Weeknote 05/2024
“No input, no output. Meaning, we’re going to hear a band, we’re going to go to a museum, or we’re going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We’re going to get some input, because if we don’t, then we have nothing. It’s a circle. It’s a respiratory thing.”
Verbs
Wondering: Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti
I quite like the Oulipean approach to literature, which imposes some arbitrary rule or rules on a text and then sees what happens under those conditions. Creating under constraint is an interesting practice and it’s often the case that the right constraints can breed greater creativity. The most famous work of that school is likely George Perece’s A Void which was written entirely without the letter e. I’m a fan, too, of books that play around with the medium as well as the conventions of the craft. Books like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski or S by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams that challenge the core notions of what makes a book a book and even what constitutes a work of literature. There are also the books of B.S Johnson that deploy tricks like cutouts in the pages that let the reader see further ahead than the characters, or pages that fade to black at a character’s death, or even a book in a box which leaves it to the reader to shuffle and order the chapters. In Alphabetical Diaries, Shiela Sheti has constructed a work by taking lines from many years of diaries and running them all together in alphabetical order. It’s probably somewhere between a classic Oulipo novel and a work of found or constructed poetry. I think any creativity that subverts, reimagines, or deconstructs the conventions of form and media is an exciting and provocative thing.
Watching: Slow Horses, Apple TV+
I’ve said before that we love a detective show in this house, whether it’s a full period-set Agatha Christie, or a cyber-sleuth in the snows of Iceland. Give us a knackered and disintegrating Gary Oldman, firmly put out to pasture, and his collection of misfits, oddballs, and failures, and throw all of that at some classic Le Carré style spy drama and we’re very happy indeed. We’ve made pretty quick work of seasons 1 and 2, especially as they’re only 6 episodes a piece and not some ungainly 20+ episode American behemoth. We’ll be hoovering up season 3 in short order, I expect, and then waiting it out for the new season to be released later this year. It’s tightly written, beautifully paced, and stacked full of drama, intrigue and plot twists, all slathered with the sardonic bon mots of Oldman who appears to be having an absolute blast from start to finish.
Listening: Twenty Thousand Hertz, Podcast
The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast bills itself as “The stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.” That might mean a deep dive into the iconic Netflix opening sound - the so-called “Tudum.” Or it might be an exploration of what happens when your A-List actor is happy to do the voice for the film, but maybe the tie-in ads, video games, cartoons, and toys don’t quite fit in their diary. It’s a really well-researched, and expertly produced podcast that keeps the episodes pretty trim and light on their feet. It could be tempting to go down very deep rabbit holes with all of these topics but from the episodes I’ve listened to so far, there’s a neat balance between depth and interest. I particularly enjoyed the two-parter that looked into the origins and development of the music and sounds of the Zelda game series.
Using: Arc Search, iOS
I switched over to using Arc Broswer a little while back and have been really enjoying it ever since. The ability to build spaces for the different kinds of things I do (personal, work, freelance, D&D etc) has been fantastic, and I love using the easels feature to easily build boards of things as I’m browsing - I use one for this weeknote for example. As a companion to Arc Browser, there is now Arc Search on iOS which works much like a regular mobile browser but with the addition of a really effective AI search function. Along with normal mobile browsing and searching you can ask Arc Search to ‘browse for me” which will have the app do some wide-ranging browsing based on your search and then use that to build a custom webpage with all the relevant information, links, sources, and data right on it. It’s been a great tool, already, when thinking about planning days for our upcoming UK trip but even simple day-to-day things have really been enhanced by Arc Search doing the reading and compiling it into a custom website for me.
Words
Some weeks arrive full of promise and potential with lovely clear vistas of time and space in which you can imagine yourself working, being productive, and maybe being out and about and enjoying yourself. Then some weeks arrived stuffed to the gills, wheezing, and staggering about under the weight of all of the to-do’s, tasks, jobs, errands, maybe’s, probably’s, and ought to’s that they bear. This was one of the latter weeks.
We had a broken down washing machine - now fixed. We had a broken down dishwasher - now fixed. The cyclical saga of the burst pipe and damp walls threw itself into yet another extended verse as we grappled, again, with walls, furniture, and repairs on that front. We’ve been continuing to look after Teddy the dog, who’s doing very well but is still needing check-ups, occasional blood tests, and some dietary supplements whilst we try to find out what is making him unwell from time to time. There have also been many of the usual little things that like to crop up without you noticing, like LEGO bricks on the stairs. All is well, though, and whilst the days have been pretty packed we’ve gotten through the week and, finally, January. The month that unconvincingly claims to be a mere 31 days long.
In the midst of all of this, I’ve been working with a collaborator on a conference workshop proposal that is something of a long shot, being in unchartered territory for us both, but could be quite exciting given a bit of luck. I’m also putting together another project proposal for a friend and colleague that focuses on educational research and development, and I’ve got two more current applications underway for other conferences and events which I’m really excited about. I’ve come to realise how much I like the whole process of prepping, writing, planning, and delivering conference talks and workshops and I want to lean into that a little more this year. Once we begin to move more firmly into spring things will also begin to get underway with a lot of the work I do as an examiner and senior examiner for the IBO and that will have me entirely neck-deep in examination scripts, sample papers, moderation models, and rubrics.