GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • 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.

  • Push Tricycle, again

    He can pedal the himself now, but he still enjoys being pushed around for a ride.

    Soon enough, he was enthusiastically leaning into the turns as we did loops around ground floor.

    Nope, something didn’t seem quite right. He was asleep.

    It’s been months since he fell asleep riding the tricycle.

    A parent learns to wonder if this will be the last time.

  • Atomic Habits, James Clear, 2018

    Atomic Habits is a survey of the best knowledge of habits; worthy of being perennially on hold at the library as an update to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. I remember listening to Duhigg’s book a few years ago and feeling quite inspired about habits. Then nothing happened.

    Unfortunately, both of these books are great at motivating one to pick up good habits, but neither is great at giving you concrete steps to get there.  

    As alternative, I suggest BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits. Fogg has developed simple crystalline ideas (such as his B=MAP model) and paired it with his powerful Focus Mapping exercise. The power in Fogg’s book is rooted in his career long focus on behavior change. He is a primary source who is able to provide actionable advice from the first chapter onward – for personal, family, and business use. When he says the majority of popular literature on habit formation is incorrect, I trust him.  

    Even though the publication dates are reversed, I would say that Fogg is the teacher, while Clear is the student. This is not intended to be an insult. While the master has myopically focused on the craft, the student is free to explore interlocking connections within the field. It was useful to read Atomic Habits as a refresher a few weeks after completing Tiny Habits. Getting a different author’s holistic perspective on the subject was a nice jolt to keep pursuing the practice.

    I’m not saying the two books are in perfect alignment. For example,  Atomic Habits proposes a path of Identity > Behavior > Outcomes (similar to Sinek’s Start with Why).  Even though this “concentric ring” model isn’t directly addressed by in Tiny Habits, I think BJ Fogg would propose that one should start by modifying Behavior, which will then influence your Identity and Outcomes (Identity < Behavior > Outcomes).

    However, the differences are minor, and they complement each other well. For example, I’m using both approaches to help me lose weight. I created a new food intake checklist that helps me track what I eat (a tiny habit at every meal), as well as regularly repeating a mantra “I enjoy hunger” to adjust my identity from someone used to rely on snacks all day.

    Both are worth reading. Maybe you’ll prefer Atomic Habits. However, since action are more significant than words, I should note that I purchased a my own hardcopy of Tiny Habits, while I am content to merely compliment Atomic Habits.

  • Bread, 09 March 2021

    I’m still using the toaster oven with a cast iron Lodge pan, but I’ve made a couple tweaks from my previous bread post that has made the process even easier and provided more consistent results.

    Poolish
    40g starter from the previous dough
    60g water
    60g flour
    Dough
    200g water
    120g bread flour
    120g whole wheat flour
    4g salt

    As you can see, I’ve added a step to make a poolish, which adds about four hours to the process. You can mix a full loaf with the starter, but I’ve been getting more consistent results by cranking up the starter with fresh ingredients before mixing the main dough.

    I also lowered the hydration a little, and I’m back to regularly using whole wheat flour. I’ve always preferred including a little whole wheat flour in my bread (20%), but I’m comfortable pushing it up to to 40% with the help of the King Arthur Bread Flour, which I absolutely adore. These percentages would work with my wet-grind method, so I might start doing that after we use up our whole wheat flour.

    The final tweak is that I now pull the starter for the next loaf while it is still in the proofing bowl. It seems minor, but I found that the loaf will deflate quite a bit if you pull the starter after its been poured into the pan. It’s nothing time can’t fix, as long as your dough isn’t already on the verge of overproofing.

    As for the poolish starter, you can keep it on the counter for a few hours to ripen up before mixing the the poolish, or you can throw it in the fridge until you’re ready for the next loaf (just be prepared for a 36 hour process, which could be accelerated with warm water, or as we head into summer).

    Of course, none of this is foolproof. I forgot to add salt to a recent loaf and the darn thing came out quite flat. I was quite disappointed that night, but half of it was gone after breakfast. The best part of this hobby is that you can eat your mistakes, even if I prefer the next day’s success!

  • Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, 1972

    Invisible Cities and Labyrinths have been close at hand ever since my Berkeley days, including a couple trips to China. But the dirty secret is that I’ve never completely read either book. I hadn’t gotten around to the non-fiction essays of Labyrinths, and my attempted read of Invisible Cities was waylaid by the deep sleep deprivation of studio. As a privileged knowledge worker comfortably hunkering down during the pandemic, I was fortunate to rectify both omissions over the past year.

    I’m happy I did. I suspect the book endures as a classic because it is a lovely collection of prose poems that is perfectly suited for random sampling. Which is a fine practice, but such a habit misses the structure of this book.

    The algorithm is nominally obvious from looking at the table of contents. Then again, reading a book by the TOC is knowing a City via its subway map. Calvino starts in Marco and Kublai’s dream world, slowly introduces anachronisms, bringing the reader into the present day (now delightfully patinaed from the vantage point of the 21st century), toys with darker themes, and leaves on a wistful note.

    The flow is as rich as the individual pieces. The book is carefully ordered arrangement, and the reader is well served going covered to cover. My copy still sits next to the bed; unlike many of its compatriots who quickly return to the shelves, this one ain’t going nowhere.

  • Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning, (Robert Eno translator) 2016

    I’ve written fondly about wisdom literature, however I’m not fond of books that just focus on the idea of “wisdom”.

    These two books are more poetic than the Wisdom of Solomon, but all three are thin paeans to the concept of wisdom.

    The Chinese books sell wisdom for the sake of a well ordered empire and emphasize balance and relationships.

    This sales pitch is more appetizing than Solomon’s heavy handed appeal to a monotheistic god presenting naive choices between right and wrong.

    But it’s all thin gruel.

    Gotcha.

    Wisdom good.

    Where do go from here?

    ䷾䷛

    Even so, a book that has survived the test of time to enter the canon of a great empire is most likely worth a download and quick read. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.

  • Sorting the Unread Library

    In 2020, I started a system for my personal reading. I took five books to become my current reading list, put them next to the bed, and stashed the rest out sight.

    Each of the five books satisfied a category:

    1. Non-Fiction
    2. Fiction
    3. Spirituality
    4. Self Help
    5. Art

    When I wrote the first draft of this post, the books on deck were:

    • Mythologies, Roland Barthes
    • Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
    • Collected Writings of Epicurus
    • Zen of Seeing by Fredrick Franck
    • Jazz, Henri Matisse

    The only book I haven’t completed is Epicurus.

    In a world where there is so much information, it is important to simplify what is immediately available. Once resolved, you are free to just read within the preselected menu. If I lose interest in a book, I can either throw it off out of the favored circle (as I did with Epicurus) which frees you up to read other books within the category (I’ve read quite a few wisdom texts over the past couple months. Alternately, I can let a book marinate while I dive into other topics. If so, at least I’m avoiding other books within the same genre, which makes it easier to return to the lagging book.

    This system makes it evident if I’ve been heavily pursuing one category over the others. I may or may not counteract against such a trend, but either way, it is good to be clear what is top of one’s mental interests.

    This system has turned out to be a well rounded way to wrangle all the good books around me – unread, re-read, library loans, and newly purchased. I’d recommend giving it a shot if your “to read” pile has become intimidatingly tall.