Humility and passivity are in short supply in hip-hop. Actually those qualities are rare in the world at large, but rap is not a good place to start looking. Which is just one of many reasons that Yauch, Horowitz and Diamond stood apart from the pack. From crude beginnings they grew into thoughtful, principled artists who nevertheless avoided the trap of taking themselves too seriously.

One thing that the Beasties came to represent to me was the possibility of change and growth. Raw and purile in the beginning, they evolved both their style and what they stood for throughout a long career, and had the grace to admit to their failings. As lifelong goofballs with a political conscience they also stood as license not to limit yourself be it musically, intellectually or in any other sphere of life. To my mind their 2004 album To The Five Boroughs remains the finest artistic response to the events of September 11, 2001.

When Yauch was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 it came as a surprise. He was young and seemed healthy even in the video in which he gave fans the news. And even though an album got delayed and there had been no shows in quite a while I don’t think it really ever sunk in that he was sick – after all, he was still directing completely insane half-hour music videos. One message that really hit home with me on Friday said simply ‘I don’t think I can live in a world where a Beastie Boy can die’.

A smart, kind, funny, basketball fan. A father. An activist, Swiss-impersonator, vegan, Buddhist and incredibly talented artist. It feels like a lot to lose all at once.

RIP MCA

It’s undeniable however, that the type of experiences the net provides are qualitatively different from those found elsewhere, and that they can be somewhat addicting. Using the web provides the alluring prospect of seemingly limitless choice; it contains the same interactive thrill as video games; it promises a constantly updated supply of content – it’s a living thing as opposed to a static form. All of these things can be great, but they also have potential downsides. Limiteless choice and constant evolution can easily lead to a lack of genuine connection; interactivity can easily degrade one’s relationship to, and connection with, something to a simple +1, a Like, or a tweet[1].

I love the web, but I feel like I need to think about my relationship with it. If I’m spending the day at home it’s not uncommon for me to turn my laptop on before I’ve showered in the morning, start the RSS reader, visit the mental list of a dozen or so blogs, and to do the same several times during the day – to still be doing it just before bed. I frequently catch myself checking Twitter whilst I’m supposed to be doing something else: cooking, eating, having a conversation. Not accomplishing anything online so much as repeating familiar and comfortable patterns with enjoyable, predictable outcomes. The place the web has started to take up in my life has all of the constituent parts that you might expect: entertainment, news, communication, discovery, creation… but there’s also a dose of Linus’s blanket in there. The mild dopamine glow of a constantly updating Twitter feed is akin to a flickering fireplace. Navigating the endless surprises of sprawling design blogs and image aggregators can be as comforting and reassuring as wrapping up in a thick duvet. It’s not that we’re changed irevocably by our contact with these things, and they definitely have a place, but you can’t stay in bed or sit by the fire all day – time, rather than capacity, is what I feel I’m losing.

It may sound paradoxical to say that by electing not to do two things at once I’m saving time. If I can check email, write status updates, and read The New Inquiry whilst watching a movie then isn’t that time saved? Of a kind, sure – but you take a serious hit in your level of engagement with any one of those activities. I’m not going to be paying as much attention as I could to the MyFonts newsletter, that status update isn’t going to be as witty as it could be, and I could certainly be getting more out of great, thoughtful articles that smart people spent time writing. I could be more engaged in all of these things, just as I could be getting a lot more enjoyment out of how great the colour pallate in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is, and how much Christopher Plummer rules.

When I go running or sit zazen one of my absolute favourite aspects of either is being able to concentrate solely on one thing. It feels like a privilege to not have to multitask, and yet that’s a pressure I’m solely responsible for admitting into my life. Flitting around the net is so easy to do that it seems like something you could do without it draining too much of your attention. To think of it that way however, is to say that the content is undeserving of my time. In fact the exact opposite should be true: there’s plenty online that deserves my full attention, not the part I’m willing to divert from the TV screen.

I’m going to start re-thinking some of the ways I use the web, or rather I’m going to think about it more rather than allow my usage to be patterned solely by habit. To start with, the next time I sit down to some TV it will have my full attention – which is useful because The Bridge is on in an hour and I don’t speak Danish or Swedish. I was on the internet throughout the first two episodes last week though, so right now I have to hit Wikipedia for synopses.

The game’s (seemingly) final puzzle took the community almost a week, and some brute-force tactics, to crack – and whilst the creation of various forums and internet tools to empower the collaboration is in itself impressive, we’re currently in a position of having an answer without a method of solution.

