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Linda Button| Longreads | July 4, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,167 words)
Momo
She filled our lives with good food,
chutzpah, laughter, and love.
Enh. I could sense Momo looking over my shoulder as I typed, her head wrapped in a bright coral scarf. I was relieved she had put on weight since death. The final month her skin had hung on her, a size too big. She was back to her firm, long-legged self, her dark eyes bright with interest.
“Enh?!” I said.
I like where you’re going, but the words aren’t right.
This was what we had always done for each other—poked and questioned and haggled over art. Still, I felt the pressure of the deadline. “Your husband needs this in four days. I‘ve got to get the ball rolling.”
Momo shrugged. You’re the writer.
What did she know? Inside I harbored a delicious fantasy that my words would cause the audience—Momo’s friends and sisters, her husband, Marty, and their daughter—to ooooh at how I had captured her gusto on a tombstone.
For most of my career I have written ad copy. The work suits me. Constraints. The single page of paper. Brevity. Choose as few words as possible. Let the visuals tell the story. Conjure emotion in compressed space and time. Here, then, was the perfect writing assignment for me. A three- by two-foot billboard. Thirty words, max. My business partner’s epitaph.
But unlike advertising, lofted into the airwaves to evaporate, this project would be carved into granite for eternity. I yearned to create a gravestone that would sing through the ages, that would capture the joie de vivre that was my partner. One year later, Momo’s death still had me reeling. I had worked with her for two decades. I loved her. I considered Marty, her husband of only a few years, a latecomer to the Momo party. Now, for this assignment, he was also the client. He had final say, after all: When it comes to customs of death, spouses top all others. According to Jewish tradition, the time had come to inscribe the grave marker. A literal deadline.
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Marty had procrastinated for months. So, at the request of friends, I was pitching in. The final words were due by the end of the week. Could I deliver genius in five days?
Momo was right. The copy was “enh.” I emailed the lines to Marty anyway—She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love—and hoped he would embrace it.
Momo and I had run an ad agency together. She was a seize-the-day daughter of Holocaust survivors; I was bred from stoic Yankee stock. When our agency dwindled to two, we embraced our differences and renamed the business Tooth and Nail. She, the smile. Me, driving home the point. We spread out giant sheets of paper on her dining room floor for brainstorms, plotted campaigns on her sofa, pilfered images off the internet, fought, competed, stepped over each other’s words, slashed ideas, fretted over stubborn, uninspired clients, and laughed about our men.
In the early days, on train rides home from New York to Boston, Momo would find a table for four and unfurl her coat onto the adjoining seat so no one would join us, while I tucked my backpack around my shoes, not wanting to take an inch more than I had paid for. The coastline scrolled by. She counseled me on my imploding marriage; I marveled over her athletic dating. “Who should I choose?” she asked. “The heart surgeon who’s analytical, or the brain expert who’s all heart?”
“Which one brings you joy?” I knew enough to ask that question. Momo chased pleasure, splurging on business class and nice hotels. She spent far more energy on my happiness than I did. She gifted me photographs of tulips exploding in red and orange, a painting of a woman treading a gray ocean, her nose barely above the surface, as if Momo saw beauty in me but also my struggles. She extended a life raft. She cooked homemade matzoh ball soup steaming with ginger and fennel, she listened deeply, as the best therapists do. I left our conversations feeling both filled and emptied, cleansed and heard.
Finally, she chose Marty, the psychiatrist who strummed classical guitar and wrote her love letters from his neglected house near the shore.
Then, the mammogram revealed a 2.2-centimeter lump. Cue the mastectomies, chemo and radiation, wigs and thinning eyebrows. Momo rejected that as her entire story. For seven years after her diagnosis, Momo made even cancer an adventure. She wrote a blog.
Am I upset over the possibility of losing a breast? Not really. I’ve had a terrific pair for 48 years. My girls have given me and many boys great pleasure.
She treated loss as a punch line, no topic too intimate.
On Monday I took a shower and quickly realized that I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.
