July 2024

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July

July 31 According to this video by CinemaStix, John Hughes wrote Ferris Bueller's Day Off in less than a week but had the whole thing in the wrong order. The first cut was 2.5 hours, and the editor Paul Hirsch is the one who put everything into the right order, resulting in what might be my favorite movie of all time. I didn't know I owe it to him, and now I want to research the man's work. Maybe we're kindred spirits, as editors. What can I learn from him?

We're like comets hurling through space, bound at some point to fall into the gravity of some celestial body and slowly bend into the atmosphere to blaze out into dust and rain on the generations to come.

Inspired by this video and the lyrics "I am a comet, no destination."

I'm not dogmatic about the ending-on-a-preposition rule, but I'm becoming increasingly rigid on the correct use of the object pronoun whom, because the misuse of who is unbecoming.

Incorrect but cleaner: "What audience are you presenting to?" Correct but clunky: "To what audience are you presenting?"

Incorrect and clunky: "Who are you presenting to?" Correct and clean: "To whom are you presenting?"

July 30 You can choose treat any draft as a first draft — even a published piece — because any draft can always be better. Or, any draft could be revised for a different purpose or audience. The self-editing method I've developed can be applied to a draft at any stage, and it encourages this attitude of seeing whatever is in front of you as raw, rough, ready to be seen in a completely new way and improved from its face to its foundation — from the forest to the trees and the leaves.

Holy moly! I finally — just now — finished copying “Authority and American Usage,” including all 81 footnotes. The body text (sans footnotes!) is 16,309 words. This may have taken me 30 hours; I don't even know. It's 3:15 pm on July 30, 2024. I'm sitting in a WeWork in Times Square (1450 Broadway), and I feel at peace. This has been an open loop in my head for the past 58 days (yes, just checked — I created the document on June 3rd). Next step: the edit.

Just found John Perry today, a Stanford philosophy prof. who broke out of academia by writing The Art of Procrastination and coining the term "Structured Procrastination", which essay was recommended to me toady in the Readwise newsletter.

I'm not writing to teach you what I've done. I'm still learning. I'm writing to share what I've learned so far, and to reveal what I'm aiming for, in the hopes that it inspires something in you that moves you forwards, that helps you dive inwards. And what I've learned from reading philosophy far and wide is that there is at least one thing upon which all great thinkers agree — from East to West, empiricist and rationalists, absurdists and existentialists, monotheists and polytheists, transcendentalists and materialists, monks and emperors, consequentialists and deontologists. They all prescribe one common thing: know thyself. To live an examined life (the only type of life worth living) is to, first, examine yourself. As soon as you step back behind your eyes to witness the world, you start to witness yourself perceiving and acting in the world. You start to introspect, and the more you do that, the more you'll know yourself. I would argue that introspection is an end in itself and a worthy pursuit without any reward, yet there are benefits too. You become skilled in navigating emotions, congruent in your thoughts and actions, and detached from what you can't control. You learn about your nature and walk towards it. The best way to help the world is to become the best version of yourself. That's why introspection has been prescribed by every culture for millennia, and it's why it's worthwhile.

Sound ethics is not an attitude or temperament or some formal system of knowledge. Your ethics is the sum of your actions.

July 29 The best of us are head-smart enough that you would expect they would be arrogant, and they are heart-smart enough to be humble and empathetic.

I was always frustrated with myself for misspelling led as lead (to lead in the past tense), until today I realized why it feels so irregular. The past tense of the verb to read is read, and you're expected to understand its tense by context. Yet, with to lead, which is perfectly analogous with to read, we denote the tense with a different spelling.

Read less but deeper.

I'm about six pages through the first short story in the collection of Borges's, Labyrinths, called "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," and I've already stopped two times — the second one because I was deeply inspired to pen a short story that's been in my head for a couple years now. Seven months ago, I wrote a first draft of it; today, after reading Borges, the whole thing took shape in my head, and I banged it out on the typewriter within a few minutes, in the most concise, clean, powerful version I've ever conceived it.

