Jack Cheng

Moving Upstairs

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:28:00 -0400

One of my roommates moved out of our apartment this weekend, and a former roommate came by to pick up a few things she’d left behind during her own move. In their wake of open cupboards and swaths of dust, I decided to do some early summer purging. I cleaned out the fridge, the bookshelves, the wardrobe in my bedroom closet.

The experience was not entirely different from when I edit early drafts of my writing. The hoarder impulses kick in, and there’s a similar desire to hold on to certain pithy sentences and clever metaphors, literary equivalents of the hundred-forty-dollar shirt you bought three years ago and never wear or the ugly oversized sentimental sweater you got from your aunt last Christmas. When you attempt to triage, the Voice tells you: “this isn’t a bad shirt, I should wear it more” or “this is a really clever sentence, I should find a place to put it.” There’s a perfectly good reason not to keep that shirt, as there’s a perfectly good reason not to use that sentence: it doesn’t go along with the rest of your wardrobe.

A few years ago, a friend shared with me his strategy for decluttering his home. He and his wife lived in a duplex and decided to gather every single thing they had and put it in the bottom level of the duplex. They moved upstairs, lived in just the top level, and as they needed something, they would go downstairs, find it, and bring it up. Little by little, they repopulated their life with only what was necessary.

I was thinking about this strategy today, and I realized it works because if you have something at hand to begin with, you can come up with a bunch of reasons to keep it, whereas if you start without it and have to go out of your way to get it, you have to ask a different question. Instead of asking, “Why should I keep this thing?” You ask, “What thing do I need here?”

I also realized today that I use this same strategy when I write.

Think of the rough draft as the initial hoarding: you have just moved into your house and you’ve gathered all this junk and written down everything in your head and the whole place is messy and cluttered. You start there, and then you move upstairs. You create a separate document or version and begin anew, with a blank page, a basic outline, the essential furniture. You leave all the clever sentences and paragraphs downstairs, and you won’t miss them, and the ones that you do bring back are the ones that fill a need; the ones that fit.

It's Not You, It's the Writing

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:25:00 -0400

Today was the 24-Hour Book Club reading of These Days, and I was home for most of it, following along on Twitter. When evening came and a group of readers had finished the book, I joined them for a Google Hangout.

A question came up: What was it like seeing people’s reactions to the book in real-time?

My answer: It was exciting. And incredibly nerve-racking.

The ability to take criticism, to me, is something you need to have if you want to be great in any creative field. Criticism can be hard to handle because we see this thing we’ve made as a part of ourselves, and when our work is being criticized, it’s as though we’re being criticized. When our work is praised, our egos get a boost, but this too can impede our progress. Overly negative feedback leads to paralysis; overly positive feedback leads to complacency. Early on we can seek those who know how to temper useful, critical feedback to make it more palatable, but at some point, we have to put our work out there.

When feedback sends me reeling, I try to remember the following: It’s not you, it’s the writing.

It’s not an aspect of your personage you have no control over, it’s the writing. It’s the thing you created at a certain time, under a certain set of circumstances. It’s not you, it’s the writing, because the writing, you can easily work on. The writing, you can easily improve.

Even when the criticism is addressed to you, when it says, The author is this and The author is that, it’s really about the writing. It’s really the reader reacting to the writing. If the reader knows nothing about you beyond this thing you wrote, how can they make an accurate judgement about the person you are today, based on what is essentially a relic of your past? Conversely, if the reader is a friend, then they’re more likely to know the real you. They are able to separate you from the work you do, just as they wouldn’t think less of you because happened to get a bad haircut.

It’s not you, it’s the haircut. And it’s the writing. So you take the criticism and weigh it against all the other criticism, and you write and take the criticism and write and it gets easier and your writing gets better and you are still you.

A Something About "Something About"

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 19:41:00 -0400

Next Sunday, June 9th, a bunch of people on the internet will be simultaneously reading These Days and discussing it live via Twitter, as part of my friend Diana’s 24-Hour Book Club. If the book’s been sitting in your queue, this might be a good opportunity to crack it open. I read the previous month’s book with the group and posted some thoughts here, and I’ll be following along next Sunday and asking and answering questions about my own book.

