Use lynx instead of w3m for backup
Includes URL references which is nice
This commit is contained in:
David Eisinger
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About Craig
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Books & Essays
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Talks
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Membership
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Shop!
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“Special Projects” Membership
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Podcasts:🎧 On Margins & SW945
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Newsletters:📩 Roden & Ridgeline
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Header image for Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
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Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
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Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
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My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny motor. I
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love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever bought as much delight
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as the delight of an electric bike?
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The first time I rode one was nearly a decade ago, in Kyoto. The electric bike
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I rented was huge and unwieldy, but that tug of its motor never left my mind. I
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went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant had gently placed his hand on my
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back and pushed me forward. That stupid smile has been on my face ever since.
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Two years ago I rented another one. This one smaller, lighter, the motor more
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powerful. I was convinced. This is the way. Eighteen months ago, in the heart
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of the pandemic, I committed and bought my first electric bike and have never
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looked back.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to one side
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and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun beats down but it
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feels cool and there’s something irrationally stirring — downright emotional —
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about the efficiency of this dumb machine beneath my body. The motor looks too
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small — just a black cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it moves. It
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sings that song. A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and
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ride, ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to where
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I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to linger in this
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space as long as possible, this space of smooth and efficient movement through
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the world, gliding in near total mechanical silence, just the sound of rubber
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on the pavement, wind in my ears, breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This
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is what electric bikes do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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A strange trio A few of my old bikes: A mamachari, carbon fiber road bike, and
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Kalavinka
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#So Many Bikes
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All my standing life, I’ve biked. As a kid I rode a K-Mart Huffy to a rusted
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nub and then managed to nab a Haro Group 1. As an adult, bikes have been one of
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my few material indulgences (unwittingly, organically). In the past twenty
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years alone I’ve owned some fifteen bikes. I’ve had aluminum and carbon Bianchi
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road bikes. I’ve had steel Kalavinka keirin bikes with gorgeous head badges.
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I’ve had folding Dahon and Birdy BD-1s. I’ve had a handful of beloved brandless
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throwaway mamacharis — shopping bikes — that have proven hearty and fun in
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their own ways, and have each died uniquely. I’ve gone out of my way to get a
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handmade Arrow cruiser from a builder in Ogikubo. I still have a custom orange
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Moulton that I’ve modified into a single-speed city bomber that goes remarkably
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fast while floating atop its simple suspension.
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And on and on — bikes. Why? Because as any bike lover will tell you, to be
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ensorcelled by the bike is to crave one and only one thing: More bike. Each new
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bike is like riding once again for the first time. Exploring a city on a
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mamachari is different than a BD-1 is different than a Moulton. All thrilling.
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The bikes change, and so, too does your relationship to the pavement. My love
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for bikes has no categorical allegiances; if it has two wheels, and pedals, I’m
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interested. I want to ride them all.
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A Moulton Tiny, but fast, nearly flawless as a city machine — a Moulton with
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converted stem, Sugino cranks, coaster brake
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Summers in most of Japan have never been easy. The temperatures England flirted
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with in 2022 are temperatures Tokyoites have contended with for centuries (and
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now contend with ones even higher). Crushing heat coupled with suffocating
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humidity. A three-shower-a-day kinda summer. Watch an Ozu film and observe the
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languid and supine impulse of its inhabitants during summertime scenes — that’s
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not affect, it’s survival. In Japan’s August, you simply can’t walk a block
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without losing most of your moisture.
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Bikes have always helped. A bicycle generates a microclimate with minimal
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effort. Standing on a street corner you may be soaked, but on a bike, the wind
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whooshing past, you are crisp(er) and dry(er). An electric bike only amplifies
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the effect.
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When I was a child I dreamt of having a personal helicopter. Powered by my feet
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and a bit of magic (certainly not gasoline, oddly, thinking back on it now). I
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imagined quietly gliding over the city in this tiny contraption, floating from
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home to video rental shop to diner, stopping by a friend’s house along the way.
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An electric bike gets me most of the way to this feeling.
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In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my electric
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bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way. I live in a seaside
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town south of Tokyo and traffic can get ridiculous, its ancient roads sized for
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horses, not cars. The electric bike swoops between and alongside these stale
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processions of heat and burning fuel. Drifting behind a gas-powered scooter or
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moped feels like observing some Victorian contraption — inefficient and loud
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and clunky and burdensome and pollutant. And not much faster (often much
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slower) or more useful than an electric bike.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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A Vanmoof and a BESV My friend's S3 and my BESV (the X3 looks like a slightly
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smaller version of the S3)
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#Electrics
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I own two electric bikes. My first purchase was the strangely named BESV PSA1 —
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which is a smaller wheeled (20"), rear-wheel drive machine, with mostly
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off-the-shelf components allowing you to customize it to your liking. ^1 And
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then, because I was so enamored by the BESV — so seduced by its small motor of
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umph, so wanting more and different electric bike experiences — I went and
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picked up a front-wheel drive Vanmoof X3 — the smaller-wheeled brother (24") to
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Vanmoof’s (quite frankly) giant S3 — just a few months later.
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I love them both like damaged brothers, because both of these bikes are flawed
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in frustrating ways.
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The electronic brain on the BESV is as dumb as they come.^2 The settings reset
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each time you turn the bike on. The acceleration curves feel unrefined —
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herky-jerky, you might say. Its app is the worst app I have on my phone — badly
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designed, nearly functionally useless, clearly engineered without love. And
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yet. Despite these flaws I put hundreds of kilometers on this thing in the
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first month. The front and rear suspension turn every road to glass, and are
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even fine for dirt trails; I find myself hunting down paths through parks I’d
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never otherwise think about. Suddenly every hilly road is a thing demanding to
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be explored. Up up up the little machine yells, and you follow its command.
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Guests who stay at my studio are given the BESV to ride. We take it down the
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coast. It never fails to amaze. One friend felt compelled to pet it upon
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dismount, saying, Good job, buddy, so quick and deep was the affection for the
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thing.
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The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are refined, the
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app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is all custom
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components, and they aren’t the highest quality at that. The automatic shifting
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mechanism on mine failed twice in the first two months, requiring shipping the
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bike to the Vanmoof store.^3 The seat post bolt broke off in the post. The
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original plastic pedals felt cheap and flimsy (pedals are one of the few things
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you can swap for your own). The aluminum frame is too stiff for the speed the
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bike generates — it can feel like you’ve been rattled to death after a bumpy
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road. (And stiffness mitigation by lowering tire pressure seems to only
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increase possibility of puncture.) But, more than all that, the design of the
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bike has a dangerous fundamental flaw: The bottom bracket is simply too low.
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Of all my many, many bikes, I’ve never had a pedal bottom out. On this Vanmoof
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X3? Dozens of times. Most critically during a turn at speed — the pedal hit the
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pavement, jumped the bike sideways, and sent me flying. It’s the only bad crash
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I’ve had in decades. So I’ve had to modify the way I ride — no pedaling into or
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out of turns, hyper awareness of deviations in lateral road slope — because,
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despite all this, I can’t stop riding this stupid thing. It sings — that hum.
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It is joy. I reach for it daily and it takes me around the peninsula and makes
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me happy to be alive.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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BESV @ Lee's Bread, Oiso I've written about three electric bike rides for
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Papersky Magazine: Misaki, Oiso, and Yokosuka.
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Allow me to share a dirty secret: More often than not, at midnight I can’t
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repress the impulse — I have to take a bike out. Out the bike comes and
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together we head into the empty streets of my town and hum our way all over,
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visiting temples in total silence. There are no cars. Often no people. It feels
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illicit — this slipping around town, this sliding into temple parking lots in
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the shroud of the night, looking at their old beams, feeling ten years old and
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grateful for both the ability and awareness to be doing just this very thing at
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this very moment.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought everyone in
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the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be electric. I want everyone to
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feel this silliness, this punch-drunk stupidity of pure love, this sense of
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cheating the rules, the norms, this sense of ever-present delight. At our
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worst, humans mindlessly consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our
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bodies with poisons. At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have
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gotten more efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has
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brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will only
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double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year over year over
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year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We can’t help it. The charm
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is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more people who know, the better the
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world. It’s a wild notion, this sense of goodness to be had if you just reach
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out for it. Goodness with no real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines,
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electric bikes are machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Buy the best electric bike you can within your budget. Stretch if possible.
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Usually, the more you spend the lighter the machine, the more powerful the
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motor, the longer-lasting the battery. Depending on which country you live in
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top speeds will differ. In Japan the bike’s are capped at 24km/h. In America,
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32km/h. Some places only allow for pedal-assist — meaning the motor only works
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when pedaling. Others allow throttles, blurring the line between bike and
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scooter. Laws will change in the coming years as more people adopt the machines
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and cities themselves adapt. This is just the start. Ten years ago it was
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fairly rare to see an electric bike around Tokyo. Today, it seems as if every
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parent hauling their kids is doing so electrically.
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A good strategy: Find a local bike shop that will let you try out several
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electric bikes. Some have front-hub motors, others rear-hub motors. Others, the
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motor sits in the center, between the cranks. Each has a subtly different feel.
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Going up a hill, a front-motor’d machine may skip or slip as you pull back on
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the handlebars, but on flat land will feel more like being tugged through the
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world.
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Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object to be
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well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their often bad
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software, their defective geometries. Because they open the world. Whatever
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world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it nearer. This is worth
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more than you might estimate. These bikes sing their little songs and the smile
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on your face makes you look like a village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to
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be.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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A summer night: Biking home alongside a river. The air is thick with humidity
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and cicadas vibrate wildly in the distance. The moon is out. My choices:
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straight home along the shimmering moonlit river, or take a detour, up into the
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dark mountains, doubling the distance. To my surprise, I choose the mountains
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almost every time. More! That tiny child who fantasized about helicopters
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yells. More of this, whatever this is. More more more. And so I feed that
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impulse, an impulse generated and nurtured by the electric bike. Into the
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shadow mountains we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present,
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always ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An
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owl hoots. The smile has never left my face.
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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#Noted:
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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1. I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and Klamper
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disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips and saddle and it
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feels wonderful through and through. These Paul Klampers are mechanical.
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The Vanmoof uses (generic?) hydraulic brakes. After thousands of
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kilometers, my conclusion is: hydraulics feel nice, but they are fussy (and
|
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perhaps Vanmoof’s chosen components are sub-optimal) and difficult (?) to
|
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tune on your own. In the end, I just don’t think they’re worth it. Too
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“delicate.” The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas
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the hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of the
|
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last eighteen months. Were the Vanmoof more flexible, I’d happily swap out
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for mechanicals. This lack of flexibility is a bummer because, unlike an
|
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Apple iPhone, for example, where the components tend to be best of class
|
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(think: modem, CPU, camera unit, etc), the physical components on a Vanmoof
|
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most definitely aren’t — nor do they offer the option to pay more to get
|
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better components. ↩︎
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|
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2. Oh, how I wish this thing was open source, hackable — because it’s so close
|
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to great. Sadly — and I don’t know how else to frame this — it feels like
|
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the engineers behind the software don’t ride bikes. At least not this one.
