territory – taking numbered cards and simply doing something simultaneously absurd and sublime with it.

    In the months after writing this note, I have consistently brought it to the in-laws house during our weekly visits, and we have consistently not played it. Then again we haven’t played many games lately at their house. At home, my I Ching obsession has eliminated my entreaties to my wife to play games with me. So the high opinion of the design still stands, but it’s not getting nearly as much love as I would have expected.

  • Comic Relief and Rory Root

    I was a freshman living on the north side of campus. The shop was on the west side.

    It was a rough year in the dorm. I escaped by hiding in bookstores and read the entire Sandman series in his shop.

    Comic Relief had a simple rule. Read what you want but don’t sit down.

    Beyond that, they were really totally chill. I went through the Blade of the Immortal series in that shop as well.

    I was a poor student, so I read a lot but only bought the occasional comic, but they were cool about it.

    Hopefully I repaid their hospitality with many purchases after I graduated and got a job.

    The other night, I thought about Rory, a big guy with long stringy blond hair and a big black wrist stiffener. A jovial presence in his kingdom. I remember hanging out with him a few times as he smoked a couple cigarettes outside on University Avenue. I still think about his warnings about acid free tape (there adhesive was acid free, but the tape membrane wasn’t).

    He was a gracious host. After all my free loading during the college years, I willingly bought much of what he recommended to me. There are plenty of obscure graphic novels on my shelves from his store.

    I also fondly remember the time when I picked up Frank Miller’s Yellow Bastard from his Sin City series. A couple days later I returned it. I was a bit embarrassed, but that book was just too dark. A great novel, but I couldn’t have it in my house.

    No judgment. No big deal.

    He moved his shop to a bigger place right before I moved out to Texas. A few years later he passed away. The shop is now gone.

    But the memory of Comic Relief still lives fresh in my mind’s eye. It was an institution, for a moment. Thankfully I was there for it.

    These small institutions that enrich our lives are always but fleeting. This haunting reality is a bit of a downer, so I just try to be grateful in the moment. And when they’re gone, I remind myself that it was a boon to be at the right place at the right time.

  • American Photographs, Walker Evans, 1938

    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.

  • The Practice, Seth Godin, 2020

    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.

  • Programming Idea: Real-time Reality-based Ratings

    The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times)…the rest is spin….

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

    To pat myself on my back, I’ve been pretty happy with the rhythm this blog has hit over the past few months. I have also been happy with my “reviews”, even though they bounce around all over the place. However, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I ought to provide a minimal modicum of direct commentary on the these objects that springboard my ramblings.

    After years of reading reviews on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, I believe that numerical rating systems are universally overwrought and contrived. After reading Taleb’s aphorism, I’ve been trying to end my notes with a blunt factual comment about what I did with the work during and after consumption.

    Aside from immediately rereading a book, I can think of no higher complement for BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habit than to say I ran off and bought my own physical copy. However, it’s been three months since the book arrived, and I haven’t cracked it open.

    Conversely, one must wonder how much I actually liked George Valliant’s Aging Well, since I immediately returned it to the library after completing my notes on that book. Then again, I’ve mentioned some of his key concepts in recent conversations.

    I’ve been slipping in such comments in recent reviews, but I’ve decided to force this feature by adding a postscript at the end of each of my “notes” for the months of May and June. Who knows after that. As always this blog is a work in progress, thanks for joining along for the ride.

  • Memorizing the I Ching Sequence

    Over the past month, I surpassed my expectations with the I Ching by memorizing the non-intuitive “King Wen” sequence of 64 hexagrams, as well as their English and Chinese names.

    The two critical tools for this exercise were my flashcards on Quizlet and on Pleco. (Quizlet is a free website and app. Pleco is a free Chinese dictionary app, but I paid extra for its flashcard functionality years ago.)

    It was unfortunate that Pleco’s flashcards could not render the hexagram unicode characters properly, however this limitation turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Quizlet was great for learning the hexagrams. Switching over to Pleco without the benefit of seeing the hexagram image on the screen almost felt like starting over, but the extra mental effort locked in my memorization. Soon after moving to Pleco, I started visualizing the hexagram sequence in my head, which I suspect was a nice side effect of this difficult limitation. And of course, Pleco was indispensable for learning the Chinese characters for the titles.

    The path I took in learning the sequence was unorthodox. I started by pulling a few hexagrams that had been thrown in recent sessions. I realized that a purely random approach was unworkable so I pulled out all the hexagrams with Thunder below and with Lake above. (I chose these two trigrams because they were most analogous to my old rabbits Badger and Peppercorn.) Then I started to get systematic. The obvious first choice should have been simple doubled up trigrams, so I added them into the mix.

    At that point, I had about thirty hexagrams memorized. I completed the remainder by filling in the gaps in the sequence, starting from the beginning. It was slow going for a bit, but the memorization quickly coalesced at the end. For this last step, it was nice to have previously memorized milestones scattered along the entire sequence. It created a path where the mind could while rest when reciting the sequence in order.

    After memorizing the sequence with English titles and Chinese pronunciations, I decided to learn the written Chinese characters. This last step only took a week. I don’t know much written Chinese, but I suspect my multitude of attempts over the years really greased the skids for the process.

    All in all, it worked. Since the process went faster than expected, I don’t know if there is much value in trying to optimize the process. Just do it.

    This was a good exercise in memorization with the help of modern digital tools. These flashcard programs didn’t make the effort easy, but they certainly made the process less difficult. Whenever I had a short break (or spent an hour in line to get a vaccine shot) I’d pull out the phone and work out my brain.

    The benefits from this effort were immediately noticeable, even before I had memorized much of sequence. I use the slow yarrow stalk method for building the hexagrams, so I have plenty of time to mull the possible results during the process. Knowing the sequence by heart has enriched the divination process since I delight in pondering the forking paths before the final answer reveals itself.

    Outside of the benefits to the I Ching practice, it was good to just go through a pure exercise of raw brute force memorization. The value of memorization diminished considerably in this age of the ubiquitous internet. However, this skill should not be completely discarded, and there is value in practicing focused concentration. The sense of accomplishment felt great, and since the process didn’t take nearly as long as I feared, I will be more willing to deploy this mental tool as the need arises. After all, I was willing to embark on this exercise partly because of the distant memory of learning koine Greek when I was a devout Christian, a quarter century years ago.

    And heck, even if I move onto another obsession in a few months, I now have an interesting sequence for counting sheep, to help me fall back asleep if I wake up too early in the morning.

  • From Sea to Shining Sea, Hiroji Kubota, 1992

    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.

  • Batteries in a Bird

    We have a toy bird. Talk to it while pressing a button and it repeats what you said, a couple pitches higher.

    Unfortunately, the kids leave the darn thing on all day and we’re constantly changing its batteries.

    Our boy thinks that is part of the fun. He loves to pull out the screw driver and pop the two batteries into the bird. He knows which one should be pointing positive up and that the other positive goes down.

    Yesterday, he decided to put them both in, positive up. Then both positive down.

    He looked at me with a glimmer in his eye. He found it hilarious and laughed and laughed.

    Finally he put them in correctly, still chuckling at this hilarious joke.

  • 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.