Bobulate

Odes to iPads

iPad poetic practicum:

I prefer to fall asleep while reading, an excellent way to avoid those nocturnal thoughts that can suddenly jerk you into wretched wakefulness. On chilly nights, I love to pull the covers over everything but my head and read a book propped up against a pillow until I drift off.

You can only do that with the light on, of course, which means that I’d either wake up at 4 am to a bright bedroom or I’d have to calculate the exact moment when the long, cold reach of my arm to the bedside lamp would still leave me sufficient reserves of sleepiness to close the deal.

The iPad requires no bedside light, doesn’t need to be wrangled into a held-open position and will obediently turn its own pages with the tap of a single finger darting out from under the cover of the warm duvet. When that finger hasn’t dropped by in a while, the iPad obligingly turns itself off. While it’s still on, while I’m suspended with it in the darkness in that tiny pool of light, this feels sublimely intimate and snug. For these reasons, I find myself less and less willing to read anything but ebooks in bed.

I also can’t read anything for work at the end of the day, as my brain starts to switch its circuits to dreaming mode. Sometimes I’ll dream that I’m still reading the book, the narrative getting stranger and stranger, the dialogue repeating itself and yet satisfying in some odd way that the conversations in books seldom are.

A new spot to read by Laura Miller and Maud Newton. Night or day: yes.

Teammates

Somewhere among E.B. White and Adam Gopnik there is Cord Jefferson:

I’ve never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I’d wake up in my 10 by 10 room, its window looking out over my building’s rusted trashcans, and somehow think I’d achieved another great victory. …. Eventually my fellow New Yorkers started to feel more like teammates than neighbors. The tumult the City throws in your way daily engenders a sense of community the way getting its ass kicked on a rink might galvanize a hockey team. Stuff like complaining about real estate — the price of it, the rotten brokers, the changing neighborhoods — is like a secret handshake for New Yorkers, thrown out quickly to differentiate between those in the know from everyone else, who probably talk about reality television at dinner. Then there’s the knowing nods from strangers on the street in times of extreme heat or cold, their meaning being “This shit again.” In the cases of literal shit, like when I saw an old lady pooping on the street by my office, there’s the “What are you gonna do?” shrug New Yorkers give one another. At the sight of the pooping woman, I heard a man to my left say to his horrified companion, “It’s, like, New York, y’know?”

Still. We do. We love NYC.

This week my cello and I had to ride the C Train with Giants fans. Unrelated to the parade, it needed to go uptown for some repairs. As I rode, smashed together: me, giant awkward case, Giants fans, flags, shirts, yelling, mashing, directionless, in a direction, in cold sweat, past 14th Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street Station, I realized I had had a choice. I was on the subway. I was not in the privacy and softness of a taxi. We were on the subway. Huddled together. Together in motion. Well, almost. The train was stopped. “Unfamiliar objects on the tracks ahead.” But nobody stopped. The chatter moved on. Fan, flag, woman, cello. We rode along together as the train lurched forward again. Because we are all teammates.

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In commons

Chris Mizes on the seemingly quiet dredge as co-creation between the natural and its urban counterpart:

[T]his massive assemblage of global weather patterns, regional tourism, lunar gravitational forces, transportation infrastructures, urban escapism, geologic displacement, and ocean-floor ecosystems, the dredge becomes only a single point, a transient infrastructure of human desire. The dredge happens at a massive geologic scale but takes place in the context of an expansive network of relations that defies any attempt to place it within such a specific scalar boundary. The miles of pressurized metal tubing temporarily fixed in the beach landscape are a not-so-quiet reminder that “nature” is not the pristine condition of the pre-anthropocene. Instead, we tolerate the dredge’s ephemeral infrastructural interruptions for the sake of remaking a relaxing space outside the city. We are always working against other non-human forces to, in a sense, preserve the “natural” common for human consumption. The dredge reminds us that the “natural” never stands alone.

I like this: dredge as reminder of what is common. Human desire with all its attendant inventions and reinventions, with all its accusations and creations, when at its best is co-creator.

