On this date

Machines that make you feel more human

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

That we would train machines to be like us is not surprising.

The real scandal is how much we’ve trained ourselves to be like machines.

We’ve trained ourselves to be so machine-like that the machines don’t have to make that much of a leap to emulate us.

Resistance is celebrating and cultivating what is not machine-like in you.

Resistance is also using machines that help you feel more human.

By pedaling a bicycle, for example, you become one with the machine, but you’re also using all of your senses including the kinesthetic and vestibular. On your bike you come into contact with people and places you normally might not. The bicycle expands you rather than diminishes you.

(This, by the way, is nothing original that people haven’t been saying for hundreds of years. As my wife who studied STS in graduate school put it: “Same shit, different machines.”)

Schedule send

Monday, December 14, 2020

I am scheduling this blog entry to post on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020 at 8 a.m. CT.

By the time you read it, I could’ve pressed “schedule” a few hours ago, or a few weeks ago, or even a few months ago. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but whenever you read it, it will be new to you.

In an age of instantaneous messaging, I find this enormously freeing. A nice gap between writing and publishing, sending and receiving.

A bit of technology that has changed my life: Gmail’s “Schedule Send” function. (Yes, I still use Gmail, even though I know better.)

If I answer emails in the afternoon, I schedule them to go out at 8AM the next morning. This means I don’t get a bunch of replies overnight and it often gives me time to add or edit the email before it goes out.

The problem with sending messages is that they’ll get answered with new messages. If I pick a time to write all my messages, but delay sending them, that buys me even more time to be blissfully unmessaged.

I know this sounds selfish, and it is, but Schedule Send also allows me to be courteous to others: I love the world too much to send it email on a weekend. I might write dozens of emails during a weekend, but none of my correspondents will receive an email on a weekend. This is as it should be.

My dream is to never have to answer email at all.

John Waters says real wealth is never having to deal with assholes, but real wealth for me would also mean no email.

“I don’t even have an e-mail address,” Umberto Eco once said. “I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.” (This was 25 years ago, by the way.)

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things,” Donald Knuth says on his website. “But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

One day I will either have the real wealth or the courage to follow their examples, but for now, Schedule Send makes me feel a little richer.

Related reading: Answering letters

Education is not a race, it’s an amble

Saturday, December 14, 2019

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.”
—Peter Gray

One of the things I love about Lydia Davis’s advice to writers in her collection Essays One is that she is explicit that the writer’s education should be mostly self-directed.

Here are points 2 and 3 in full:

2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest. I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques…. My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.

This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.

3. Be mostly self-taught.

There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you. I have found that pursuing my own interests in various directions and to various sources of information can take me on fantastic adventures: I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.

I love those verbs: following your interests, pursuing them, trusting that they will lead you somewhere.

Ambling along your own path… even if it’s deep into an unknown woods…

Writing with kids

Friday, December 14, 2018

On Twitter, @_lisli asked:

Any tips for handling working, small baby/child care, and still doing/making things you enjoy?

Here’s what I tweeted back, lightly edited, short and sweet:

1) Nobody does it alone. (Anyone who says they do is lying.) Get help. Scheduled time away from kids OUT OF THE HOUSE to write. Look for fellowships for young parents who are artists.

2) Train yourself to get up before the kids and work. (I’ve never understood Night Owls, but I imagine they could stay up after they’re in bed.)

3) Put this post-it somewhere:

4) Consider putting off bigger projects until you’re out of tiny ones age (keep a diary or a sketchbook)

5) Ask other parents you admire. (I’m still learning!!) Read these books for inspiration.

That’s all I know, really.

Oh, one other thing: DON’T KILL THEM.

Parenting advice from my father-in-law, never bested or improved: “You’re gonna want to throw them out the window. The important thing is that you don’t.”

I do not consider myself a “great” parent (or a writer, for that matter). I’m just an amateur who shows up. A student, learning. I stick with it. It’s all you can do.