In advertising we start with the audience and consider how we want to make them feel. Who would trudge the slope to visit Momo’s gravesite each year? Her loyal circle of friends, surely. Her three older sisters, each a variation of Momo: artistic, smart, empathetic. And, of course, her 13-year-old daughter and round-shouldered Marty, his AirPods filled with classical guitar. I imagined her quiet, sarcastic daughter cresting the hill and I wanted to reward her with a smile, to feel the warmth, sechel, and humor of her mom embracing her.
Amazingly, when I look back, I did not follow my own best practices. I did no research on tombstones, threw out no wide net. I suffered from tunnel vision—exactly what I warn young writers never to do—and got stuck on a single idea. Had I bothered, I would have discovered a wide field of possibilities; it turns out that epitaphs trace the arc of history with tales of society, legacies, and stories of power and love.
From traditional Jewish blessings . . .
“May her soul be bound in the binding of life.”
and Japanese poetry . . .
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
. . . to good old sardonic American.
Here lies Butch, we planted him raw,
he was quick on the trigger, but slow on the draw.
We could have honored Momo’s philosophy, She was bubbles in the champagne of life, or captured her perseverance: Grit and Grace, or something risqué, pulled from her own blog. “I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.”
I could have offered Marty an array of choices, mocked up what the stone would look like, handed him a scotch, and nudged him in the right direction. Instead, I worried and clung to one idea. Grief stuffed me into a small, hardened box.
I was thinking of something more inspiring.
Marty’s response waited for me the next morning. In advertising, where writing is a team sport, my ego had long ago shrunk to a chickpea. Still. Ouch. He sent examples of quotes he considered inspiring.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Dr. Seuss
“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” —Abraham Lincoln
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
My stomach curdled with disappointment. I hated when clients reached for clichés. Also, I was pretty sure Old Abe never said that. Momo leaned across and squinted at the text. She turned to me with a look between constipation and impatience: What do these dead white guys have to do with a hot, middle-aged diva?
“Right?!” I nodded even though I got where Marty was coming from. When a star collapses and sucks up light and life you need big mother constellations like Abe Lincoln and Dr. Seuss on your side. Marty was crazy in love with Momo. He proposed in her throes of dying and adopted her daughter. Not so crazy.
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But he wasn’t there when Momo first brought her daughter home from China, the same year I gave birth to my youngest child. He hadn’t watched our kids grow up to be best friends. He wasn’t with us, looking down on giant sheets of paper, pulling ideas from the air, creating a company while taking turns with after-school pickup. Where was he when we got The History Channel clients snockered on vodka at a creative presentation on Russian tzars, or when Momo snored through a conference call, and we claimed it was a leaf blower?
My hand hovered over the keyboard. Momo was still making that face. I marshaled my diplomacy and shot a note back to Marty.
The Renoir quote is lovely—haven’t heard it before. How about this:
Momo
She filled our lives with chutzpah, laughter, and love.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Marty didn’t respond. The day ticked by.
In her last month I had wheeled Momo around the block, past her front yard where a gardener friend had fashioned a river of smooth stones. Momo did not admire the curving white through her lawn, or the blaze of yellow leaves outside her windows. She curled inward with pain. Now that it was my turn to lavish her with support and comfort, I had no words. I spoke to her as if to a child. “Isn’t that tree beautiful!”
“Take me home,” she said.
Her office had been turned into a sickroom, a large bed and TV at one end. Her sisters had arrived from Israel, Dominica, and Maine and tightened around her. They filled the kitchen with music, took turns dressing her, served up platters of hummus and opinions. They, and her other friends, somehow understood the rituals of grief, care, and mitzvah. Their religion was seeped in loss and optimism. They practiced simple, concrete gestures. But I didn’t even know what to do with my hands. I felt useless, as if I had gone from insider to outsider. I’ve been here all along, I wanted to say to them. Momo and I, we helped each other. She offered me refuge from my unraveling marriage. I gave her purpose.
The night she passed, I left my phone in the living room. When I woke, messages from her friends and sisters spilled down my screen. Voice mails. Texts. “Come to the hospital!” “Hurry!” I had slept while my friend died.
Another day, nothing.