I just finished season 1 of The Bear, and the entire time — every episode — I didn't want it to end. I wanted to linger on every moment longer. Everything was just the right pace where I could keep up and remain captivated, engaged, yet I wanted it to slow down so that I could savor it. It's analogous to the experience I've had eating a kick-ass beef sandwich. I get three bites in, realize, I'm halfway done with the sandwich, then start taking half-sized bites and leaving them to water in my mouth a little longer before swallowing.

Say what you know is unsaid. We don't give ourselves enough credit for knowing how to solve our problems. We act like we don't know what to do when the reality is that we don't know how to do it, or simply have not worked up the will to do it. Interpersonal conflict is just one example. The solution almost always begins with saying what you know — yes, you do know, if you're honest with yourself — is unsaid.

July 28 Newton's 3rd Law of Emotion: Minds at rest tend to stay at rest, unless acted upon by certain external stimuli.

Write about the symbolism of snakes, from Genesis to "Don't tread on me."

Write a parody to "Express Yourself" to prompt The Intronaut, called "Inspect Yourself." And or quote this lyric:

Some people have everything and other people don't /
But everything don't mean a thing if it ain't the thing you want – Charles Wright

"Write like you talk" is only good advice if you speak in the dialect of Standard Written English, which is true for almost no one.

July 27 The three root poisons (of Buddhism), and there corresponding "wind"-channels in the subtle body are:

Aversion (anger, aggression) — the right, white channel
Attachment (grasping, thirst) — the left, red channel
Ignorance (self-doubt, fear) — the central, blue channel

July 26

Anything you write has the function of helping your readers understand better something they want to understand well. That's what it is, because that's what it does. – Larry McEnerney, UChicago Writing Program Lecture

This is only "what your writing is" if you (1) write about something you know your readers want to understand well and you (2) successfully teach them more about it. So, those are two good goals to hold in mind for any essay. At the topic-selection stage, ask: What's something my readers want to understand well? And use that as a razor. Then, throughout the writing process, make it the aim that the function of your essay becomes helping your reader understand that thing they care about.

He also says, if your readers aren't in academia, then you need to write about problems your readers want to solve, whether for themselves or others.

The more minimal the writing, the more intelligible. The more maximal the writing, the more evocative. You need both.

Prime Movers

I've had three discrete revelations recently about links between what I do and value today and events from my childhood.

When I was two years old or so, my great-great-aunt Irene told me she'd give me a dollar if I would use the big-boy toilet to go number 2 (which was in fact a squatty potty). Motivated by the dollar, like the full-breaded capitalist I am, I successfully went doo-doo on the big-boy toilet for the first time. When Aunt Irene gave me the dollar, she asked what I was going to do with the dollar, and I said, "Buy more money." Today, I have a four-year degree in quantitative finance.

My earliest memory of talking about my career, the job I wanted to have, is set in the community hall of my elementary school. Some adult was asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was six or seven years old, I didn't say scientist or doctor or lawyer or athlete or author. I said, "I want to be an inventor." This was always my answer, and sometimes I'd say, "... or a spy." I am not yet an inventor; I work as an editor. But recently, I was speaking to a ew friend who's trained in seeing creative energies in people. After getting to know me, she suggested that my primary creative energy is the inventor.

Throughout my life, every night, starting before I could talk, my mom has always sent me off to bed with these words: "Sleep well. Sweet dreams." She has said that every night standing over me in my crib, every night after tucking me into my bed, every time we spoke over the phone around bedtime. It's no wonder why I've have always valued my dreams and been aware of them. I've dream-journaled for a decade now, and today, I practice Tibetan dream yoga and treat sleeping and dreaming as practice for death.

July 25

Making sense is entirely different than making you sense. One means having a rational explanation, the other evoking a feeling. The art/words/experiences that cause the most intense sensations in you are often the ones that make no sense at all.

Quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To die, to sleep —
To sleep — perchance to dream.

It uses the analogy of sleep : death :: dreams : the afterlife.

July 24 Growth is never comfortable; comfort is never the arena for growth. And the best type of growth comes from voluntary discomfort: self-imposed challenges and constraints.

There's a tension within all of us: to be a bird with no nest or a bird that can't fly. The best is to be a bird that can fly, and that can come home to a nest.