Writing the review reminded me of a phrase I’ve been trying to eliminate from my prose, the phrase, “something about.” As in, “There’s something about … ” or “something about the way … “

Clarity of thought is monumental for any communicator, and “something about” suggests the opposite of clarity. It suggests you haven’t thought through the quality or phenomenon you’re describing—what is it about the way her hair gleams in the moonlight that approximates Arizona? What is it about how he views human interaction that also makes him the perfect sushi chef?

“Something about” is a phrase for rough drafts and top-of-the-head conversation, for when you’re still working out what that something is. Once it’s there on the page, it should be an orange flag that screams, This needs more consideration.

When you’ve eliminated “something about” from your prose, when you no longer find yourself holding onto it, and instead reaching for the sharper thought, the more precise idea, then you can bring “something about” back. You can deploy it consciously, for effect—in the dialogue of a character who lacks that mental clarity, or as a mask, to obfuscate that which you yourself know but intend to hide.

The Conversation

Sun, 26 May 2013 23:56:00 -0400

A rough draft, to me, is a conversation I have with the blank page. Like great conversations, great writing sessions leap from one thread to the next, often circling around the same themes but sometimes going off on wait what were we taking about tangents. The hands on clocks and watches spin and spin, and at the end you’re buzzing with the joy of connection, filled with new ideas, excited to hang out again and pick up where you left off.

Doing research in the middle of a writing session is the awkward pause when someone stops a conversation to check something on their phone. Once or twice might be okay, but when done repeatedly, it doesn’t bode well for the larger discussion. Even when you find yourself unable to come up with the name of that place you heard the quote from, it’s better to keep the conversation moving, because more important is the underlying thought, the idea or mood being expressed. Plus, you can always look things up later.

When I work on new writing, I leave little markers for myself on facts to check or details to look into, such as «town in Colorado» or «fee for prepaid credit cards». I’ll use it when «Mr. Mulligan» talks about the oxygen content in the earth’s atmosphere during science class but his name sounds more like the name of the volleyball coach who at the last pep rally had his players run through a banner that said Let’s go «mascots».

Early on in my drafts, plots and characters tend to change with more fluidity, so the research I do for something on page twenty could be irrelevant by the time I get to page sixty. Deferring research until later also has another benefit: when I see a lot of markers next to each other, or the same ones appearing over and over, it helps focus the eventual research. For the new book, my goal is to finish the full rough draft without going out of my way to look up anything.

Maybe this practice comes from writing code, I’m not sure. I started doing it when I was working on new scenes for These Days, and I’ve been doing it regularly ever since. It gives me a name—albeit imperfect—for what I have not yet named, and thus lets me keep the conversation going, uninterrupted.

Found them too late and had to settle for A So-so Plumber LLC.

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:11:16 -0400

Found them too late and had to settle for A So-so Plumber LLC.

New Digs

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:29:00 -0400

Oh, hello! You’re the first ones here. Come in. A few new faces, I see. And a lot of familiar ones. Those who’ve been to my old place will recognize the same furniture: There’s the chair of injection-molded naivety. There’s the dining table made from reclaimed despair. That’s the same lamp, yes, 60-watt optimism. Here’s the sofa I got off Craigslist. Have a seat. Would you like some tea?

This week I made a few updates to my personal site, including a new “About” page. I’ve also been finishing up the final Kickstarter delivery for These Days: the annotated hardcovers for backers of the Marginalia Bundle.

It’s the first time I’ve re-read the book after publication, and after adding my notes, I’m struck by how much serendipity, both externally and internally, there was during the writing process. I plan to type out these written annotations and put them all online at some point, but to give you a little preview, I’ve highlighted a few stories on Readmill (minor spoilers):

One thing I’ve realized: in the beginning, I was looking for solutions outside the book. I was doing a lot of research, trying to learn more about the ideas I was exploring. In some cases it helped but was for the most part counterproductive. As I got further along, I discovered that there were often better solutions to be found in my own memories, and in the world of the book itself, and these solutions lent the novel a greater degree of realism, too. Sometimes, the characters would be struggling with an issue and they would have a sudden epiphany, and as that was happening, I was having the very same epiphany, that, Oh shit, the thing I made up off the top of my head ten chapters ago? I can use it here.

As I work on the rough draft for my next novel, I’m trying to adhere to the following rule: no research. At least not while I’m writing. How I go about it, well, that’s a topic for next week.

Courtesy of my friend Sarah: photos from the May 1 launch party...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:23:00 -0400

Courtesy of my friend Sarah: photos from the May 1 launch party for These Days at General Assembly, one of my favorite New York tech spaces.