“He hates it,” I said.
Oh, you know Marty. Momo waved her hand. He’s a BFD at the hospital. He’s probably curing ADHD and seasonal depression.
“After years of pounding me on deadlines, you’re giving him a pass?”
He’s a genius, they need more time.
Ouch, I thought. Double whammy.
The morning of the deadline, my email dinged.
This is what I woke up with at 4 AM:
Mother, wife, negotiator, artist, cook, adventurer.
Forever bold, stylish, and brave.
“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir
Thoughts? Marty.
Lists. The final refuge of the desperate, the last gasp of clients when they’d run out of ideas or lacked imagination. Marty had reduced Momo to a string of nouns, adjectives, and commas, as if that defined her. Plus, Wife was the second word?
Momo beamed. Stylish. Adventurer! Marty’s so good with words, isn’t he?
That’s what love does, I muttered to myself. It infuses mediocre writing with sentiment. “He left off sister. Friend!”
Momo frowned. Gotta include them. Maybe we need an extra tall slab. Fit everything in.
I pounded a response on the keyboard.
Oh, those 4am thoughts!
I would add friend, sister, businesswoman . . . and the list gets long. Maybe focus on how she made us feel? xoxo
How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second. Death had robbed me of my witness, my confidant, the most honest friend I ever had. She never lied to me about my situation. Or herself. How many lovers have you had? I had asked her when I started dating again. She looked off to the corner of the restaurant, counting. “Sixty? Eighty? I had fun.” Would I ever squeeze so much out of life? She left nothing on the table.
What did I give her? My doggedness. My drive. My craving for partnership, as if I was born incomplete. I gave her my standing in the industry. My fierce competitiveness. My soundless, grateful love.
I went to make coffee. Marty’s response waited in my inbox.
It doesn’t work to say how she made us feel. We need to convey who she was. Funny, I left off sister and friend as her middle sister thought that it would be unnecessary, but it’s a key part of who Momo was. I was hoping that negotiator and artist would cover who she was as a businessperson.
Off to the eye doctor.
Ah, he was pulling in Momo’s sisters. A classic zone defense move by the client. I poured contempt onto the page.
New glasses? Hope you’re seeing more clearly now. Give me a call . . .
What do you think, Momo? I looked around the room and discovered her missing. Marty never responded either. But a tombstone deadline does not melt away like some canceled ad campaign.
The morning of the unveiling broke crisp and bright, the kind of April day we long for after the gray length of winter. A brightly colored square, rippling in the sunlight, waited for us. Someone had swathed the tombstone in scarves. The wind lifted the corners, flirting and winking, to reveal edges of letters. What was written there? When I had asked Marty the night before at a gathering in their home, he shrugged and said, “Something like in the email.”
Momo had handpicked her site. Even the year before, as we tipped clumps of earth onto her casket, weeping, we admired the location. It faced a protected edge of the graveyard.
Now, a year later, grass had grown over the mound. The trees plumped with buds and sunlight flickered through new green leaves. The rabbi, a short, bearded man, gestured for us to draw close. Marty stood with their daughter, his arm around her. I expected Momo to leap out from behind the stone and join us.
We each read something. I had to borrow a quote that morning, too overwhelmed to think. Words. All my life I have wrestled with, debated, and polished them. But how much had they ever mattered? Momo’s sisters approached the stone and unfastened the tape that secured the scarves. My shoulders tensed and my hand squeezed a damp Kleenex in my pocket. As the coral silks pulled away, the epitaph revealed itself from the bottom up. The words were indistinct, unreadable, and I cursed the stonecutter. Then I pushed the tears from my eyes and read the final, stubborn, unfixable inscription.
Momo
Mother. Wife. Sister. Friend.
Negotiator. Artist. Cook. Adventurer.
Forever Bold, Stylish, and Brave.
“The pain passes. The Beauty remains” —Renoir.
November 4, 1958–October 25, 2013
Every word rang true, but they read like a catalog. Writing, I have realized, reflects the writer, not the subject. The tombstone embodied Marty: conflict-averse, hoping to placate everyone. The list did not add up to Momo. I had yearned for bolder art, and my failure said something about me too. I deferred to Marty instead of seizing the moment and creating art worthy of this woman, if that was even possible.
