Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

Albert-László Barabási shows that no matter what we think about our spontaneity, randomness does not rule our lives:

At first sight, we would not expect our e-mail patterns to show any similarities. Some people send only a few e-mails a week; others close to a hundred each day; some peek at their e-mail only once a day. Still others practically sleep with their computers. This is why it was surprising that, when it comes to e-mail, everybody appears to follow exactly the same pattern. Indeed, looking at the times between e-mails, no one obeyed a Poisson distribution. Instead, no matter the person, their behaviour followed what we call a “power law”.

But:

[A] power law predicts that most e-mails are sent within a few minutes of one other, appearing as a burst of activity in our e-mailing pattern. But the power law also foresees hours or even days of e-mail silence. In the end, the patterns of our e-mailing follow an inner harmony, where short and long delays mix into a precise law — a law that you probably never suspected you were subject to, that you never made an effort to obey, and that you most likely never even knew existed in the first place.

Einstein himself, Barabási’s studies showed, exhibited this “burstiness,” even though he averaged more than one letter written per day, weekends, included, over the course of his adult life. I like this though: hours or even days of email silence as “inner harmony,” rather than words others might be using as they wait for you to respond.

Jay Rubin (translator of much of Haruki Murakami’s work) on the challenge of translating Japanese:

[He] offers up two sample translations of a paragraph in the Murakami short story “The 1963/1982 Girl from Ipanema.” He notes that while one version is awkward and the other smooth, both are linguistically equidistant from the original Japanese. The awkward version just has an “illusion of literalness” simply because it isn’t as good.

Then Rubin offers up a real literal translation of the same paragraph. English loan words are in italics.

Literal:
High school’s corridor say-if, combination salad think-up. Lettuce and tomato and cucumber and green pepper and asparagus, ring-cut bulb onion, and pink-colour’s Thousand Island dressing. No argument high school corridor’s hit-end in salad specialty shop exists meaning is-not. High school corridor’s hit-end in, door existing, door’s outside in, too-much flash-do-not 25 metre pool exists only is.

Here’s one of the translations Rubin offers — the more literary one.

Published:
When I think of my high school’s corridor, I think of combination salads: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, asparagus, onion rings, and pink Thousand Islands dressing. Not that there was a salad shop at the end of the corridor. No, there was just a door, and beyond the door a drab 25-metre pool.

Two people pass one another on the street. “How are you? one says. Or perhaps, “What are you up to?” It doesn’t really matter. “Fine,” we respond. “Nothing.” Or worse, “How are you?” the other responds in return, not even responding with anything more than a question. These provocations are greeting defaults, our greeting autopilot, as we try to move forward with our days.

Perhaps any answer would be linguistically equidistant from a true response, as nickmamatas says, since the initial question wasn’t seeking a true answer anyway. When we receive a less than “fine” response to a greeting, it’s curious for us to consider which now feels literal and which just the illusion of literalness. Translation is hard work.

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John Ptak explores occupations that have not survived through an exploration of the alphabet:

Its interesting to see what jobs have survived over the years, and what jobs haven’t — particularly those jobs that would have been so widespread and popular that they would be instantly recognized by a child — so much part of the common culture that the initial letter of the job’s name could be used to help children learn the alphabet.

This version of commonplace employment found in a child’s alphabetical primer around 1850 lists the following professions:

[A]le brewer, auctioneer, armourer, artist, bookseller, butcher, baker, cooper, carpenter, cutler, dyer, dairyman, engraver, engineer, fishmonger, fiddle(r), florist, grocer, glazier, hatter, hawker, horse dealer, ironmonger, jeweller, knife-maker, knitter, letter-founder, lace-maker, locksmith, milliner, miner, merchant, nurse, newsman, oilman, optician, omnibus, pastry-cook, physician, rope-maker, rider, shoemaker, shipwright, scavenger, slater, surgeon, sawyer, saddler, tailor, turner, tanner, tinker, upholsterer, vintner, wharfinger, wax-chandler, yeoman, youth, zoologist.

Some of these professions are just gone (47 of the 59 are still around, he notes). Another book introduces children to occupational rhyming couplets, as in the “Amusing Alphabet for Children.” Elsewhere, he uncovers and terms the “Dada Alphabet,” monuments to quiet bits:

[N]on-sequiturs taken out of context and which — once placed on a their own stage and on their own easel in the strong Borges tradition of the reader making the book.

These come from a self-teaching book for German vocabulary in 1879 and stand as unexpected, strong, and a favorite.

[Image: Kantner’s Illustrated Book of Objects and Self-Educator in German and English, 1879 via]

Ryan Freitas on 35 lessons he’s learned so far:

My father always told me that the day we stop learning is the day we die. I wrote this as a sort of preparation for my 35th birthday last week. Some of these are poignant, others are simply trite; I attribute the latter to my growing sense of sentimentality as I age.

For example:

Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.

I’ve always been impressed with Ryan’s stunning ability to put into words what others cannot name. He sees clarity where others only, even sort of, see a gray area. I’ve taken to keeping our conversational marginalia, best I can explain it — sentences on Post-Its — of this wisdom. This from him from a snippet of a past conversation, “When I’m throwing everything into the incinerator, I occasionally stop to make something beautiful.” If conversations had margins, their residue would be on my desktop. And sometimes I get to stop to read. Thanks Ryan.

Alain de Botton on distraction:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless:

We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties — something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture — and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

We need to diet, he advises. And indeed, if we do not dwell on both on what is extraordinary about the ordinary and that there could be — at any moment — risk of volcanic proportions, we will go assuming that tomorrow will be just like today. Through stacks of unread books, seas of feeds, people, invitations, events, and unanswered emails, if we stand still long enough, if we listen and look, if we pause, we see that nothing is ever the same again tomorrow. And that is mostly extraordinary.

Kathleen Rooney on her stance on “persistent optimism,” as one of the qualities of poet Kees’ work:

An optimist is one of the saddest things a person can be. …. a person can’t become so bitter and disappointed if he didn’t start out full of hope.

Regarding him:

I get the sense of someone who knows full well that he ought to hope for the best and expect the worst, but who can’t quite force himself to do that. Even though he is sophisticated and knows that what he expects is impossible, he can’t help but keep wanting the world to be better than it is — that people should be kinder to one another, that the government should be more just, that humane behavior toward other people should be returned and maybe even rewarded — and inevitably, he keeps being thwarted in these desires.

I believe there are more than eight variations on being thwarted, but it’s a start.