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The software flaws are so fundamentally obvious, that anyone who had a)
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access to the code, and b) rode the bike, couldn’t NOT fix these obvious
|
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issues. What I really wish, though, is that I could slap the Vanmoof brain
|
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onto the BESV body and, well, then we’d be in Electric Bike Elysium. ↩︎
|
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|
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3. I’ve since learned — the drive train of the Vanmoof is not to be “ridden”
|
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like a “bike” but rather, “feathered” like a delicate sand castle — assume
|
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the gears could explode at any moment and apply the least amount of
|
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pressure you can; the motor is strong enough to take care of most of the
|
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rest. In this way, the Vanmoof feels more like a moped that uses “pedal
|
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assist” as a suggestion than a pure electric-assist bike — a smart way to
|
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get around motorcycle laws in most countries, which I assume is the main
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point. Not to say you don’t get a workout on the Vanmoof, you do, but not
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nearly as much as the more classically committed BESV — which really does
|
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require you to pedal.
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Maybe this is a good place to bring up the question: Why not just get an
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electric scooter? I think it mainly comes down to flexibility and
|
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philosophy. With a pedal assist bike (even if the pedaling required is
|
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minimal) you simply have more flexibility in parking, in riding, in
|
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“lightness” of transportation, than with an electric scooter. Also:
|
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Insurance costs, maintenance, and higher base cost. And philosophically,
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being able to still use the bike as a “bike” without power feels like an
|
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aspect of these machines we shouldn’t be so quick to toss aside. ↩︎
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This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email me@craigmod.com.
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|
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Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article
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|
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Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the author of Kissa
|
||||
by Kissa and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing fellow. His essays and
|
||||
articles have appeared in Eater, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine,
|
||||
Wired, Aeon, New Scientist, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New
|
||||
York Times, The Morning News, Codex: Journal of Typography, and elsewhere. He
|
||||
writes newsletters, oh yes, newsletters: Roden & Ridgeline.
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|
||||
The work on this site is supported in part by paid memberships.
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Popular Essays
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Walking Venice
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Notes on a week of walking Venice, an incredibly beautiful city that feels
|
||||
totally cursed
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Brando’s Room
|
||||
|
||||
Traveling space, if not time, to say hello to Capote and Brando
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Zero milestone
|
||||
|
||||
From where everything is measured
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
A Few Feet Above the Earth
|
||||
|
||||
On balance and the inner ear
|
||||
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
|
||||
© 2001 - 2023, Craig Mod
|
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|
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|
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[piwik]
|
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|
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403
content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/craigmod-com-xfi1ge.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,403 @@
|
||||
#[1]Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
|
||||
|
||||
[2]About Craig
|
||||
[3]Books & [4]Essays
|
||||
[5]Talks
|
||||
[6]Membership
|
||||
[7]Shop!
|
||||
[8]“Special Projects” Membership
|
||||
Podcasts:🎧 [9]On Margins & [10]SW945
|
||||
Newsletters:📩 [11]Roden & [12]Ridgeline
|
||||
|
||||
Header image for Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
|
||||
|
||||
Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny
|
||||
motor. I love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever
|
||||
bought as much delight as the delight of an electric bike?
|
||||
|
||||
The first time I rode one was nearly a decade ago, in Kyoto. The
|
||||
electric bike I rented was huge and unwieldy, but that tug of its motor
|
||||
never left my mind. I went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant
|
||||
had gently placed his hand on my back and pushed me forward. That
|
||||
stupid smile has been on my face ever since.
|
||||
|
||||
Two years ago I rented another one. This one smaller, lighter, the
|
||||
motor more powerful. I was convinced. This is the way. Eighteen months
|
||||
ago, in the heart of the pandemic, I committed and bought my first
|
||||
electric bike and have never looked back.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to
|
||||
one side and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun
|
||||
beats down but it feels cool and there’s something irrationally
|
||||
stirring — downright emotional — about the efficiency of this dumb
|
||||
machine beneath my body. The motor looks too small — just a black
|
||||
cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it moves. It sings that song.
|
||||
A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and ride,
|
||||
ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to
|
||||
where I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to
|
||||
linger in this space as long as possible, this space of smooth and
|
||||
efficient movement through the world, gliding in near total mechanical
|
||||
silence, just the sound of rubber on the pavement, wind in my ears,
|
||||
breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This is what electric bikes
|
||||
do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
A strange trio A few of my old bikes: A mamachari, carbon fiber road
|
||||
bike, and Kalavinka
|
||||
|
||||
[13]#So Many Bikes
|
||||
|
||||
All my standing life, I’ve biked. As a kid I rode a K-Mart Huffy to a
|
||||
rusted nub and then managed to nab a Haro Group 1. As an adult, bikes
|
||||
have been one of my few material indulgences (unwittingly,
|
||||
organically). In the past twenty years alone I’ve owned some fifteen
|
||||
bikes. I’ve had aluminum and carbon Bianchi road bikes. I’ve had steel
|
||||
Kalavinka keirin bikes with gorgeous head badges. I’ve had folding
|
||||
Dahon and Birdy BD-1s. I’ve had a handful of beloved brandless
|
||||
throwaway mamacharis — shopping bikes — that have proven hearty and fun
|
||||
in their own ways, and have each died uniquely. I’ve gone out of my way
|
||||
to get a handmade Arrow cruiser from a builder in Ogikubo. I still have
|
||||
a custom orange Moulton that I’ve modified into a single-speed city
|
||||
bomber that goes remarkably fast while floating atop its simple
|
||||
suspension.
|
||||
|
||||
And on and on — bikes. Why? Because as any bike lover will tell you, to
|
||||
be ensorcelled by the bike is to crave one and only one thing: More
|
||||
bike. Each new bike is like riding once again for the first time.
|
||||
Exploring a city on a mamachari is different than a BD-1 is different
|
||||
than a Moulton. All thrilling. The bikes change, and so, too does your
|
||||
relationship to the pavement. My love for bikes has no categorical
|
||||
allegiances; if it has two wheels, and pedals, I’m interested. I want
|
||||
to ride them all.
|
||||
A Moulton Tiny, but fast, nearly flawless as a city machine — a Moulton
|
||||
with converted stem, Sugino cranks, coaster brake
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
Summers in most of Japan have never been easy. The temperatures England
|
||||
flirted with in 2022 are temperatures Tokyoites have contended with for
|
||||
centuries (and now contend with ones even higher). Crushing heat
|
||||
coupled with suffocating humidity. A three-shower-a-day kinda summer.
|
||||
Watch an Ozu film and observe the languid and supine impulse of its
|
||||
inhabitants during summertime scenes — that’s not affect, it’s
|
||||
survival. In Japan’s August, you simply can’t walk a block without
|
||||
losing most of your moisture.
|
||||
|
||||
Bikes have always helped. A bicycle generates a microclimate with
|
||||
minimal effort. Standing on a street corner you may be soaked, but on a
|
||||
bike, the wind whooshing past, you are crisp(er) and dry(er). An
|
||||
electric bike only amplifies the effect.
|
||||
|
||||
When I was a child I dreamt of having a personal helicopter. Powered by
|
||||
my feet and a bit of magic (certainly not gasoline, oddly, thinking
|
||||
back on it now). I imagined quietly gliding over the city in this tiny
|
||||
contraption, floating from home to video rental shop to diner, stopping
|
||||
by a friend’s house along the way. An electric bike gets me most of the
|
||||
way to this feeling.
|
||||
|
||||
In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my
|
||||
electric bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way. I
|
||||
live in a seaside town south of Tokyo and traffic can get ridiculous,
|
||||
its ancient roads sized for horses, not cars. The electric bike swoops
|
||||
between and alongside these stale processions of heat and burning fuel.
|
||||
Drifting behind a gas-powered scooter or moped feels like observing
|
||||
some Victorian contraption — inefficient and loud and clunky and
|
||||
burdensome and pollutant. And not much faster (often much slower) or
|
||||
more useful than an electric bike.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
A Vanmoof and a BESV My friend's S3 and my BESV (the X3 looks like a
|
||||
slightly smaller version of the S3)
|
||||
|
||||
[14]#Electrics
|
||||
|
||||
I own two electric bikes. My first purchase was the strangely named
|
||||
BESV PSA1 — which is a smaller wheeled (20"), rear-wheel drive machine,
|
||||
with mostly off-the-shelf components allowing you to customize it to
|
||||
your liking. ^[15]1 And then, because I was so enamored by the BESV —
|
||||
so seduced by its small motor of umph, so wanting more and different
|
||||
electric bike experiences — I went and picked up a front-wheel drive
|
||||
Vanmoof X3 — the smaller-wheeled brother (24") to Vanmoof’s (quite
|
||||
frankly) giant S3 — just a few months later.
|
||||
|
||||
I love them both like damaged brothers, because both of these bikes are
|
||||
flawed in frustrating ways.
|
||||
|
||||
The electronic brain on the BESV is as dumb as they come.^[16]2 The
|
||||
settings reset each time you turn the bike on. The acceleration curves
|
||||
feel unrefined — herky-jerky, you might say. Its app is the worst app I
|
||||
have on my phone — badly designed, nearly functionally useless, clearly
|
||||
engineered without love. And yet. Despite these flaws I put hundreds of
|
||||
kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear
|
||||
suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails;
|
||||
I find myself hunting down paths through parks I’d never otherwise
|
||||
think about. Suddenly every hilly road is a thing demanding to be
|
||||
explored. Up up up the little machine yells, and you follow its
|
||||
command.
|
||||
|
||||
Guests who stay at my studio are given the BESV to ride. We take it
|
||||
down the coast. It never fails to amaze. One friend felt compelled to
|
||||
pet it upon dismount, saying, Good job, buddy, so quick and deep was
|
||||
the affection for the thing.
|
||||
|
||||
The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are
|
||||
refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is
|
||||
all custom components, and they aren’t the highest quality at that. The
|
||||
automatic shifting mechanism on mine failed twice in the first two
|
||||
months, requiring shipping the bike to the Vanmoof store.^[17]3 The
|
||||
seat post bolt broke off in the post. The original plastic pedals felt
|
||||
cheap and flimsy (pedals are one of the few things you can swap for
|
||||
your own). The aluminum frame is too stiff for the speed the bike
|
||||
generates — it can feel like you’ve been rattled to death after a bumpy
|
||||
road. (And stiffness mitigation by lowering tire pressure seems to only
|
||||
increase possibility of puncture.) But, more than all that, the design
|
||||
of the bike has a dangerous fundamental flaw: The bottom bracket is
|
||||
simply too low.
|
||||
|
||||
Of all my many, many bikes, I’ve never had a pedal bottom out. On this
|
||||
Vanmoof X3? Dozens of times. Most critically during a turn at speed —
|
||||
the pedal hit the pavement, jumped the bike sideways, and sent me
|
||||
flying. It’s the only bad crash I’ve had in decades. So I’ve had to
|
||||
modify the way I ride — no pedaling into or out of turns, hyper
|
||||
awareness of deviations in lateral road slope — because, despite all
|
||||
this, I can’t stop riding this stupid thing. It sings — that hum. It is
|
||||
joy. I reach for it daily and it takes me around the peninsula and
|
||||
makes me happy to be alive.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
BESV @ Lee's Bread, Oiso I've written about three electric bike rides
|
||||
for Papersky Magazine: Misaki, Oiso, and Yokosuka.
|
||||
|
||||
Allow me to share a dirty secret: More often than not, at midnight I
|
||||
can’t repress the impulse — I have to take a bike out. Out the bike
|
||||
comes and together we head into the empty streets of my town and hum
|
||||
our way all over, visiting temples in total silence. There are no cars.
