At the start of 2023 I got back into using fountain pens after a long hiatus after finishing Berkeley. The ink in my bottle of Waterman Green had dried out so I revived it with water.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to focus on finishing this bottle so I took it out of the dark storage box and left it on the desk.
Yesterday I realized there was a little white mold floating on the surface!
I’m most likely too cheap for my own good, but I refilled up a couple eyedroppers that already had this green in their barrels and pulled out a brush to burn through the rest. As you can see, the green had morphed to an interesting dark teal.
I suspect I got this bottle while still in high school, so it’s been with me for more than a quarter century. It’s now empty and washed.
Given my morning pages and sketches, I suspect this old buddy will be all gone in a week.
This is a great little survey of what’s possible with this medium. Hobbs picked a variety of artists and provided thoughtful commentary on each of his picks.
As I get deeper into sketching, this book is a definite keeper. It’s nice to have an overview of all the different approaches in a single volume. Seeing the multiplicity of technical skills makes the practice less intimidating than studying the work of a single master.
I got mine for $14, but prices fluctuate because it’s out of print. While you fish for a good price, I’ve included the list of artists in the photos below.
Please note that this book is a bit smaller than I expected, so I included a Lamy Safari for scale on a couple photos.
This has been Seth’s mantra over the years. This book is no exception.
It’s a fun read, delightfully nostalgic for someone that live through the internet revolution. Even though this book was about the World Wide Web before social media inhaled the information superhighway, Seth’s encouragement is still as powerful as ever.
Go out there, let it all hang out, and do something.
This book emphasizes “zooming” — acclimating to the difficult art of change. He posits that zooming is a powerfully motivating way to view the world.
This book comes from that short lived genera of collected blog-posts volumes. The world has changed a bit since publication, but it still rhymes with the 00’s, even if things feel a little gloomier.
Seth has been telling the same story for the past three decades.
So if you dig him, check it out. If you don’t, this book won’t change your mind.
With AI, change is coming (again!). What would you do if you knew for certain that what your work today won’t survive the next two decades of disruption? How will you embrace the change that is coming? Are you gonna zoom?
~
One of my favorite riffs is when Godin embarks on an extended discussion about “maybe-proofing” the company. One of the best ways to kill a project flow is to dawdle. Sometimes we should pause and let things develop, but that should be a deliberate choice. As OPM’s, we have to maybe-proof ourselves. Our job is to make choices.
~
In the two years after reading this book, I’ve realized that I’m on the back half of my career. So I’ve lost interest in self-help and Seth has been a casualty of this shift. He’s correct that one needs to embrace change in your career, but I’m not focused on my career anymore.
I will always work hard and dabble with process improvements, but when I’m not at work, I focus on other joys. I no longer feel an urge to to maximize my output or lead the charge to make things better in the office.
~
Some Links
At the end of each month, I often need to use up my quota at Hoopla (a library streaming service). I invariably return to these albums. Two of them are absolute classics. The third is lesser known, though by perennial request by our kids. The fourth is a nod to my weakness for EDM.
Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert. It’s the best selling solo jazz album of all time, but I’ll switch it up and borrow his Paris Concert which forays into baroque counterpoint.
The Awakening is one of the most sampled albums in hip hop. Recorded in February 1970, it feels like a distinct evolution by the Ahmad Jamal Trio from the bebop of past decades. If I’ve had too much piano lately, I’ll get Way Out West with a unique trio of bass, drums, and saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins.
My kids are obsessed with the “Ballad of Pancho Villa” (which they call “cafe music”) so they always insist on borrowing From All Sides, a collaboration between guitarist Bolo Sete and the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
I recently mentioned Klangphonics for their quirky YouTube shorts. Driving feels better with Songs to Try on the speakers (but it’s not so aggressive to become dangerous).
To excel in life we need to address three gaps — Belief, Value, and Time.