I’m glad that my first journey through Fez (up to about 50/64 cubes) was within a week or so of release; there has been something special about playing it whilst it has its moment in the spotlight, whilst it’s a living thing. News broke on Twitter just a couple of days ago that the game’s newly released soundtrack album contains hidden images – another twist to a puzzle whose true dimensions remain unknown.

At the same time as playing through Fez I’ve been working on the essay for my Postmodern Fiction class. My chosen topic is the multi-authorial nature of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and it’s been striking how similar the feeling of being lost in the mazes of those books has felt to being embroiled in Fez’s trickier puzzles. The authors of all three works have fashioned narratives, and more importantly narrative spaces, shaped with infinite care to allow for a lot of play and interpretation by those who come to them. There are elements of games amid Pale Fire (remembering that Nabokov was a practiced composer of chess problems), as there is a story interwoven amid Fez’s game spaces. The same feeling of piecing together a mystery that attends a playthrough of Phil Fish’s game is also to be found in reading House of Leaves. In all three cases it’s a very participatory, interpretive act which is asked of the reader / player, and there’s something really thrilling about being part of it.

It goes like this: there’s this universe populated by two-dimensional shapes. That’s to say that the things that live there are like triangles and circles, both comprised of and perceiving only in two dimensions. They’re all going about their normal, daily business safe in their knowledge of both height and width. They live in 2D houses, work in 2D offices, and swim in 2D pools. Then one day these odd occurances start to take place where two shapes will be talking, say an oblong and an oval are chatting at a water cooler, and for an instant this bright red circle appears next to them and then vanishes. Some place else a family of triangles is sitting down to supper when the red circle appears for a flash right in their 2D kitchen and is then gone. The red circle blinks into existence so quickly at the bus stop that an elderly rhombus wets himself.

Long story slightly shorter, it turns out that what’s actually happening here is that the instances of red circles are actually the moments when a ball is meeting with and bouncing off the 2D plain of the universe as the shapes perceive it. They can’t comprehend a third dimension: it’s not within their capacity to conceive of it and they therefore lack a language to speak about it.

It’s interesting to think about the limitations to our understanding and experience of life imposed upon us by our senses and by the related cognitive processes we’re pretty much powerless to alter. I think about this stuff when I read about some spiritual guru who has alledgedly expanded his consciousness or claims capital-E Enlightenment: how he still hears and sees through the processing of received electromagnetic waves; still feels by way of electrical signals conducted as nerve impulses; is still bound by immutable laws of physics, and would still feel sick if he ate three Cornettos and went on the Big Dipper.

Better maybe to stay grounded – get your wisdom from video games, comedians and stories about anthropomorphised geometry.

The recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, however, made it pretty much a snap decision for me to delete my IG account. Regardless of issues about the price paid, or brand integrity, about which plenty of good pieces have already popped up (eg. here & here), it comes down to the fact that as someone who doesn’t use Facebook the app was necessarily going to be diminished for me going forward. The same thing happened with Spotify, who, whilst not acquired by Facebook, relied upon it so heavily for social integration that not having a Facebook account essentially broke parts of the application.¹

It wasn’t long after hitting delete on my Instagram account that I started to feel a pang for somewhere to post quick snaps to. There are plenty of decent Instagram substitutes out there (eg. Hipster; PicYou) but I’ve decided instead to make a space on the web just for my Polaroid-style instant-ish photos to live, and it’s called Disjecta. Hosted at Tumblr, and using Justin Ouellette’s beautiful, simple High Res theme, I aim to keep posting snaps there pretty frequently… or at least as frequently as I used Instagram.

1. Ironically, news broke today of Spotify launching a standalone streaming plugin. ↩

The prime example of this was my long-lasting search for the ideal note-taking workflow. I had tried numerous plaintext editors, as well as more full-featured software like Evernote, in various combinations, none of which quite ticked all of the boxes I wanted. When I put the question to a group of people on Lettery, the response was near unanimous: Notational Velocity & Simplenote. With a little experimentation (I’m actually using a Notational Velocity fork called nvALT2.1, which allows for tag sync) I pretty much immediately recognised that I had hit upon a set-up that worked perfectly for me. I can take and edit notes on my Mac using nvALT, when I’m out on Simplenote for iOS, and via the Simplenote web app when I’m at a different computer – all in sync via Dropbox: seamless, clean and super-powerful.

The pieces just fell together like this for me where another workflow is concerned: bookmarking. I’ve lost count of how many different bookmarking solutions I’ve used at one point or another. Everything from browser-based to standalone apps, and nothing has really done what I want as well as I’d like it to. The closest, for a long time, was Delicious, which provided a nice, uncluttered UI with powerful tagging functionality and an interesting search & social layer. I started to lose a little faith after the recent re-design placed more emphasis on the sharing and less on the bookmarking. (It also did some ugly things to the interface which lessened the appeal for me.)