|
||||
Often no people. It feels illicit — this slipping around town, this
|
||||
sliding into temple parking lots in the shroud of the night, looking at
|
||||
their old beams, feeling ten years old and grateful for both the
|
||||
ability and awareness to be doing just this very thing at this very
|
||||
moment.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought
|
||||
everyone in the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be
|
||||
electric. I want everyone to feel this silliness, this punch-drunk
|
||||
stupidity of pure love, this sense of cheating the rules, the norms,
|
||||
this sense of ever-present delight. At our worst, humans mindlessly
|
||||
consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons.
|
||||
At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more
|
||||
efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has
|
||||
brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will
|
||||
only double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year
|
||||
over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We
|
||||
can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more
|
||||
people who know, the better the world. It’s a wild notion, this sense
|
||||
of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no
|
||||
real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are
|
||||
machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
Buy the best electric bike you can within your budget. Stretch if
|
||||
possible. Usually, the more you spend the lighter the machine, the more
|
||||
powerful the motor, the longer-lasting the battery. Depending on which
|
||||
country you live in top speeds will differ. In Japan the bike’s are
|
||||
capped at 24km/h. In America, 32km/h. Some places only allow for
|
||||
pedal-assist — meaning the motor only works when pedaling. Others allow
|
||||
throttles, blurring the line between bike and scooter. Laws will change
|
||||
in the coming years as more people adopt the machines and cities
|
||||
themselves adapt. This is just the start. Ten years ago it was fairly
|
||||
rare to see an electric bike around Tokyo. Today, it seems as if every
|
||||
parent hauling their kids is doing so electrically.
|
||||
|
||||
A good strategy: Find a local bike shop that will let you try out
|
||||
several electric bikes. Some have front-hub motors, others rear-hub
|
||||
motors. Others, the motor sits in the center, between the cranks. Each
|
||||
has a subtly different feel. Going up a hill, a front-motor’d machine
|
||||
may skip or slip as you pull back on the handlebars, but on flat land
|
||||
will feel more like being tugged through the world.
|
||||
|
||||
Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object
|
||||
to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their
|
||||
often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the
|
||||
world. Whatever world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it
|
||||
nearer. This is worth more than you might estimate. These bikes sing
|
||||
their little songs and the smile on your face makes you look like a
|
||||
village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to be.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
A summer night: Biking home alongside a river. The air is thick with
|
||||
humidity and cicadas vibrate wildly in the distance. The moon is out.
|
||||
My choices: straight home along the shimmering moonlit river, or take a
|
||||
detour, up into the dark mountains, doubling the distance. To my
|
||||
surprise, I choose the mountains almost every time. More! That tiny
|
||||
child who fantasized about helicopters yells. More of this, whatever
|
||||
this is. More more more. And so I feed that impulse, an impulse
|
||||
generated and nurtured by the electric bike. Into the shadow mountains
|
||||
we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present, always
|
||||
ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An
|
||||
owl hoots. The smile has never left my face.
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
[18]#Noted:
|
||||
__________________________________________________________________
|
||||
|
||||
1. I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and
|
||||
Klamper disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips
|
||||
and saddle and it feels wonderful through and through. These Paul
|
||||
Klampers are mechanical. The Vanmoof uses (generic?) hydraulic
|
||||
brakes. After thousands of kilometers, my conclusion is: hydraulics
|
||||
feel nice, but they are fussy (and perhaps Vanmoof’s chosen
|
||||
components are sub-optimal) and difficult (?) to tune on your own.
|
||||
In the end, I just don’t think they’re worth it. Too “delicate.”
|
||||
The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the
|
||||
hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of
|
||||
the last eighteen months. Were the Vanmoof more flexible, I’d
|
||||
happily swap out for mechanicals. This lack of flexibility is a
|
||||
bummer because, unlike an Apple iPhone, for example, where the
|
||||
components tend to be best of class (think: modem, CPU, camera
|
||||
unit, etc), the physical components on a Vanmoof most definitely
|
||||
aren’t — nor do they offer the option to pay more to get better
|
||||
components. [19]↩︎
|
||||
2. Oh, how I wish this thing was open source, hackable — because it’s
|
||||
so close to great. Sadly — and I don’t know how else to frame this
|
||||
— it feels like the engineers behind the software don’t ride bikes.
|
||||
At least not this one. The software flaws are so fundamentally
|
||||
obvious, that anyone who had a) access to the code, and b) rode the
|
||||
bike, couldn’t NOT fix these obvious issues. What I really wish,
|
||||
though, is that I could slap the Vanmoof brain onto the BESV body
|
||||
and, well, then we’d be in Electric Bike Elysium. [20]↩︎
|
||||
3. I’ve since learned — the drive train of the Vanmoof is not to be
|
||||
“ridden” like a “bike” but rather, “feathered” like a delicate sand
|
||||
castle — assume the gears could explode at any moment and apply the
|
||||
least amount of pressure you can; the motor is strong enough to
|
||||
take care of most of the rest. In this way, the Vanmoof feels more
|
||||
like a moped that uses “pedal assist” as a suggestion than a pure
|
||||
electric-assist bike — a smart way to get around motorcycle laws in
|
||||
most countries, which I assume is the main point. Not to say you
|
||||
don’t get a workout on the Vanmoof, you do, but not nearly as much
|
||||
as the more classically committed BESV — which really does require
|
||||
you to pedal.
|
||||
Maybe this is a good place to bring up the question: Why not just
|
||||
get an electric scooter? I think it mainly comes down to
|
||||
flexibility and philosophy. With a pedal assist bike (even if the
|
||||
pedaling required is minimal) you simply have more flexibility in
|
||||
parking, in riding, in “lightness” of transportation, than with an
|
||||
electric scooter. Also: Insurance costs, maintenance, and higher
|
||||
base cost. And philosophically, being able to still use the bike as
|
||||
a “bike” without power feels like an aspect of these machines we
|
||||
shouldn’t be so quick to toss aside. [21]↩︎
|
||||
|
||||
This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email
|
||||
[22]me@craigmod.com.
|
||||
[23]Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article
|
||||
|
||||
[24]Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the
|
||||
author of [25]Kissa by Kissa and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing
|
||||
fellow. His essays and articles have appeared in Eater, The Atlantic,
|
||||
California Sunday Magazine, Wired, Aeon, New Scientist, Virginia
|
||||
Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Morning News,
|
||||
Codex: Journal of Typography, and elsewhere. He writes newsletters, oh
|
||||
yes, [26]newsletters: [27]Roden & [28]Ridgeline.
|
||||
|
||||
The work on this site is supported in part by [29]paid memberships.
|
||||
|
||||
Whatever you do, don't follow @craigmod on [30]Twitter or
|
||||
[31]Instagram.
|
||||
|
||||
Subscribe to my newsletters
|
||||
|
||||
Join some ~30,000 other subscribers.
|
||||
[32]Roden: photography × literature × tech × film (monthly)
|
||||
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|
||||
Always one-click to unsubscribe.
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
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||||
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|
||||
(BUTTON) Subscribe
|
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|
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||||
|
||||
Self-Improvement and the Big Walk
|
||||
|
||||
Every day a change to be better
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Upon this Wrist
|
||||
|
||||
A week with Apple Watch
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||||
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
My talk from Figma's Config conference
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||||
|
||||
____________________
|
||||
|
||||
© 2001 - 2023, [34]Craig Mod
|
||||
|
||||
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|
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|
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|
||||
18. https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/#noted
|
||||
19. https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/#fnref:1
|
||||
20. https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/#fnref:2
|
||||
21. https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/#fnref:3
|
||||
22. mailto:me@craigmod.com
|
||||
23. https://craigmod.com/about/
|
||||
24. https://craigmod.com/about/
|
||||
25. https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa-4th-ed
|
||||
26. https://craigmod.com/newsletters
|
||||
27. https://craigmod.com/explorers/
|
||||
28. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/
|
||||
29. https://craigmod.com/membership/
|
||||
30. http://twitter.com/craigmod/
|
||||
31. http://instagram.com/craigmod
|
||||
32. https://craigmod.com/roden/
|
||||
33. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/
|
||||
34. https://craigmod.com/about/
|
||||
35. http://twitter.com/craigmod
|
||||
36. http://instagram.com/craigmod
|
||||
37. https://mastodon.social/@craigmod
|
||||
38. https://craigmod.com/index.xml
|
||||
|
||||
Hidden links:
|
||||
40. https://craigmod.com/
|
||||
41. https://twitter.com/craigmod/
|
||||
42. https://instagram.com/craigmod/
|
||||
43. mailto:?subject=From%20craigmod.com:%20Electric%20Bike%2c%20Stupid%20Love%20of%20My%20Life&body=I%20think%20you%20might%20enjoy%20this%20article:%0D%0Ahttps%3a%2f%2fcraigmod.com%2fessays%2felectric_bikes%2f%20%0D%0A
|
||||
44. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Electric%20Bike,%20Stupid%20Love%20of%20My%20Life+https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/
|
||||
45. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/047/
|
||||
46. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/091/
|
||||
47. https://craigmod.com/essays/upon_this_wrist/
|
||||
48. https://craigmod.com/ridgeline/058/
|
||||
@@ -8,16 +8,16 @@ tags:
|
||||
references:
|
||||
- title: "Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life — by Craig Mod"
|
||||
url: https://craigmod.com/essays/electric_bikes/
|
||||
date: 2023-04-04T23:47:24Z
|
||||
file: craigmod-com-avmku7.txt
|
||||
date: 2023-04-05T14:58:16Z
|
||||
file: craigmod-com-xfi1ge.txt
|
||||
- title: "Programming is a Pop Culture – Baldur Bjarnason"
|
||||
url: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/programming-is-a-pop-culture/
|
||||
date: 2023-04-04T23:47:24Z
|
||||
file: www-baldurbjarnason-com-7p5031.txt
|
||||
date: 2023-04-05T14:58:17Z
|
||||
file: www-baldurbjarnason-com-uaaq9d.txt
|
||||
- title: "Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages - The New York Times"
|
||||
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
|
||||
date: 2023-04-04T23:47:25Z
|
||||
file: www-nytimes-com-tq2xdi.txt
|
||||
date: 2023-04-05T14:58:18Z
|
||||
file: www-nytimes-com-gvijqf.txt
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
With the warm winter we've been having in NC, I've gotten to take Nev to and from daycare on the e-bike a whole bunch, which has been just fantastic. I'm wary of becoming too much of an evangelist, but it really does feel like they can replace cars for a lot of folks, and they're fun as hell.
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -1,610 +0,0 @@
|
||||
• Essays
|
||||
• Newsletter
|
||||
• Ebook
|
||||
• Contact
|
||||
|
||||
Baldur Bjarnason
|
||||
|
||||
Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
|
||||
|
||||
I’m available as a consultant. I also have a book out.
|
||||
|
||||
21 November 2022
|
||||
|
||||
Programming is a Pop Culture
|
||||
|
||||
(What follows is an extract from Out of the Software Crisis, lightly edited to
|
||||
work as a blog post.)