Loss had yawned over me the past year with daily reminders of my friend. The plants she had bequeathed to me, now gasping for water, hung from my ceiling; my phone became a minefield of photos and buried emails. I would rifle through contracts or sort through our old projects and feel fresh pinpricks of grief. I turned funny tales from our partnership over until they became smooth, comforting stones in my palm.
I had tried to find another business partner. I needed someone else, I knew that, to keep me from spinning tighter into self-criticism, to slow down and let my feelings catch up, to find happiness for myself, as she had taught me. I even met with a consultant who listened carefully over bad hotel coffee and said “You’re lucky if you get one or two partners like that in a lifetime. Don’t try to replace her—go out and seek many people.” So I found designers, producers, and accountants to help me run the business. I began a relationship with a kind man. Each person filled a hole in my life but, like the litany on the tombstone, couldn’t capture what I had lost. Death had rubbed its heel squarely on what vibrated and flourished between us, ending the world Momo lived in, of possibility, her quicksilver wit, the warmth that rose from her, her push to seek out new adventures.
I closed my eyes and imagined going home and calling Momo and telling her about this day, where we sang songs and prayed and grieved both privately and as a chorus. The group murmured on either side of me. The edge of a cold breeze snuck down my collar. I folded my arms and held myself tighter.
Ach!
“Momo?”
What’s with the waterworks? Life is waiting for you down the hill, my dear.
I never visit Momo’s gravesite, nor do I want to. She sits next to me when I labor over a script or edit a commercial, and even now, as I try to craft this memory of her. I did not have the right words to say to her in her final weeks. I could not conjure poetry for her at her service. My words failed me then, they fail me still, and I keep trying. I want to breathe life back into the shining energy that filled my days. I want to make Momo alive for you on this simple piece of paper.
Do words matter? I visit Momo’s blog and linger over her final post, written weeks before she died. The stamp of that last date floats farther away from me, but the words still leave fresh yearning.
Seven years of debilitating treatments, anxious scan results, and the occasional self-diagnosis. It’s a lot to go through to drop a few pounds. Seven very precious years spent with my magnificent husband, my daughter and stellar friends. Seven years going on eight years with nine years in reach and ten years hardly a stretch.
Knowing all that and still, I live like there is no tomorrow.
Linda Button is a storyteller and writer for a large non-profit. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Magazine, PBS, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress, Fight Song, explores mental illness, martial arts and learning to let go, despite love.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin
Last month on the blog, I floated the idea of thinking about generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard as technologies for learning. I drew an analogy to the digital camera I used as I learned photography. As I was developing a conceptual understanding of photography, I was also learning how to use the tool in my hands, with all its knobs and buttons, and these two kinds of learning informed and supported each other. Could we use generative AI tools in a similar fashion, teaching students to use the tools well as part of learning other skills, like writing and researching? If so, it might help to know what kind of tools we’re dealing with when we talk about ChatGPT and other AI text generation tools.
For instance, I saw this post by Simon Harris go around Mastodon a couple of weeks ago:
15yo: I use ChatGPT quite a bit.
Me: Oh?
15yo: Today, I asked it to give me the last digit of Pi.
Me:
15yo: …exactly
Me:
15yo: Apparently, it’s 4
This is funny because ChatGPT is so, so wrong about pi. As an irrational number, pi has a nonterminating decimal representation; there’s no last digit of pi. The joke, however, relies on an assumption that ChatGPT is supposed to be some kind of answer machine, a tool for answering questions correctly. However, ChatGPT is famously not that. It’s well known for “hallucinating” facts and inventing citations. There are, in fact, a lot of educators who are worried that students will rely too much on ChatGPT and similar tools because these tools produce text that is factually incorrect. For example, check out this YouTube video of a chemistry instructor evaluating the accuracy of ChatGPT’s answers to various organic chemistry questions. Spoiler: It didn’t do that great.