I began thinking about what I wanted from a bookmarking service, what I use bookmarks for, and how they should fit into my other activities on the web. Around this time I was also led by a couple of articles (like this one) to consider the virtues of Readability’s new freemium pricing model, and whether I might re-think my ‘read later’ set-up too. With a little poking around the solution to these two issues came together pretty nicely, in the form of Pinboard & Instapaper.

I had taken a look at both services in the past, but found myself swayed by the relatively rudimentary UI of each, and turned instead to more polished looking alternatives: e.g. Delicious & Read It Later / Readability. It didn’t take long once I started looking, however, to determine that the ‘uglier’ services are the more robust and feature-rich; plus, they fit together beautifully.

The set-up I’m using now is Instapaper for keeping articles to read at a later time, and Pinboard as a bookmarking service. After import from Delicious it didn’t take long to go through my bookmarks and decide on private vs. public for each (plus Pinboard allows the adding of private tags to otherwise public bookmarks, which is a neat added layer). The real beauty is that Pinboard can archive full page versions of all of my bookmarks so that a) they’re accessible to me even if the site goes down or is changed; b) they’re fully searchable within Pinboard. Add to that the ability to auto-import from any folder within Instapaper, and I have a fully searchable archive of all the content I read via Instapaper and decide I want to keep.

The lesson learned here is to not be so easily persuaded by the prettier version of web services as often the slightly hackier-looking tool is doing a better job.

On the surface it’s a really useful word, capturing in three neat syllables the entire idea of paying more attention to one’s surroundings, the moment you find yourself in, and everything else inbetween. There’s mindful walking, mindful eating, I’ve even heard of mindful brushing of teeth – and it’s all useful stuff, or at least it can be.

Recently, on Twitter, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (or someone acting on his behalf?) posted a message advocating the mindful appreciation of a sunrise. Nice – what could possibly be wrong with that you might think, but another Buddhist monk took issue with the post; here’s the original tweet, and Brad Warner’s reply:

@thichnhathanh Sounds to me like mindfulness would get in the way of the sunrise.

— Brad Warner (@BradWarner) March 5, 2012

Warner followed up with a blogpost explaining his take on the matter, and it makes for interesting reading. The crux of the argument is that the way in which Hanh uses ‘mindful’ speaks too neatly to the basest quick-fix, self-help instinct, and therefore actually works against its own cause. As Warner points out, there shouldn’t be room for admonition in this instruction; this isn’t about a right or wrong way of seeing.

It’s possible, of course, that Warner is misreading Hanh’s intention, or that Hanh’s intent was mistranslated by whomever tweeted it for him. Regardless, it’s added something to the way I think about ‘mindfulness’; I’ll let you know if it changes how I brush my teeth.

The second half of January and early February has been a pretty hectic time with one thing and another, and the deadline for dissertation proposals kind of snuck up on me somehow. It had been on the calendar for some time, but had been gradually getting closer without me having paid enough attention. I’d been running over ideas in my head most of last week, and last night I sat down to finalise something to submit to the department.

In the end I tried to go with something which will allow me to cover a lot of material that I like. Most of the essays I’ve written in the last couple of years have been on one or two writers (not always ones I’m overwhelmingly fond of), and I felt like this larger piece of work might benefit from being based around a concept, or school of thought, rather than on a specific writer’s work. Here’s what I came up with:

Towards a New Aesthetic of Minimalism

Literary minimalism remains a somewhat fluid concept the definition of which is still contested. Unlike minimalism in the visual arts, or as a school of design, the conversation surrounding minimalism in literature has few agreed-upon tenets from which to work. By investigating the history of the term’s critical use since the 1940s I aim to assess the possibility of a consensus on literary minimalism’s characteristics in terms of both form and style. Alongside this I will address the question of whether there might be candidates for a minimalist canon.

equanimity of surface, ‘ordinary’ subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don’t think out loud ¹

Through interrogation of established working definitions of minimalism (such as the one above), alongside close reading of contemporary works, I also aim to establish a sense of the current state of minimalist writing. It may be possible to establish a line of influence running from Gordon Lish to Tom Spanbauer, Chuck Palahniuk and Amy Hempel – all writers who have, at one time or another, been described as employing a minimalist style. Likewise work by Nicholson Baker and Tao Lin would be considered as arguably representing current evolutions of literary minimalism.