A chat with Jack Cheng, author of “These Days”

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:40:48 -0400

A chat with Jack Cheng, author of “These Days”:

Had a quick chat with the folks at Readmill last week about Kickstarting These Days, the use of technology in narrative fiction, and novels for people who don’t read novels. They’re also giving away ten copies of the e-book.

I spent a half hour this morning thinking about my ideal daily...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:50:18 -0400

I spent a half hour this morning thinking about my ideal daily routine and here is the result.

I visited Tumblr today.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:36:32 -0400

I visited Tumblr today.

Or you could leave it. It your decision.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:00:09 -0400

Or you could leave it. It your decision.

These Days is my first novel. It’s modern-day love story about a...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:08:00 -0400

These Days is my first novel. It’s modern-day love story about a guy who designs prop computer interfaces for furniture showrooms and a girl who doesn’t have a cellphone. It’s about creative work, startups, our relationship with these glowing rectangles in our pockets, and how they affect our relationships with each other.

It came out of a journaling exercise in the summer of 2009. I found myself devoting my nights and weekends to it, and three years later, I successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign to publish it. I hired an editor, completed the final manuscript, then designed and typeset the book myself. A limited run of hardcover editions went out to Kickstarter backers in April 2013, and the paperback and e-book are now available in the US:

If you live outside the US, or prefer to purchase a DRM-free ePub directly from me, you can do so here.

Help spread the word!

The Weather Channel has taken to naming winter storms. They put...

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:30:00 -0500

The Weather Channel has taken to naming winter storms. They put up a page on why they’re naming these storms, a page that reads like some TSA checklist or corporate communications handbook they give you on your first day at a new job and you only ever skim. I bet the scribes at the Weather Channel have already written the punny headlines for every name on this list too (though, I don’t know if the alternative is more preferable). I suppose this is what you get when you’re a 24-hour cable channel that’s been around for thirty years covering something that’s been around forever, competing for attention with a little widget that shows up when I slide my finger from the top of my phone to the bottom of my phone.

What makes this wreak of sensationalism is how ominous sounding the names are. But it’s an oddly appropriate sensationalism, because the worst storms tend to have the least ominous names. Take Andrew for example. Sounds like a swell guy. Growing up his friends all called him Andy but lately he’s been introducing himself as Andrew because it sounds more mature, which makes it all the more endearing. Except he’ll piss all over your furniture and rip the roof off your house and fling it across the palmtops like a frisbee, and he’ll do it wearing the biggest shit-eating grin on his face. You have to watch out for guys like Andrew.

Look at the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record. The two deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record (once the National Weather Service started naming hurricanes in the 50s) have been Mitch and Fifi. A soccer dad and someone’s poodle on a pink leash. One of the few exceptions might be Katrina, who sounded like she was going to be a total bitch and actually turned out to be a total bitch. But Fifi? Fifi?! Fifi. Look at the Weather Service’s list of storm names and you’ll see an unmotley crue of similarly mild-manned characters.

I think we have some basic human need to dress up something innocuous with something flashy, temper something devastating with something tame. We crave slight dissonance, like erotica with the cover of a crime thriller. The catch is once we start down that path, the dissonance dissolves. We see more erotica in understated covers and roll our eyes and go oh great not another one of those. We figure out quickly that Nor’easter Khan or Winter Storm Xerxes are probably not worth our attention and stop buying into them. We are the town’s villagers and The Weather Channel is crying wolf.

I’ll admit that there’s a certain entertainment value in the names, and I do look forward to when this inevitably seeps into other meteorological phenomena. Because come on, water cooler small talk would be that much better if we had Heat Wave Diomedes or Pollen Alert Voldemort to talk about. I’ll laugh, you’ll laugh, we’ll talk about how silly it all is and the suits at The Weather Channel will nod their heads and the reports from their focus groups will tell them gosh, it’s really working. And people will get promoted and we’ll move on with our day as usual, until a real one rolls around and we wait in line at the Trader Joe’s and buy up all the bread and three-dollar wine and charge all our phones and laptops and iPads as the skies darken and the city shuts down, bracing for the wrath of Hurricane Justin.

Lately I’ve been taking pictures of ads in New York subway...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:20:00 -0400

Lately I’ve been taking pictures of ads in New York subway stations and using bits and pieces of these ads to compose short visual poems. I’ve set up a tumblr blog to collect some of these poems, called Subway Cento. A couple of my favorites so far are the one shown above, along with distillation and Popmoney.