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
So I think what happened is computing has turned into pop culture and the
|
||||
universities are not helping in general, at least not in the US.
|
||||
|
||||
So, Cicero---anybody know a good Cicero quote having to do with the present
|
||||
and past? Let's check your classical education here. So, you know who
|
||||
Cicero was. He was one of those old Roman guys.
|
||||
|
||||
So, Cicero once wrote: 'He who knows only his own generation remains
|
||||
forever a child.'
|
||||
|
||||
Programming and Scaling (Alan Kay, 2011)
|
||||
|
||||
The programming pop culture defines change—any change—as progress. Most
|
||||
developers, myself included, have a fascination with novelty. If it’s new, then
|
||||
it must be an improvement. You even hear this stated outright as an argument by
|
||||
developers: it’s newer and therefore better. Trends in software development are
|
||||
rarely based on objective observation or sensible practice. This endless
|
||||
chasing of trends leads to projects being needlessly rewritten, code being
|
||||
abandoned, and new projects being started when fixing the bugs in an old
|
||||
project would have done the same. The stocks of the software development system
|
||||
are flushed out at a moment’s notice simply because the developers found
|
||||
something shinier.
|
||||
|
||||
Experienced developers are aware of this tendency in themselves and work to
|
||||
mitigate it, but younger developers are often under the mistaken impression
|
||||
that this is how software development works. Unless they can pare back this
|
||||
tendency or are matched with teammates who hold them back, this tendency can
|
||||
lead to immense destruction of value for an organisation.
|
||||
|
||||
Pop cultures favour the visual aesthetic of the day. We all know what sort of
|
||||
aesthetic designers commonly favour. Small, low-contrast text, lots of
|
||||
whitespace, no pure whites or pure blacks (just greys). The details vary with
|
||||
fashion, but each generation of designers has a preferred visual aesthetic.
|
||||
That aesthetic tests poorly; the text is illegible; the layout doesn’t have
|
||||
enough contrast. The information density is so sparse it’s effectively
|
||||
non-existent.
|
||||
|
||||
Looks pretty, though.
|
||||
|
||||
Coders have a similar tendency, their preferred aesthetic is just a bit
|
||||
different, but as with designers, it tests horribly when put in front of
|
||||
genuine users. The exact details of the preferred aesthetic tend to vary from
|
||||
generation to generation. One group prefers light-on-dark text (despite not
|
||||
suffering from conditions that benefit from dark mode) and unusable
|
||||
hyper-complex layouts where everything is configurable. Another group goes for
|
||||
ultra-minimalism where nothing is shown by default. You constantly scrub around
|
||||
and hunt for a button, a widget—anything that even vaguely resembles an
|
||||
affordance. This is usually not an issue if you have designers on the team. If
|
||||
you’re letting the programmers design the user interface or are a programmer
|
||||
designing a user interface, you need to be aware of it.
|
||||
|
||||
But this adherence to a specific aesthetic isn’t limited to designs. It’s also
|
||||
an issue when it comes to the code itself.
|
||||
|
||||
The programming pop culture favours specific code aesthetics based on the
|
||||
trends of the day. I’m not talking about code style or formatting. The code in
|
||||
a project should adhere to a single style, simple as that. The issue is that
|
||||
the programming pop culture demands that code exhibit the latest popular
|
||||
aesthetics of rigour, formality, and cleverness. Whether the code actually is
|
||||
rigorous, formal, or clever matters less. A few years ago, as the popularity of
|
||||
the Ruby programming language peaked, a certain dynamism and trickery were en
|
||||
vogue. It didn’t matter if you were writing in Ruby, JavaScript, or
|
||||
Objective-C. Your code had to have a level of “magic” to it. Metaprogramming,
|
||||
syntax-hacking languages to create ad hoc Domain-Specific Languages, tricks
|
||||
with extreme late binding, and more were frequent topics on developer weblogs
|
||||
and forums. Even a phrase like “objective-c runtime metaprogramming” will date
|
||||
you to a specific generation of native app developers almost down to a single
|
||||
year.
|
||||
|
||||
As with all of these pop culture trends in programming, this led to unreadable
|
||||
code that was impossible to work with or fix as soon as it faded from popular
|
||||
consciousness.
|
||||
|
||||
The current trend is towards the aesthetics of correctness. Everything has to
|
||||
look like it has strong or static typing. It doesn’t have to really have static
|
||||
typing. That can all be made up after the fact in a declaration file. It merely
|
||||
needs to have the aesthetics of types. Type annotations everywhere,
|
||||
implementing logic through type system trickery, and forcing any and all
|
||||
dynamism out of the system in the name of correctness is the name of the game.
|
||||
|
||||
A part of this trend is the unpopularity of the approaches and languages that
|
||||
are seen as less rigorous. CSS is dropped in favour of statically typed
|
||||
CSS-in-JS approaches. HTML is dropped in favour of a strict inline XML-like
|
||||
markup format called JSX. Just a few years ago, everybody in web development
|
||||
hated and dropped XML and XHTML specifically because it was too strict and felt
|
||||
less dynamic and flexible than HTML. At some point, pop culture will bore of
|
||||
this and swing its attention back the other way.
|
||||
|
||||
It’s a fashion industry. Trends come; trends go. The lack of historical
|
||||
awareness is considered by most to be a feature.
|
||||
|
||||
This rigour is useful in moderation. Static typing does prevent bugs. Usually,
|
||||
they are the same sort of bugs unit testing prevents. Both have immense value
|
||||
as tools to manage your software development. Currently, the fashion is to
|
||||
favour static typing over unit testing for establishing a certain base level of
|
||||
correctness in your code. At some point, they are likely to switch again. They
|
||||
have a couple of times in the past. That you could use both at the same time
|
||||
and get the benefits of both doesn’t enter the discourse. Static typing with
|
||||
compile-time correctness checks has its uses. So do dynamism, extreme late
|
||||
binding, and metaprogramming. Most of these approaches can be used together,
|
||||
but that isn’t how pop culture works. Pop culture demands there be only one
|
||||
winner at a time. Choose one, not whichever works the best at each time.
|
||||
|
||||
Product development can’t indulge in being pop culture. Be wary of these
|
||||
popularity contests.
|
||||
|
||||
These issues with programming culture aren’t new.
|
||||
|
||||
Jamie Zawinski calls it the “Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers” model. We
|
||||
can’t do much to change the nature of the field by now—Alan Kay has certainly
|
||||
tried—but we can mitigate the harm done by the trend-seeking. We can work to
|
||||
ensure that everybody on the team, programmers and designers, is aligned, and
|
||||
have the same understanding of what matters and how to accomplish it.
|
||||
|
||||
For that, you need everybody to understand the context they are working in—the
|
||||
works of their field and how they are received. You need to develop taste and
|
||||
understanding.
|
||||
|
||||
You need research.
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
Bonus Alan Kay quote on programming as a pop culture that I didn’t include in
|
||||
the book:
|
||||
|
||||
But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about
|
||||
identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with
|
||||
cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the
|
||||
same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea
|
||||
where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most
|
||||
people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather
|
||||
than something that was man-made.
|
||||
|
||||
Alan Kay, Dr. Dobb’s Interview with Alan Kay
|
||||
|
||||
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
|
||||
|
||||
Out of the Software Crisis
|
||||
|
||||
Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
|
||||
|
||||
Software projects keep failing, not because we don’t have the right team or
|
||||
tools but because our software development system is broken. Out of the
|
||||
Software Crisis is a guide to fixing your software projects with
|
||||
systems-thinking making them more resilient to change and less likely to fail.
|
||||
|
||||
Systems-Thinking For Software Projects
|
||||
|
||||
WTF is a Framework?
|
||||
|
||||
The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing
|
||||
|
||||
Join the Newsletter
|
||||
|
||||
Subscribe to the Out of the Software Crisis newsletter to get my weekly (at
|
||||
least) essays on how to avoid or get out of software development crises.
|
||||
|
||||
Join now and get a free PDF of three bonus essays from Out of the Software
|
||||
Crisis.
|
||||
|
||||
[ ]
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
Archive
|
||||
|
||||
Writing
|
||||
|
||||
• GDPR and American AIs 3 April 2023
|
||||
• Regulating AI (plus links & notes) 27 March 2023
|
||||
• AI summaries and AI healthcare (links & notes) 20 March 2023
|
||||
• Keeping up with and assessing AI research (links & notes) 13 March 2023
|
||||
• Waiting for the AI Godot (Links & Notes) 6 March 2023
|
||||
• Copyright, Situating Search, and other links & notes 27 February 2023
|
||||
• Deno, Shakespeare's Emoticon, Return to Office, and other links and notes
|
||||
20 February 2023
|
||||
• Book production, AI, Single-Page-Apps, and other links and notes 13
|
||||
February 2023
|
||||
• Some thoughts on how to make a book, three months after I made one 10
|
||||
February 2023
|
||||
• AI is a Hail Mary pass and other links & notes 6 February 2023
|
||||
• EU and copyright protections for AI-generated works and other notes 30
|
||||
January 2023
|
||||
• On the Layoffs, Narcissists, and Other Links & Notes 23 January 2023
|
||||
• Madeline, Existential Terror and other links & notes 16 January 2023
|
||||
• Out of the Software Crisis Available on Kindle 28 December 2022
|
||||
• A lot can happen in a month: on AI art and the fediverse 16 December 2022
|
||||
• The response to Out of the Software Crisis has been amazing 5 December 2022
|
||||
• Programming is a Pop Culture 21 November 2022
|
||||
• WTF is a Framework? 18 November 2022
|
||||
• Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies 16
|
||||
November 2022
|
||||
• Great apps are rare 15 November 2022
|
||||
• (Released!) Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software
|
||||
Projects 14 November 2022
|
||||
• Out of the Software Crisis: the ebook is imminent! 11 November 2022
|
||||
• I wrote a book – now you must suffer with me 26 October 2022
|
||||
• I’m offering research, writing, and notetaking coaching for techies and
|
||||
programmers 17 October 2022
|
||||
• Playacting genius: the performative logic of reasoning from first
|
||||
principles 18 September 2022
|
||||
• I don't care how you web dev; I just need more better web apps 4 July 2022
|
||||
• Essay Archive 2 June 2022
|
||||
• On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software 2 June
|
||||
2022
|
||||
• The different kinds of notes 6 May 2022
|
||||
• What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people 6 May
|
||||
2022
|
||||
• The Colophon Cards User Survey 2 February 2022
|
||||
• How to keep up with web development without falling into despair 31 January
|
||||
2022
|
||||
• Let's just not talk about 2021 and look forward instead 5 January 2022
|
||||
• Making Colophon Cards 29 November 2021
|
||||