July 23 One of my mantras: "Always be holding."

"Beholding" reminds me to appreciate forms as they appear, and "be holding" reminds me to — at the same time — be aware of emptiness as the essence of all form.

Honesty means being truthful, but it doesn't necessarily mean being forthcoming. Truth-telling has as its complement another method for being truthful: omission. If you are going to speak, speak the truth. If you would lie to conceal a truth, do not speak; omit it.

And when a truth is subjective, the most honest portrayal of it is to overtly condition the truth as being from one perspective or another.

Books are mirrors depicting all of us; phones are portals to parallel dimensions, distorting all of us.

Through revision, make your writing coherent, clear, and concise — in that order of priority. You don't want a clear meaning that's incoherent, and you don't want something that's concise yet confusing. Get the structure right, then the meaning/content, then the prose and style.

I could have read every word of Infinite Jest (and many of the footnotes) in the time that I spent copying word for word one essay from DFW: "Authority and American Usage."

Kant might just be the least quotable philosopher, because his writing is anti-aphoristic; you'll strain to find a single simple sentence — one that you can quote from leading-cap to full stop — that doesn't digress into long parenthetical clarifications (that often confuse, for their density and verbosity, rather than clarify) or that doesn't only make sense as the summary of the very complex argument preceding it, which context is required for the quote-candidate sentence to be valuable. Even the Categorical Imperative has four formulations, each with its own nuanced implications and complex derivation.

July 22 Don't talk to someone who has their eyes closed, whether it's for sleep, mediation, or a moment of interior peace or self-reconciliation. If someone has an extra long blink during your conversation, let that be a beat of silence. If you stumble upon someone who is meditating, take that chance for a personal moment of stillness.

Reverse Outlining Simplified A reverse outline is an outline for your next draft, informed by the content of your previous draft.

Describe:

What is there, and in what sequence?
What is the best of what's there?
What needs to be there, and what doesn't? What's missing?

Revise:

Cut what doesn't need to be there, and add what's missing.
Arrange what remains into the most coherent possible sequence, with a clear hierarchy: thesis, main claims, and evidence.

(Reverse outlines are most useful after a messy first draft, as part of the Content Edit.)

July 21 The least illusory part of reality is other people. When you see another, that reaffirms and solidifies the self. So, being isolated and out in the world, reality feels most like a dream.

In Hornstrandir, during my two days of solitude, there was no one to reaffirm my existence, and I was increasingly less assured of my self.

Cameron Frye is the hero of the story in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but Ferris is our perspective character. The same is true for Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby; he is our perspective character (and narrator), but Gatsby is the hero/protagonist. The difference is that Ferris's life is more like Gatsby's and Cameron's more like Nicks.

July 20 Work hardest at the work that comes most easily to you.

July 19 Personal style guide: You can insert FNs within the middle of a sentence only if it would otherwise confuse the reference if it were at the end of the sentence. If there are two footnotes within a sentence, definitely place them at different parts of the sentence. Whenever possible, add the footnote after a punctuation mark, at the end of a clause.

Dialogue for a conceded, deluded character at the sight of a celebrity (not this, but):

"I'm not going to take single second of your time, so that you can keep enjoying your day with your beautiful family. I just came over to tell you how much I love your work, and I can't imagine how bothersome it must be for people to come up and ask things of you, as if they know you just because they recognize you. I hope you don't give them the time of day."

Research how "great men" have spoken about their mothers, and use their quotes as evidence in an essay about the virtues, appeal, and impact of feminine ambition/success.

July 18 My differentiated stance: The best way to become a better writer is to become a better self-editor. Most writers don't have the skill of seeing their work as a reader. This doesn't make for a blind spot; it makes up the condition of blindness. You don't know how to improve the piece, to improve its effectiveness and clarity and value to the reader.

It's a real advantage for a writer to have an editor to get thoughtful feedback. But if you can become a better self-editor the drafts you send out will be better. You raise your floor, and any feedback you get from others will just improve you from that new starting point.

Any writer will tell you that most of writing is rewriting and revising. So maybe you don't need to spend time and take courses to learn how to become a better writer. Maybe you could wildly improve the quality of your writing by becoming a better self-editor.

