Silas Jelley's Corner of the Web / Rambling

How many developers does it take create a login flow that works?

2025-06-30T09:08:50Z

A Samsung login story

I needed to login to my Samsung Account to keep it from being deleted for inactivity. Why not just let it be deleted if your not using it you ask? Because Samsung loves to shoehorn logging in into every product they create. I don’t plan on buying any future products from them, but I don’t want to be unable to use my wireless earphones one day because they’ve moved device pairing behind login in their Wearables app or something equally moronic.

This brings me to the first broader complaint which I’ll direct at Samsung, but really at all online accounts: don’t assume I’m a frequent user of your service! Don’t make me jump through 38 hoops to login to your feature-free dashboard that only exists in order to try and trick me into agreeing to more and more invasive Terms of (Dis)Service.

So, 14 days ago, following the notification that my account will be deleted permanently if I don’t log in within the next 60 days, I try and login, only to discover that Samsung at some point automatically enable SMS based 2FA using the number that was on my account at the time, a New Zealand number that I no longer have.

(If ever I’m setting up 2FA myself, and SMS is the only option, I always use my UK number that I’ve had for more than fifteen years, and is my only stable number.)

Thankfully, there is a process for changing this number, and sensibly there is a 14 day cooldown period on this process to somewhat protect against hostile account takeovers. So I go through the form and submit my change request.

Two weeks later I get another email saying the phone number registered to my account has been successfully changed. Brilliant, and I still have 46 days to login before my account is deleted. Thankfully no major life disaster befalls me around this time to distract me from the massively mundane procedure long enough for the account to be unceremoniously deleted anyway. So I login again — again, tapping out my email in full because a 300 billion US dollar corporation can’t handle creating a proper login form that browsers can auto-fill — toggle my UK SIM on on my phone (I’m in Georgia at the moment, having just crossed the border from Turkey, and I don’t keep my UK number switched on all the time), wait three minutes for the SMS to arrive, the web portal tells me that code has expired before it even arrives, request another 2FA code (which thankfully arrives a bit quicker) and… I’m in!

But wait, now Samsung is trying to trick me into clicking an accept all button on an egregious list of permission to mine all my data for any morsel of information they might be able to sell directly to the highest bidder. I accept the required Terms of Service, and reject the “optional” insults.

I go straight to the Security tab to configure an actually sane 2FA scheme (TOTP), and… it’s not there. I can click the tab, but it’s empty. I refresh, change tabs, try again — nothing. I logout, clear the browser cache, log back in (tapping out my email again), put in another 2FA SMS (because I cleared the cache), and try the Security tab again. Hurrah, it works this time!

TOTP setup is done in the usual way using a QR code, but I need the plaintext of that because I’m on my laptop, thankfully Samsung does show the TOTP secret beneath the QR code, but in order to backup the OTP I have to construct the URI myself, eg:

otpauth://totp/$EMAIL?secret=$SECRET&issuer=Samsung

Once I’ve done that and saved it into my vault, I scan the QR code with my phone to have it at hand in my mobile authenticator app too, input one of the codes to confirm, and Samsung cheerfully says everything is setup correctly! But it isn’t. I refresh the page, logout and login. TOTP still shows as not setup on the account. I go through the entire flow again, guessing that there is perhaps a silent timeout on the setup that I went over, and sure enough, by going through the flow and replacing the OTP in my vault and phone a bit faster this time, get the same cheerful confirmation, but this time thankfully it is actually set up.

In summary:

The login page doesn’t properly label the email input, so browsers can’t auto-fill it.
Samsung may forcibly enable SMS based 2FA on your account.
Two week delay on changing numbers (this is a good thing, but it was only necessary because of failure 2)
The login page still doesn’t properly label the email input.
The first 2FA SMS takes so long to arrive it has already expire by the time it comes.
The Security tab just loads a blank page the first time, forcing me to logout, clear the cache, and go through half the above steps again.
Setting up TOTP 2FA fails silently the first, probably due to some invisible timeout, but still tells me it has been setup just fine.

Samsung, you absolute clowns… Please. Do. Better.

Yours insincerely,

One of your several hundred million dissatisfied customers.

9:08am on June 30, 2025 from Batumi, Adjara, Georgia

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In these four walls

2025-04-07T08:20:39Z

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Esquire, 1936

The dark night for me is winter. The weather draws in, the temperature falls, I self isolate and my energy dwindles until I sink into a listing state of apathy, fatigue, and sadness at the reminder that by every winter’s end that mannequin in the mirror has become less honest, less generous, less thoughtful, just… less.

We’re two weeks into spring now, but the spirit that has slowly been brought low may only now, and almost equally slowly, begin to recover. The last few days have been rain again, but when the sun shines I feel myself coming back to life, bit by bit.

In her essay The Language of Literature (Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction, 2020), Arundhati Roy describes using the characters of her novels to escape “the tyranny of hard borders” and immediately I felt that these four walls are that hard border for me. Not the walls of this apartment, but the four walls of my mind. What then, is my equivalent means of escape? Where do I shelter from the tyranny of my mind? The irony is I seek shelter within these four walls from which I am trying to escape — a regressive feedback loop, a death spiral.

There’s something haphazard about both my descent to, and ascent from these lows. Or perhaps not haphazard, but helpless. The maxim of tyranny is “divide and rule” and I am both tyrant and subject. I can’t shake the instinct that I have to do it alone — as my mother does, as my father does — despite knowing that it is no good.

Martha Beck (The Way of Integrity, 2021) gets at that instinct I have, when things are not working, to simply do the same but harder, and how that instinct will always fail me.

“If whatever you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.”
This applies in every area of life, but most of us don’t seem to realize it. Our cultural assumption is that doing things harder is the way out of confusion and into happiness. With a bit more elbow grease and a solid grip on our own bootstraps, we should be able to yank ourselves straight out of suffering and into a fabulous life.
— Sonja in Martha Beck's, The Way of Integrity, Penguin Random House, Ch. Desperate for Success, p. 23, 2021

The only remedy I know is the long walk.

But am I ready to go back to the walk?
In barely more than two weeks I’ll be back at the head of this walk that I have bound myself to, and the transition feels almost masochistic this time.

Last year the walking season began from Pëllumbas, that home from home, having spent the month in happy company with Atlas, Darcy, Bara, Matt, Ilir, Diego, Eliana, Harry, Ellie, Kaur, Helen & Irfaan, and a steady stream of guests. That transition back to the walk — from working on the mud houses, bumpy bus rides into Tirana, walking and re-walking the canyon, playing cards nearly every night — felt natural, easy. And the season came to an end with equal delight. I hadn’t intended to end the year in Istanbul, but serendipity knew. Meeting Kyle and Avvai en-route, those weeks in that megalopolis with them, the offer to join them in Canada for the winter. Through the tint of nostalgia at least, last year felt like an unending crescendo. Every step (including the miss-steps) seemed to carry that crescendo higher.

So perhaps it’s only right that going back feels hard. If I feel uncomfortable at the end of this chapter it is out of a fear of letting go, of having wanted that wave to last forever. But if it had gone on I would have only taken it for granted, and dysphoria, discomfort, and doubt return because they still have much to teach me. The torment is knowing that it is the trying to hold on that accelerates the end.

So yes, I am ready to walk again.

8:20am on April 7, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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In My Time of Dying

2025-02-06T09:25:23Z

Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.
— Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying, Simon & Schuster, p. 6, 2024

A few days ago I was scratching around for a book to read. I was drawn to In My Time of Dying on the shelf, but settled on another, which turned out to be a dud, and something else which I also put down. I asked Kyle to choose for me and he chose In My Time of Dying. It’s not a long book. It’s a short wander and a small wonder. Its brevity adds to its humanity and its humility, and I read it quicker than I’ve read anything these last few months.

In the opening pages, Junger writes about his first near death experience, the kind where you know in the moment — rather than realising only afterwards — that you are probably about to die, and I’m grateful to him for it. I never know quite how to relate my own near death experiences, but I feel relieved of that now. I can’t. Junger writes it well and still it doesn’t connect, only scratches at what that sharp awakening is like, so I’ll likely never write it well enough to reflect what goes through the mind in those moments, nor relate fully the strangeness of feeling it both ripple out across, and be fully subsumed by, all past and future experience. And that’s okay.

Near death opens us up to life, insulation from it is insulation from life, and leads to unhealthy preoccupation with it. But also it changes very little, it’s significance fades into sur-reality.

I lay on the frozen sand imagining myself dead: arms askew, mouth full of sand, eyes blank. […] The phone would ring at my parents’ house and my mother would answer. At first, she wouldn’t understand. Then she’d scream. Eventually she would call my father […] The news would ripple out through the small group of people who loved me and the larger group of people who just knew me.
— Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying, Simon & Schuster, p. 12, 2024

Later, when Junger describes the guilt of writing about dead men, having posthumously gotten to know their lives so intimately as to feel intrusive, I realise this and the last book I read (Magritte: This is not a biography) both cover this theme, intruding on the privacy of the dead.

Ken, Kyle’s father, and one archetype of a patriarch, is a writer of letters, or rather in any other era he would be a writer of letters, but in this one he is a writer of emails. His emails are earnest accounts of his experience — ranging from the mundane to the profound, that are kind, open, and almost always funny — they serve to knit together a shared story more fully.

This book too feels like a letter from a kind of patriarch, written with a humility that is unique to the necessarily occasional interrogation of being that that role allows. The kind of discovery that surprises and delights you, changes the way you see that person, increases your affection for them, but without in any way disturbing things as they are.

If storytelling is an expression of the essential anxiety of mortality, of entropy, then Ken’s letters affirm Ken’s existence, and Junger’s “letter”, though written with a finger in the pie of popular science, exists as an affirmation of his existence and of how he would like to be remembered, and is made most interesting in that light.

9:25am on February 6, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Workouts, portraits, figure drawing, and small software tools

2025-01-31T23:07:25Z

January 27 – February 2, 2025

Still taking a new portrait every day. Here’s Neil, a carpenter, and his custom van.

I just play around with ‘em. I’ve got another one that I’m gonna build out. […] The wife and I live on a boat, I’ve lost count of how many vehicles I’ve owned.