So if these tools aren’t answer machines, what are they? I would argue that ChatGPT and similar tools are actually wordsmiths. They are powered by large language models that mix words together to create fluent prose. Ask it to draft an essay for you on a given topic, and it will put words together to do just that. Ask it to revise that draft based on your feedback, and it will do that, too. See, for instance, how Ethan Mollick used Bing to help him craft the final paragraph of his April 26th newsletter. Ask it to summarize a long text, and, because it’s good with words, you’ll get a pretty decent summary. It’s a wordsmith that actually doesn’t know what it’s writing but still produces intelligible texts.
This is, in fact, the other reason that educators are worried about AI text generators, because they can quickly produce acceptable responses to pretty standard essay question prompts, and educators are worried that students will use these tools to cheat, whether the essay question is of the “writing as assessment,” “writing to learn,” or “learn to write” variety. Because ChatGPT and its peers are good with words.
I’m struck by how the initial reporting and framing of these tools affect the ways we think about them. While AI text generators were seen as answer machines (albeit flawed ones), AI image generators have been seen as “smiths” of a different kind, working with pixels to create images. While a tool like ChatGPT making stuff up is seen as a problem, if I ask Midjourney or DALL-E (a couple of popular image generators) to give me a scene of robots playing basketball, no one worries about the result not being real-world realistic.
If AI text generators are tools for learning, as I argued on the blog last month, then I think it’s helpful to think of them as wordsmithing tools. Does a student struggle to come up with counter arguments for their thesis? Ask an AI tool to generate a few. Does a student freeze up when confronted with a blank page? Ask an AI tool to write a first draft. Does a student find it hard to adopt the right voice for their writing? Ask an AI tool to rewrite a draft essay in different voices. These are all wordsmithing tasks that ChatGPT and its ilk can handle pretty well.
Please note that I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t help students learn to develop counter arguments or to get past writer’s block or to figure out their writing voice. I am suggesting, however, that AI tools might be used to help students learn these skills, just as my digital camera helped me learn photography. Cynthia Alby uses the metaphor of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels to talk about how AI tools might provide a kind of scaffolding for students learning writing skills. When I heard that metaphor, I was reminded of a 2012 blog post by Mark Sample, in which he talks about balance bikes as a different way to teach kids to ride bicycles. Learning with training wheels means getting help with balancing while learning to pedal, while learning with a balance bike means not worrying about pedaling while learning to balance, which is apparently easier for most kids. We might need to think carefully about where our students need the kind of support that AI tools can provide, and the answer might vary by student.
I’ve been using the training wheels and balance bike metaphors in my recent talks on teaching with AI, and I was all ready to bust out the “AI as wordsmith” argument above at a talk I gave earlier this week. But then I signed up for ChatGPT Pro to see what ChatGPT’s plugins are all about. Back in March, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that the tool would have plugins that allowed it to communicate (in a fashion) with other web tools and websites. It’s taken me three months, but I finally started playing around with these plugins. I quickly realized that some of the advice I had given faculty earlier in the year about designing “ChatGPT-proof” assignments hadn’t been accurate for a while!
For instance, if I ask the free version of ChatGPT, which uses GPT-3.5, to tell me about the May 2023 Supreme Court decision that dealt with Andy Warhol’s art, here’s the response I get:
I apologize for the confusion, but as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I’m not aware of any specific Supreme Court decision in May 2023 related to Andy Warhol’s art. It’s possible that such a decision may have occurred after my knowledge cutoff or it may be a hypothetical scenario that hasn’t actually taken place. I recommend checking reliable news sources or legal references to get the most accurate and up-to-date information on any recent Supreme Court decisions regarding Andy Warhol’s art.
If I think about ChatGPT as an answer machine, I’m not getting the answer I want, but at least the tool is telling me what it doesn’t know. That’s an improvement over how the chatbot presented information at the start of 2023. But watch what happens when I use the same prompt in ChatGPT Pro with the VoxScript plugin enabled:
In May 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Andy Warhol Foundation in a copyright infringement case. The case was centered around a series of silk screen images that Warhol created based on a photograph of the late musician Prince, taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith in 1981.
