Auden’s The Shield of Achilles gets a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.
temporary storage
Drafts is a fantastic app, so well-designed, so capable, so powerful. For my money it’s the best “bucket” app, ideal for holding onto chunks of text.
But I have a problem: I put things into Drafts and then forget about them. Yes, I tag them, but that doesn’t help. They just disappear into the bucket.
Which is why over the past few months I’ve been using Tot. I bought Tot when it first came out, but didn’t use it much. Now it’s vital to my organizational system. Here’s why: it has a single window with seven tabs, each tab a different color. That’s it. Seven is all you get.
And that’s what I love about Tot. I put things there and they’re easy to find; and when I’ve filled all the tabs, I have to decide whether (a) to delete something or (b) to put it into an proper text file to make something useful of it — a blog post, a reminder, a note for my students, whatever.
This is yet another situation in which I’ve learned to make friction my friend. Drafts is absolutely frictionless, brilliantly so, but for whatever reason my mind doesn’t thrive in frictionless conditions. Back to the rough ground!
try not to think
Fraudulent academic papers are on the rise, and will continue to be on the rise as long as academics substitute counting for judgment. The fetish for sheer numbers of publications should have ended decades ago, but the professoriate can’t confront its addiction, or accept its responsibility for creating this vast system of perverse incentives. It’s always interesting to see what elements of their wobbly structures academics are simply unable to reconsider, no matter how dire the situation. In this case, I think people who have climbed the greasy pole to tenure can’t bear the thought that some younger people might be less miserable than they and their cohort were.
I always like to remind people that the real, legal, birth-certificate name of Blossom Dearie was … Blossom Dearie.
Austin Kleon’s great newsletter edition on the objects we love and live with reminds me that we still use our metronome, some sixty-plus years after Teri’s mom bought it.
The most Arsenal thing ever would be for Spurs to beat Man City today and then Arsenal lose to Everton on Sunday. ⚽️
This by Rob Chapman is one of a zillion videos encouraging me to ask whether I’m a beginner, intermediate, or advanced guitar player. “Beginner” is a bad word here, because no one who has been playing for a long time (in my case, 20 years) can properly bre called a beginner. The better word is basic. Also, I think “advanced” should be distinguished from “professional.” So I think we need five categories:
- beginner
- basic
- intermediate
- advanced
- professional
I think I’m a basic/intermediate player, and will probably not get much better. It’s hard to progress when you start an instrument in your forties, and I have the added handicap of some permanently damaged fingers on my left hand (thanks to a habit, common among basketball players, of breaking them and then not having them properly set). But it would be silly to call myself a “beginner.”