Working out three days a week with Kyle and Avvai has been top, and today I added a small bonus kettle-bell workout in the morning. Kyle swears by the kettle-bell and today it finally clicked why, it barely takes any thinking about and you can work muscles hard pretty quickly.

I’ve been wanting to get more drawing done outside of the weekly 90–minutes with Ania, so last week I plucked up the courage to ask everyone in the class — Ewan, Olga, Ondrej, Natsuki, Nasim, and Cesar — if they’d like to meet up once or twice a week outside of class and practice our figures. I’ve been anointed leader by default which is an interesting role for me. In a working environment it’s normal for me, but less typical in social organising. Wednesday (29th) was the first meeting of the imaginatively named Drawing Club. Nasim and Ondrej joined me, others were working. Surprised myself by drawing for five hours straight, which got me thinking, prior to that session I’d probably only done 12 hours of figure drawing before, all of it over the last couple months with Ania. More practice feels good, and Nasim showed herself to be a great practice partner, always pushing for more challenging poses.

We met again after Saturday’s class,

Yesterday I proposed the Drawing Club meet again immediately after today’s class and I’m very glad I did. Ondrej couldn’t stay and Ewan wasn’t in class today so initially it was only going to be Nasim and I (which would have been very fine), but as the lesson wrapped up and I got talking with the new people, we found four new members for the club — Marika, Anju, Tori, and Lidia-Lucia. Lidia, from Peru, couldn’t stay today but Marika, 29, from Japan, Anju & Tori, two 16–year–old high school students, also from Japan, and Nasim all did, and we did 90 minutes of mostly 3–minute figures, but with time to talk and compare in-between.

In the classes we’re always against the clock so there’s never time to actually watch how others draw. We get to see the result, but not the work. These less formal practice sessions let us learn from each other a lot more, perhaps even more than the classes themselves.

February 1, 2025 5.17PM ⚕ Vancouver, Canada

Anju and Tori, here on high school exchange from Japan, are both very talented, almost scarily so! I levelled up just by watching Anju draw the first four lines of a figure on the page.

On Wednesday night I “treated” Kyle and Avvai to poutine, my first experience and I gotta say, pretty yum!

Project wise, it’s been a week of mini-programs. On Thursday I knocked up an interactive program for wrangling my old plaintext journals into structured TOML. So far I’ve converted this months, and all of last year. I’ll continue back to my earliest preserved journal ( 2012). Once I had over a years worth in the new format I worked up a local webserver and viewer so I can read and search through the whole lot at once. Usually I just grep through my old journals, but for extended reading a proper UI is nice too. Ultimately I’ll add location filtering/plotting of my journals via an interactive map, and embeddings-based semantic similarity search, but this v1 has already been nice.

Friday, for my January review I wanted to include screen-grabs from Severance, Kyle and I just finished season 1. In the past I’ve done this by scrubbing through a film and picking out scenes, but because I wanted to cover a whole season of a show I opted to write a little program to extract a frame from each episode at 5–second intervals, from there I could scan through the whole lot very quickly and pluck out the frames I wanted.

I wrote a second script to stitch all the frames together into a video as an experiment in recap/memory-prompting ahead of starting the second season. The result was okay, but I have a feeling it might flow better with fewer frames (every 10th second?) playing back at a lower frame-rate (15fps? I chose 30 for the tests).

On Monday I knocked out a couple short posts:

I’ve almost finished my January reflections, which I’ve just now decided I’m going to try and do every month this year, in a very similar style to this, basically summarising what I’ve been up to. Not entirely decided on month vs week. This weekly scale feels nice, but maybe it’s not a broad enough view for more connective reflections, so I’ll experiment with both. The vague goal then is to have month-notes or week-notes, or a combination thereof, covering all of 2025.

Jamie is going through a particularly dark patch back in England, I’m trying to support him where I can. Kyle and Avvai have asked a few times if there’s anything they can do to support me, but I’m so used to coping with my family on my own, and so pathologically averse to being a burden that I haven’t managed to draw on them much. But tonight, unexpectedly, Kyle and I’s conversation drawing on his reading of Byron Katie’s self-inquiry method aka The Work, and my reading of The Book of Joy, led to some meaningful insights about what supporting my brother means to me. The iterative process of so called turnaround statements proved itself out, and Kyle’s capacity to synthesise — both the essence of everything he reads, and the truth of what I said — continues to inspire me.

A snow day! Sunday has brought the week to an end, and the city to a standstill, with 10cm of snow. I went out early and just wandered around in the blizzard in bliss.

Kyle is playing the piano and around midday we’ll trek across the city to Sam’s apartment for a craft day on the 24th floor, with a panoramic view of Stanley Park and English Bay under snow.

Safe to say, it’s been another good week in Vancouver.

11:07pm on January 31, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Why do we fear rejection?

2025-01-27T11:04:34Z

For the last 19–days (and at least another 11), I’ve been approaching strangers in the street and asking to take their photograph. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no. The minimum requirement for each day is to have at least one portrait accompanied by a quote.

Everyone has a story, and this project is meant above all to remind me of that. The quote forces me to engage with a person. Even if the anxious voice in my head tells me to flee, I have to connect with a person enough to get at something about their story.

When I was back in England last, I surprised my father (and myself somewhat) by saying “I want to spend the rest of my life in conversation with people”. My father and I are similar in a lot of ways, but here we differ. Almost nothing would compel my father to approach a stranger unprovoked, heck, he says very little to the people he knows.

This photography project is partly about taking portraits, but at least as much as that it is about breaking down the imaginary membrane between myself and everyone else. The challenge of it is the point and so, when I notice it getting comfortable, I create other mini-challenges that ratchet up the difficulty. An example: after noticing that I was mostly approaching men, out of fear of making women uncomfortable, I made the following day’s challenge to get at least one portrait of a woman approximately my age.

I’m proud of both the effort and the output, though not yet satisfied. The resistance — the fear — lingers. There’s probably an instinct related to fragile masculinity at work here but, if so, it is misplaced. Because the “risk” to my standing is miniscule. I am a guest in Vancouver, I have no standing here and therefore nothing to lose.

But I know that more than that, this fear comes from a lifetime spent in my own head,

When you focus too much on yourself, you become disconnected and alienated from others. In the end, you also become alienated from yourself, since the need for connection with others is such a fundamental part of who we are as human beings.
— Dalai Lama in The Book of Joy, Avery, Ch. Loneliness: No Need for Introduction, p. 130, 2016

11:04am on January 27, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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What does it take to foster integral online communities?

2025-01-27T10:01:17Z

Assume good faith, clarify potentially unclear points before going on the attack, formulate disagreements based on the strongest version of the opposing argument, and avoid unwarranted certainty.
— Erin Kissane, How we'll do discussions here, wreckage/salvage, 2025

The above, a summary of the dialectical principle of charity reflects a truth — the practice and assumption of good faith is essential.

Focus & Curiosity also feel essential to me, though there is something both complimentary and contradictory about the two. Focus both creates a framework for and a resistance to curiosity; without a focus, curiosity has no context of use without curiosity, a focus will struggle to germinate anything; but too much curiosity derails focus, and too much focus obliterates curiosity.

when interpreting an ambiguous term in a text of discourse, the interpretation that makes sense of the discourse should be preferred. A meaning that makes the text absurd or meaningless should be avoided
— Douglas Walton, New Dialectical Rules for Ambiguity, Informal Logic, Vol. 20, p. 261-274, 2000

The Hacker News guidelines echo a similar sentiment,

Be kind. Don’t be snarky. Converse curiously; don’t cross-examine. […]

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. […]

Respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize. Assume good faith. […]

Don’t post shallow dismissals, especially of other people’s work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
— dang, Hacker News Guidelines

The single greatest challenge to their effectiveness in that community is simply scale. Amongst millions of users, and tens–of–thousands of active voices it is probably impossible to maintain strong norms of civility. But this can be a feature, instead of a bug, in human behaviour in that it creates an inherent back pressure against runaway scale in communities.

It reminds us to seek out small, focused communities of curious people with a strong shared ground truth, creating a story together.

I include a substantial extract from The Dialectical Principle of Charity: A Procedure for a Critical Discussion by Jakub Pruś & Piotr Sikora, 2023

A. When interpreting, choose the best possible interpretation and skip the minor mistakes of the opponent’s argument.

When the proposition or the argument is ambiguous, one should choose the best interpretation, that is, the most reasonable one. If the argument contains some irrelevant problems or obvious mistakes in the argument, it is better to ignore them (if they are not crucial to the main point that the opponent is trying to make).

B. Assume the good will of the opponent’s intentions

To put it in more simple terms, if the interlocutor’s argument seems problematic, it is good to assume that it is unintentional on their part, as long as it is reasonable to do so. It means that, if possible, one should give people the benefit of the doubt, and attribute issues in their arguments to a misunderstanding on their part, rather than to a malicious intent to deceive.

The third component might not seem essential, but it proves to be very useful in any discussions which are truth-oriented and especially in academic debates. It might be overwhelming, misunderstood or even redundant in everyday life arguments, but some authors include it in the charitable interpretation.

C. Consider using a logically structured approach to the opponent’s argument.

It is highly beneficial, but very rare, to attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, logically structured, and fairly so your opponent might say: “Thank you for putting my thoughts so clearly!”

The component (c) might seem controversial however—sometimes putting one’s argument in a logical form may seem uncharitable to the interlocutor—especially if the discussion is not a purely philosophical debate between scholars. Arguments which have a maximal commitment to truth would certainly benefit from this procedure (actually, this is a good practice of such debates), but in more common arguments this may seem uncharitable to the person, who is “being corrected,” for it suggests the superiority of one side.
— Jakub Pruś & Piotr Sikora, The Dialectical Principle of Charity: A Procedure for a Critical Discussion, Argumentation, Springer, Vol. 37, p. 577-600, 2023

10:01am on January 27, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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An overly critical look at The Self and the Soul

2025-01-17T14:09:49Z

Here is more or less my stream of consciousness as I read The Self and the Soul, a dialogue between N.S. Lyons and Freya India.

If I’m being honest I wouldn’t have read past this following bit if not for the fact that it was sent to me by someone I respect,

[Lyons describing Freya India] she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

“what used to be described as wisdom, […] how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl”…

I don’t know what to say about that condescending bundle of conservative (always hearkening back) fetishisation of the “girl” except that “It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.”

