Alan Jacobs

For me, his great gift – on the page and in person – was visual generosity. He made you see different things and look at things differently. It was not works of art in galleries that interested him so much as objects, particularly those from which a story could be extracted. On the wall of his attic room in Albany, the apartment block in Piccadilly, was the king of Hawaii’s bedsheet: apricot-coloured, patterned with a shoal of jumping fish, looking like a Matisse. Chatwin had turned up at Christie’s on his bike to buy it in the 1960s. In the small Eaton Place flat designed by John Pawson – pleated like origami to hide his books – he hung pictures he had made by cutting coloured drawings from the catalogue of a broom manufacturer: rows of pinky-red-and-white toothbrushes, elegant and comic. In all his houses, he kept a prayer inscribed in Latin by the artist-poet David Jones: “May the blessed Archangel Michael defend us in battle lest we perish in the terrible judgment.” When he fell ill he took it with him in and out of hospitals.

— Susannah Clapp

Between 1968 and 1974 Ursula K. Le Guin published

• A Wizard of Earthsea • The Left Hand of Darkness • The Tombs of Atuan • The Lathe of Heaven • The Farthest Shore • The Disposessed

— along with a series of classic stories, including “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” “Winter’s King,” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” That would be quite a literary career. She did it in six years.

There are various methods applied to translate hapaxes that aren’t conventional words. In the case of “apoculamus” from the Satyricon, classicists can use context and precedent to define the term. At this point in the story, the narrator is describing how he and his companion departed from their house. From the ending “-mus,” we know that this word is a first-person plural, present, active, indicative verb. Therefore, “apoculamus” can be interpreted as a form of movement. Given the influence of ancient Greek on Latin, scholars have also relied on etymology for translation hints. The prefix “apo” means “away from” and the noun “culum” refers to a person’s buttocks. Hence, “apoculamus” might be defined as “hauling your posterior away from” something.

— How Do You Decode a Hapax? (Also, What’s a Hapax?) - Atlas Obscura

Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something — anything — out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again — top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version — if it did not exist — you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short , you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day — yes , while you sleep — but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.

— John McPhee's letter to his daughter, in Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

Twitter [is] not actually a company, it’s a dysfunctional non-profit that accidentally provides a valuable service.  — Tim Bray

A brief follow-up to yesterday’s post: Another interesting element of Kevin Kelly’s rhetoric is his use of “we.” This is something I have written about before: the assumption on the part of those writing about technology that they will be among the cadre of decision-makers. It’s always, for them, what “we” will decide about technology, what “we” will do with technology. And Saruman uses that rhetoric too: “We may join with that Power” etc. But Gandalf knows just how empty and deceptive the first-person plural can be: “‘Saruman,’ I said, standing away from him, ‘only one hand at a time can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!’”

New show in London.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“725”] Paul Nash, Night Landscape (1912)[/caption]

More about Nash here.

A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better. My intent in this book is to uncover the roots of digital change so that we can embrace them. Once seen, we can work with their nature, rather than struggle against it. Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs. It may be against our initial impulse, but we should embrace the perpetual remixing of these technologies. Only by working with these technologies, rather than trying to thwart them, can we gain the best of what they have to offer. I don’t mean to keep our hands off. We need to manage these emerging inventions to prevent actual (versus hypothetical) harms, both by legal and technological means. We need to civilize and tame new inventions in their particulars. But we can do that only with deep engagement, firsthand experience, and a vigilant acceptance.

— Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

— Saruman, in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Mean­ing comes not from sys­tems of thought but from sto­ries, and the Jew­ish story is among the most un­usual of all. It tells us that God sought to make us His part­ners in the work of cre­ation, but we re­peat­edly dis­ap­pointed Him. Yet He never gives up. He for­gives us time and again. The real re­li­gious mys­tery for Ju­daism is not our faith in God but God’s faith in us.