A cento is a poem made from other poems, and I’ve found that the language of underground ad copy is ripe with poetic material—a grab bag of big declarative statements, amusing attempts at empathy, and the latent hopes and desires and fears that drive the vernacular of modern-day consumerism. Mix it up in the right ways and there are surprising stories to be told, of love and loss and aching truth and staggering beauty.

I’ve spent my nights and weekends these past three years...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:10:15 -0400

I’ve spent my nights and weekends these past three years writing a novel. It’s about a guy who designs fake computer interfaces and a girl who doesn’t own a cellphone. If you enjoyed essays of mine like The Slow Web and Habit Fields, I think you’ll find a lot to love about this book.

But first I need your help. I recently finished a new draft of the manuscript and now I’m raising money to hire an editor and publish a hardcover version of the book. I made a short (2 minute) video about it, and you can see the video and back the project on the Kickstarter page.

Working on this book has been an incredible learning experience for me, and I look forward to sharing it with you.

Dad's Idea

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:26:00 -0400

Dad's Idea:

A short essay I wrote for the debut issue of Offscreen Magazine, a beautifully assembled print publication about web workers.

The Slow Web

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:46:00 -0400

One of the better spots to enjoy a bowl of ramen noodles here in New York is Minca, in the East Village. Minca is the kind of place just out of the way enough that as you’re about to get there, you start wondering if you’ve already passed it. A bowl of noodles at Minca isn’t quite as neatly put together as those of other ramen establishments in the city, but it is without a doubt among the tastiest. There’s a home-cooked quality to a bowl of noodles at Minca. And there’s a homey vibe to the restaurant. Minca is a good place to meet a friend and sit and talk and eat and drink, and eat and talk and sit and drink some more.

The last time I was at Minca, I had an especially enjoyable conversation with Walter Chen. Walter is the CEO of a company called iDoneThis, a quiet little service that helps you catalog the things you’ve accomplished each day. iDoneThis sends you a daily email at your specified time, and you simply reply with a list of things you did that day. It’s useful for teams who want to keep track of what everyone is working on, and for individuals who just want to keep track.

I first reached out to Walter because I was mesmerized by this koan at the bottom of the daily emails:

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you’ll find an updated calendar when you wake.

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. The Slow Web Movement. I’d never heard that phrase before. I immediately started digging around—and by that I mean I googled “Slow Web Movement”—and the lone relevant search result was a blog post from two years ago. If you run the search again today, you’ll find Walter’s writeup on his company blog, which reflects a lot of what he told me over dinner.

As we talked further, I said to Walter that as soon as I saw “the slow web movement,” I assigned my own meaning to it. Because it’s a great name, and great names are like knots—they’re woven from the same stringy material as other words, but in their particular arrangement, they catch, become junctions to which new threads arrive, from which other threads depart. For me, “The Slow Web” neatly tied together a slew of dangling thoughts.

Slow Web and Slow Food

The Slow Web Movement is a lot like the Slow Food Movement, in that they’re both blanket terms that mean a lot of different things. Slow Food began in part as a reaction to the opening of a McDonald’s in Piazza di Spagna in Rome, so from its very origin, it was defined by what it’s not. It’s not Fast Food, and we all know what Fast Food is… right?

Yet, if you ask a bunch of people to describe to you the qualities of Fast Food, you’re likely to get a bunch of different answers: it’s made from low-grade ingredients, it’s high in sugar, salt and fat, it’s sold by multinational corporations, it’s devoured quickly and in overlarge portions, it’s McDonaldsTacoBellSubway, even though Subway’s spent a lot of money marketing fresh bread and ingredients but it’s still Fast Food albeit “healthy” Fast Food.

Fast Food has an “I’ll know it when I see it” quality, and it has this quality because it’s describing something greater than all of its individual traits. Fast Food, and consequently, Slow Food, describe a feeling that we get from food.

Slow Web works the same way. Slow Web describes a feeling we get when we consume certain web-enabled things, be it products or content. It is the sum of its parts, but let’s start by describing what it’s not: the Fast Web.

