striker
2mo ago
Just finished Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Published 25 years ago, but plot – about a university professor who finds himself cancelled after using a word where the literal/dictionary meaning is perfectly correct but an alternative/colloquial meaning is disparaging/racist – feels totally current.
I am awestruck by Roth’s sentences. Almost every page has a great one. (If you enjoy technically brilliant long – sometimes page-long – sentences.)
There are some blind spots – a couple of characters’ stories just seem to stop without resolution – but overall a great read. Extremely perceptive, sort of culture wars years before the culture wars. I haven’t read much Roth. Will be checking out more.
striker
6mo ago
This is helpful, sounds like a great process. Daily word count targets are essential - getting it down, can all be edited later. Will consider this. You can’t beat a good spreadsheet.
striker
6mo ago
To add: what’s your ”working well” process been like? I’ve never attempted a novel because I haven’t trusted myself to stay in my lane for long enough, so my go-to’s have been essays and poems. Basically the finishing line has to be in view for me to make progress. I understand I need to change this psychology to produce a meaningful body of work.
striker
6mo ago
Standard sports pages player ratings model. 6/7 is average. 3/4 is terrible. 8/9 is excellent. Almost no one scores 1, 2 or 10
striker
6mo ago
breaking 20,000 matches in relatively modest sized metro areas like Copenhagen, Stockholm or Denver
Interesting. Source?
striker
6mo ago
A few things on the go.
- Fiction - The Secret History (Donna Tartt) - which I think was recommended here recently.
- Finance - Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber) - re-teaching me things I already know about the way the world works.
- Race - The Barn (Wright Thompson) - I would read Wright Thompson transcribing the phone book. Also, I’m not American, so it’s good to get an understanding of this from the pen of a master.
striker
6mo ago
”Just keeping track of everything that needs doing is worse than actually doing it.”
100% true. Currently playing with AI or an assistant (or a combination of both) to do all this so I don’t have to do any of it. Not close to succeeding yet, but I know it’s the one big problem that solves most of my smaller problems.
striker
6mo ago
It’s been a while since I checked but in general comments there are (a) plentiful and (b) quite long. Those two put it in the top 0.001% of Substack blogs. That’s a different measure than: “are they objectively good comments?” I’m not sure there’s much on the internet that’s objectively good anymore. Enshittification effect, borne out of generalised ADHD-like behaviour created by algorithms.
striker
6mo ago
Complete lack of comments is probably 99% of substacks. Including mine, disappointingly. (I’m as prone to dopamine attraction as the next man…)
striker
6mo ago
like, is everyone paying for fake AI comments?
I fear there’s every chance of this.
I haven’t noticed many good comment sections.
Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) has a mature type of commenter, which is probably to be expected.
George Saunders (Story Club) has a very committed and engaged community, definitely more rounded than your tongue-in-cheek example.
Paul Kingsnorth (Abbey of Misrule) has a very good community who engages reliably.
Even these top 1% are often characterised by positivity towards the poster. It’s very much a leader-follower dynamic.
striker
6mo ago
Gabor Mate in particular has a very broad definition of trauma. I.e. it’s a lot more than what is typically set down. I would recommend his books, yes.
striker
6mo ago
I always find Fitzgerald’s books an unending wonder. Often it feels like not much is happening but afterwards, often years afterwards, you still find yourself bathed in the glow of whatever feeling he manages to convey. Gatsby is amazing but possibly the least “bathesome” - Beautiful and the Damned and Tender is the Night both left me with something inexplicable and permanent in my veins.
striker
6mo ago
Schwartz (the guy who coined IFS) has some books. I didn’t read it all but liked “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For”.
Also pretty sure both Bessel Van Der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score) and Gabor Mate have written about IFS positively in their books.
striker
8mo ago
Yes 100% - I was at university in Dublin about 20 years before the setting of Normal People but a lot of what Conall experienced was exactly my experience too and it was good to see it represented
striker
8mo ago
Didn’t stick with Conversations with Friends but found Normal People very perceptive and, in many ways, a perfect representation of the experience of many parts of rural and urban Ireland and especially where those two things collide. (I’m Irish.)
striker
10mo ago
I hate hate hate modern journalism.
This is a small point in your broader post, but it is an important one. Things like this make journalism and media untrusted and untrustworthy, and it has been getting worse over the past ~10 years.
At the risk of playing up to “touch grass” memes, I’m only ever truly relaxed when I get earthed. This can happen in several ways, but a few: disconnecting from tech, hiking/walking/wandering, cooking/eating/drinking beer outdoors, breathing fresh air, reading a paper book, digging a hole and planting a tree, trimming hedges, cutting grass, chopping/hauling/burning wood. Basically any day when my information diet is mostly non-human and mostly full of soil nutrients relaxes and invigorates me for all the necessary days of working with people.
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