Archives for 2011

Rabble Rouser: Seattle WA

May 16, 2011 By
Rabblerouser

Deepak Jois has launched a copy of the Stealth Edition named "Rabble Rouser" on its journeys from Seattle. He writes

"I just finished reading Tempo, and found it very insightful for the most part. Reading the book took a significant amount of my mental
energies, so I am going to pass on an actual review :). However, I did take a photo of the book with the Seattle Space Needle in the
background."

"For the most part." Ouch, that hurt.

A lot of people are finding the book quite a dense read though, again a surprise for me.

Lame name: Belmont, CA

May 16, 2011 By
Photo

The Tempo Tracer Game for the stealth edition is finally seeing some action. It is taking much longer for people to finish and pass on the book than I expected, and a surprising number of people actually want to keep their copy rather than pass it on.  But looks like a few people are game for the game.

Terry Smiley writes: "I really enjoyed the book; now I just need to get senior management to read it!" 

He's named his copy "Lame Name."

Week 3: Memphis, St. Louis, Omaha, Carhenge, Deadwood, Yellowstone

May 16, 2011 By

I am in Memphis, where I plan to meet up with Daniel Pritchett, some local entrepreneurs at a startup incubator, and anyone else who might be around. Next stop, St. Louis on Tuesday. As far as I know, I have no readers there, but I wanted to check out the Billy Goat chip company, maker of my favorite chips. If anybody is out there, it’d be great to meet up. From St. Louis I head to Omaha and after that, the road-trip basically goes into a sights-over-people mode, since my destinations in Nebraska and South Dakota (North Platte for a second visit to Bailey Yard, Alliance for Carhenge and Rapid City for Deadwood) aren’t places I am likely to find any readers. I’d be shocked to find somebody beyond Omaha. After South Dakota, I head to Jackson Hole in the heart of Yellowstone, where oddly enough I do have someone to stay with. After that, depending on how much time I have left, I might dawdle or dash my way to Vegas, the end point for this leg.

Posts from Week 2

 

Strategies, Counter-examples and the UnAha! Experience

May 16, 2011 By

I stopped for coffee and a chat with Peter Lambert-Cole at Highland Coffee in Baton Rouge. Peter is a mathematics graduate student at LSU and works on low-dimensional topology problems (knots, doughnuts and such). So naturally our conversation took a mathematical turn.

It is funny how a conversation with the right person will sometimes help me connect dots in my own thinking. Talking with Peter helped me figure out something about anti-strategies.

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On Ritual Time

May 15, 2011 By

When was the last time you coordinated a rendezvous with someone saying “I’ll meet you before sunset?” I did that with my New Orleans host, Dimitry Lukashov because he keeps Shabbat, and I wanted to make sure I got to his place before he turned off his phone, in case I got lost.

You should try a sunrise or sunset based  rendezvous sometime. It is interesting to look at the sun as an actual practical time signal instead of just a maker of beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Very calming. Scheduling around natural times tends to add a natural fuzziness which can be relaxing or anxiety-provoking depending on your relationship to clock time.

Post-Shabbat on Saturday, we went downtown, wandered past Bourbon street and the touristy French Quarter to a nightlife block preferred by the locals (I forget the name). I felt my age I guess. It was still too chaotically “happening” for me.  We wrapped up the evening with a 1:00 AM breakfast at a famous local diner.

I am starting to feel my age. One of Dimitry’s housemates (he’s a graduating Tulane senior) said to me, “you’re staying with Dimitry, right?…. and are you kinda older?” That cracked me up. “Yup, much older,” I said. It is curious how blogging gets you connected to people in age-agnostic ways. The ribbonfarm/Tempo readership seems to span the age range 18-70. In almost any other context, I’d find it very weird, as a 36-year old, staying with a college senior. The blog/book road-trip context reduces it to “only slightly weird.”

Hard Takeoffs and Landings

This morning, I left New Orleans after a creole-inspired brunch. The restaurant had the biggest selection of hangover drinks I’ve ever seen, including a very complicated DIY Bloody Mary bar. I am afraid mine wasn’t very creative. Dimitry’s (on the right) was a work of art. I can’t do okra in a drink though.

I’ve been mulling Alain de Botton’s evocative description, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, of the tempo of industrial age workdays: “the hard takeoffs and landings of coffee and alcohol.”

In New Orleans, where the day seems to start around noon and end around 4:00 AM (the town allows you to walk around with alcohol containers on the streets and there is no legal last-call time), Alain de Botton’s description must be modified for New Orleans to “the hard takeoffs and landings of alcohol. Period.”