I'd like to come up with a salutation that I can use in emails that is broad enough to use in every email yet unique to me and kind of playful. One came to mind today: "In prose,". Of course, I love it because it's a nerdy, self-referential thing about the fact that what I just said was written, but it doesn't convey any emotion (contrast that with something a friend of mine says, "With love,"). I could go full woo-woo and say something like "May you find stillness today,".... I have some work to do.

Lexicographical Peace

The easiest argument against the descriptivists' take on lexicography is to point out the very plain and demonstrable fact of their hypocrisy. Descriptivists vie for the validity of all demonstrated usage, aiming to describe language at is used in speech by native speakers, but when any descriptivist sits down to write, they use all of the conventions and rules and usage guidelines that have been created by many generations of prescriptivists. Why do they write this way (for n Standard Written English) and not in whatever willy-nilly way they fancy? Because they want to make meaning well and clearly; they want to be understood.

Of course, we need both camps. The prescriptivists can't be left to garter-strap language and ignore how it's changing. And the descriptivists can't be allowed to topple authority and expunge all rules of usage on the basis of their being "arbitrary," for we'd become passive observers of the entropic decay of our language rather than active stewards aiding in its development and refinement. Let the descriptivists describe usage in speech, and let the prescriptivists declare the rules for Standard Written English.

Let us bask in peace, upon the resolution of the Grammar Wars.

July 17 Words conjure images and feelings. Think of all the meaning packed into the phrase "the caged bird." Think of the feeling it evokes. And compare that to "the caged bird sings." (Also think of the typical use-contexts of words like consent [sexual], trinity [religious], alien [sci-fi], invest [financial], and propose [romantic] could undermine or distract from your intended meaning for the word.)

To wield words well, you must always be aware of the associations that attend them. If you are aware, you can play with these associations in the arena of subtext.

Scope and Depth

Harry Dry on HIW:

The strength of an idea is inversely proportional to its scope.

This is so true. The only exception, or nuance, is that you can tackle a broad scope with a sufficiently deep and thorough analysis/story/argument and make for an even stronger idea. I guess there's a corollary where the strength (or power or impact) of an idea is the product of its depth and its scope.

Direct the same energy at a narrower scope, and you'll go much deeper, making the whole thing stronger (more powerful/impactful) overall. But it's even better if you could keep the broader scope and take the whole idea just as deep. Then you're digging a hole through the center of the Earth, shaking the ground beneath our feet.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker is a narrow scope with great depth; it's powerful. The Bible is a broad scope (life and death and God and love and creation) that goes bedrock-deep (multiple accounts, multiple eras, centuries of interpretation and conversation, multiple religions in conversation); it's the most powerful.

July 16 Another all-timer from Emerson's "Self-Reliance":

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

The women in my life always seem to find the thing in the exact same moment that they announce the thing is lost (most commonly, a cell phone).

Indulging in your fantasies as fantasies tempers your desire to act on them in reality. Dreams are a great and natural and healthy medium for exactly this.

July 15 Hot take: Pay-walled media > free, ad-revenue media — it gives creators the freedom to serve their readers/watchers/listeners rather than pander to advertising partners.

Imagine if each individual strand of hair were microscopic. As they are, they are just thick enough to see with our naked eye. But imagine if you couldn't make out single strands but only clumps of strands. Would that change how hair looks at all? It would at the roots — maybe — but probably not much would be different about any part of the sensory experience of hair.

Are the strands of hairs that we see not collections of smaller strands already?

Start the day with mindful movement. End it with silent stillness.

Every organism is resilient in the right environment.

July 14 Some of the best quotes from Andrew Holocek's Dream Yoga:

Fear, and the hesitation born from it, smothers life so that it burns at a pilot-light level. Things are safe, but semi-dead. […] On a spiritual level, fear is what keeps us from waking up. This is mostly our fear of the dark. Darkness represents the unknown, or the unconscious. We're always afraid of what we don't know or can't see (pg. 19).

What we refuse in conscious experience turns in to the refuse (rubbish) of the relative unconscious mind. As the saying goes, What we resits, persists' (pg. 19).