• What do I need to read to be a great at CSS? 19 October 2021
|
||||
• The event listening toolkit: five ways to get out of an event handling mess
|
||||
11 October 2021
|
||||
• FormData and fetch, why is serialising a form such a pain? 29 September
|
||||
2021
|
||||
• The Single-Page-App Morality Play 6 September 2021
|
||||
• Software Crisis 2.0 25 August 2021
|
||||
• Lessons in Interactivity, 2021 redux 13 August 2021
|
||||
• Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink 29 July 2021
|
||||
• Spontant: in praise of grey 26 July 2021
|
||||
• Ways of reading without the influence of community 6 July 2021
|
||||
• The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was 11
|
||||
May 2021
|
||||
• You are what you do, not what you say or write 4 May 2021
|
||||
• The Curious Case Of The Crashing Conic Gradient And How I Used A Technique
|
||||
I Learned In The 90s To Fix It 28 April 2021
|
||||
• 136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to
|
||||
landscape painting or nude modelling 21 April 2021
|
||||
• I’m available for projects and other work 20 April 2021
|
||||
• Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you? 31 March 2021
|
||||
• Every Day; a Fair Warning (You Should Read These Articles) 3 March 2020
|
||||
• Weeknote 3 - Resistance and the dull blade 10 February 2020
|
||||
• Weeknote 2 (2020) - News, Bad News, and Star Wars 2 February 2020
|
||||
• Weeknote 1 (2020) - Ending the hiatus 26 January 2020
|
||||
• The Ed Tech Conundrum 2 January 2020
|
||||
• Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development 1 January
|
||||
2020
|
||||
• The Web Falls Apart 3 November 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 19 ─ blog redesign and changes at work 27 October 2019
|
||||
• When life hands you lemonades, sit down and contemplate the meaning of life
|
||||
10 September 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 18 - Uncertainty and Discomfort 11 August 2019
|
||||
• Web Dev: The Red Queen Wire Mommy of Modern Tech 6 August 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 16 – Vacation 29 July 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 15 - Counting Down the Days 1 July 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 14 - Shadows and DOMs 25 June 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 13 - The weight of deadlines 16 June 2019
|
||||
• That Web Dev Thing Where Everybody Says Something Clever Involving Toast 15
|
||||
June 2019
|
||||
• SwiftUI, Privacy, macOS, and the Web 9 June 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 12 - The genres of web media 5 June 2019
|
||||
• The Aesthetics of Concentration 3 June 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 11 - do I have focus? 29 May 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 10 - A clear view and more reading 20 May 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 9 - Being contemplative, finishing a photo project 12 May 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 8 – Moving, Endgame, and more musings on colour 5 May 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 7 - Story length and that thing about colour 29 April 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 6 – Star Trek, rest and spring finally arrives 22 April 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 5 – Stuff, comics, superheroes, and other nonsense 14 April 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 4 – TV week with The Expanse 7 April 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 3 — MVPs, fatigue, and emotional crutches 31 March 2019
|
||||
• Web Development: with great power comes the ability to make great mistakes
|
||||
24 March 2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 2 - Web Development Mistakes, Mary Sues, and Icy Spring 24 March
|
||||
2019
|
||||
• Weeknote 1 18 March 2019
|
||||
• Hitchcock and the author construct 12 February 2019
|
||||
• Seams, Stitches, And The Decline Of The Mac 3 November 2018
|
||||
• Neither Paper Nor Digital Does Active Reading Well 3 September 2018
|
||||
• Focusing on market share blinds you to growth 7 January 2018
|
||||
• The future of Software Development: Just Business Logic 7 January 2018
|
||||
• Remote work is a completely different beast 7 January 2018
|
||||
• Hypertext is still the fundamental model of the web 7 January 2018
|
||||
• Leftover Thoughts From 2017 7 January 2018
|
||||
• Over-engineering is under-engineering 25 November 2017
|
||||
• The process is the thing 23 March 2017
|
||||
• Von Be Don: A few notes on a recent digital publishing project in Iceland
|
||||
19 February 2017
|
||||
• W3C and EME: it isn't about preventing DRM but saving the W3C 14 February
|
||||
2017
|
||||
• Unpopular opinion: dismissing indirect pointers is a mistake 4 February
|
||||
2017
|
||||
• Anger feels like poison 24 January 2017
|
||||
• Is JavaScript more fragile? 7 December 2016
|
||||
• Debating Progressive Enhancement 5 December 2016
|
||||
• The downside of believing in Apple 1 November 2016
|
||||
• A short primer on Icelandic politics on the day of the 2016 election 29
|
||||
October 2016
|
||||
• The Tragedy/Farce of the Open Web according to journalists 18 October 2016
|
||||
• Notes on debating for the web development community 17 October 2016
|
||||
• Addendum on loose coupling and the iOS App Store 11 October 2016
|
||||
• Idle thoughts on modularity and loose coupling in digital media 9 October
|
||||
2016
|
||||
• When fear is rational 24 June 2016
|
||||
• Once upon a time, I couldn't imagine a better word processor than Word 7
|
||||
June 2016
|
||||
• A thought to consider 24 May 2016
|
||||
• A few thoughts on standardisation, W3C, and the IDPF 16 May 2016
|
||||
• Filling in the gaps – the dynamics of zero marginal cost 21 April 2016
|
||||
• Which CMS/blog system would you choose? 12 April 2016
|
||||
• A few simplified points on web and document security 30 March 2016
|
||||
• Judge the work 21 January 2016
|
||||
• Why did Paul Graham argue against equality? 13 January 2016
|
||||
• Purpose, Joy, Capability 4 January 2016
|
||||
• You can't fix the App Store, so here's how you fix it 20 November 2015
|
||||
• Why I am worried about Twitter and why you should be too 4 November 2015
|
||||
• The crossroads or the wilderness 23 October 2015
|
||||
• You can't solve people problems with software 28 September 2015
|
||||
• The discussion about ad blocking is very dumb (but not in the way you
|
||||
think) 18 September 2015
|
||||
• This is not a book, but it is a podcast 10 September 2015
|
||||
• A week of 'This is not a book' 7 September 2015
|
||||
• Launching "This is not a book" – what it is and why you should be
|
||||
interested 1 September 2015
|
||||
• My kingdom for a new bookstore 28 August 2015
|
||||
• Modern software sucks 26 August 2015
|
||||
• The cost versus benefits of disorganised programming power 25 August 2015
|
||||
• Who benefits the most from Open Source Software? 25 August 2015
|
||||
• Sex Apocalypse Later 24 August 2015
|
||||
• Random thoughts on work and that Amazon thing 23 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – UI flaws and other great capers 14 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – learnable programming 13 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – More money for open-source 12 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Leaving bosses 11 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Promoting other people's work 10 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – What Would Kamala Khan Do? 7 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Trickle down golden geese 6 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Hateviews are us 5 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Milk it 4 August 2015
|
||||
• Iterating the web away:
|
||||
losing the next generation 4 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – You haven't been paying attention 3 August 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – It's a note card world, we just live in it 31 July 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Just call it Smylfeste 30 July 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – That one is shaped like an idiot 29 July 2015
|
||||
• Blogger nostalgia 28 July 2015
|
||||
• Bookmarks – Make it simpler 28 July 2015
|
||||
• Wet streets cause rain and criminal responsibility 27 July 2015
|
||||
• Tweet bookmarks galore 26 July 2015
|
||||
• Random links that catch my fancy, part four of ∞ 23 July 2015
|
||||
• Random links that catch my fancy, part three of ∞ 22 July 2015
|
||||
• Mythic visions of sexuality 21 July 2015
|
||||
• Random links that catch my fancy, part two of ∞ 21 July 2015
|
||||
• Random links that catch my fancy, part one of ∞ 20 July 2015
|
||||
• An exercise for the reader in integration and modularity 17 July 2015
|
||||
• How to read my nonsense 17 July 2015
|
||||
• Is it distributed or just a disorganised hierarchy? 10 July 2015
|
||||
• On the vaunted robustness of the web 10 July 2015
|
||||
• The rules of the game have changed for RSS 10 July 2015
|
||||
• The web app developer's lament 6 July 2015
|
||||
• Other people write about digital media 25 June 2015
|
||||
• The plural of 'Medium' is clearly 'clusterfuck' 25 June 2015
|
||||
• Burnout 24 June 2015
|
||||
• The files Steven Pressfield works with 24 June 2015
|
||||
• iOS 9 content blocking extensions are not a mobile advertising armageddon
|
||||
14 June 2015
|
||||
• Writing the Other:
|
||||
a book that's useful to all writers 3 June 2015
|
||||
• Should I make a WWDC prediction?
|
||||
Yes, let's 3 June 2015
|
||||
• Grim Meathook Present #2 2 June 2015
|
||||
• Other people discuss software quality (spoiler: it sucks) 2 June 2015
|
||||
• Other people talk about startups and entrepreneurship 2 June 2015
|
||||
• A few quick links and thoughts on big web problems 29 May 2015
|
||||
• I really want the Supergirl TV show to be fun 25 May 2015
|
||||
• Our Grim Meathook Present 25 May 2015
|
||||
• The new age of HTML:
|
||||
the web is being torn apart 20 May 2015
|
||||
• Her movie, his name;
|
||||
Mad Max: Fury Road 19 May 2015
|
||||
• We are a violent species 19 May 2015
|
||||
• Toxic environments:
|
||||
inequality in tech is a symptom of something worse 18 May 2015
|
||||
• Where I write about Facebook's Instant Articles 16 May 2015
|
||||
• Facebook and the media:
|
||||
united, they attack the web 15 May 2015
|
||||
• Speeding up decision cycles with rules and heuristics 14 May 2015
|
||||
• You are here #5:
|
||||
UX, design, and CSS as a parasite 14 May 2015
|
||||
• You are here #4:
|
||||
an epic journey through app dev and male bodies 13 May 2015
|
||||
• You are here #3:
|
||||
the glorious wonders of online reading await you 12 May 2015
|
||||
• 2015-05-11-18-39-16 11 May 2015
|
||||
• You are here #2:
|
||||
an artisanal curation of reading material 11 May 2015
|
||||
• You are here #1:
|
||||
a selection of fine links and tweets for your pleasure 10 May 2015
|
||||
• 2015-05-07-00-59-18 7 May 2015
|
||||
• Five publishing-related thoughts on a Friday afternoon 4 May 2015
|
||||
• Why should people read more books? 4 May 2015
|
||||
• How is taxing ebooks as print books supposed to work? 4 May 2015
|
||||
• Kathy Sierra's Badass: Making Users Awesome – the book you all should read
|
||||
4 March 2015
|
||||
• Idle Sunday thoughts about web trends 1 March 2015
|
||||
• Repetition only works in fiction 1 March 2015
|
||||
• The web has covered the basics — that’s why it’ll get harder from now 1
|
||||
March 2015
|
||||
• A draft of a chapter of some thoughts on things. 9 January 2015
|
||||
• Taking stock of 2013 and 2014 31 December 2014
|
||||
• The weather, of course 17 December 2014
|
||||
• Publishing business ideas are a dime a dozen 3 December 2014
|
||||
• EU VAT changes shift the digital landscape 25 November 2014
|
||||
• Money is a poor measure of value 25 November 2014
|
||||