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Weathering weather derivatives

Reportedly, “weather derivatives” are not only a thing, but a growing market:

Financial contracts based on the weather have been around since at least the late 1990s. The contracts, many of which trade like stocks, are typically pegged to such things as rainfall and temperatures. But in the past few years, contracts specifically tied to snowfall have started to take off in popularity. The contacts essentially act like insurance, allowing, say, retailers or ski mountains to insure against too much snow or too little. Wall Street sells the contracts, matching buyers and sellers and pocketing a small commission. Typically, it’s a good business, but this year it could be a real moneymaker. In theory, there could be as many firms betting against snow as for it. But in reality the market is always lopsided. It turns out there are more firms that are hurt by large snowfalls than the opposite. And large ski mountains have yet to get into the market.

The result:

[U]nable to find sellers, brokers who specialize in the market say financial firms ended up taking other side of the trade in order to complete their clients transactions, essentially betting that snowfall would be light this year. “I’m short snow,” says Bill Windle, who heads up weather trading at reinsurance firm RenRe.

Just how much money the financial firms will rake in and who will profit is unclear. Last year, PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimated that the total weather derivatives market was $12 billion. Snow is only a small portion of that, perhaps a few hundred million. But it’s growing.

It’s one thing to capitalize on weather that may be, but another to try to control and capitalize on weather that may be more desirable. Yet that’s precisely what the science of cloud seeding does. The practice was most loudly taken on by Yuri Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow and its most notable enthusiast, who seeded the clouds (with help from the Russian Air Force) to stop rain from falling on his parades. It nearly worked.

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10 ways to be invisible, or rules for making

Elmore Leonard with rules to remain invisible when writing a book that help show rather than tell. Number 10 and the unofficial number 11:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Substitute the word “writing” for whatever it is you do, and this becomes the most important rule for making – not only true for writing, but for anything we make.

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The hill approach

Seth Godin on the hill approach to career development:

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

The craft of your career comes in picking the right hills. Hills just challenging enough that you can barely make it over. A series of hills becomes a mountain, and a series of mountains is a career.

Career wisdom in hill format.

See also: the brick approach.

Itself the revelation

I’ve become very interested in making a whole object. And providing a window into a memory and a time or a place where I like to be.

That’s Eric Cahan, photographer of “equal parts flat color and limitless space.” Or, skies:

The photos were taken at either sunrise or sunset at bodies of water in California, Florida, and New York. The process of finding the right shades to bring out the sublime in nature is “very intuitive – the moment I see it, I feel the color that needs to be highlighted, that wants to emerge.”

Cahan’s most recently work has actually been influenced by James Turrell’s famous project over at the Crater, and as Turrell stated, Cahan also believes:

[L]ight is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

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I love the wild not less than the good

Jeremy Denk writing an account of editing during the making of a recording of the playing of the “Concord:”

[W]e find ourselves trying to cobble together a note-perfect devil. Part of me wants to keep the wildest one, with all its imperfections; as Thoreau said, “I love the wild not less than the good.” But Adam [the recording editor] is convinced that we can have the notes and the wild. There is the vanity of editing yourself to be a perfect version of yourself, but there’s the vanity of loving your imperfections, too. … I reflect with satisfaction that I have drawn him into my insanity.

Ultimately:

[E]diting turns out to be even more nerve-racking than recording. In the moment of playing, the logistics of just hitting the notes distract you from the continuos choices you are making. In the edit you have nothing but choices. And yet you feel helpless, since everything has already been played.

Read the piece in its entirety while listening to Denk’s performance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze from 2010. Not a needless note.

The Two Things game

Economist Glen Whitman on The Two Things:

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Since, Glen has been playing this each time he meets someone from a different profession, which is how he gathered The Two Things about the Two Things:

1. People love to play the Two Things game, but they rarely agree about what the Two Things are.
2. That goes double for anyone who works with computers.

Head over to see his collection of The Two Things from binary systems to piloting an airplane, or a talk that wraps up with them. As for me: 1) intrigued, 2) curious if it could be edited down to only one thing.