And who is N.S. Lyons? Here I must admit, I sometimes find it difficult to read a thing without prejudice when I know the author holds views that I find abhorrent somehow, eg,

We are now more than two years downstream from the fiery Year Zero of the Revolution, 2020, when, amid the most widespread and destructive riots in the nation’s history, nearly every public and private institution in American life (and then beyond, across nearly the whole of the broader Western world) simultaneously pledged allegiance to the same transformational illiberal ideology that had inspired the violence.

The results were immediate, shocking in scope, and lasting in consequence: the primacy of racial consciousness and grievance was forcefully reintroduced into society in the name of racial ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’; police departments were defunded and criminal behaviour effectively decriminalized in the name of ‘social justice’, resulting in a deadly ongoing crime wave; elite medical and educational institutions, along with the American government, began not only to mainstream extremist concepts like the mutilating surgical ‘affirmation’ of children’s alleged transgender identity (among other innovations) in the name of ‘inclusion’, but to actively seek to criminalize any opposition to these and other practices; in a coordinated effort with the state, the world’s largest technology and media giants imposed a great wave of censorship in an effort to entrench and defend the ideological hegemony of the revolution and its values; mobbed by zealots, dissenters to the new ideological regime were summarily ousted from their positions and livelihoods; families and friendships were torn apart as the window of acceptable opinion shifted with lightning speed… This is only to scratch the surface of the traumatic upheaval that was thrust onto American society.
— N.S. Lyons, The Woke Revolution Is Still Far from Over, Hungarian Conservative, Vol. 3, 2023

Elsewhere he rails against the “establishments” maligning of Trump. I’m also wary of people writing under pseudonyms while trying to influence public opinion or policy (as he does in his other writing). Lyons real identity is concealed, as with a number of the new crop of intensely Conservative commentators. See Who is “Peter Dukes” for another example.

Still, I welcome the opportunity to practice believing that wisdom can come from anywhere, so I’ll try to read it with an open mind.

no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

No argument from me here, in fact I think this is a notably good framing in that it recognises a strong similarity but not uniformity ( “no clean separation” ), a nuance that would be easy to miss, the omission of which would sound stronger but which would obscure truth.

My only objection then, the (mis)use of en-dashes where em-dashes belong :)

we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Good questions for the most part, even if I can’t help reading appeals against “the deconstruction of authority” as the eternal whistle of conservatism.

Given that the main thrust of this dialogue is about therapy, maybe I should acknowledge that I have never sought therapy. At a young age, as people pushed harder for me to see a therapist, I looked around and realised that all the people I knew who saw therapists were miserable, and that if I wanted to be something other than miserable I should probably take my advice from a different sort of people. Only, the foolish lesson I actually internalised was to not listen to anyone, and I remained miserable. Perhaps then I can’t say anything credible about the efficacy of therapy, but I can still say something.

I agree that the preoccupation with self is a dead and deadening end. I believe that therapy as a discrete pursuit is a weak tonic to symptoms not causes, and represents a kind of cultural failure to nourish the spirit. Well adjusted minds can heal forward, this over focus on healing backwards is spiritual wheel-spin.

At the real lows of mine and ma’s depressions we would despair most, not at our pain as incomparable, but at the awareness that — even knowing others endure much worse — we remained unable to think of anything else.

Therapy too often reinforces the disaggregation of self that is the single greatest cause of our pain, ie. an inability to integrate all that we feel into the self we express.

why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

The introduction ends with this interesting run of conclusions disguised as questions.

“our culture feels so utterly unsexy now”

Society needs to be more sexy? Does it? Why? And what does that even mean? Isn’t that actually part of the problem? I guess I’ll have to wait and see what Lyons means by “sexy”, but this feels like a dubious claim.
“we all need to learn to be playful again”

That we need play is an absolute truth, amen
“what men and women really want”

That people either don’t know what they want, or are unable to express that want is a conclusion I can broadly agree with, but again, it’s the particulars that matter here.
“[true] love can rescue us from selfishness”

Maybe there’s an opportunity here to talk about the para-social relationships that seem to have swept into the world, and perhaps they’ll discuss the need to cultivate a love for all of humanity, but I doubt it. Probably they will just appeal to traditional Christian marriage.
“virtue is the only sure path to sanity”

I’ll be interested to hear what constitutes “virtue” according to Lyons and India because, cynically, I’m weary of hearing “virtue” when what is meant is (deontological) “duty”.
“drawn inexorably […] to religious faith”

That we need religious faith is a strong claim. I have no doubt that we need faith. And if “religion” can grow to include any healthy community of people enacting a shared story, then I’d go so far as to claim that we need religion and faith, but I’m very sceptical that we need religious faith as laid down to Abraham.

“therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” […] just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.”
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the straight white fella leading with what I read as a coded version of “why isn’t romance today like it was in the Hollywood movies I watched growing up?”

I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Freya manages to say a lot that is of merit, as above, interspersed with a load of nonsense and dishonest “statistics”,

In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five!

This is a gross abuse of statistics without including any anchoring numbers. If there were 10 children of that age using antidepressants in 2015, and 14 in 2021, that would be a 40% increase! I’ve no doubt that the absolute number is a lot higher than 14, but that doesn’t make this rhetorical trick any less dishonest. Especially given that this window (2015 to 2021) falls within the reign of a Conservative government that has pushed more than 900,000 children into poverty, where prior to this government childhood poverty had been declining sharply for more than a century.

Rather than spend hours detailing every dishonest claim, I’ll string together some of the bits I can agree with,

girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world […] I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. […] It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. […] People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. […] I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! […] That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. […]

The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. […]

they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families […]
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

I broadly agree with this, whatever our claims about empowering girls and women, we seem to be failing in the creation of a world that supports their spiritual health. “Loneliness isn’t empowerment.”

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

“Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole”… proceeds to get right into it with some raving revisionism.

Wilhelm Reich’s substantive writing about fascism was written and famous before WW2, and besides, if you’re really trying to re-establish authority figures as credible, maybe “stop picking on fascists!” isn’t the best rallying cry.

Lyons claims that the therapeutic era emerged as the result of a conspiracy between two German psychiatrists backed by the U.S. government, and that this is “obvious”, without any consideration for the fact that therapy took root after WWII not because of some conspiracy to rob men of all agency, but rather because millions of men had just returned from the bloodiest war in human history with what, at the time, we were still quaintly calling “shock”, and that nearly half a million of them hadn’t returned at all. And that’s only in the U.S., a country that sat out most of the war. The war saw approximately 80 million casualties worldwide and many more injured and traumatised. I mean, mightn’t that have something to do with it, pal?

Most of what Lyons goes on to insist about the need for and loss of “legitimate external authority” rests on the existence or at the very least a belief in the Abrahamic god. I find this unsatisfying, both as a given truth, and as any part of a journey toward god.

Of the many claims — broad and specific — made about relationships, the only one that seems to support itself is that strong gender roles made heterosexual relationships modelled in the Christian tradition simpler. This is true, in cultural and spiritual terms they were much, much simpler. Lyons goes on to conclude that they were, therefore, better. He fails to support this claim in any way at all, seemingly taking it as a (god) given or otherwise indisputable truth. His only (anecdotal) support for this claim is that during a single trip to Hungary (Budapest) he had an easier time flirting with women and he found that sexy. Hungary is more conservative, therefore conservatism is more sexy, so his logic seems to go.

Even ignoring how facile that is, he goes on to attach this to “an earlier time” which brings us to the trouble with the conservative line. Conservatism is a politics of nostalgia, and nostalgia is the minds device for misrepresenting the past as a comfort to our present selves. People are almost always expressing nostalgia for a time before they had responsibilities, or a time before they born. This narrow nostalgia is presumed to reflect the world as it was then, and “back then” was always simpler. Nostalgia abhors nuance.

Lyons then proceeds to set up a fantasy wherein meaningful love between a man and a woman must adhere to a pattern of male sacrifice followed by female submission.

Freya half-heartedly pushes back against Lyons assertion that women must submit to men, but only really disputes the when not the whether, and doesn’t make any objection to the bizarre and unsupported claim that men make the greater sacrifice in relationships,

From the beginning, a man’s love for a woman is expressed through sacrifice. He sacrifices time, resources, energy, attention, optionality, and more for her.

In what way is this distinct from the sacrifices a woman makes? What evidences is there for that?

He continues,

there is a kind of subconscious but fundamental asymmetry present in male-female relationships from the start, because a woman cannot afford to engage in the same kind of self-sacrificial love for a man.

What are you talking about man? Culturally speaking, in the time you’re nostalgic for and often still today, women sacrifice themselves constantly, every day, and for what? The hope that if an incredibly rare event (Lyons uses the example of a mass-shooting) occurs, he might make one big sacrifice in return? That’s a raw feckin’ deal, for everyone, but for women especially.

In fact it’s probably an important moment of maturation for any man to come to terms with the fact that, after having left boyhood, he can expect to receive unconditional self-sacrificial love from no one but God.

But while men cannot expect this particular form of love from a woman, they nonetheless obviously do need something reciprocal from her in a relationship. They can’t just sacrifice for her indefinitely for nothing.

Do me a solid and substantiate that, my guy. The world where it is anything close to a norm for men to “sacrifice for her indefinitely for nothing” is not the world we live in.

So both partners find themselves at an impasse. To her, he seems unsatisfyingly emotionally detached. To him, emotional detachment is the only thing keeping her attached and at least still sleeping with him. From my amateur observation a huge number of relationships today seem to end up stuck at this point, sometimes for years, and eventually crumble.

Ah, now we’re getting to it. Women find him unsatisfying, and he isn’t having as much sex as he’d like. Got it. Uncharitable? Maybe, but am I wrong?

How can this chasm be crossed? I think it requires a leap of faith—by both partners, but today maybe especially by women. She must choose to effectively make her own reciprocal form of sacrifice. Not of herself, but of her initial self-centeredness in the relationship. She has to subdue the self-interested pragmatism of her own nature, with its relentless desire to optimize, and choose him as the man he is, flaws included. This further requires recognizing the full value of the sacrifice he is offering her in his role, and the legitimacy of the claim, in a sense, this makes on her. Her own sacrifice is then a submission, not so much to him—though it may look that way to outsiders—but to loyalty and trust in him.