• On conferences 13 November 2014
|
||||
• Crushed by multinationals 12 November 2014
|
||||
• Software as a strategy: prefabricated publishers 7 November 2014
|
||||
• Software as strategy in the ebook world 6 November 2014
|
||||
• The five types of unpublished books 5 November 2014
|
||||
• Four hundred words from Anita Elberse's book "Blockbusters" 4 November 2014
|
||||
• The splintered author 4 November 2014
|
||||
• There is no war between Amazon and Traditional Publishing 3 November 2014
|
||||
• Ebooks suck for learning 10 October 2014
|
||||
• The Poisoning of Social Media: A Reading List 9 September 2014
|
||||
• Wobbly Amazon 10 August 2014
|
||||
• This week's must-read post 24 July 2014
|
||||
• Friends don’t let their friends become authors 10 July 2014
|
||||
• Both at the same time 4 July 2014
|
||||
• So I had to make an ebook cover... 15 April 2014
|
||||
• So long, Readmill, and thanks for all the fish 31 March 2014
|
||||
• What ebook production problems are self-publishers facing? 24 March 2014
|
||||
• Many stories, many truths 13 March 2014
|
||||
• Problem statements for digital publishing research 28 February 2014
|
||||
• To do, to do 21 February 2014
|
||||
• iBooks Author tempts you with bling 20 February 2014
|
||||
• Microsoft Word is a liability 19 February 2014
|
||||
• The print design mentality 18 February 2014
|
||||
• Book contracts 12 February 2014
|
||||
• Intermission: sorting through the banal 5 February 2014
|
||||
• How to create value with a new thing 30 January 2014
|
||||
• HTML is too complex 29 January 2014
|
||||
• The ebook as an API 28 January 2014
|
||||
• My last word on DRM 27 January 2014
|
||||
• Except, except, except 23 January 2014
|
||||
• A thought exercise 22 January 2014
|
||||
• Losing faith in yourself 21 January 2014
|
||||
• Changing your readership mix 20 January 2014
|
||||
• Sex, education, readers, and futures: what works, what doesn't 18 January
|
||||
2014
|
||||
• The various types of readers 17 January 2014
|
||||
• The unevenly distributed ebook future 16 January 2014
|
||||
• Sex, violence, and stílbrot 15 January 2014
|
||||
• Recipe for pundit response to Hugh Howey’s suggestions 14 January 2014
|
||||
• Bling it up for education 13 January 2014
|
||||
• Blogging has trained me to assume you’re stupid 9 January 2014
|
||||
• Ergodic literature 8 January 2014
|
||||
• What I thought I wanted versus what I really wanted 7 January 2014
|
||||
• The mistake of 'enhancing' novels 6 January 2014
|
||||
• Pessimistic ramblings and other fun links (week overview + further reading)
|
||||
4 January 2014
|
||||
• Stumbling into publishing 3 January 2014
|
||||
• The publishing industry's new product categories 2 January 2014
|
||||
• The last two Knights and Necromancers stories 1 January 2014
|
||||
• Random, loosely connected, thoughts on the future 31 December 2013
|
||||
• Old photos posted without context: Reykjavík Cats 29 December 2013
|
||||
• Old photos posted without context: Sweep After Use 22 December 2013
|
||||
• The Checklist: fix iBooks image handling 20 December 2013
|
||||
• Great text transcends nothing 17 December 2013
|
||||
• Quarantine all ebooks 17 October 2013
|
||||
• The self-publisher's perspective of the ebook market 17 October 2013
|
||||
• Light evening trauma 10 October 2013
|
||||
• Just say no to ebook CSS and JS 2 October 2013
|
||||
• The Google Wave Heuristic 17 September 2013
|
||||
• Amazon's biggest ally is Apple 12 September 2013
|
||||
• Readmill versus Kindle – Readmill is worth the hassle 26 August 2013
|
||||
• Proprietary ebook formats versus DRM 19 August 2013
|
||||
• Publishing has catered to dumb for a long while 16 August 2013
|
||||
• Computers are too difficult and people are computer illiterate 14 August
|
||||
2013
|
||||
• Why disruption goes unchecked 12 August 2013
|
||||
• Make ebooks worth it 9 August 2013
|
||||
• Ebooks and cognitive mapping 8 August 2013
|
||||
• Ebook silos, update 7 August 2013
|
||||
• Ebook silos and missed opportunities 6 August 2013
|
||||
• Technology is not inherently good 5 August 2013
|
||||
• Administrative note on baldurbjarnason.com and feeds 29 July 2013
|
||||
• Posted without comment 29 July 2013
|
||||
• The inefficiencies of joy 24 July 2013
|
||||
• Winner takes all versus the Matthew effect 23 July 2013
|
||||
• What you people read (on my websites) 22 July 2013
|
||||
• Tolerating the heat, noticing the water 19 July 2013
|
||||
• If the Kindle fails so will ebooks 18 July 2013
|
||||
• Followup to 'this ebook is a lemon' 16 July 2013
|
||||
• This ebook is a lemon 12 July 2013
|
||||
• Caught between madmen and mercenaries 10 July 2013
|
||||
• Major update to Studio Tendra's Oz project 3 July 2013
|
||||
• What are self-publishing's biggest pain points? 1 July 2013
|
||||
• Intellectual terrain 1 July 2013
|
||||
• Good books don't win 26 June 2013
|
||||
• Why does it matter? 10 May 2013
|
||||
• The OZ Reading Club: Books three and four 7 May 2013
|
||||
• Which kind of innovation? 3 May 2013
|
||||
• Books and Print Showcase 2 May 2013
|
||||
• Peasants 30 April 2013
|
||||
• For the love 14 April 2013
|
||||
• The idiocies of young men 5 April 2013
|
||||
• Studio Tendra's grand and marvellous Oz Reading Club 2 April 2013
|
||||
• Iceland’s ‘crowd-sourced’ constitution is dead 29 March 2013
|
||||
• The B&N fallacy 27 February 2013
|
||||
• Hire me! 19 February 2013
|
||||
• A question only you can answer 15 February 2013
|
||||
• Respect the reader 6 February 2013
|
||||
• 33 observations on the year 2012 5 February 2013
|
||||
• Knights and Necromancers: new books and megapacks! 4 February 2013
|
||||
• The falcon's shriek 2 January 2013
|
||||
• What is actually going on in Iceland 29 December 2012
|
||||
• Merry Christmas! 25 December 2012
|
||||
• Tag soup is history 21 December 2012
|
||||
• Schlock 15 December 2012
|
||||
• Strange definitions of 'nice' 5 December 2012
|
||||
• Books of Christmas Past 4 December 2012
|
||||
• Using IDs in CSS 26 November 2012
|
||||
• Design highlights from the Icelandic book season 22 November 2012
|
||||
• News, updates, and the Icelandic book market 19 November 2012
|
||||
• A response, of sorts 15 November 2012
|
||||
• High tide and a room of your own 8 November 2012
|
||||
• Knights and Necromancers 2 has been released 6 November 2012
|
||||
• The comment-fiction challenge post-mortem 30 October 2012
|
||||
• Fantasy, Collapse, and a sense of history 29 October 2012
|
||||
• Two questions on putting books on the web 26 October 2012
|
||||
• iBooks 3.0 25 October 2012
|
||||
• Perceptions of society 22 October 2012
|
||||
• What I've been up to 19 October 2012
|
||||
• The Readmill comment fiction challenge 1 October 2012
|
||||
• Is it safe? 27 September 2012
|
||||
• The time work takes 24 September 2012
|
||||
• I need your help 21 September 2012
|
||||
• Designing the covers 19 September 2012
|
||||
• Free Kindle version 19 September 2012
|
||||
• What is this? 17 September 2012
|
||||
• The stillborn creature 1 August 2012
|
||||
• EPUB javascript security 27 July 2012
|
||||
• I be writing 21 July 2012
|
||||
• Farce 16 July 2012
|
||||
• Bad writing 19 June 2012
|
||||
• A few random points on DRM 7 June 2012
|
||||
• The web and ebooks have little in common 7 May 2012
|
||||
• The end of ebook development 26 April 2012
|
||||
• Aftermath – notes on the Amazon post 20 April 2012
|
||||
• Today is not tomorrow (or, how to beat Amazon) 15 April 2012
|
||||
• Bits, bobs, and anecdata 3 April 2012
|
||||
• Lessons in interactivity 29 March 2012
|
||||
• Hierarchies of ebook design 20 March 2012
|
||||
• It's time to treat ebook developers as developers 12 March 2012
|
||||
• Code doesn't change minds 7 March 2012
|
||||
• Game over, Amazon wins 3 March 2012
|
||||
• On CSS Page Templates 2 March 2012
|
||||
• Javascript in ebooks 29 February 2012
|
||||
• Explanatory windows 20 February 2012
|
||||
• Readium and other good intentions 13 February 2012
|
||||
• ePub windows and widgets – a proposal 10 February 2012
|
||||
• The semantics of ebook widgets 4 February 2012
|
||||
• iBooks widgets – to javascript or not to javascript 1 February 2012
|
||||
• What do we want from the Kindle platform? 1 February 2012
|
||||
• Disruptive crap 27 January 2012
|
||||
• Me, elsewhere 26 January 2012
|
||||
• The pros and cons of the iBooks 2.0 textbook format 21 January 2012
|
||||
• The iBooks 2.0 built-in widgets 20 January 2012
|
||||
• The iBooks 2.0 textbook format 19 January 2012
|
||||
• The publishing animal 17 January 2012
|
||||
• A day of innovation on the future of the book 8 December 2011
|
||||
• What a publisher does 30 November 2011
|
||||
• Design pseudoscience 8 November 2011
|
||||
• A tale of three blog posts 28 October 2011
|
||||
• CSS and ebook design 24 October 2011
|
||||
• The loss of ambient intimacy 15 September 2011
|
||||
• Friday links and reading 26 August 2011
|
||||
• Convert or engage 4 August 2011
|
||||
• CSS3 Hyphens 30 July 2011
|
||||
• Just you & Google 29 July 2011
|
||||
• Knowledge is not adoption 24 July 2011
|
||||
• HTML5 history API 23 July 2011
|
||||
• Your friends, in boxes 17 July 2011
|
||||
• Localstorage & messaging in ePub 27 January 2011
|
||||
• Javascript in epub 26 January 2011
|
||||
• An epub experiment 25 January 2011
|
||||
• What is an ebook? 21 December 2010
|
||||
• Hypotheses and testing 25 October 2010
|
||||
• Identifying publishing innovators 7 October 2010
|
||||
• On quality in publishing 7 October 2010
|
||||
• An interesting discussion 28 June 2010
|
||||
|
||||
You can also find me on Mastodon and Twitter
|
||||
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content/journal/dispatch-1-march-2023/www-nytimes-com-gvijqf.txt
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|
||||
#[1]alternate [2]Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
|
||||
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
(BUTTON) Sections
|
||||
(BUTTON) SEARCH
|
||||
[3]Skip to content
|
||||
|
||||
[4]Style|Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
|
||||
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.
|
||||
html
|
||||
* (BUTTON) Give this article
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
|
||||
Julia Cameron, making change at 70.
|
||||
Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New
|
||||
York Times
|
||||
|
||||
Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
|
||||
|
||||
With “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate
|
||||
the creative soul.
|
||||
|
||||
Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New
|
||||
York Times
|
||||
|
||||
Supported by
|
||||
[5]Continue reading the main story
|
||||
* Send any friend a story
|
||||
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.
|
||||
Anyone can read what you share.
|
||||
(BUTTON)
|
||||
(BUTTON) Give this article
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
* (BUTTON)
|
||||
|
||||
[6]Penelope Green
|
||||
|
||||
By [7]Penelope Green
|
||||
* Feb. 2, 2019
|
||||
|
||||
SANTA FE, N.M. — On any given day, someone somewhere is likely leading
|
||||
an Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises of “The
|
||||
Artist’s Way” book, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,”
|
||||
as its author Julia Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar to
|
||||
blocked writers and other artistic hopefuls for more than a quarter of
|
||||
a century. There have been Artist’s Way clusters in the Australian
|
||||
outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil, Russia, the United
|
||||
Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s Way Meetups
|
||||
reveals, in Des Moines and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons and
|
||||
sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centers, from
|
||||
Esalen to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the [8]Open Center, where
|
||||
Ms. Cameron will appear in late March, as she does most years.
