Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: Steinbeck

  • #22: Taking the Long View

    I have been thinking about East of Eden since I finished it, not too long ago. And Lee, as a character and presumably a sort of surrogate for the author, is full of some really fascinating asides. He talks about how much he loves bookshops throughout the novel, and even leaves to go open his own (returning shortly after). When he mentions this to Adam, he lays out the rest of his life in front of him.

    I want to open a bookstore in Chinatown in San Francisco. I would live in the back, and my days would be full of discussions and arguments. I would like to have in stock some of those dragon-carved blocks of ink from the dynasty of Snug. The boxes are worm-bored, and the ink is made from fir smoke…

    …I would like to have my little bookshop at last. I would like to die there.

    When I look at my life, I feel as if I can barely see six months ahead. Maybe I have some plans for the next year. But even stretching out best laid plans a few years out in front of me feels blurry and unstable. Nevermind being able to succinctly describe what I’d like to die doing.

    I think that one of the knock-on effects of our collapsing attention spans is the inability to take the long view. There are a growing number of self-help books, and anti-self-help-books and don’t-call-it-self-help books that you can shell out $30 for so they can tell you as much. Embrace minimalism, find focus, and clear your mind of distractions to catch up with the pace of modernity.

    The knack—the trick at the center

    Which is the subject of a growing number of self-help books designed to embrace minimalism, and shed distractions, and find focus, and generally race to catch up with the pace of modernity.

    It is difficult to find the courage and clarity needed to just slow down. T ounderstand that you can’t get to everything you want and that a singula rpursuit informed by passion is far more satisifying than trying to do it all. And I appreciate Lee in East of Eden because I think he echoes the author, who, at another point in the novel finds his own diagnosis.

    The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

    How can I say goodbye to these small time units?

    In her newsletter, Molly White has been delivering a near-flawless streak of new entires over the last couple of months. One of those was about Chris Dixon’s hot of the presses Web3 book “Read Write Own.” Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think the book is going to be worth my time, filled mostly with the hollow promises that characterize Web3 and crypto in general.

    One aspect of Web3 that always pisses me off is its overlooking of simple, reliable technologies that are already serving the needs of millions of people, because they lack the flashiness of whatever VC happens to be obsessed with. Which White points out:

    It’s profoundly weird to read RSS’s obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn’t provide a functional feed.a And does Dixon somehow not know that much of the thriving podcasting industry is built on RSS, or that many other apps and websites build features on top of RSS without their users ever even knowing it?

    But of course, RSS is unlikely to attract billions in investment. After all, it’s pretty much done. There’s no room for lofty pretensions of what it almost definitely will not become.

    Lisa Barrett on how emotions are made:

    Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others’ emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems. Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

    Notes

    Active Proejcts:

    • Taxes
    • Visual Regression
    • Async Retreat (Plan agenda, set time)
    • Organize and Declutter (cabinet / move things aorund)
    • History of the Web new design (launch)
    • Hemmings kickoff
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Review projects in Obsidian
    Add to collections in Obsidian
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #19: Managing the what

    I have found that a lot about managing people comes down to trust. Earning, keeping it, directing it. And I guess, subconsciously or not, I have been collecting some articles over the past few months about how to give a team autonomy while still driving and focusing on accountability. So this is just a reference for those articles as they start to congeal in my mind.

    My unified theory on how this applies to management is still a work in progress, but I can start with an initial insight from Paul Taylor.

    People are downstream of the system

    And that’s a critical observation. Individuals in an organization are undeniably influenced by the systems and processes that are all around them. Often, when it seems that these processes are breaking down, it can actually just be an indicator of a deeper systemic issue.

    First, look at your systems with a critical ye. What you’re really looking for is patterns. What appears to be happening over and over. Where are the most common breakdowns in communications. These are gaps, and are great starting points. These recurring issues represent gaps and serve as excellent initial areas for improvement.

    But also, attack the why and make sure it’s shared. One strategy is to Manage the What, Not the How. This approach encourages clear alignment around shared goals through transparency. . It requires leaders to focus on defining the objectives and desired outcomes without micromanaging the specific methods by which the team members achieve these results.

    The key to exceptional management is to get great at defining the “what”. As a leader, you need to know how to create alignment, how to clarify what you expect, and how to communicate all of it.