I promise I am trying to read this as something more than the wail of a conservative man who wants a legally-binding contract wherein a woman has to very convincingly pretend to like him. And I acknowledge that his feelings probably represent his lived experience, at least on some level, but is this really the experience people are having? And why is it everyone else’s fault but his?

And why is it here Lyons is identifying women as possessing a uniquely “relentless desire to optimize” when earlier in the dialogue he claimed this was the particular response of men in the atomised age?

This act functions as something like a miracle. The antagonism latent in the relationship is defused, the chasm overcome through a new unspoken covenant. In allowing herself to become fully his, the freedom is granted to him to reciprocate and fully open to her.

Lyons seems to want women to worship men as they did when they were made completely dependent on men for their livelihood, when they weren’t allowed their own income or to own anything, when they were servants to a clan that expanded at the whim of the man who ~~ownded~~, ahem, married her.

I’ll skip making commentary on the rest of Lyons bit here because there’s really nothing in it except the lament of a man who didn’t get the subservient bimbo that Hollywood convinced him he was owed.

As before, Freya has more interesting things to say,

The problem is, for many young people, we never saw our parents play. We grew up in broken and blended households. Our parents are often two strangers who can barely look at each other. We associate relationships with trauma, turmoil, disloyalty, deceit, and suspicion. Relationships were always serious, strained, never relaxed enough, never safe enough, to play. You can’t play when you’re searching for threats.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

once you’ve chosen someone, both men and women need to take that “leap of faith” […] but I would add that this of course only works with a partner they can trust. There’s no sense wishing your girlfriend would relax and stop nagging and being neurotic, if you aren’t making her feel safe. If you aren’t trustworthy, or even kind. We have to feel safe to relax into the relationship. That’s when the self-centredness drops, and the guard comes down.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Ultimately what both sexes need, I think, is a cultural message that it’s okay to depend on each other. We should depend on our partners—to stay, to be faithful, to give support. And from that we can be more independent. Long-term relationships shouldn’t be about losing yourself, but becoming more of who you are.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Good meaningful stuff that manages to identify real social issues and even hints at local resolutions, mostly because here Freya manages to avoid falling into the trap these two have created for themselves of blaming everything on “therapy culture”. Here she gets at something because she expresses real empathy, or perhaps not…

From things she’s written here and elsewhere, I get the impression that this is her own story, this describes her childhood and her experience of relationships so it isn’t exactly empathy, but rather self-sympathy. Which is no bad thing, I think her self-diagnosis is accurate and useful, I only flinch slightly because she spends a lot of words elsewhere in the dialogue railing against such self-diagnosis and inward looking.

But then, a leap,

But yes, the trouble is young people seem to have a core belief that love is transactional, a commodity that can be exchanged. Probably because we grew up displaying ourselves like products on social media, then advertising ourselves on dating apps, and maybe even had a parent who left the marriage for someone else. I see this belief in young people’s obsession with appearance, in the obsession with optimising ourselves, even in the terror of ageing we’re now seeing among teenage girls—all seems to me an attempt to become a better product, to avoid getting traded in, or exchanged for someone of “higher value”.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Eh? Freya uses the fact (linked article) that young people today are getting more cosmetic surgery than ever as evidence of an obsession with appearances? People are getting more cosmetic surgery today because today is literally the first time in history that cosmetic surgery has been widely available. Tell me of an age where disposable income was ever not first and foremost deployed in service of appearances. The only change is in the proportion of the population who have access to some amount of disposable income, and the (consequent) availability of treatments and products to satisfy that spending power. I’m pretty staunchly against cosmetic surgery, but let’s not pretend that people wouldn’t have been lining up for cheap interventions a hundred years ago if they’d been available.

And there are bits like this, where she identifies a truth, only to draw it to a non-sequitur of a conclusion,

We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient… and alone.
— Frey India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Too much control doesn’t make us robotic, it makes us neurotic. We become brittle, too fragile to tolerate the very thing we need, surprise and delight.

I agree that people are “trying very hard not to be vulnerable and get hurt” and that this is preventing connection but I can’t bear the sound of two people both describing themselves as “hopeless romantics” while hearkening back to a time when women were only a half step removed from property, where marital rape wasn’t a crime, where homosexuality was illegal etc. Not “hopeless romance”, just more nostalgia.

I’ve spent so much of my life quietly obsessing over how I feel. Stop feeling this way. You should feel more like this. Why do I feel so much? What’s wrong with me? […]

But over the years I’ve realised I have to cut it out. I can’t solve my feelings. To live my life and actually be helpful to people around me, I have to stop going inwards and start looking outward. Anxiety is very self-absorbed. The only relief I’ve ever gotten is by turning toward other people and their problems.
— Freya India in N.S. Lyons's, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

This is a good and healthy realisation, and should be applauded. As before, when she talks about herself and her own experiences, Freya is sharp and prescient. It’s only when she takes that thinking and didactically prescribes it to all, and moralises at the behaviour of others that her arguments seem to collapse.

Let’s go back to Lyons for a bit.

I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn, by people who in their genius showed the Truth rather than told it. And, even more than that, by witnessing people I knew and admired who, even when the world was falling apart, even in the face of personal trial and persecution, remained unbowed and undaunted from speaking truth with courage and doing right with love. Invariably I discovered they were people of faith—a quiet, happy, steel faith. Theirs was an evangelism that didn’t need words.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

“I was converted by Dostoevsky and Tolkien, Lewis and Solzhenitsyn”. This reeks of self-masturbatory revision, but whatever.

Of course if you look back at historic figures you deem noble you will find almost all of them were religious, because nearly everyone was! That is not in and of itself a good argument for religion. The ritual sacrifices of the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians; the endless conquests of empires; the “holy” work of The Inquisition and The Crusades; the atrocities carried out at the behest of Leopold II; Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution; all of it in the name of God and religion. Similarly, if you look back through western history you’ll also find most of the “heroes” are white, this doesn’t support the idea that white folk are more heroic, only that almost everyone else was written out of history, unlikely even to be named beyond “savages”.

I say all this as someone who is increasingly drawn to faith myself, but let’s not launder history.

I don’t know quite how to put it, but when Christ tells his disciples to be “the light in the world,” I think this is what he means. Individuals have power beyond what they know, but that power is in the force of their example—in their deeds, in their inner virtue, not necessarily their words. Personally I think this is how someone who has found God can really best help those who are struggling (and who are liable to be watching even when we don’t know it): by showing that walking a better Way is possible in life. This doesn’t mean we can’t ever try to also put what truths we’ve learned into words, but I think those words can only ever be secondary to the truths we live. And that is hard enough.
— N.S. Lyons, The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue with Freya India, The Upheaval, 2024

Nothing here is particular to religion or belief in God, nor more specifically to Christian religion. Such people exist the world over, Christian, Muslim, Satanic, Jesuit, Jewish, Amish, and indeed, secular and agnostic too.

My cynicism about religion, as opposed to faith, arises mainly from it’s inherent need for a social hierarchy. Whether it’s the chosen peoples of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) who are empowered to evangelise (as missionaries), slaughter (as crusaders or jihadists against unbelievers/infidels), and rule (as colonisers) until only true believers remain; or the caste systems of Hinduism and certain sects of Buddhism which identify “Untouchables”, the lowest in the social hierarchy, on the basis of ethnicity.

The story of hierarchy is that it is “right” that some should have more and some should have less. Can’t we have a better story?

Did I fail to read charitably?

The piece as a whole is made disjointed by the fact that Freya India is a more effective writer and thinker than Lyons, while Lyons seems to condescendingly believe the reverse is true, but both make endless flurries of unsupported claims. I find the breathless repetitions of “I completely agree”, and “you put it perfectly” unconvincing, and ironic given they rail against a culture wherein people are afraid to disagree with one another.

I’m left distrusting the two. They identify a couple of areas contributing to changes in the way we form relationships today when compared to some largely fictional (Hollywood) window of time in which relationships were more sexy (ie. Before consent was considered important), and then tie those in varyingly direct and indirect ways to the loss of traditional (Christian) values by way of the machinations of “therapy culture” — and, in the process, sloppily co-mingle the distinct ideas of faith and religion.

Without that non-sequitur of a conclusion, I could find more of note in this. I do agree that we have lost the essential rallying/community that traditions provide, and that has substantially brought about the disaggregation of the collective spirit, but that loss has come about not at the hands of “therapy culture” — that is simply a symptom of the thing — but at the altar of money, to which we have sacrificed everything else. It is money, above all, that promises the radical “self-actualization” that has proved itself so destructive to communities everywhere. Therapy culture is merely playing it’s part in enacting the story of money, where all activity, purpose, and meaning must be gated behind that cold arbiter.

The other fundamental slight-of-hand of this dialogue — as with most nostalgia — is comparing the “virtuous” of some earlier age to the “fallen” of this age. Sure, C.S. Lewis was a great thinker, and wrote beautifully, and possibly loved beautifully too — although that he married only out of pragmatism that an intellectual friend could remain in England, not out of romantic love, runs against Lyons’ and Freya’s veneration of him as some ideal archetype — but what of all the countless people who were unhappy and unsupported in that age too? Do these two think unhappy marriages were rarer at some earlier time?

Has this deeply romantic love that these two have such adamant opinions about ever been the norm? Because surely they’re not claiming that such love doesn’t happen any more, so then what of those who embody this love today? Where is the evidence for the claim that this (pompous) “eros” arises less today?

The only support given for such a claim is the eternal conservative cry of “things were better before, if only we can get back to that”.

“our culture feels so utterly unsexy now […] we all need to learn to be playful again […] men and women really want“ different things, “[true] love can rescue us from selfishness”, “virtue is the only sure path to sanity” and all this should see us “drawn inexorably […] to religious faith”.

Nostalgia. I remain unconvinced.

So what is salvageable from this vague and unsubstantiated attack on “therapy culture”?

People are lonely. People need community and a sense of purpose outside themselves. Too much control over our destiny, that is, over “self-actualization” — which I attribute to the elevation of money as mediator to all things, but which Lyons attributes to ‘wokeness’ and both attribute to therapy — is a recipe for misery.

To that I can agree.