|
||||
Adherents of “The Artist’s Way” include the authors Patricia Cornwell
|
||||
and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend, Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton
|
||||
have all noted its influence on their work.
|
||||
|
||||
So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind “The Four
|
||||
Hour Workweek,” though to save time he didn’t actually read the book,
|
||||
“which was recommended to me by many megaselling authors,” [9]he
|
||||
writes. He just did the “Morning Pages,” one of the book’s central
|
||||
exercises. It requires you write three pages, by hand, first thing in
|
||||
the morning, about whatever comes to mind. (Fortunes would seem to have
|
||||
been made on the journals printed to support this effort.) The book’s
|
||||
other main dictum is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of alone time each
|
||||
week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new experience
|
||||
might be possible.
|
||||
|
||||
Elizabeth Gilbert, who has “done” the book three times, said there
|
||||
would be no “Eat, Pray, Love,” without “The Artist’s Way.” Without it,
|
||||
there might be no [10]adult coloring books, no [11]journaling fever.
|
||||
“Creativity” would not have its own publishing niche or have become a
|
||||
ubiquitous buzzword — the “fat-free” of the self-help world — and
|
||||
business pundits would not deploy it as a specious organizing
|
||||
principle.
|
||||
Image
|
||||
|
||||
The book’s enduring success — over 4 million copies have been sold
|
||||
since its publication in 1992 — have made its author, a shy
|
||||
Midwesterner who had a bit of early fame in the 1970s for practicing
|
||||
lively New Journalism at the Washington Post and Rolling Stone, among
|
||||
other publications, and for being married, briefly, to Martin Scorsese,
|
||||
with whom she has a daughter, Domenica — an unlikely celebrity. With
|
||||
its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists
|
||||
and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80,
|
||||
for example — “The Artist’s Way” proposes an egalitarian view of
|
||||
creativity: Everyone’s got it.
|
||||
|
||||
The book promises to free up that inner artist in 12 weeks. It’s a
|
||||
template that would seem to reflect the practices of 12-step programs,
|
||||
particularly its invocations to a higher power. But according to Ms.
|
||||
Cameron, who has been sober since she was 29, “12 weeks is how long it
|
||||
takes for people to cook.”
|
||||
|
||||
Now 70, she lives in a spare adobe house in Santa Fe, overlooking an
|
||||
acre of scrub and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She moved a few
|
||||
years ago from Manhattan, following an exercise from her book to list
|
||||
25 things you love. As she recalled, “I wrote juniper, sage brush,
|
||||
chili, mountains and sky and I said, ‘This is not the Chrysler
|
||||
Building.’” On a recent snowy afternoon, Ms. Cameron, who has enormous
|
||||
blue eyes and a nimbus of blonde hair, admitted to the jitters before
|
||||
this interview. “I asked three friends to pray for me,” she said. “I
|
||||
also wrote a note to myself to be funny.”
|
||||
|
||||
In the early 1970s, Ms. Cameron, who is the second oldest of seven
|
||||
children and grew up just north of Chicago, was making $67 a week
|
||||
working in the mail room of the Washington Post. At the same time, she
|
||||
was writing deft lifestyle pieces for the paper — like an East Coast
|
||||
Eve Babitz. “With a byline, no one knows you’re just a gofer,” she
|
||||
said.
|
||||
|
||||
In her reporting, Ms. Cameron observed an epidemic of green nail polish
|
||||
and other “Cabaret”-inspired behaviors in Beltway bars, and slyly
|
||||
reviewed a new party drug, methaqualone. She was also, by her own
|
||||
admission, a blackout drunk. “I thought drinking was something you did
|
||||
and your friends told you about it later,” she said. “In retrospect, in
|
||||
cozy retrospect, I was in trouble from my first drink.”
|
||||
|
||||
She met Mr. Scorsese on assignment for Oui magazine and fell hard for
|
||||
him. She did a bit of script-doctoring on “Taxi Driver,” and followed
|
||||
the director to Los Angeles. “I got pregnant on our wedding night,” she
|
||||
said. “Like a good Catholic girl.” When Mr. Scorsese took up with Liza
|
||||
Minnelli while all three were working on “New York, New York,” the
|
||||
marriage was done. (She recently made a painting depicting herself as a
|
||||
white horse and Mr. Scorsese as a lily. “I wanted to make a picture
|
||||
about me and Marty,” she said. “He was magical-seeming to me and when I
|
||||
look at it I think, ‘Oh, she’s fascinated, but she doesn’t
|
||||
understand.’”)
|
||||
|
||||
Image Under the pines.
|
||||
Under the pines.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
|
||||
|
||||
In her memoir, “Floor Sample,” published in 2006, Ms. Cameron recounts
|
||||
the brutality of Hollywood, of her life there as a screenwriter and a
|
||||
drunk. Pauline Kael, she writes, described her as a “pornographic
|
||||
Victorian valentine, like a young Angela Lansbury.” Don’t marry her for
|
||||
tax reasons, Ms. Kael warns Mr. Scorsese. Andy Warhol, who escorts her
|
||||
to the premiere of “New York, New York,” inscribes her into his diary
|
||||
as a “lush.” A cocaine dealer soothes her — “You have a tiny little
|
||||
wife’s habit” — and a doctor shoos her away from his hospital when she
|
||||
asks for help, telling her she’s no alcoholic, just a “sensitive young
|
||||
woman.” She goes into labor in full makeup and a Chinese dressing gown,
|
||||
vowing to be “no trouble.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I think it’s fair to say that drinking and drugs stopped looking like
|
||||
a path to success,” she said. “So I luckily stopped. I had a couple of
|
||||
sober friends and they said, ‘Try and let the higher power write
|
||||
through you.’ And I said, What if he doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Just
|
||||
try it.’”
|
||||
|
||||
So she did. She wrote novels and screenplays. She wrote poems and
|
||||
musicals. She wasn’t always well-reviewed, but she took the knocks with
|
||||
typical grit, and she schooled others to do so as well. “I have
|
||||
unblocked poets, lawyers and painters,” she said. She taught her tools
|
||||
in living rooms and classrooms — “if someone was dumb enough to lend us
|
||||
one,” she said — and back in New York, at the Feminist Art Institute.
|
||||
Over the years, she refined her tools, typed them up, and sold Xeroxed
|
||||
copies in local bookstores for $20. It was her second husband, Mark
|
||||
Bryan, a writer, who needled her into making the pages into a proper
|
||||
book.
|
||||
|
||||
The first printing was about 9,000 copies, said Joel Fotinos, formerly
|
||||
the publisher at Tarcher/Penguin, which published the book in 1992.
|
||||
There was concern that it wouldn’t sell. “Part of the reason,” Mr.
|
||||
Fotinos said, “was that this was a book that wasn’t like anything else.
|
||||
We didn’t know where to put it on the shelves — did it go in religion
|
||||
or self-help? Eventually there was a category called ‘creativity,’ and
|
||||
‘The Artist’s Way’ launched it.” Now an editorial director at St.
|
||||
Martin’s Press, Mr. Fotinos said he is deluged with pitches from
|
||||
authors claiming they’ve written “the new Artist’s Way.”
|
||||
|
||||
“But for Julia, creativity was a tool for survival,” he said. “It was
|
||||
literally her medicine and that’s why the book is so authentic, and
|
||||
resonates with so many people.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I am my tool kits,” Ms. Cameron said.
|
||||
|
||||
And, indeed, “The Artist’s Way” is stuffed with tools: worksheets to be
|
||||
filled with thoughts about money, childhood games, old hurts; wish
|
||||
lists and exercises, many of which seem exhaustive and exhausting —
|
||||
“Write down any resistance, angers and fears,” e.g. — and others that
|
||||
are more practical: “Take a 20 minutes walk,” “Mend any mending” and
|
||||
“repot any pinched and languishing plants.” It anticipates the work of
|
||||
the indefatigable [12]Gretchen Rubin, the happiness maven, if Ms. Rubin
|
||||
were a bit kinder but less Type-A.
|
||||
|
||||
“When I teach, it’s like watching the lights come on,” said Ms.
|
||||
Cameron. “My students don’t get lectured to. I think they feel safe.
|
||||
Rather than try and fix themselves, they learn to accept themselves. I
|
||||
think my work makes people autonomous. I feel like people fall in love
|
||||
with themselves.”
|
||||
|
||||
Anne Lamott, the inspirational writer and novelist, said that when she
|
||||
was teaching writing full-time, her own students swore by “The Artist’s
|
||||
Way.” “That exercise — three pages of automatic writing — was a
|
||||
sacrament for people,” Ms. Lamott wrote in a recent email. “They could
|
||||
plug into something bigger than the rat exercise wheel of self-loathing
|
||||
and grandiosity that every writer experiences: ‘This could very easily
|
||||
end up being an Oprah Book,’ or ‘Who do I think I’m fooling? I’m a
|
||||
subhuman blowhard.’”
|
||||
|
||||
“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of
|
||||
a cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation,” Ms. Lamott
|
||||
wrote. “It’s sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the
|
||||
warm soaking water, so your fingers have something to do, and you don’t
|
||||
climb the walls.”
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
In the wild.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
|
||||
|
||||
Ms. Cameron continues to write her Morning Pages every day, even though
|
||||
she continues, as she said, to be grouchy upon awakening. She eats
|
||||
oatmeal at a local cafe and walks Lily, an eager white Westie. She
|
||||
reads no newspapers, or social media (perhaps the most grueling tenet
|
||||
of “The Artist’s Way” is a week of “reading deprivation”), though an
|
||||
assistant runs a Twitter and Instagram account on her behalf. She
|
||||
writes for hours, mostly musicals, collaborating with her daughter, a
|
||||
film director, and others.
|
||||
|
||||
Ms. Cameron may be a veteran of the modern self-care movement but her
|
||||
life has not been all moonbeams and rainbows, and it shows. She was
|
||||
candid in conversation, if not quite at ease. “So I haven’t proven
|
||||
myself to be hilarious,” she said with a flash of dry humor, adding
|
||||
that even after so many years, she still gets stage-fright before
|
||||
beginning a workshop.
|
||||
|
||||
She has written about her own internal critic, imagining a gay British
|
||||
interior designer she calls Nigel. “And nothing is ever good enough for
|
||||
Nigel,” she said. But she soldiers on.
|
||||
|
||||
She will tell you that she has good boundaries. But like many
|
||||
successful women, she brushes off her achievements, attributing her
|
||||
unlooked-for wins to luck.
|
||||
|
||||
“If you have to learn how to do a movie, you might learn from Martin
|
||||
Scorsese. If you have to learn about entrepreneurship, you might learn
|
||||
from Mark” — her second husband. “So I’m very lucky,” she said. “If I
|
||||
have a hard time blowing my own horn, I’ve been attracted to people who
|
||||
blew it for me.”
|
||||
|
||||
Advertisement
|
||||
[13]Continue reading the main story
|
||||
|
||||
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|
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Style|Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/style/julia-cameron-the-artists-way.html
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• Give this article
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•
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Julia Cameron, making change at 70.