As Michael Chabon put it in Manhood For Amateurs: “The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”

Shelf life

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Here’s a photo of Steal Like An Artist on sale at a Target in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by my cousin.) Sure, it’s on sale at all kinds of places, including some of the best bookstores and museum gift shops in the world, but there’s a kind of weird fun knowing that my aunt saw my book while doing her grocery shopping and texted it to my mom. (And a kick for my mom, I imagine: There’s not a whole lot of social currency in small-town Ohio when you tell your friends your son is a writer.) Even my wife said she got a little thrill seeing it in our local store.

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Jason Segel gives it a shout-out in his By The Book interview:

The book is 8 months older than my oldest son, and he reads chapter books, writes songs in Garageband, and tells poop jokes. He has a whole life of his own now! So does the book. I was 28-years-old when I wrote it. I’ll be 35 next year. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it was me who wrote the thing. How strange to see it still making its way out into the world, to have people reading it for the first time. I am lucky. And grateful.

MY READING YEAR, 2009

Monday, December 14, 2009

Ten good books I read this year:

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
by Carl Jung

The best thing I read all year. Jung started his autobiography when he was 81, and worked on it right up until his death. See my map of the book.

Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World
by Ed Emberley

I discovered this book last year, but returned to it over and over this year, recommending it often to folks as a beginner’s drawing book.

Asterios Polyp
by David Mazzuchelli

A graphic novel that’s as good as everybody says it is.

Map of My Heart
by John Porcellino

Porcellino is one of my favorite cartoonists, ever. This collection is even better than King-Cat Classix.

Lunch Poems
by Frank O’Hara

Jen Bekman got me into O’Hara. This collection, written while O’Hara was on his lunch break, includes the great “Ave Maria” and “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)”

Await Your Reply
by Dan Chaon

This is the only novel I read this year. A terrific read.

Stitches
by David Small

The drawing in here is really top-notch: Small enjoys teaching anatomy, and it shows.

Every artist’s memoir has one underlying plot: *how I became an artist*. That plot can allow for infinite variations. My favorite page from the book.

Trickster Makes This World
by Louis Hyde

Hyde’s The Gift is one of my favorite books. This book isn’t as good, and took me a few months to finish, but it was worth the read.

Seven Days In The Art World
by Sarah Thornton

My wife got me this after reading one of Thornton’s articles. After reading it, I understood the art world better, and wanted less to do with it than before.

Ignore Everybody
by Hugh Macleod

Hugh’s said the book is “advice I wish I had when I was in my early 20s.” The book sprung from his piece “How To Be Creative,” which was a big deal to me when I found it a year or so ago, specifically for his “Sex and Cash Theory.” Helped me feel better about keeping my day job.

What was the best book you read this year?

BOOK REVIEW: BLACK HOLE

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Charles Burns’ BLACK HOLE is a graphic novel set in a Seattle suburb during the 70s. It follows a group of horny teenagers who contract an STD that basically turns them into mutants: they grow tails, they shed skins, some even grow second mouths. I decided to pick it up after listening to a pretty good hour long interview with Burns and Chris Ware. Since 1995, BLACK HOLE has been serialized in 12 installments, but having read none of them, I came to Burns’ work with fresh eyes: I’d only seen a small clip of BLACK HOLE in McSweeney’s 13, and his cover art for THE BELIEVER.

Reading it, I was reminded of John Neborak’s senior project presentation, in which he talked about the unique verbal/visual blend of comics as a narrative. Burns’ artwork is admirable, no doubt about it: his masterly brushwork is intricate and meticulous, and his command of black and white is great. However, when it comes to storyline, BLACK HOLE really falls flat for me. Mostly what you get from reading it is a sustained, creepy mood. Because the sexual metaphors that evoke this mood are purely visual (the vaginal gashes, the hot dogs roasting over an open fire), I’m wondering what BLACK HOLE would read like without any words.

I’d go on, but Meg sent me an e-mail that really summed it all up:

Graphic novels aren’t art and they aren’t a novel – they’re both, and too few graphic novelists (even the so-called “pros”) seem to get that. If either the art or the story aren’t really up to par it ends up detracting from the whole thing. I feel like so many graphic novels are written by men who are emotionally still teenagers in high school who get a big charge out of drawing scantily-clad women. Sometimes I just want to tell the authors to grow up a little. That’s what made a novel like FROM HELL so good, it rose above all that to tell an interesting story.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself. (And didn’t.)