    Clarity in communication and expectations sets the stage for a team’s success. When leaders excel in explicating the “what” – the objectives, targets, and benchmarks – they provide a clear direction for the team to follow, a clarity that enables the team to understand the purpose behind their work and align their efforts accordingly.

    There are nuances to this approach. There might need to be greater control over the how for team members that struggle to collaborate or are more junior. But on teams comprised of more senior, experienced individuals, the strategy of managing the “what” can be adopted as a systemic approach, empowering team members to leverage their expertise and take initiative. By establishing clear goals, leaders can trust their teams to determine the most effective “how” – the processes, techniques, and strategies – to reach those goals. In doing so, leaders encourage innovation and drive accountability through autonomy.

    All of which is tied up rather well by another article I have read, which extends the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor to management. And I think it most clearly articulates the vision I have for myself as a leader.

    The bazaar manager is like the organizer of the bazaar. Leaders in this style tend to have a broad vision, a flexible plan, and a flat network of roles and responsibilities for the team. The manager acts as the facilitator, the coach, and the enabler of the team’s work, defining goals and objectives and providing guidelines, feedback, and resources, while empowering the team to define their own tasks, processes, and standards, encouraging them to explore and innovate.

    As a facilitator, the bazaar manager does not dictate each move but rather sets the stage for innovation and creativity. The managers role here is to provide clear goals and objectives-the what-while giving some latitude to the team to approach problems in their own unique ways.

    It is a form of leadership that trusts in the capabilities of the team members and their ability to collaborate effectively. And so trust remains at the center of it all.

    Chapter 34 of East of Eden begins like this:

    A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

    I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us…

    It’s a short, precise, poignant chapter. Around 900 words later, it ends like this:

    We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

    I want to write the whole chapter down and take it with me wherever I go.

    Oliver Sacks with a prescient reflection on the irreproducibility of the human mind:

    in contrast to a computer, that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced; that there is, rather, a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same. Experience is ever-changing, like Heraclitus’ stream. This streamlike quality of mind and perception, of consciousness and life, cannot be caught in any mechanical model — it is only possible in an evolving creature… One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling — perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream — that stream is me.

    Notes

    Today:

    • WP Mail SMTP check in
    • Scorecard
    • Publish this post
    • Review collections (add to async and management collections with what we have in “To Sort”)
    • Start prepping the paperwork
    • Book a vision appointment
    • Watch first part of Vonnegut
    • Garbages

    Add to notebook:

    • Have to do taxes soon
    • Spray for bugs  
    • Look at tree in backyard 
    • Carpet cleaning in playroom
    • Review Tina’s updates to core process
    • Check on Plugin updates
    • Follow up on Mail devlierability


    Week focus:
    – Visual regression workflow
    – Passport and elementary school docs and paperwork
    – Sportsengine – WP Mail SMTP
    – Sportsengine – prep next steps in combined deploy
    – Spray for bugs

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #18: Letting Time Use You

    The feeling of being overwhelmed, blocked by stressors of the mind rather than by an immediate physical threat, is uniquely human. And so is the desire to provide some sort of order to that in the form of “time management.” Both of these concepts, born from human ingenuity, more often than not result in a rabbit hole of wasted time, exacerbating rather than alleviating and making everything worse.

    Whenever something like that occurs to me, I think about the book “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman, an insightful and profound meditation on the meaning of time, existing within it, and learning to except is finitude.

    And its not just phillosphy. It’s an insightful and practical guide to accepting the limitations of time. However, what I find most intriguing is Burkeman’s ability to completely flip around time in your mind (emphasis mine):

    There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

    Burkeman suggests thinking about time a bit differently then we are often taught, and that endless blog posts and books about time management seem to recommend. Instead of viewing life as a canvas to execute our meticulously planned visions of success, he proposes that we should react to the demands of our surroundings and our unique place in history.

    It’s a reminder to focus on our desires, to embrace what we truly want, and to let go of what we cannot control. It’s not about fighting time, but about learning to dance with it, to let it lead us through the rhythm of life.

    And so, this week I feel overwhelmed. Which is simply my mind telling me to be present, to lean into what I want, and to just fucking let it go.

    You get about a halfway through the Count of Monte Cristo and you realize that it is not actually one novel or one story or one tale. It is many stories nested and layered on top of one another that builds the portrait of a man and his time, and the never-ending march of vengeance. And what stories. Such fun. And so many more left.