The Fast Web

What is the Fast Web? It’s the out of control web. The oh my god there’s so much stuff and I can’t possibly keep up web. It’s the spend two dozen times a day checking web. The in one end out the other web. The web designed to appeal to the basest of our intellectual palettes, the salt, sugar and fat of online content web. It’s the scale hard and fast web. The create a destination for billions of people web. The you have two hundred twenty six new updates web. Keep up or be lost. Click me. Like me. Tweet me. Share me. The Fast Web demands that you do things and do them now. The Fast Web is a cruel wonderland of shiny shiny things.

Timely vs. Real-time

One of the centerpieces of the Fast Web is this notion of real-time. Your friend listens to a song, and you find out about it. The smaller the gap between these two, the closer it is to real-time.

Real-time interactions happen as they happen. Timely ones, on the other hand, happen as you need them to happen. Some real-time interactions, like breaking news about an earthquake, can be timely. But not all timely interactions are real-time. I’d argue that most are not. And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness.

A great example of a Slow Web product is Instapaper. Instapaper takes the process of discovering a long article and reading it on the spot (real-time) and breaks it apart, deferring the act of reading until later, when we have an extended moment to read (timely). I may be stretching my analogy a bit here, but it’s kind of like boxing up a meal and putting it away in the fridge for when you’re hungry, except in this case, it doesn’t lose as much of its taste.

Likewise, iDoneThis takes a pretty standard interaction of creating an item in a database and then reading it back—one that might normally take less than few seconds to execute—and blows it apart.

A typical app might work like this: there’s a text field for you to type in what you did. You type it in and hit submit. The database gets updated and almost instantly you see the submitted text displayed back to you. iDoneThis takes those last two steps—the update and the review—and stretches them out from a few milliseconds to half a day. The database gets updated sometime overnight and the display-back happens the next morning in your inbox.

Another name for this is turn-based, as in turn-based gaming. A traditional game of Scrabble or Pictionary is relatively demanding in real-time: it requires two or more people in the same place with both desire and freedom to play these games. Deconstructing the real-time experience gives you the Words With Friends and Draw Somethings of the world. An activity that would otherwise be impractical can now carry on in a manner more timely for each participant. Instapaper is turn-based reading. iDoneThis is turn-based data tracking.

But timeliness alone doesn’t make something Slow Web. Email, after all, is turn-based communication, and our email inboxes are probably one of the biggest sources of Fast Web distress. Those turn-based games can also quickly get overwhelming if we have too many of them going at once. What’s missing in these cases is an inherent sense of rhythm.

Rhythm vs. Random

Let’s say I told you there was a new HBO drama that aired for one hour from 9-10pm every Wednesday night. Once you decide it’s a show you’re interested in and can make room for, the act of watching takes over. It becomes about the show. Now let’s say I told you there’s a new HBO drama that’s sometimes an hour, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two hours, that may or may not air every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, between 6 and 11pm. Suddenly it’s no longer just about the show. It’s about whether or not the show will be on. What next? becomes When next?

In the Fast Web, we’re faced with this proposition numerous times a day. The randomness and frequency of the updates in our inboxes and on our dashboards stimulate the reward mechanisms in our brain. While this can give us a boost when we come across something unexpectedly great, dependency leads to withdrawal, resulting in a roller coaster of positive and negative emotions. The danger of unreliable rhythms is too much reward juice.

Reliable rhythms lead to predictable outcomes, and rhythm is an expression of moderation. Apps like iDoneThis have this moderation: you receive your email prompt at the same time each day, and each interaction is similarly demanding. Unlike your inbox as an aggregate, where there can be a large range of demandingness: there are newsletters you can scan and trash, personal emails that require lengthy responses, and everything in between. The lack of moderation means sometimes you spend a few minutes going through your inbox, and other times you spend a few hours.

That’s why most email productivity systems are concerned with a form of moderation: standardization. They encourage you to standardize the size and demandingness of the interaction (archive or delete messages and move on, transfer email requiring lengthy follow-ups to a to-do list, limit responses to three sentences) and standardizing the frequency (limit checking email to x times a day, at specified times).

A great example of rhythm and moderation in practice is the rollout of Wander. For the weeks leading up to their beta launch, Keenan and crew took what could have been a first-run experience on another site and stretched it out over the course of four weeks into something akin to an advent calendar. Every week there is a similarly demanding interaction: give a place, pick a photo, type a reason.