I also agree that the “way out” is through the fostering of community and the de-focusing of self, the establishing of shared ground truth, I just don’t think nostalgia is the answer, and I’d sooner settle it among the problems that have gotten us here than among the solutions that’ll get us out.

2:09pm on January 17, 2025 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Meaning has left the building

2024-12-14T22:58:56Z

We live forward, but understand backward.
— Harald Høffding

A week ago there was seven of us sleeping in this small one bedroom apartment. Four-by-four and two-by-two they went, tonight it’s just me. Serena, Jake, Dena, and Maddie are back in Toronto. Kyle and Avvai are in Medicine Hat, Alberta¹.

The contrast is so vivid². It’s funny, in a tragic kind of way, witnessing myself feel lonely, because it’s been a while. I caught myself turning all the lights on in the apartment so it doesn’t feel so vacant. Twice this evening I’ve wandered over to the freezer for an ice cream sandwich — two slices of sugar of one colour bracketing a thick mass of sugar of another colour. All guilt, no pleasure.

Listen to me, so dramatic. But I’m okay. It’s a kind of indulgence, this taste of loneliness. So far it tastes of sugar, and too much peace and quiet.

Had drawing class today — my first without Avvai — it was so so. Ania could tell I was off, “we need your energy back!” she said. Next week. Tomorrow morning I’ll head down to the water for the Sunday cold plunge, but who will shiver beside me and bear witness to my dramatic performance and cursing of the cold?

This could be the last bit of writing for a while. I say could be because when I originally decided I’d write every day for some length of time I settled on 4-weeks, 28-days. That would be today. But about two weeks in I decided I’d go to 30, and then this week I floated the idea of going til Christmas or the New Year, and Kyle pushed for the latter, so… maybe.

It was during the second trip to the freezer that I decided to write only this today. A bit of not much after a day of not much, so that I can get an early night. Hopefully when I wake up I’m not still a lil’ baby ;)

Kyle, Avvai, I know you’ll be reading this when you wake up, so please believe that I’m fine. It’s good to wobble, it helps me to appreciate things more fully.

Having and not having arise together.
— Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching

K&A are in Alberta because Henry, Kyle’s grandfather, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I met Henry twice and each time I left hoping I’ll be even half as funny and fiery when I’m his age. At any age.↩︎
It doesn’t help that it’s been a tough week with family back home. Six hours of phone calls yesterday. Days of that.↩︎

10:58pm on December 14, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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In the Dark Night of the Soul It's Always 3:30 in the Morning

2024-12-09T21:57:43Z

The first episode of The Morning Show takes its name from an unsung F. Scott Fitzgerald essay,

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Esquire, 1936

Which in turn is a reference to a 16th-century Spanish poem and accompanying treatise (Noche Oscura) by St. John of the Cross, which I’ll abridge by cherry picking a few lines,

On a dark night,
[…] I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.
In darkness and in concealment,
[…] This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday

The absent “day after day” is restored implicitly in the rinse & repeat of each day of The Morning Show, but that can wait because I only want to talk about the first five minutes of this first episode.

Fitzgerald’s Three o’clock becomes 3:30 in the show, but this distortion proves an improvement. At 2.58am we find Charlie Black laying in the Dark Night of the Studio, breathing heavily. Out of the gloom all around him, another character emerges, glowing brightly and intruding on his lonely panic. The telephone. No longer a mere technological or narrative device, the telephone is elevated to a complete character. Three phones ring within 90 on-screen seconds: Fred rings Charlie; Charlie rings Mitch; Charlie rings Alex.

Of the first two calls we only hear the dialogue from the receiving end, we’re thrown into the middle of a game of telephone.

Charlie is first, as he picks up he mutters “Oh God” before asking “Fred, what happened?” Fred is unseen, but we can see he has power over Charlie who waits for him, answers his calls from the dark at 2.58am. Fred, we imagine, is a kind of Devil. But Charlie works in the shadows too. He is awake, eyes wide open — he has seen this coming — anxious but not surprised by what Fred says, so we imagine Charlie is not quite innocent either.

Mitch is asleep so we suspect he has been complacent, he answers with “Someone better be dead, buddy”¹, his mute shock confirms his complacency and raises the question: is it his death the telephone has delivered?

Alex doesn’t answer, there’s a rift there, there’s a story here. Three missed calls become four, text messages to Alex and her assistant, she arrives at the studio to find Charlie waiting for her outside, urgent, tense. Exasperated, she delivers her first line of dialogue, the last of the six lines that make up the first five minutes of the show, and the first to be delivered face-to-face, bored and sarcastic,
“Oh my God. Who died?”

All told, those first five minutes sum to,

Charlie
“Oh God. Fred, what happened?”
“So, that’s it?”
“Motherfuck, we’re destroyed.”
“No, I’ll tell him.”
Mitch
“Someone better be dead, buddy.”
Alex
“Oh my God. Who died?”

And we haven’t yet heard both sides of any conversation. We find ourselves in a story where people are likely to be forever talking past, misunderstanding, and mistrusting one another.

Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up begins,

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Esquire, 1936

These first five minutes deliver both “the big sudden blow” and the “blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it”.

That each character will be guided by the ‘light’ of greed in the dark, “More surely than the light of noonday”, has not yet revealed itself, not in these five minutes, but even if the rest of the show falls flat, the first five minutes of The Morning Show charmed me a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutory day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work— and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream—but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza—one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality…
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Esquire, 1936

And when Mitch later styles himself as a martyr and a messiah, and attempts to resurrect himself, we can see him fully as the false prophet.↩︎

9:57pm on December 9, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Who is my father?

2024-12-08T23:52:41Z

I don’t know my father. He wasn’t absent, but he was. I grew up in his house¹ but we’re still strangers. I used to blame him for that. He was a difficult man sure, but when we broke it was me that did the damage that we haven’t been able to mend, it was me that walked out.

Back in England it’s already my brother’s birthday, I just got off the phone with him. He’s spending it in the worst part of cocaine withdrawal, that 3-5 week window where the hyper-mania, sleepless nights, sweats, and mood swings are at their worst. And all that after a week in the hospital following another overdose to try and kill the voices in his head.

I was surprised to find him almost chipper on the phone — the last two nights he’s finally been able to sleep, after days without. He’s kept himself busy by continuing to scan old family film negatives, a project he and I began when I last returned to England to get him sober at the beginning of the year.

The scanning is slow and repetitive or steady and methodical, mood depending, but there is delight in it. It keeps him occupied. It’s a weak substitute for the dopamine spike that coke can deliver, but it’s something, and out of it comes tumbling a positive flood of memory material.

And confusion, and questions. We create stories to make sense of our experience and the world around us. Jamie and I have stories about dad, but do they make sense? I know he didn’t want children, he had a vasectomy young, ma persuaded him to reverse it — there our story begins — and it has been a story of contradictions.

We see photos of our father and through them we see our father, in ways we’ve forgotten to, or ways we never did. I look at photos of him before we were born, in that window when he was master of his own life, and I wonder. I wonder at my own life. I am in that window now, on my own feet and in my own power, able to live as I want to.

He gave that up for us, uprooted the life he’d imagined to make a go of things for us, and before it was all over he would come to resent us for that, but why shouldn’t he? He and ma came from resentful families anyway, and here he was living a life he hadn’t wanted with two difficult, ungrateful children who would turn their backs on him before long. And sure he has to own his part in it, children shouldn’t have to be afraid like that, but surely we can do better now? See clearer now?

When did things go off the rails? How did he feel back then? How does he feel now? And really, Who is he?

I wonder because my father looms large in me. I used to hate our similarities. I thought I hated myself because I was like him, but I don’t hate myself any more and I’m still like him. He’s there, in the good parts of me. But while we have much in common, we find little to say. Everything that might be is suffocated by everything that is, and still I don’t know who he is.

Well, I lived in his house until age nine anyway, then alternate weeks for a couple years, then not at all (the break).↩︎

11:52pm on December 8, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Cy, the king of 'castle

2024-12-05T23:57:40Z

It’s not often that you meet a person who can see right through you, see the daft wee child crouching within.

I was half-managing a warehouse in Moorabin — an industrial suburb of Melbourne — when Cy joined on as an extra pair of hands. We latched onto each other immediately, laughed and cried at the absurdity of the culture in that office where the founder role-played Steve Jobs¹, his business partner looked like 120 kilos of Geordie Shore wrapped in a pin-stripe suit, and our immediate boss was the Sri-Lankan version of David Brent. In the chaos of all that, Cy would pull me off the warehouse floor, drop a cup of tea in my hands, and laugh at me for spending even a moment of the day taking myself or any of that mayhem seriously.

I won’t recount the whole of that time, but months later, not long before I left Australia, Cy took me out for breakfast. Good food, good patter, but what I remember most vividly is Cy poking his head into the kitchen of that busy cafe just as we were leaving and bellowing a thanks to remember to the cooks in the back. All of ‘em were smiling ear to ear after. That memory stuck with me — that and the time he went cartwheeling (truly) through the Monday morning meeting. To exist alongside Cy was to exist in a sort of perpetual awe at the volume of joy that a single human being could add to the world.

That uneasy sense that I’d had since about age ten, that my life was being suffocated by my shyness — and I’d be far better off without it — found it’s first talisman in Cy, and I’ve been drawing on it (avash) ever since. As Cy put it recently, a decades friendship emerged in weeks back then, and for all that we’re both hopeless correspondents, when we do manage to get to the phone at the same time, there’s no one with whom I can more reliably let go of the silly guff in my head that, left unchecked, would have me and the world at odds.

Yes, including the turtleneck sweaters and circular, wire-framed glasses.↩︎

11:57pm on December 5, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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What do objects remember?

2024-12-04T23:37:32Z

Know the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
— Richard Feynman in Christopher Sykes's, Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1981

It’s easy to think we understand something simply because we can describe it, and just as easy to think that we don’t understand something because it seems to defy description. I try to remind myself that description is subordinate to the experience, and experience is the only true understanding.

Something that I love about this life on foot, and the unshakable constraint of only what I can carry, is that it makes necessary a constant meditation on the stuff I keep. There’s no attic, basement, or storage closet to keep all those things you only need sometimes, and there’s virtually nowhere for a thing to be forgotten. Every object is a kind of burden, but on the walk everything is felt viscerally, weighing on the shoulders, and on the mind. The things we give space to, hold us in place too — so to carry something becomes an expression of love for that thing, or of an idea related to that thing — at least according to this wanderers whimsical preoccupation with texture.

