making-meaning

4/4. Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work,  all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.”

It’s not just movies and TV, of course — we’re all aghast at how much time we spend on devices, consuming content , whatever that means. Reading and watching and posting and shopping, always shopping for things and ideas and comfort and distraction. Surely this endless marketplace will turn up something that satisfies us at some point! I complained... See more

This, I think, is another reason why Updike has so many detractors. Ever since F.R. Leavis wrote The Great Tradition , there has been a school of literary criticism that has demanded that great novelists also be great moralists: that the job of the writer is not just to reflect the world but to tell it the difference between right and wrong.

That is... See more

If I sometimes feel like my hard drive is full, then it doesn’t matter if what I’m adding to the drive is, on its face, soothing. It’s just more stuff, more data, more things to process. By adopting my friend’s elevated standard for what’s allowed in, I decreased the number of inputs, the number of demands for thought and work and reaction I was re... See more

The ones and zeroes of the digital map tolerate no error or noise. It’s an auto-tuned reality where everything is on the note or it doesn’t exist. Never mind that James Brown reaching up to that note is where we find the soul of the music. In the world of digital figures, that expression of the human soul — that stuff between the official notes — i... See more

The idea is that literary representation is an act of transubstantiation. Literature pulls the real up out of the realm of temporality and insignificance and remakes it into a form that will never decay and never die. There is nothing doctrinally religious about this conception of the literary act. It is at the heart of modernism.

Second, by not letting algorithms decide what deserves your attention. If you want to feel creatively and intellectually alive, stop mindlessly consuming the internet and start mindfully curating it. You need a space away from social media's compulsive rhythm, where your ideas can grow at their own pace.