Tagged "writing"

I launched a newsletter yesterday. So far, the feedback has been good. A few readers said that they felt drawn in by the writing. In any case, the purpose of the first few posts is simply to get myself warmed up. Any extra flutter the posts generate is a bonus. Amit Varma recommends not looking at the stats for a couple of years.

It taught me quite a few things. Particularly that I need to be smart about the data analysis. It’s important to remember that this isn’t a work project. It’s meant for a general audience, so there is such a thing as too much detail. For example, detailed handwritten notes on every single table in the HCES isn’t important. You could have dealt with each table independently. Only focusing on the tables needed for the problem in question should have sufficed. On the other hand, cleaning and denormalizing the data and releasing it on GitHub was a good idea; and the tweet announcing this has 10 reposts, 69 likes, 52 bookmarks, and has gained me 12 new followers. This is what Austin Kleon calls “showing your work” (Mahima Vashist says “your journal is your art”). Perhaps one needs to think carefully about what shareable and useful assets can be created in the service of a larger, transcending work.

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I went into this essay expecting Virginia Woolf had written about what the eponymous room is like - its design and contents. But she deals with a more fundamental issue - that one needs a room of one’s own.

The essays are a fine piece of scholarship. I’d never have thought that Woolf’s characteristic device, the “stream of consciousness” could be used to not only as a writing technique, but also as a powerful pedagogical technique.

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I can’t think of a single fantasy character that would be Neil Gaiman. I’m tempted to think that he’s like Santa Claus, but he’s not the sort who’d care if someone was being naughty. He’s not Dumbledore or Gandalf either - he’d rather be your friend than your mentor. He’s not even the Dream of the Endless, since he’s not aware of how powerful he is.

Reading Gaiman’s nonfiction is like meditation that clears and even expands your mind. It’s like a cool refreshing drink after a long day of rigour (I read The View From the Cheap Seats after the underwheling chore of reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). This book is satisfying and disquieting at the same time. You will discover a lot more to read, and at the same time, reading Gaiman has a normalizing effect on whatever you have read. I think Gaiman has unwittingly achieved a standardization of literature that ought to be widely adopted. The book is scattered with dreamy encounters with giants like Stephen King and Terry Pratchett (among many more), punctuated with brutal shocks that he felt about the Syrain refugee crisis or Charlie Hedbo, grounded by his account of the bauble of the Oscars. What he doesn’t deal in is mediocrity and trivia.

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