Substrate

I'm delighted to say that I've sold all available copies of CW-PUB-001: Field Notes on Productive Friction. It was a limited edition, physical copy-only run of 50. There won't be any reprints. I've now updated the Cognitive Wallpaper website hinting at further zines, although I haven't decided what they'll be yet.

1. Finishing off my zine on Productive Friction. It's currently at the printers, so will be ready to ship soon!

2. Recovering from tearing my calf muscle caused by an ill-advised race in the back garden with my daughter.

Sometimes you read things that explain eloquently something you've felt but not been able to articulate. For example, this from Sam Kahn:

There was a point when the middle class... was more culturally aspirational. The heyday of this probably was Mortimer Adler’s great books program and the ubiquity of Encyclopedias Britannica and Great Books boxsets in middle class homes. It’s still discernible in, say, old Woody Allen movies where a major part of Allen’s neuroses is that he’s not measuring up to what he takes to be a European cosmopolitan ideal.

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So, I was "the reader" in question which prompted this post from my good friend Laura:

A reader pointed out that in my second assignment, I sort of waved off the question of “What does validation look like?” My protagonist was, to be fair, quite snarky in telling the professor what validation would look like. Thus, I am submitting this brief reflection for extra credit (or for full credit since I lost credit points by being dismissive of the question).

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As I've grown older, I've realised that one of the joys of reading is not only to discover new books but to re-read and re-discover ones I've read before. Just as listening to a song when you're in love is different to when you're not, so (as I've commented before somewhere) reading a book at one age is different to reading one at another.

I'm not sure whether it's the old one gets, or just the older I personally get, but essentially nothing is urgent. As I'm fond of quoting the artist Finley Quaye as saying, "good things happen slowly, bad things happen fast."

I've long been an advocate of 'islands of productivity'. It's a fancy way of saying that it's a good idea, for me at least, to do different kinds of things in different spaces.

So, for example, I go to coffee shops and to the library. But I also sit in what we affectionately call our 'spare lounge' (because we're not posh enough to need/want a dining room) and do things on my laptop.

Earlier this week, I read Mike Caulfield's announcement that he's started a new film podcast with Jim Groom(!) Since then, I haven't been able to get this section of his post out of my head:

I tried to talk to a number of people I used to talk with about films, like 10 years ago, all the time. They turned out to not be able to talk about films anymore. They would get two beats into talking about the plot of a movie then veer off and start talking about how this film either shows how their political position is right, or — if it shows them to be wrong –how this is evidence of a vast Hollywood conspiracy.

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Source: Are.na