Another service that does this well is Budge from Buster and the team at Habit Labs. Budge is built around notifications reminding you to do the daily things that improve your life in small but beneficial ways, like flossing, meditating, or tracking your weight. Once you’ve signed up, you can interact with Budge solely through their notifications. In the past I’ve gone for weeks without visiting their site or app while still happily using the service just by replying to the timed texts I get on my phone.

This is a tremendously important distinction between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is destination-based. Slow Web is interaction-based. Fast Web is built around homepages, inboxes, and dashboards. Slow Web is built around timely notifications. Fast Web companies often try to rack up pageviews, since pageviews mean ad impressions. Slow Web companies tend to put effectiveness first. Here’s the crazy thing about Budge: the better it works, the less I use it. Once I get in the habit of flossing, my brain takes over, and I no longer need the notifications. Walter describes this credo well in the aforementioned blog post:

Behavior change, not growth. Behavior change is about improving the lives of others, scale is about ego. Getting scale after nailing behavior change is easier than nailing behavior change (and thus having a shot at durability) after hitting scale.

It doesn’t mean Slow Web companies can’t grow. It simply means that they put effectiveness before growth. And effectiveness leads to a sense of gratitude—I may be done flossing with Budge, but there are other things I could improve, and having been through it once, I trust the company even more.

Knowledge vs. Information

Timeliness. Rhythm. Moderation. These things dovetail into what I consider the biggest difference between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you. And timeliness, rhythm, and moderation are all essential for memory and learning.

Again, iDoneThis serves as a fitting example. After you use it for a few days, you start seeing at the bottom of your daily emails the things you’ve done in the past, a day or a week before. It’s kind of a contained version of Timehop, Benny and Jon’s product that, once you’ve connected it to your various social accounts, sends you a daily—get ready for this word—digest with everything you did a year ago on that day.

Timehop and iDoneThis both help us remember and reflect, and this gives us perspective. It grounds us in the flow of time, or perhaps lifts us up above the treetops. iDoneThis is the only task management tool I’ve come across with the potential to help you realize you’re working on the wrong thing. Fast Web derives value from the just happened or the soon to happen. Slow Web unlocks value from deeper in the past.

The Slow Web

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as individuals can always set our own guidelines and curb the effect of the Fast Web, but as I hope I’ve illustrated, there are a number of considerations the creators of web-connected products can make to help us along. And maybe the Slow Web isn’t quite a movement yet. Maybe it’s still simmering. But I do think there is something distinctly different about the feeling that some of these products impart on their users, and that feeling manifests from the intent of their makers.

Fast Web companies want to be our lovers, they want to be by our sides at all times, want us to spend every moment of our waking lives with them, when sometimes that’s not what we really need. Sometimes what we really need are friends we can meet once every few months for a bowl of ramen noodles at a restaurant in the East Village. Friends with whom we can sit and talk and eat and drink and maybe learn a little about ourselves in the process. And at the end of the night get up and go our separate ways, until next time.

How to Build an Owl

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:16:00 -0400

by Kathleen Lynch

Decide you must.

Develop deep respect
for feather, bone, claw.

Place your trembling thumb
where the heart will be:
for one hundred hours watch
so you will know
where to put the first feather.

Stay awake forever.
When the bird takes shape
gently pry open its beak
and whisper into it: mouse.

Let it go.

My Interview on The Setup

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:05:05 -0500

My Interview on The Setup:

I’m a fan of Daniel Bogan’s The Setup and am honored to be on a short list of interviewees alongside heroes like William Gibson and Keita Takahashi. There’s a certain kind of ambient learning that makes The Setup work as an interview blog. The answers to the boilerplate questions are revealing when considered across the full archive—you start to understand people by the differences in what they pay attention to.

You also start to see what they have in common, and I find that the answer to the last question, “What would be your dream setup?” is almost always the same. It’s some variation of “I have it” or “I’m nearly there,” and I think it’s because doing any kind of personally meaningful work requires a state of almost-thereness. If you had the absolute, perfect setup, you would stop trying to change, stop dreaming of the way things could be better. Being almost there keeps you moving but with an eye peeled for a better path. The answer to the last question is always the same because the constant pursuit of perfection is the closest we ever come to attaining it.

"All systems for developing human potential try to teach us to know and understand ourselves better."

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:31:20 -0500

“All systems for developing human potential try to teach us to know and understand ourselves better.”

- Robert Masters & Jean Houston in Listening to the Body: The Psychophysical Way to Health and Awareness