In New Zealand I had a sweater, green, sleeves slightly too long, very soft inside, with a latticed texture outside. It was plain to look at, simple, hardly remarkable. Still it remains the piece of clothing to which all others are compared. Partly because its texture was special somehow, and partly because I wore it so often during the building of the cabin that those memories seemed to knit their way into its fibres.

I still carry a scrap of fabric from the bright yellow shirt I wore for much of this years walk, that disintegrated beneath the constant abrasion of my backpack. Sometimes I carry it in my pocket and use it to wipe sweat from my face so I can pretend it serves a practical purpose, but really I carry it because that shirt is a part of the colour and the texture of this journey.

I carried a jar containing six feathers for 500 kilometres through three countries; two tortoise shells across two countries; a piece of rubber for a week of road walking; a length of orange nylon weed matting through much of Greece; a goat horn, a single glove, a scrap of a table cloth found in an abandoned building.

Mizuki knows this part of me best. This constant sifting of the world is the vital manifestation of a belief that any moment or idea may be intensified by the presence of a kindred object. The proper object, in turn, becomes that moment incarnate, a totem around which yet more kindred ideas may agglomerate. In our cabin things were forever appearing — things I’d found in the forest, in the gutter, in bins, and op-shops. Old magazines en-route to my scrapbook, scraps of fabric that were simply nice to look at, old furniture diverted from the waste stream, and then the scavenged sheet metal, steel mesh, plaster-board, timber, fixings, etc that made many of the building projects in and around the cabin possible. Mizuki would laugh, and tease, and perhaps eventually say “please, do you really need a dozen empty film cartridges and a broken pair of binoculars?”

If asked to describe why I’m compelled to hold and carry these objects, words fall short, description isn’t enough. When I think back to walking towards, up, and over Mt Olympus — and then on toward Thessaloniki — I think first of Alexandra and her father, Ben, Manolis, and Lazarus, and second, of that bundle of orange nylon stuffed in my pocket, days spent in its texture.

We feel a connection to objects because they express things that words cannot — through them we develop a vocabulary of touch, of tactility, and a visual language for the re-presentation of memory and the making of meaning. Objects get at the essence of being because, by being tangible fragments of lived experience they help us remember how it felt to be there, they confirm our being. Without them we fear being “only something vague and fluid like a dream.”

11:37pm on December 4, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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What can we trust if not our memory?

2024-12-02T22:40:15Z

Last night, walking back from Jessey’s after watching The Substance, reflecting on the place of gore and horror with Kyle, my scepticism toward it, I was reminded of a memory of a particular kind, a memory that raises more questions than answers.

In What It Is, Lynda Barry asks (and asks, and asks) questions. The core of this ubergraphic-novel is a stream of rhetorical questions. (If you’re someone who wants to be journaling more, pick up What It Is and treat every question like a journaling prompt, you’ll be set for years.) Two questions leapt out for me this morning — Is a dream autobiography or fiction? and What is a memory? — both connected with the memory that surfaced last night.

It’s late at night and there’s a knock at the door. Little four year old me goes flying down the corridor, always racing to reach it before my brother, who in the same moment is thundering down the stairs. Ma’s in the kitchen. I don’t remember who reaches the door first, or who opens it, but I remember we all scream together. “No!”, ma screams from the kitchen, the realisation dawning on her a split-second before the reality hits us. Next comes my brother’s “blood curdling scream”. No one remembers if I scream or not, but I sink to the floor, unable to process the experience. Outside our front door, against a dark night sky, is a knight in full armour, atop a horse that — from my low vantage point — appears nearly two stories tall. Ma sprints through the house and slams the door. She spends the rest of the evening consoling her two distraught children, and a part of her will never forgive herself for this momentary lapse.

We all forgot it was Halloween.

So what’s so particular about this memory? The terror I felt in that moment was real and significant, but it isn’t what makes the memory unique. What makes this memory so interesting to me is that I know there was no knight and there was no horse. There were a handful of trick-or-treaters probably dressed in a selection of not particularly scary costumes I can’t remember.

The memory that formed around that event is distorted. All the rest of the memory is true to life, is exactly as my mother and brother remember it, all except for the knight and the horse. By one way of seeing the distortion is minor, a detail, but it feels more substantial than that. I remember something that wasn’t. Moreover, it remains the memory even though I know it didn’t happen.

There are other stories that I know were reconstructed in my mind by other people holding them for me, telling the story to me, recreating it for me; but this memory is one that never left me.

If a story is something we tell ourselves in order to understand something that happened, then perhaps my mind needed to construct the scariest version of that night in order to understand the fear I felt. And a part of me is afraid of it still — afraid not of the knight, but of what it says about the frailty of my memory. If I can’t rely on my memory, what do I have? What am I? But another part of me is helped by it, in it I find an opportunity for humility. When I get caught up in my version of a story, become too adamant in my way of seeing, I try to surface that memory, or at least the memory that my memory does fail me, not just by forgetting but by remembering too.

What does memory do to human beings? How does it shift? How do we form our existence through memory?

There’s no truth in memory.
— Werner Herzog in Thomas von Steinaecker's, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, 2022

10:40pm on December 2, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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World building, the horrid and the absurd

2024-12-01T23:21:09Z

I’m not a watcher of horror, and certainly not of body horror. I’d say encounters with cinematic horror, and certainly gore, have been a reliable source of regret for me.

I still vividly remember a rare, truly haunting scene in an episode of Midsommer Murders that I watched age seven or eight. I was eleven when I snuck into Saw IV at the cinema, something in me was drawn to the idea of being able to endure awful things. I left the theatre feeling sick and lonely. Around that same time, a friends mum put Pan’s Labyrinth on for us, all of us under the illusion of it being a ‘family friendly’ affair. She left us to it and we were swept into the fantasy world Guillermo del Toro had created. Right up until the scene. The one where Vidal smashes a rebel’s face in with a bottle or the butt of a handgun — I can’t remember which and I don’t intend on finding out. I couldn’t eat after that.

Those images lingered in my memory for a decade or more, often re-appearing in the cinema of the mind just as I was falling asleep, making a small but meaningful contribution to the chronic insomnia of my teens.

So it was with light trepidation that I sat down to watch Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) with Kyle and Jessey tonight. Jessey, who’s watched over two-hundred-and-thirty films this year, has it in his top two and was watching it for a third time.

My doubts proved founded and unfounded. I’m very glad to have seen it. Why?

The world building is something special. The use of a medley of heavily stylised aesthetics to show Elisabeth’s desperate nostalgia of self, the anguish of aging as a woman in this world we’ve built; the unconventional cinematography as an effective tool for un-mooring the viewer from any expectation of reality and therefore expanding what the viewer is ready to accept; there being very little in the way of explicit exposition in the film, a particular relief when so much media is going the other way, dumping masses of world building into poorly written character dialogue. In fact there is very little dialogue at all.

Using these tools, Fargeat quickly establishes trust. In the first hour she doesn’t waste a moment¹, every ounce of every shot has earned its place, giving you only what you need to understand the world she has built and nothing else. The viewer is respected, so the work is respected.

The casting was superb, without much to fault. Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid really sell the whole film. Margaret Qualley is very good, but didn’t feel irreplaceable in the way that Moore and Quiad did. Moore in particular is striking in always giving great performances without inadvertently creating too much character, allowing Elisabeth to maintain a sort of blankness into which the films central cultural critique can be injected, rather than have it fall on too narrow an archetype. The seeming ease with which this is carried off is testament to both Moore and Fargeat.

Fargeat uses nudity extensively but tactfully, showing Elisabeth and Sue as vulnerable, only erotic when it adds, never stooping to pandering.

In terms of cinematography and visual exposition the film feels hugely and beautifully referential, openly acknowledging the influences of Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Mary Harron (American Psycho), Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), Stanley Kubrick, Edgar Wright, possibly Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), and others too. The references to the The Matrix prompted me to consider whether this might in some way emerge as a Red Pill/Blue Pill landmark for some women, in the way that the Wachowski’s world has for some men.

It’s visceral engagement with our cultural addiction to visible beauty above all else shares a truth with my reckoning with the role of photography, how the camera insulates and isolates us from one another (See Reality in the second degree?).

On balance, the first hour of the film is extraordinarily tight and compelling but the second half, while never ceasing to be engaging, doesn’t feel necessary. The result, a very good film, but a little short of great.

Still, I must be clear: This is a good and powerful film. If I am dissatisfied, it is because it contains the promise of being more than it is.
— Roger Ebert, reviewing American History X, Chicago Sun-Times, 1998

I’ll make one caveat to the “no wasted moment” praise, the Hollywood Star scene — more or less a (very) short film in it’s own right — feels unnecessary. The only moderately compelling argument I can think of for it being in the film is that it immediately sets up the film to be an overtly over the top affair, but the following scene could have done that just as well, so I’d say it weakens rather than strengthens the whole.↩︎

11:21pm on December 1, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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The Joy of Figures, Sans Faces or Fingers

2024-11-30T11:57:03Z

“What is the matter with you?”

“Oh, don’t ask! I never expected it; no, I never expected it! It’s… it’s positively incredible!”
— Anton Chekov, Joy, 1877

I’m reading Chekov’s Joy while I reckon with my own.

Saturday, 23 November

Under protest, I find myself in a drawing class.
I have been wickedly tricked.

Avvai, knowing that I want to learn, asked if I’d go with her. Ania (our teacher), clearly also a trickster, has made this first class a pure delight, so as to trick me into coming back! So tricked have I been that I am signing up for six weeks!

Saturday, 30th November

Today was the second class and now Ania has revealed her true character!… She really is a delight! She says I’m a good student, which is a first for me. I have always been an archetypally bad student.

I’ve always wanted to draw and, like a billion silly buggers before me, I’ve always said that “I can’t”. Cy was best at setting me straight when I said things like that, but he has the interminable habit of living on the far side of the blue marble. Helen and Irfaan lured me out of another daft mantra, “can’t learn a language”. Kyle and Avvai are hard at work on a couple more.

Many thanks to all the patient folk, mentioned and unmentioned, who coax and cajole me, stubborn as I am, into living better and better, brighter and brighter.