    I just got to the fulcrum of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a reflection on the story of Cain and Abel and its potential meaning. After discussing it earlier, one of the characters of the book, Lee, recounts his own experience in subsequent years studying a specific sentence, and even a specific word, in the translations of the Cain and Abel story. It revolves around the Hebrew word tishmel, and refers Cain relationship to sin after he is cast out. In one translation, Lee says, the word “thou shalt rule” over sin, while in the another it is said that “Do thou rule.” In the former, a promise is made, and in the latter, an order is given.

    But after years of study, Lee and the scholars he refers to found a new meaning for that word. “Thou mayest.” Our ability to conquer sin, Lee says, is up to us. It is a choice.

    This is an essential part of the novel, and is a focal point for all of its various characters and motifs. And is interesting because of how profound it could be. But on the other hand, it is possible that it is not even true. All of which warrants some inspection I think. I’ll be reading up on this.

    The meaning of Tishmel in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. (Just an intro, I want to look into it more and write a proper post)

    little project in each area of his life at any given time. It helps prioritize and choose what to work on in that moment:

    I artificially limit myself to having one major and one minor active side project at a time, my agility goes up because I’m not doing ten projects at once, I’m doing one or two. When one project finishes, I move to the next best idea that fits the available slot. I will never be taking on too much and it’s easier to say “no” to new distractions if I have to substitute projects.

    I love the no nonsense approach. I worry that I allow “projects” of my life to go on for too long and simply become routine or habits. But maybe that’s a plus.

    And speaking of one thing, here’s one trick to help with decision making in teams: decide how to decide.

    John Burroughs on what it is to live life:

    We may fancy that there might be a better universe, but we cannot conceive of a better, because our minds are the outcome of things as they are, and all our ideas of value are based upon the lessons we learn in this world.

    Notes

    Add to Revolutions Podcast
    Finish goals as narratives post
    Scorecard review
    East of Eden Quotes
    Add to management and Async colleciton about everything going on with the team
    Read Brainpickings
    Monthly fiiiaces
    expese report
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #17: Our Personal Worlds

    Kening Zhu has a suggestion. Use your digital space to build a world, and don’t worry so much about an audience.

    instead of “building an audience,” build a world. build a digital garden-ecosystem, that exists — first and primarily — for itself. a world that doesn’t need likes, traffic, subscribers, or clicks — in order to validate its existence.

    My thinking, in this moment, has become much slower. I have tried to focus my mind on building thoughts, and layering together ideas. And so the idea of building a world, my world, is appealing. This year, I want to begin creating my own.

    Writing about our quest for knowledge and answers, Steinbeck once described the ways in which we try to erect a world around our beliefs:

    An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.

    And this is a key point. Your world is never done and it will often need to be recreated. A world builds over time, and it responds to the changes of our lives. We can’t be afraid to scrap what we have and redraw our own maps.

    If I were to build a world around my ideology and my passions and my thoughts, what would that look like? What are the chapters and how are they organized? What grows from it? I’m not sure yet.

    In the midst of an invasion into Belgium that early French revolutionaries believed would “liberate” the country into liberty, only to have their own values turned against them by a foreign country that felt much more like it was being occupied, the infamous Robespierre had this to say.

    Freedom can never be found by the use of a foreign force

    Robespierre would go on to be rather forceful about freedom not too long after that, but it’s an interesting anti-war sentiment that rings true all these centuries later in our post-Enlightenment age.

    Steinbeck, on the reason for being:

    The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #15: Finding focus in the new year

    I’m thinking a lot about focus this week. There’s something about a new year that makes you look forward. I spent the last year trying to clear away time for things that were important to me or to my work: larger projects, time for reading books, for spending time with my family, for writing here and on The History of the Web.

    And that was, somewhat to my surprise, pretty successful. At work, I have been spending more time on priorities. In my personal life I’ve been able to find the time I wanted for writing and reading and organizing my thoughts.

    Now I’m looking forward with a bit of a question mark. I don’t actually know what my goals are right now. What I’m looking to get out of the next year. I’m ready to try something different. So I did what I usually do. I searched around. It brought me to a new book about mindfulness called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It seems practical and approachable. Clearing my mind and finding focus? That sounds right up my alley.

    I’m looking forward with a flicker of uncertainty. My goals feel a bit hazy and out of focus. But I have settled on one thing—I’m ready to share things up and try something new. I poked around some search engines and checked a few things and stumbled onto at least one intriguing book. It’s called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It appears to be a practical guide to mindfulness and meditation, a practice I am admittedly a little wary of. Yet, the idea of clearing my mind and focusing better? That sounds like something I could do.