Belief gaps are the deep cause of your underperformance. It’s hard to change ingrained beliefs. Hyrum recommends that you test drive new beliefs by acting “as if” to see if the alternate reality will ultimately change your situation.
Value gaps are your own personal constitution. What matters? So much that they govern your life? How will you prioritize them, to reorient your life?
Hyrum uses the I-Beam thought experiment to test how important something is in your life. What’s worth crossing the Grand Canyon on a little slippery I-beam?
Family
Integrity
Health
Mind
Work / Finances
Making a Difference
Time gaps are where the practical world collies with Belief and Value gaps. His primary recommendation is to start the day with daily “Magic 15 Minutes” exercise.
Quiet Focus
Seek Inspiration
Review Values
Integrate Long Term Goals
List Appointments
List Tasks
Prioritize
That’s it. It’s a two-hour audiobook that took an hour at 2x speed.
I was inclined to like this book since I have a weakness for self help fare and I appreciated that he didn’t bloat the book like many others in this genre.
However, I could argue that his advice is too simplistic. This book is for someone who is already in a good spot and wants an extra edge. Someone in a tough spot has bigger emergencies at hand.
For someone in such a difficult situation, I wonder if such bootstrap advice is comes off insulting. Ultimately, this is generic advice, packaged tightly.
When I wrote the first draft I thought this might be a good book to return to regularly, like John Miller’s QBQ. In reality, I haven’t given it a second thought over the past two years.
The Japanese aren’t scared of sex. Heck, the first episode includes a stripper who is a regular throughout the series.
But the show isn’t explicit — nothing more than what you find on Instagram. It just accepts sex workers, gangsters, cross dressers, and normies as part of the fabric of life in this district.
The show is ultimately conservative. It touches on the fringes, but happiness is found in a solid relationships and family.
It’s also not afraid of or death. Like many Asian shows, they’ll kill a likable character. Such a dynamic inserts needed tension to keep this upbeat show from going completely saccharine.
I almost wonder if the show is a mirror of where America is headed. A little lewd, a little violent, a little corrupt, but ultimately conservative. I guess things could be worse.
Seasons 3, 4, & 5
Midway through the third season my wife lost interest. I also took a nine month break before finally finishing season five.
A small restaurant with recurring characters is a fun premise, but the characters don’t go anywhere. I wonder if the producers were trapped with a season-by-season contract.
The show is worth watching, but don’t worry when you’ve had enough of their quirky little world. It’s a great case study in television flash fiction (albeit a tad too heartwarming), but fifty episodes is too much.
Then again, if they came out with a sixth season, I’d check it out.
~
At twenty minutes a pop, the show is a series of barely connected short stories. It has a few regular characters, but each episode is free standing. Of course some stories are stronger than others, but pick any one at random (even just the first one). If you dig it, you’ll dig the rest, until you don’t. If you don’t, then don’t bother.
Since this is the first non-animated TV show that I’ve watched and finished, I assume there must be be something good about this series. Or maybe it’s a sign that I have no idea what I’m talking about.
I often write about the grand challenges aspects of this work — eliminating and preserving slack in the system, juggling budget and schedule, fostering a decisive culture, executing a careful process, developing relationships.
But in this world of digital communication, much of my time on the job is trying to write good. A well turned email can make a difference, and it’s amazing when a carefully crafted memo gets the needed response.
This book stands out from prescriptive manuals (like Strunk and White) because Pinker carefully explains the why behind the rules. This book’s strength is also reflection upon what I do as an OPM.
Yes we must follow our agency standards. And we all got personal preferences. But we’re at our best when we can explain the logic behind our decisions. It’s important for our team to know why, especially if the institutional logic results in weird choices.
At least that’s what I hope. Maybe I just bore my consultants to tears with extended explanations of bureaucratic esoterica.
That’s one of the perks and dangers of being a client — no one will tell you to shut up.