While “at first in an unconscious condition, [those silly ideas in] his head turned out not to be serious. [artistic] aid was given to the injured man [… who then] put on his cap with its cockade and, joyful and triumphant, ran into the street.”

[He] laughed and sank into an armchair, so overcome by happiness that he could not stand on his legs.

“It’s incredible! You can’t imagine! Look!”

Anton Chekhov, Joy, 1877, translated by Constance Garnett

11:57am on November 30, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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The game of Dutch

2024-11-29T09:37:12Z

The Dutch football team visited a Polish orphanage during Euro 2012.

“The sight of those empty, hopeless, and sad faces deeply affected us,” said 13-year-old orphan Oskar Kowalczyk.

Dutch is known by almost as many names as Odin, including: Cambio, Memo, Go, Pablo, Datz, Cactus, 4-card golf, Rat-a-tat-cat, Rafiki, Gandalf, Kings, Scum, President, etc.

Regardless of the name you know it by, it is the best card game.

The Rules

The objective is to have the lowest score at the end of the game.

A game is made up of multiple rounds.

Terms

bench: the face-down cards in front of each player
deck: the face-down deck placed in the middle of the playing table
discard pile: the face-up pile, next to the deck, created by the dealer turning over the top card of the deck. All cards added to the discard pile must be face up.
penalty: an additional card given to a player for breaking a rule

The term bench is used because this is a game without a ‘hand’.

Each player is dealt four cards, face down.

The player arranges their cards in a 2x2 grid (without looking at their faces), after which they may not be re-arranged.

On the dealer’s signal, all players look at any two of their cards. Looking before the dealer or at any time after, unless explicitly allowed, is a penalty. It is important to remember your cards throughout the game. Suits don’t matter, except for Kings.

The dealer takes the top card from the deck and places it beside the deck (face-up), the round begins immediately.

Play runs clockwise from the left of the dealer.

The round ends after a player has called Dutch, and all remaining players have played their final turn.

The game ends when any player’s score reaches 100 or more, at which point the player with the lowest score is the winner (see Tie Breaking if two players end a game with the same score).

Card Scores

  0  —  Red Kings (Hearts & Diamonds)
  1  —  Aces
2—9  —  Numbered cards (face-value)
 10  —  Jacks, Queens
 13  —  Black Kings (Clubs & Spades)

Numbered cards score at face-value eg. a 5 of Clubs scores 5 points
Suits don’t matter except for Kings

Special Cards

A special card is triggered only when it is placed onto the discard pile (face-up)

Queen lets you look at any card in any players bench (including your own)
Jack lets you swap any two cards in any two different benches (including your own)

On Your Turn

On your turn you may do one of the following:

Draw one card from the deck and look at it. Then either,
- Exchange it with one of your own cards (without looking at it)
- OR Discard the card (face up) onto the pile.
Draw one card from the pile and exchange it for one of your own cards.
Call “Dutch”
Dutch may only be called on your turn, at the start of your turn, and your turn immediately ends. All other players play one more turn, after which the round ends (see Round End)

If at the beginning of your turn you have zero cards, then Dutch is automatically called for you (see Round End).

The Snap

Any player may ‘snap’ one of their own cards onto the discard pile if it matches the card that is currently face-up on the discard pile.

This can be done at anytime, it does not have to be your turn.

Each card on the discard pile may be snapped only once, a snapped card cannot be snapped again.

If multiple players try to snap at the same time, the first card onto the discard pile wins the snap, any other players must take back their card and a penalty card.

If a player snaps incorrectly (wrong card), or if the card they were snapping has already been covered or pulled, they must take the wrong card back and take a penalty card from the deck (without looking at it).

Round End

At the end of a round, all cards are turned over and each player’s score for the round is totalled.

Whichever player called Dutch — whether deliberately or by default — must have the lowest score or they take a penalty from the deck for each player who scored equal or lower than them.

Each player’s score is recorded.

When one player’s score reaches 100, the player with the lowest total score is the winner.

Tie Breaking

If two players finish a game with the same score, the player who scored lowest score in the final round is the winner.

Tips

Dutch is a game of knowledge. For this reason, in your first turns in a round you almost always want to learn what your two blind cards are (by drawing a new card and discarding your dealt card), even if one of the two cards you know is a high card that you will want to get rid of.

Optional rules for Make Benefit Glorious ~~Nation of Kazakhstan~~ Game of Dutch:

For players comfortable with the basic rules, there are an approximately infinite number of variations and modifications that make Dutch the only card game you’ll ever need to know.

The Snap can be expanded to include snapping cards from other players cards.

If the player snaps from another player’s cards, the player may then give one of their cards to the player. An incorrect snap from another player’s cards results in a double penalty for the player. This makes games more chaotic/fun/intense but is likely to leave less experienced players feeling excluded.

A Queen played by the last player before a round ends following a Dutch call allows play to continue for another round

9:37am on November 29, 2024 from Istanbul, Marmara, Turkey

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In The Cart by Anton Chekhov, 1897

2024-11-28T23:40:11Z

I’m reading In The Cart aka The Schoolmistress, written by Anton Chekhov in 1897. I’m reading In The Cart because in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain George Saunders is telling me to. I’m reading In The Cart as mentioned in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain because Kyle recommended Saunders to me. I’m reading In The Cart during A Swim In A Pond In The Rain because I want to write better.

Or… I was.
Now I’m writing rubbish on the internet.
It’s 11pm and I’ve only read 19 pages.
Kyle and Avvai have gone to bed.
I think they’re ever so slightly worried about me.
Maybe I should be worried about me, but I’m too busy thinking about the doorbell.
Since landing in Vancouver 12 days ago, from somewhere deep within this apartment building, there has been the faintest ding, dong of an electronic door bell, and it is winding Kyle and I up like clockwork (probably it was ringing before we arrived too but I didn’t care then). It is intermittent but unrelenting, never a matter of if, only of when. My whole being has been reduced to anticipating the next ring.

Anyway, if you would also like to read In The Cart, I’ve included it at the end of the page. It is a short story. The version I have is called The Schoolmistress. I think it’s the same story… *shrugs in Russian*

It begins, “At half-past eight they drove out of the town.” Honestly I can’t tell whether or not that’s a good opening, hopefully George will tell me. I mean, it feels strong, it’s intriguing, I have the feeling of having been transported somewhere — though I don’t yet know where — but maybe I only feel that because I’ve been told this is a very good story™. If this were an unknown author, would I care?

It continues,

At half-past eight they drove out of the town.
The high road was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark, long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden. But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always—invariably—longed for one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897

By the end of that first paragraph any doubt is gone, I have been transported! Then ADHD. I’m reading wikipedia.

In terms of artfulness, superb, but he becomes didactic when trying to give meaning to it.
— Leo Tolstoy, from his diary, 21 December 1897

Leo wrote that the same day it was published! Dude was keen!

Now I’m looking up what didactic means…

didactic: Intended to teach, especially in a way that is too determined or eager, and often fixed and unwilling to change.

Okay, so Leo thinks it sounds nice but it doesn’t hold up. I don’t know what to think yet, I’ve only read one paragraph.

Avvai thinks Kyle and I are being obsessive and over-dramatic about the doorbell. I didn’t think we were, but then Kyle made a very unconvincing rebuttal to Avvai’s concerns and in the process he convinced me that we are in fact obsessed.

No time to dwell on that though. The first good lead was The Convenience Store Theory wherein I thought the sound might be the open door chime of the convenience store below the apartment. ‘First’ because I’ve forgotten the one before that, and ‘good’ because it was before we all got very jaded about ever figuring out where the flippin’ doorbell is. Back when things could still be good.

Avvai and I investigated the convenience store on the way back from ~~a free pizza party~~ a talk on data-journalism at a university that sounds made-up. By investigated I mean I opened the door, heard no chime, and backed out while giving the cashier — who probably thought I was insane — that particular kind of awkward smile that is usually reserved for bumping into someone we vaguely knew in schools’ mum at the supermarket, the kind of encounter that makes you wish you’d moved to a different city years ago. I then proceed to walk past the window while holding eye-contact with him. (The eye-contact may not have been necessary)

Okay, back to live-blogging a woman in a cart.

The imagery is ‘strong’ (why does strong sound weak when I say it?), the contrast of a beautifully described scene and Marya’s boredom, her feeling of having “been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years” is vivid, artful,

She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had once had a father and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big flat near the Red Gate, but of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague and fluid like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had died soon after… She had a brother, an officer; at first they used to write to each other, then her brother had given up answering her letters, he had got out of the way of writing. Of her old belongings, all that was left was a photograph of her mother, but it had grown dim from the dampness of the school, and now nothing could be seen but the hair and the eyebrows.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897

The loss of memory, the loss of family, the loss of everything once owned — everything’s shit but it sounds really beautiful (except the ding dong, which obviously does not sound beautiful). Top marks. And we’re well into aha! territory — the feeling — that awful exquisite ache that is the other side of beauty. I read something beautiful and all of a sudden I’m reminded of how little I will read in my life and I hate it. And then I console myself with all the things I’m so grateful to have read and I love it again. This is really good. I still don’t know why this is good though, need George for that.

Avvai’s final contribution on the case — before herself backing away and laughing from the other side of The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003) — was to suggest that maybe it was some kind of pager system for someone in the building who makes deliveries for ÜbermenschEats.

I can’t remember why we think it’s not that, but Avvai has abandoned us now,

[she] merely laughed, and apparently it was all the same to [her], and [she] asked nothing better of life. [She] was kind, gentle, naïve; [she] had no grasp of this coarse life, [she] did not know [what it is to be held hostage by a doorbell.]
~~— Marya describing Hanov~~ me, despairing at the unfairness of it all, of the care-free experience of the neuro-typical, of the Avvai’s of the world

Kyle suggested it might be a special bell for delivery people at the lobby; I wondered if it was the door chime from the liquor store (wait… is that my only contribution… just slight variations on {A Bell In A Door In The Shop?}… shit); Kyle felt sure he’d cracked the case wide open with The Crosswalk Theory. Standing beside the crosswalk, staring up at unmarked boxes on power poles, realising there isn’t even a button, that no even approximately similar sound emanates, we start to feel that maybe the case has cracked us.