'Illusify' the contents of your mind, regard your thoughts and feelings as dreamlike, and watch your entire world soften. Your speech becomes gentler and your acts become kinder (pg. 165).

Reality is dreamlike. It is not a dream. Reality is not an illusion. It is illusory. As the masters warn, 'Self-liberate even the antidote.' Saying that reality is like a dream is the antidote to saying that it's solid, lasting, and independent. Now release that antidote. The Dzogchen master Khenpo Tenpa Yungdrung says, 'Always remember that illusion itself is an illusion' (pg. 209).

At our core, below any superficial language, beneath any gender, race, color, or creed, underneath even the slightest scent of duality and difference, we are absolutely all the same. The practices to the night lead us to this common ground and awaken us to the universality of the human condition (pg. 265).

The Best of Surrealism

I consider three artists to have best captured the feeling of dreams visually. They are René Magritte (Belgian), M.C. Escher (Dutch), and Salvador Dali (Spanish). All of the collected paintings below are works that I love and that, to me, relate directly to dreams or evoke the feeling of a dream.

René Magritte(WikiArt) communicates how dream-like our physical world is but putting mundane objects in surreal contexts, which makes the image feel at once like a dream and reality. And he calls upon the female image and the feminine energy to do it, which I often find to lead the content of my dreams.

Magritte was prolific, and he has so many dream-like works, which were first introduced to me by Malcolm Godwin in The Lucid Dreamer. Here are some of my favorites, in a loose order:

Here's another online collection of his work: RenéMagritte.org.

M.C. Escher (WikiArt) captures the fact that dreams are fluid and ever-changing and uncanny, yet they appear to be solid and sensical. It's why we don't question what we're seeing as we dream. He does this with optical illusions and metamorphic, fractal images. My favorites in a loose order:

Salvador Dali (WikiArt) brings the images and landscapes of dreams to life, including the erotic and dark and shameful parts, which we would normally want to keep unconscious. My favorites in a loose order:

Other great works by these artists that do not relate to dreams:

Magritte: Black Magic and The Lovers
Escher: Bond of Union, The Fall of Man, and Tower of Babel
Dali: The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus

More dream-like works from other artists:

Henri Rousseau: The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream
J.H. Moesman: Self-Portrait
Richard Hess: Reflections and Man in Bottle / Bottled In, by Richard Hess
Malcolm Godwin: Desert Dream
George Tooker: The Subway

July 13 Non-lucid dreams are prompts for introspection that can be paired with writing for dream-journaling, as a medium for introspection. Lucid dreams are a medium for introspection in themselves, for they offer self-knowledge and -growth from the experience alone, without any additional reflection.

Dreams do not have inherent meanings to uncover; the only meaning a dream can have is one that you ascribe to it from a state of conscious awareness. To interpret a dream as if it has some essential content would be like chartering a helicopter after a thunderstorm, reaching a waffle cone out the window, and trying to scoop up part of the rainbow. You're grasping at something that is empty. You can't retrieve meaning from something that is empty, but you can fill it. Fill it with meaning.

Dream-journaling has helped me develop a posture of intellectual openness and a habit of non-dogmatic thinking, because time and again I have recalled in detail the experience of perceiving the contents of my mind to be completely solid and real.

Example of a hyphen distinguishing between a phrasal noun and a closed-compound verb: dream journal (noun) vs. dream-journal (verb).

All bad things happen by accident or because of habit. All good things happen by choice, intent, and effort.

Accident comes from the Latin verb accidere, meaning "to fall upon," "fall out," "happen." When we do bad things, they're almost always things we fall into, or that fall upon us.

Reading is leisure. Reading is education. Education is leisure.

July 9 OpenAI is an oxymoron. What could possibly more concealed and inaccessible — enclosed — than a black box?

Breadcrumbs and Pots of Gold

The best essays and novels are like a trail of golden breadcrumbs that lead you to a pot. The pot is empty if you go there first (the end), but it fills up as you work along the trail of golden breadcrumbs. The more diligently you read, the more gold you'll gather and the fuller the pot will be by the end. Then, your takeaway, the pay-off, for the journey is that you get to carry a pot of gold home with you. You can even spend that new currency to enrich your life in myriad ways. That's the value of great writing; it will reward you in proportion to how well you read.