    I’ve returned to Steinbeck for the third time in less than a year in his culminating work East of Eden. It is broad—in length and in scope—but maybe its most admirable quality is how much it takes its time. Grapes of Wraith oscillated between its socially charged narrative and didactic monologues injected by Steinbeck himself. So it’s most brilliant moments live in either the world of the story and its dynamics or in Steinbeck’s soliloquies.

    East of Eden feels different. As it drifts along, Steinbeck pulls on various threads. Different characters, different locales, and all the contrives of an exciting plot. As you read, however, you realize that Steinbeck is pulling from different POVs which blend together a contradictory worldview both confused and in awe of the march of progress.

    And then Steinbeck will do what he does best. Sits himself in the middle of a scenario as a conflict converges and extracts the truth and message in it. East of Eden is fascinating for its thematic density and allegorical connections and autobiographical story. But it’s also sharp and personal and familiar and in the first quarter of the novel, that’s what I’m enjoying the most.

    Things I wrote this week:

    John O’Donohue on the artifice of beginnings:

    When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Steinbeck’s resistance

    I am finishing up Grapes of Wraith, and the back half has me convinced that Tom Joad is one of the greatest characters in fiction, and that Steinbeck’s humanist, agrarian solution to the problem of inequity is elegant and timeless.

    The novel, to me, is also half-treatise. He lays out the problem clearly. People are hungry and need work. And instead, they are met with cruelty and neglect. Centralization, the logical extreme of capitalism, results in inefficiency and inhumaneness.

    Nowhere is this more clear than in Chapter 25—a chapter that ends with the title of the book—where Steinbeck lays his message out, rejecting subtlety in favor of clarity. And the message hits home. America, and its people, are withering. Needlessly. Endlessly.

    The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce…

    …There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

    And the solution is simple and plain. Return to the Earth and cultivate it. Help your neighbors. Build a community. Use the government to fill the gaps of equity. And if all else fails, resist.

    Tom Joad resists. He is drawn to, and he can’t escape it.

    Tom leaves us with a powerful declaration conveyed to his story, but really told to us, the reader. It’s not a threat, but it sort of reads like one. Tom, in the wind, aims to help folks wherever he can.

    I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.

    Tom will be there. He still is.

  • Men made it, but they can’t control it

    Thinking about HTML tables this week. Not only because I’m going to be talking to a class about that very topic soon, but because it seems that we are in the HTML tables phase of technology’s next big Internet-driven cycle (it would seem): AI and language learning models.

    Anyway, what do I mean by that? We’re forcing it, basically. We are using the technology of AI in a clunky way. It is unrefined and depends on hacks, rather than going with the grain of the technology. When the technology recedes into the background, becomes more minimal, and less intrusive, than we may truly be on to something. Until then, I can’t help but feel like we’re using tables for layout.

    Reading

    Read through The End of the Googleverse. The web has been reported dead before. The Post-Google world is more interesting to me than not.

    Speaking of Google, I could take a look at their NotebookLM, which I was surprised (and kind of pleased) to find had at its helm Steven Johnson, the co-founder of Feed and writer of many books including Interface Culture.

    Notably, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Ted Nelson never quite cracked that technological nut, and we are so well past it that nobody even thinks about it anymore.

    Bleak House continues, Chapters 31 through 37. Much is revealed and we are quite expeditiously arriving at the point at which it will all collapse. Lady Deadlock has made herself known to Esther. Richard has fallen to the Jardynce sickness. Tachyhorn is onto Deadlock. And the world continues to simply turn, in a way only Dickens can describe:

    Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed.

    On to The Grapes of Wrath. If I could write like any author, oh man would I want it to be Steinbeck. There is so much pathos in every passage of the book. Every word choice is perfect.

    Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

    Harrowing, and true, and poignant. But also, the rhythm of that excerpt is right on point.

    Watching

    Fully caught up to Only Murders in the Building

    Octavia Butler on writing:

    The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration….

    Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

    Notes

    Maybe there’s someothing to a public and shared Aboard board that can be used to collect History of the Web type resouroces innto different categories, or mabe collect it there everytime a footnote is made

    For today:

    • Move Notion finances into Google Drive
    • History of the web ideas
    • Mow the lawmn
    • Do all the laundry