Before I know it I’m actually inside the convenience store, and now even I think I sound like a crazy person. I hear myself telling the older Turkish woman at the desk that I live in the apartment upstairs, that I’ve been hearing a very faint, intermittent ringing sound that is slowly driving me insane, and does she know anything about it? Has she also heard this sound? She looks alarmed, she doesn’t know anything about any ringing — except maybe the thought of ringing the police — then for some reason she says “thank you” and I will myself to just cringe out of existence.

Now we’re introduced to Hanov, “a man of about forty, with a worn face and a lifeless expression”. Very cringe.

He lived alone on his large estate, was not in the service, and it was said of him that he did nothing at home but pace from one end of the room to the other, whistling, ~~or play chess with his old footman~~ [driven to madness by the incessant ringing of an unknown bell].

But why are Kyle and I so affected? The c-section theory is out (we’re one of each), so that leaves only… ADHD!

George agrees,

the mind can be two places at once. (Many trains are running simultaneously in there, consciousness aware of only one at a time.)
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Random House, Ch. Thoughts on "In The Cart", p. 27, 2021

Okay I’m not sure if that really supports what I’m getting at but basically, the ringing of the bell feels like the first-world version of what we always called Chinese Water Torture as kids, where an intermittent drip of water is trained on your immobilised head, and you go mad anticipating when the next drip will come.

The ‘Chinese’ in that is no doubt apocryphal, much like the Chinese burn, or Chinese whispers, but we were kids, we didn’t know any better. And now we’re adults, and we still don’t know any better. Probably Kitchener invented it and then blamed it on the most distant foreigners he could think of.

Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897

So she thinks he’s a loser but she wants to marry him, “devote her whole life to saving him”, what kind of twisted male fantasy is this? You’re horny and lonely Chekov!

On page 22 (Pond, not Cart) George sums up the story (Cart) so far,

An unhappy woman is going somewhere in a cart.

“Meanwhile the ~~road~~ ringing was growing worse and worse” causing me to sum up my time in Vancouver thus,

A confused man is going nowhere in his quest to figure out WHERE THIS FUCKING DING DONG IS COMING FROM!

And all too soon, Chekov is wrapping up the story (it is short after all),

she felt as she had been then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly, beseechingly:
“Mother!” And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had awakened…
“Vassilyevna, get in!”
And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897

From perfect dream to perfect nightmare. Reading this is like watching great cinema, I sit in wonder at the artist who can move and conduct me with such easy fluency; I feel buoyed up, rendered weightless by the exquisite craft. And I contrast this artist with the sadist, who curses me hourly, minutely, with this wretched ringing,

In reality, life was ~~arranged~~ awful and ~~human relations were~~ complicated so utterly beyond all understanding [BY THE INCESSANT RINGING OF THE BELL!] that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one’s heart sank.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, Russkiye Vedomosti, 1897

Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, 1897, translated by Constance Garnett

11:40pm on November 28, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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In the cave we starve and grow fat

2024-11-27T23:24:42Z

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, Ch. In Plato's Cave, 1977

We are the glutton, unable to escape our hunger. In our cultural subconscious we imagine ourselves as Moses in the desert, gasping for ideas, starving for meaning, when in truth, we are drowning in a flood of false ideas and false idols. In this age of abundance, how do we shift from accumulating ideas to truly understanding the great ones we already have?

I’m not so vain as to imagine I will originate any new ideas in my lifetime, and I don’t lament that either, I think there are enough ideas in the world already, and enough very good ideas that the primary goal of developed society — rather than focusing on new ideation — ought to be connecting the right people, with the right ideas, at the right time.

This, in essence, is the pure idea of the school — to transmit the essential, irreducible ideas of our culture and furnish the mind with robust tools for thinking in depth — but we’ve pretty well bungled that with a combination of rote learning and standardised testing. If the ideas are good, the dogma is unnecessary, and if the dogma is necessary, the ideas are no good. Our over-emphasis on breadth and an obsession with the archetypal complete individual dramatically limits our cultural capacity for depth by disavowing the necessity of collaboration. And depth, not breadth, is the way into meaning,

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
— Matthew 7:13–14, The New Testament

Consumption has consumed our culture. The belief that we need new ideas arises not from actual fact, but from this hunger borne of a belief that, with just the right ideas, we might be able to “hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology”. This approach to learning, of infinite accrual, the implicit belief that more is better, is failing us. Only better is better. More is just more.

Drowning in such abundance, it is more likely that we are limited not by what we don’t yet know, but by all that we already do.

So if the better ideas we’re searching for have already been written, what even needs doing?

Re-contextualisation and re-exploration of those ideas. Spreading those ideas. Building them into the fabric of meaningful, human-scale communities. Doing justice to just ideas.

We do justice not with lip-service, but with reverence. By enacting them now, not waiting for some future idea or technology to usher in a utopia. A meaningful life emerges from a foundation of good ideas that cover how we relate to each other and the world, how we discover can be of service to others. The world is hungry for a gospel for our time, but we can’t have it because we’ve lost all taste.

What is taste? It’s hard to define, but we all have it, that melange of thoughts and feelings that emerge spontaneously when we’re first confronted with an object, a person, or an idea. Taste is the minds gatekeeper, it is the first filter, manning the same watchtower as prejudice, but under an altogether different mandate. Taste is a kind of prejudice, and like any prejudice it may do harm, but the alternative: to engage with every object, person, and idea with not just an open mind, but an empty one — I don’t believe this is possible, though I think there is great value in trying. Language is prejudice, skill is prejudice, pain creates prejudice, as does pleasure. Everything we are, all that we see and do, and which is done to us, alters our relationship with the world forever. But where regressive prejudice makes the world small and scary, taste enlarges and entangles the world, acknowledges both that all things are connected, and that we cannot swallow it all. Taste, true taste, does not close doors, rather it helps us to decide which doors to open.

11:24pm on November 27, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Publishing something everyday for a month

2024-11-23T23:43:45Z

Like a fool I’ve committed myself to publishing something every day for a month. I can’t lie, it’s already been a struggle. I’ve been succumbing to distraction, if anything, more than usual. I’d have given up by now but Kyle and Avvai are both supporting the effort with proof reading, handy tips, accountability, and lots of encouragement — so there’s no escape!

Today is day six and it’s a meta day, writing about the process of writing. Sue me.

The writing so far, having started on the 18th,

What makes a good shortcut?
Kyle's inspiring person project
How can you afford this? — my favourite so far, very much the vein I want to be writing in
Gasper, Prand, and Wilson
Little communities on the Kupa
Publishing something everyday for a month — this one you’re reading now

Day 30, the end of the commitment, will be December 17th.

Committing to publishing something every day for a month is a forcing function, and it is potent. I am writing more. And feeling where I get bogged down each day, repeatedly, is forcing me to confront those hurdles and imagine better ways over them. Gradually I am discovering what my natural process is.

Here are some of the areas I’m trying to focus on,

Write a lot, write it now, spend it all, shoot it, don’t wait until you know enough to write it well else you’ll never learn what it takes to write it well.
Delay the edit as far as possible
Too often I get bogged down in premature optimisation. I’ve always done this. I even wrote about it… three and half years ago. Precious little has changed.
Contextualise as little as possible
Say only what is essential to situate it in a rich story. I frequently lose momentum with writing because of unbounded scope and premature editing. But there is tension with the scoping, because writing is at its most thrilling for me when I can write in a stream of consciousness way and feel its parts expanding to their true proportion. When one part has outgrown the piece of writing it began in, it naturally becomes its own thing, and that spidering-out of thought elicits a kind of bliss for me. Some examples of this indulgently sprawling style,
I need to find the balance of the two, a rhythm that permits both the cycle of expanding and focusing, but also the tighter stories/vignettes that move me.

Better to be left wanting than wanting to leave.
Write for one person
After really struggling to bring my writing on the 20th to a cohesive point, it was throwing the whole lot out and rewriting it for that German father I met in Slovenia last year that made it all make sense. But even in that, I was really writing for myself. Acknowledging that — leaning into it, deepening that practice — is what I want to be doing.

The first objective of writing for me is to engage with my way of being — to look at how I live and explore what that says about me; to examine my assumptions about the world, about people, and practice letting go; to gradually synthesise my ways of seeing, thinking, and being into a cohesive, integral philosophy of living.

It comes down to respecting the audience. People don’t need spoon-feeding, they can come to their own conclusions by drawing inspiration from a diffuse set of influences of which my writing will be — at best — a small part.

Rather than being dispiriting, this is liberating. If I can consistently write the best version of a thing for me, or for some specific person that I know/love, then through that process I will write things that can be of use to a broader set of people. Specificity is the key.

11:43pm on November 23, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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The origins of the bug in the machine, Thomas Edison, Capt. Grace Hopper

2024-10-31T18:52:17Z

I wasn’t quite satisfied with my recall of the first computer bug story when I told it recently, but it took me a while to piece together where I’d heard it. Eventually I got to thinking it might have been from Grace Hopper so did a bit more digging and turned up a video of a presentation she gave in 1982,

I thought you might like to know that the first computer bug is still in existence. We were building Mark II the summer of 1945. It was a hot summer in Cambridge, and naturally since it was World War II we were working in a World War I temporary building. Air conditioning wasn’t very good, no screens, and Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay, it was one of the big signal relays, and inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth about this big.

So the operator got a pair of tweezers and very carefully fished the moth out of the relay, put it in the log book, and put scotch tape over it. And below it he wrote, “first actual bug found”.

I knew you’d be glad to know that the bug is still in the log book under the scotch tape. It’s in the museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren, Virginia.
— Capt. Grace Hopper, Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People, National Security Agency, 1982

Which confirms what I had thought except for one significant detail: they were called bugs even before the finding of the bug.

The Wikipedia history of the bug cites Moth in the machine: Debugging the origins of ‘bug’ from Computerworld, September 3, 2011, and says,

The Middle English word bugge is the basis for the terms bugbear and bugaboo as terms used for a monster.

While a Thomas Edison quote confirms that Bug has been used to refer to undesired behaviour in a system since at least the 1870′s,

It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that “Bugs”—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.
— Thomas Edison, Edison to Puskas, 1878

6:52pm on October 31, 2024 from Istanbul, Marmara, Turkey

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