~ Mark

Listen for follow-up questions, because when those dry up, that means your companion’s interest usually has, too.

Carolyn Hax.

CONVERSATIONS ON SLOWNESS | Vestoj

~ Mark

When we talk about the 1970s for instance, they think about ABBA as one of the icons of the decade. They don’t know that ABBA at the time was considered to be extremely bad taste – vulgar and completely unfashionable. ABBA was still wearing platform shoes when everyone else had already moved on. What I mean to say is that it’s not always the best versions of the past that live on.

CONVERSATIONS ON SLOWNESS | Vestoj

Thrillers

~ Mark

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.

The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?

The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions.

Thrillers

Why Michael Pollan Is Wrong About Artisanal Food

~ Mark

I’m kind of exhausted with food talk these days, so I almost skipped this interview. Glad I didn’t. It’s a great change of pace.

Farm products are not food; they are the raw materials for food. Turning plants and animals into something edible is just as difficult, just as laborious as farming itself. Very few of our calories come from raw, unprocessed food. And if those calories are from fruits and vegetables, then it’s only because centuries of breeding has made them less chewy, more tasty, and easier to digest. Cooking, which is one part of processing, went hand in hand with becoming human. Human food is processed food. And there are good reasons for this. Overall, processed foods are easier to eat and digest, more nutritious, tastier, safer, and longer lasting. The idea that any change made in the raw material is detrimental is just flat wrong. […] That we can talk about “A cake made from scratch” when the butter, sugar, and flour that go into it are are highly processed shows how we have lost awareness of the energy that formerly went into food preparation.

Why Michael Pollan Is Wrong About Artisanal Food

Mad Max: Fury Road

~ Mark

Mad Max: Fury Road. Ridiculously fun, and so refreshing. I do wish the dialogue were more intelligible. I would have killed for some subtitles or something in the first 10-15 minutes. Sneaky side-effect, though, is that it makes you dial in a bit more, and pay attention. On the other other hand, it doesn’t matter too much, though, as it’s a (very extended) chase film where the details don’t matter too much. (Made me think of Apocalypto in its relentlessness.) Furiosa joins a long, storied line of shaven-head heroines like Ripley, Lt. Ilia, LUH-3417, what’s-her-face in V for Vendetta, et al. Filed under: road movies.

The Loveless

~ Mark

The Loveless. Gotta admit I got really restless watching this one. Funny to see old fashion from yesteryear that’s still around today, but the cultural associations are so different. I love Willem Dafoe. Another willfully slow-paced and stylish movie with a hero on the fringe: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Easy Rider is a better movie focused on bikers. Can I count The Place Beyond the Pines, too? And yeah, Sherlock Jr. has one of the best motorcycle scenes you’ll ever see.

Blue Steel

~ Mark

Blue Steel. It took me a while to realize I’d seen big chunks of this one before. Jamie Lee Curtis is a cop with itchy trigger finger issues, but she’s also in a frame and no one believes her! Interesting to watch this in the wake of The Thin Blue Line and see how easily cops are over-committed to their early suspicions and prejudices. Slowly catching up on Kathryn Bigelow films. She’s good.

Orion Magazine | Landspeak

~ Mark

A new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.

Orion Magazine | Landspeak

The Secret of Kells

~ Mark

The Secret of Kells. Gorgeous, but a little thin, story-wise. It focuses on Brendan, and hints at so many possibilities about creativity, religion, fear, duty, and so on… but only hints, and left me wanting more. Not sure there’s enough in here for kids, either, now that I think about it. Beautiful, though. I love that it embraces the frame and uses big chunks of the screen borders just for mood/decoration when it feels like it.

Sphinx

~ Mark

I read Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, and there’s a crazy Oulipian experiment going on here. Once you realize the constraint that makes this book strange and different, you can’t help but be impressed that it was 1) written and 2) translated well (shout-out to Deep Vellum). It’s a story of the narrator’s obsession and romance, “caught up in a love that was always uncompleting itself”. I enjoyed it.

The Inner Game of Tennis

~ Mark

I read Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, and really enjoyed it. It’s one of those “hub” books you come across every so often, where you realize there are spokes sticking out into a bunch of other stuff that’s been on your mind lately.

Gallwey’s working theory here is about the internal dichotomy between “Self 1” and “Self 2” in performance. Self 1 is that voice inside, that part of you that “knows” how to do things, that instructs, urges, reprimands, exhorts. Self 2 is the one that does things. Given that Self 1 is so eager to “try hard” and correct and evaluate, successful practice and performance is about building trust for Self 2 and learning through practice and simple observation.

Letting go of judgments does not mean ignoring errors. It simply means seeing events as they are and not adding anything to them.

Mindfulness! There’s a flip side of that, too – Self 1 can be too pleased with itself when things are going well. Self-congratulations also takes you out of the moment. I really like this section, about avoiding criticism as we learn:

When plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless”. We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential.

Another interesting bit:

If you think you are controlled by a habit, then you will feel you have to try to break it. […] There is no need to fight old habits. Start new ones.

And I thought this was nicely phrased…

Natural focus occurs when the mind is interested.

Focus isn’t something we do, it’s something that results.

I also like one final section on the games that people play aside from the actual game itself. We each tend to embrace different goals within the game: to be perfect, to be better than the other guy, to appear to be great, to bond, to learn, to be challenged, etc. Each of these motivations influence and contaminate and distract us from performance to some degree.

Very highly recommended!

Some other related posts around here: Never try to look cool and learn something at the same time. Nervous is good. Performance vs. editing. In order to have your best performance you have to be relaxed. That eye-on-the-object look. Reality not maybe is zen. Festina lente. Willing to be shit at things. Forever the 5-year-old of something. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you.

Carolyn Hax: A friend with seemingly everything still has time for fine whine

~ Mark

Classic Hax. You have to be pretty open-minded and self-aware to be able to sympathize with those who appear to be (and may objectively be) more fortunate than you are.

Or she’s genuinely unhappy. It can, of course, happen amid gaudy equity, lovely kids, an attentive spouse, a flexible career, stable finances and ambitious travel; just because these have societal value doesn’t mean they’re valuable to her.

And just because the decisions were “very-thought-out” doesn’t mean they were the right ones for her. If a person’s baseline understanding of herself is a degree or two off, then her choices can lead her, over the years, hundreds of miles off-course.

Carolyn Hax: A friend with seemingly everything still has time for fine whine