Though the city has great coffee, overall it is a far more relaxed place than any similar-sized city in America I’ve been. The locals have a curious self-perception of the city as actually being part of the Carribbean. An embassy for island time in the middle of mainland time perhaps.

I am also surprised by the number of people I am meeting on my travels who have quit coffee. Maybe we are heading towards a softer tempo age.

 

 

 

 

The Author’s Journey and the Blogger’s Journey

May 14, 2011 By

I am in New Orleans, ironically pretending to be an author in the traditional publishing-industry sense of the word. I am sitting in a seriously cliched writerly cafe, the Rue de la Course near the Tulane University campus. Jazz is playing in the background. Its the sort of coffee shop that conforms to your expectations of an archetypal artsy coffee shop so well, it is surreal. Like The Simpsons’ idea of an artsy coffee shop.

If I grew an instant goatee, slapped a beret on my head and called myself a flâneur, (a self-descriptor preferred by a certain celebrated evil twin of mine),  I’d be a perfect parody of a writer. A tres French writer at that. The only way I can continue sitting here (and I want to because it is actually a very nice place and the coffee is good) is to do so ironically.

Jokes aside, being in this coffee shop, doing what I am doing, got me to a serious breakthrough concerning the difference between being a blogger and being an author, a question I’ve been pondering ever since I started out on this road trip to promote Tempo nearly two weeks ago. Though I have now published a book, I view myself (and usually introduce myself/prefer to be introduced) as a blogger, not “author” or “writer.” It isn’t really about what medium you use or how you write. It is about how you view yourself. Author is a profession within the publishing industry. Blogger is a trade practiced by an individual. Professions and trades both wrap around a skilled craft and a specific way of seeing the world (the “art”), but there the similarities end. Blogger and Author are very different archetypes that lead to very different narratives. Specifically, Author leads to a standard redemption narrative, while Blogger leads to a life-as-performance-art narrative.

So here we go; my first serious and long post on this blog. And yes, it may be a bit confusingly self-referential for those who’ve read Tempo, since it i s a book about archetypes and narratives, but I am sure you’ll be able to keep everything straight. If you haven’t read the book, you should probably read this post first.

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Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia

May 14, 2011 By

This is a guest post by Stefan King.

In 1990, the art historian Camille Paglia provoked feminists and post-modernists with her controversial book Sexual Personae.  Paglia’s goal was to show the pagan patterns of continuity in western culture, and to expose feminist ideals as misguided wishful thinking. Now, two decades later, it is time to dig Sexual Personae out of the cultural compost heap and see if something interesting has grown there. Paglia has a highly sensitive intuition about great works of art, and she is a talented psychoanalyst of artists. The value of the book lies in those intuitions, which we can now study with the benefit of hindsight.

The Venus of Willendorf

The grand narrative of western archetypes, or “sexual personae” as Paglia calls them, starts with the Venus of Willendorf, a small statuette from the Stone Age. It is a faceless lump of feminine flesh, possibly a fertility talisman. It contrasts perfectly with anything civilized: there is no line, no shape, no stillness, and no Apollonian light. In those times, nature’s domination of humanity was total.

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Functional Fixedness and Kata Learning

May 12, 2011 By

I am spending a couple of days here in Atlanta with Ho-Sheng Hsiao (Hosh). He invited me to join him for the monthly meeting of the Atlanta Ruby User Group (ALTRUG), and I jumped at the opportunity, since for whatever reason, a lot of programmers (and I think Ruby programmers in particular) seem to read my writing. The event provoked a fertile trail of thought on the nature of learning.

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Freytag Staircases in Nashville

May 12, 2011 By

One of the key concepts in Tempo is something I call a “Freytag staircase” (the term is derived from “Freytag triangle,” a well-known model of simple narrative structures). I am working on putting a glossary for the book online, but I am mentioning it now because the Freytag staircase is a way to visualize birth-to-death life narratives and use the visualization to frame your decision-making. And the reason I am bringing it up is that I never really thought about how it might work for people with different religious beliefs. In Nashville, where I bunked with musician Micah Redding of the Redding Brothers and his wife Emily,  I dropped in on a very interesting local meetup (Micah and Emily are part of it) devoted loosely to debating religious themes from a wide variety of perspectives.

 

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The Car/Truck Ratio

May 11, 2011 By

P112

The drive down the center of America from Detroit to Nashville is fascinating. Among the interesting Tempo-related things I noticed was that the car/truck ratio was much lower than on the coasts. Correlates to the lower population and greater presence of logistics industries, and gives driving here s very distinct feel. It’s like being in a forest of semis instead of an open road.