You can go at it alone, but it might kill you. Accept help and go at it together and it will be just as difficult along the way, but the thing is less likely to kill you.

Dysphemism is a euphemism for shit-talk.

Use en dashes (not hyphens) to join a phrasal noun with another word, or words, to create a closed compound adjective or closed compound noun — e.g., "Pulitzer Prize–winner" (compound noun) or "Pulitzer Prize–winning story" (compound adjective). The most common use of this would be with proper nouns, as in this example. The en dash indicates that Pulitzer Prize is one noun-phrase. If it were a hyphen, Pulitzer could be confused for a modifier of the closed compound noun Prize-winner.

July 8 Ambition is overrated, and it is misunderstood to be a prerequisite for contentment.

July 6 Avoiding what's dark and challenging is the single best method for denying yourself what's light and simple in life. In the deepest depths, there are are kernels of clear light, like the core of the Earth bursting through the seafloor with the power of the Sun.

Every night, we set ourselves adrift at sea, floating blindly on our backs above the dark, formless parts of our minds. To not recall your dreams is to black-out to the contents of your unconscious, disconnected from the deepest parts of your self. Look down. Dream-journaling gives you the surface-level awareness of a snorkeler observing the contents of another world. Dive inwards. When you become lucid, you can submerge yourself in your inner world.

To never recall your dreams would be to live an entire lifetime on Earth without ever opening your eyes underwater.

July 3 Is "lightning and thunder" singular or plural? Should we write "lightning and thunder is" or "...are majestic"? Because lighting and thunder are the same thing. Thunder is the sound of lightning. Does that mean that lighting is only referring to the sight of lighting and not to the entire phenomenon? This is not a grammatical question but one ontological.

July 2 Your greatest strength has an attendant weakness, and it's likely your greatest blind spot. What is the shadow-side of your greatest strength, and how can you manage it?

Self-Investigative Journalism: Go out into the world to discover something about yourself, then report your findings. Go on an inward voyage and inspire others to do their own version of the same.

July 1 Sacrifice is a vice; devotion is the virtue.

Contraction vs. Openness

Contractions are the primordial movers of life. Physical, spiritual, and metaphorical — contracts are what keep us grasping on to our desires; they convince us of who we are; they keep us bound to what we think we ought to do; they are why we hang on to life; and they propel us through space and time. Contractions move us in every way, all the way down to the physics of childbirth. Contractions thrust us out into the world, and they limit us by imperceptibly erecting this illusion of a solid, lasting, and independent reality. Contract when you want to move and grasp and cling and achieve. When you want to be grateful and joyful and still — when you want to allow for reality to be other than what it appears to be— stop contracting. Open up.

The sweet spot for an editor's client: "This entire thing is my own, but there's no way I could have done this on my own."

If a concept is too steep for your reader, write switchbacks. Don't lead them straight up a sheer pitch. They'll get exhausted or give up and resent you. It is your job to escort your reader to the mind-expanding, life-enriching vista at the summit, and the only reliable, sustainable way to reach it is gradually — one sure step at a time.

[[Park-Ranger Revision]]

An excerpt from the introduction of A Handbook on Trail Building and Maintenance, written for rangers of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks:

"This Trail Handbook is meant to be used by the trailworker. Sections of this handbook may be read and discarded, and other sections may be removed and found useful in the backcountry as a reference for project work (and starting fires!). The handbook gives the trailworker a few suggestions for solving the kind of problems encountered on a high Sierra trail system and presents standards for sound, long lasting, and environmentally compatible trailwork.
The primary standard for trail work in Sequoia and Kings canyon is one of environmental integrity. All problems and project are approached from an environmental perspective which allows natural processes to prevail. No work is undertaken or campsite used which unacceptably impacts the backcountry resource. We trailworkers, along with the backcountry rangers, are the major "stewards" of the backcountry.
If we don't set the standard, who will?"

Now, replace "trailworker" with "writer/self-editor" and "environment/backcountry" with "reader," and you have the perfect description of Park-Ranger Revision and the writer's responsibility to his/her reader.

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