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Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
|
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Times
|
||||
|
||||
Julia Cameron Wants You to Do Your Morning Pages
|
||||
|
||||
With “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron invented the way people renovate the
|
||||
creative soul.
|
||||
|
||||
Julia Cameron, making change at 70.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York
|
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|
||||
Penelope Green
|
||||
|
||||
By Penelope Green
|
||||
|
||||
• Feb. 2, 2019
|
||||
|
||||
SANTA FE, N.M. — On any given day, someone somewhere is likely leading an
|
||||
Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises of “The Artist’s Way”
|
||||
book, the quasi-spiritual manual for “creative recovery,” as its author Julia
|
||||
Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar to blocked writers and other artistic
|
||||
hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century. There have been Artist’s Way
|
||||
clusters in the Australian outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil,
|
||||
Russia, the United Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s
|
||||
Way Meetups reveals, in Des Moines and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons
|
||||
and sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centers, from Esalen
|
||||
to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the Open Center, where Ms. Cameron will
|
||||
appear in late March, as she does most years. Adherents of “The Artist’s Way”
|
||||
include the authors Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend,
|
||||
Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton have all noted its influence on their work.
|
||||
|
||||
So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind “The Four Hour
|
||||
Workweek,” though to save time he didn’t actually read the book, “which was
|
||||
recommended to me by many megaselling authors,” he writes. He just did the
|
||||
“Morning Pages,” one of the book’s central exercises. It requires you write
|
||||
three pages, by hand, first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind.
|
||||
(Fortunes would seem to have been made on the journals printed to support this
|
||||
effort.) The book’s other main dictum is the “Artist’s Date” — two hours of
|
||||
alone time each week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new
|
||||
experience might be possible.
|
||||
|
||||
Elizabeth Gilbert, who has “done” the book three times, said there would be no
|
||||
“Eat, Pray, Love,” without “The Artist’s Way.” Without it, there might be no
|
||||
adult coloring books, no journaling fever. “Creativity” would not have its own
|
||||
publishing niche or have become a ubiquitous buzzword — the “fat-free” of the
|
||||
self-help world — and business pundits would not deploy it as a specious
|
||||
organizing principle.
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
|
||||
The book’s enduring success — over 4 million copies have been sold since its
|
||||
publication in 1992 — have made its author, a shy Midwesterner who had a bit of
|
||||
early fame in the 1970s for practicing lively New Journalism at the Washington
|
||||
Post and Rolling Stone, among other publications, and for being married,
|
||||
briefly, to Martin Scorsese, with whom she has a daughter, Domenica — an
|
||||
unlikely celebrity. With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes,
|
||||
fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe
|
||||
yourself at 80, for example — “The Artist’s Way” proposes an egalitarian view
|
||||
of creativity: Everyone’s got it.
|
||||
|
||||
The book promises to free up that inner artist in 12 weeks. It’s a template
|
||||
that would seem to reflect the practices of 12-step programs, particularly its
|
||||
invocations to a higher power. But according to Ms. Cameron, who has been sober
|
||||
since she was 29, “12 weeks is how long it takes for people to cook.”
|
||||
|
||||
Now 70, she lives in a spare adobe house in Santa Fe, overlooking an acre of
|
||||
scrub and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She moved a few years ago from
|
||||
Manhattan, following an exercise from her book to list 25 things you love. As
|
||||
she recalled, “I wrote juniper, sage brush, chili, mountains and sky and I
|
||||
said, ‘This is not the Chrysler Building.’” On a recent snowy afternoon, Ms.
|
||||
Cameron, who has enormous blue eyes and a nimbus of blonde hair, admitted to
|
||||
the jitters before this interview. “I asked three friends to pray for me,” she
|
||||
said. “I also wrote a note to myself to be funny.”
|
||||
|
||||
In the early 1970s, Ms. Cameron, who is the second oldest of seven children and
|
||||
grew up just north of Chicago, was making $67 a week working in the mail room
|
||||
of the Washington Post. At the same time, she was writing deft lifestyle pieces
|
||||
for the paper — like an East Coast Eve Babitz. “With a byline, no one knows
|
||||
you’re just a gofer,” she said.
|
||||
|
||||
In her reporting, Ms. Cameron observed an epidemic of green nail polish and
|
||||
other “Cabaret”-inspired behaviors in Beltway bars, and slyly reviewed a new
|
||||
party drug, methaqualone. She was also, by her own admission, a blackout drunk.
|
||||
“I thought drinking was something you did and your friends told you about it
|
||||
later,” she said. “In retrospect, in cozy retrospect, I was in trouble from my
|
||||
first drink.”
|
||||
|
||||
She met Mr. Scorsese on assignment for Oui magazine and fell hard for him. She
|
||||
did a bit of script-doctoring on “Taxi Driver,” and followed the director to
|
||||
Los Angeles. “I got pregnant on our wedding night,” she said. “Like a good
|
||||
Catholic girl.” When Mr. Scorsese took up with Liza Minnelli while all three
|
||||
were working on “New York, New York,” the marriage was done. (She recently made
|
||||
a painting depicting herself as a white horse and Mr. Scorsese as a lily. “I
|
||||
wanted to make a picture about me and Marty,” she said. “He was magical-seeming
|
||||
to me and when I look at it I think, ‘Oh, she’s fascinated, but she doesn’t
|
||||
understand.’”)
|
||||
|
||||
ImageUnder the pines.
|
||||
Under the pines.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
|
||||
|
||||
In her memoir, “Floor Sample,” published in 2006, Ms. Cameron recounts the
|
||||
brutality of Hollywood, of her life there as a screenwriter and a drunk.
|
||||
Pauline Kael, she writes, described her as a “pornographic Victorian valentine,
|
||||
like a young Angela Lansbury.” Don’t marry her for tax reasons, Ms. Kael warns
|
||||
Mr. Scorsese. Andy Warhol, who escorts her to the premiere of “New York, New
|
||||
York,” inscribes her into his diary as a “lush.” A cocaine dealer soothes her —
|
||||
“You have a tiny little wife’s habit” — and a doctor shoos her away from his
|
||||
hospital when she asks for help, telling her she’s no alcoholic, just a
|
||||
“sensitive young woman.” She goes into labor in full makeup and a Chinese
|
||||
dressing gown, vowing to be “no trouble.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I think it’s fair to say that drinking and drugs stopped looking like a path
|
||||
to success,” she said. “So I luckily stopped. I had a couple of sober friends
|
||||
and they said, ‘Try and let the higher power write through you.’ And I said,
|
||||
What if he doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Just try it.’”
|
||||
|
||||
So she did. She wrote novels and screenplays. She wrote poems and musicals. She
|
||||
wasn’t always well-reviewed, but she took the knocks with typical grit, and she
|
||||
schooled others to do so as well. “I have unblocked poets, lawyers and
|
||||
painters,” she said. She taught her tools in living rooms and classrooms — “if
|
||||
someone was dumb enough to lend us one,” she said — and back in New York, at
|
||||
the Feminist Art Institute. Over the years, she refined her tools, typed them
|
||||
up, and sold Xeroxed copies in local bookstores for $20. It was her second
|
||||
husband, Mark Bryan, a writer, who needled her into making the pages into a
|
||||
proper book.
|
||||
|
||||
The first printing was about 9,000 copies, said Joel Fotinos, formerly the
|
||||
publisher at Tarcher/Penguin, which published the book in 1992. There was
|
||||
concern that it wouldn’t sell. “Part of the reason,” Mr. Fotinos said, “was
|
||||
that this was a book that wasn’t like anything else. We didn’t know where to
|
||||
put it on the shelves — did it go in religion or self-help? Eventually there
|
||||
was a category called ‘creativity,’ and ‘The Artist’s Way’ launched it.” Now an
|
||||
editorial director at St. Martin’s Press, Mr. Fotinos said he is deluged with
|
||||
pitches from authors claiming they’ve written “the new Artist’s Way.”
|
||||
|
||||
“But for Julia, creativity was a tool for survival,” he said. “It was literally
|
||||
her medicine and that’s why the book is so authentic, and resonates with so
|
||||
many people.”
|
||||
|
||||
“I am my tool kits,” Ms. Cameron said.
|
||||
|
||||
And, indeed, “The Artist’s Way” is stuffed with tools: worksheets to be filled
|
||||
with thoughts about money, childhood games, old hurts; wish lists and
|
||||
exercises, many of which seem exhaustive and exhausting — “Write down any
|
||||
resistance, angers and fears,” e.g. — and others that are more practical: “Take
|
||||
a 20 minutes walk,” “Mend any mending” and “repot any pinched and languishing
|
||||
plants.” It anticipates the work of the indefatigable Gretchen Rubin, the
|
||||
happiness maven, if Ms. Rubin were a bit kinder but less Type-A.
|
||||
|
||||
“When I teach, it’s like watching the lights come on,” said Ms. Cameron. “My
|
||||
students don’t get lectured to. I think they feel safe. Rather than try and fix
|
||||
themselves, they learn to accept themselves. I think my work makes people
|
||||
autonomous. I feel like people fall in love with themselves.”
|
||||
|
||||
Anne Lamott, the inspirational writer and novelist, said that when she was
|
||||
teaching writing full-time, her own students swore by “The Artist’s Way.” “That
|
||||
exercise — three pages of automatic writing — was a sacrament for people,” Ms.
|
||||
Lamott wrote in a recent email. “They could plug into something bigger than the
|
||||
rat exercise wheel of self-loathing and grandiosity that every writer
|
||||
experiences: ‘This could very easily end up being an Oprah Book,’ or ‘Who do I
|
||||
think I’m fooling? I’m a subhuman blowhard.’”
|
||||
|
||||
“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of a
|
||||
cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation,” Ms. Lamott wrote. “It’s
|
||||
sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the warm soaking water, so
|
||||
your fingers have something to do, and you don’t climb the walls.”
|
||||
|
||||
Image
|
||||
In the wild.Credit...Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
|
||||
|
||||
Ms. Cameron continues to write her Morning Pages every day, even though she
|
||||
continues, as she said, to be grouchy upon awakening. She eats oatmeal at a
|
||||
local cafe and walks Lily, an eager white Westie. She reads no newspapers, or
|
||||
social media (perhaps the most grueling tenet of “The Artist’s Way” is a week
|
||||
of “reading deprivation”), though an assistant runs a Twitter and Instagram
|
||||
account on her behalf. She writes for hours, mostly musicals, collaborating
|
||||
with her daughter, a film director, and others.
|
||||
|
||||
Ms. Cameron may be a veteran of the modern self-care movement but her life has
|
||||
not been all moonbeams and rainbows, and it shows. She was candid in
|
||||
conversation, if not quite at ease. “So I haven’t proven myself to be
|
||||
hilarious,” she said with a flash of dry humor, adding that even after so many
|
||||
years, she still gets stage-fright before beginning a workshop.
|
||||
|
||||
She has written about her own internal critic, imagining a gay British interior
|
||||
designer she calls Nigel. “And nothing is ever good enough for Nigel,” she
|
||||
said. But she soldiers on.
|
||||
|
||||
She will tell you that she has good boundaries. But like many successful women,
|
||||
she brushes off her achievements, attributing her unlooked-for wins to luck.
|
||||
|
||||
“If you have to learn how to do a movie, you might learn from Martin Scorsese.
|
||||
If you have to learn about entrepreneurship, you might learn from Mark” — her
|
||||
second husband. “So I’m very lucky,” she said. “If I have a hard time blowing
|
||||
my own horn, I’ve been attracted to people who blew it for me.”
|
||||
|
||||
Advertisement
|
||||
|
||||
Continue reading the main story
|
||||
|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
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