~
Listening is not the best way to consume this book, but a little is better than none. There are diagrams and complex analyses that warrant a visual reading (either physical or electronic). But I haven’t bothered in the past couple of years, so I guess it’s not going to happen.
~
Some Links
Live performances of electronic music sounds like a contradiction, but they have a spark that is sometimes missing from their albums. Here are a few examples.
I’ve haven’t gotten into his studio albums, but I often play Oupio’s concert at Red Rocks with the SYZYGY Orchestra when I’m cranking on work.
I used to listen to Moon Safari album on a little blue MP3 player while walking to studio. This video of La Femme d’Argent in a recording studio materializes the music and the memories.
It took three months between milestones this time.
This long interval reflects my shift from hanging out on Post to Substack Notes.
Post is a better feed experience — I love the variety.
But the newsletter integration at Substack is the “killer app” that kept my attention there. My major goal this year was to make a dent in the pile of old blog drafts and Substack is a better platform for that endeavor.
But things might be shifting, now that I’ve signed up for auto posting from the RSS feed. It effectively lets me schedule posts for Post and this place has always been a bit more interactive for me. (Until this week, it was essentially impossible hard to follow anyone on Substack Notes without Subscribing to their newsletter, so the circles there are small and extremely top heavy.)
It will be interesting to see how these Social Media Wars play out, even as I try to reduce my time on digital feeds (though I’ve recently discovered Pinterest as a great resource for visual inspiration). I’ve made a dent in my publishing backlog but it will take some effort to clear the decks and I want to spend more time sketching and reading books.
The internet is a tricky beast. In the past month I might have spent more time shopping for fountain pens than pushing any of those priorities. Perusing virtual shelves, watching youtube videos, and planning purchases are great hacks at making you believe you’ve done something while accomplishing nothing.
So I’ve made a resolution to stop shopping for the rest of the year. I’ve got a few toys in the mail and I bet that “necessities” will pop up to open my wallet. But no more discretionary browsing!
When reading classic literature, I often stumble at the introduction and never make it to the text itself. So I have mixed feelings towards introductory materials.
However, Gene Luen Yang wrote an amazing foreword. It was concise but heartfelt. He spoke of himself, but captured a moment that included me.
He nailed the rootlessness that I sensed as an Asian kid growing up in America. My mom also read the Journey to the West to me and my sister. Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy were integral parts parts of our childhood in a universe where they didn’t exist outside our home.
Unlike Gene, I never fell in love with comic books. I never thought I had a favorite superhero, until I realized I did all along. This ridiculous monkey had settled deep into my psyche and never left.
Like us, Sun Wukong was an outsider navigating a strange land. I never had his brashness, but I wish I did! (If I ever get a tattoo it would be 齊天大聖 , Great Sage Heaven’s Equal)
One of the best introductions I’ve ever read. But I’m biased since Gene wrote it just for me.
~
I drafted this note two years ago, before reading the book. I will always be in debt to the Lovell abridgement because it lead me to read the full translation by Anthony C. Yu, which I prefer. The story is a classic but the experience is incomplete without the poetic interludes in the novel.
I watched Rivers and Tides multiple times in a theater in Berkeley before it was demolished for a new apartment complex.
It blew my mind. The pacing was deliberate and the images were gorgeous. I was entranced by the musings of Andy Goldsworthy.
When I gushed about it to a professor, she pushed back, “Don’t you think it mythologizes the artist too much?”
That dampened my enthusiasm for two decades. Last year, we rewatched the movie with the kids.
I see where my prof was coming from. So what! She’s wrong.
Yes, the movie glamorizes the artist and his work. But it’s about failure as part of the artist’s process. It takes a metric shitton of boring-ass effort. If this is mythology, then we need more myth to do the work.
It’s a great film, equally matched by the avante-garde music of Fred Frith.
The entire soundtrack is great, but my favorite moment in the movie is at the start of this clip, where Goldsworthy discusses the effect of sheep on the land while the music builds towards a muted climax when the camera pans around a huge stone sculpture.