The court ruled in a 7-2 vote that Warhol infringed on Goldsmith’s copyright. The case hinged on whether Warhol’s images of Prince transformed Goldsmith’s photograph to a great enough degree to stave off claims of copyright infringement and therefore be considered as fair use under copyright law.
Goldsmith had sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (AWF) for copyright infringement after the foundation licensed an image of Warhol’s titled “Orange Prince” based on Goldsmith’s image of the pop artist to Condé Nast in 2016 for use in its publication Vanity Fair…
It goes on for another couple of paragraphs, and it gives me the news source it used to generate this summary of the case, a May 18th NPR report. This version of ChatGPT is indeed acting like an answering machine!
Quick sidebar: It is also now possible to share one’s ChatGPT correspondences with others. A few months ago, you needed some third-party tool to do so, but now ChatGPT has a share button for every chat. Thus the argument that there’s no “paper trail” for how one uses ChatGPT is no longer true.
I used ChatGPT for the above examples, but please remember that ChatGPT isn’t the only game in town. I asked Bing about the Andy Warhol case, and I got a similar summary, this time with three different news sources cited. Google Bard gave me a similar summary and added some text about how fair use works in the United States. Its sources, however, were meeting notes from a 2004 Congressional subcommittee hearing and a Quizlet created for maybe a law course? Your mileage may vary with these tools.
So are these tools now, in fact, answer machines? I’m going to argue that while they can be used in that way, a better way to think of them is as interfaces to other systems. Just as Siri or Alexa act as a voice-based interface to the apps on your digital devices, ChatGPT and Bing and such are text-based interfaces to, for instance, all the transcripts attached to all the YouTube videos. These tools are still wordsmiths, but wordsmiths used as interfaces.
To use a left field example, the fast food chain Wendy’s recently announced that it was working on an AI chatbot to take drive-thru orders. That’s AI-as-interface, with the chatbot, which is good with words, taking spoken orders for a cheeseburger and a Frosty and turning that into an order in the restaurant’s food production system. For a more academic example, consider Elicit, an AI research assistant that can help you find research in its corpus of 115 million academic papers that might address your research question. Ask it a question like “How should I form groups of students when using group work in the college classroom?” and (because it’s good with words) it will return a table of potentially relevant papers, summarized and tagged by intervention, sample size, and outcomes.
AI as answer machine, AI as wordsmith, AI as interface… I’m not sure where we’ll land with how we think about these tools, but I believe these framings are helpful in assessing what the tools can and cannot do and what roles they might play as learning technologies.
One more caveat: Most of what I’ve presented here is focused squarely on AI text generation tools powered by large language models. There are lots of other kinds of AI tools, like Cornell University’s Merlin app, which can identify birds by their songs, or that AI-powered agent that excelled at the strategic negotiation game Diplomacy, that don’t fall into any of the categories I’ve described here.
Oleg Alexandrov, vector space illustration. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Counterpath Press’s series of now thirteen computer-generated books, Using Electricity, offers a refreshing alternative to the fantasia of terror and wonder that we’ve all been subjected to since the public release of ChatGPT. The books in this series present us with wide-ranging explorations into the potential interplay between human language and code. Although code-based work can be dauntingly hermetic to the noncoder, all computationally generated or mediated writing is the result of two fundamental decisions that remain in the hands of the human author: defining the source text(s) (the data) and choosing the processes (the algorithms or procedures) that operate on them. A text generator like ChatGPT uses brute force on both sides—enormous amounts of text vacuumed from the internet are run through energy-intensive pattern-finding algorithms—to create coherent, normative sentences with an equivocal but authoritative tone. The works in Using Electricity harness data and code to push language into more playful and revealing imaginative territory.
Many of Using Electricity’s authors mobilize computational processes to supercharge formal constraints, producing texts that incessantly iterate through variations and permutations. In The Truelist, Nick Montfort, the series editor, runs a short Python script to generate pages of four-line stanzas comprising invented compound words. “Now they saw the lovelight, / the blurbird, / the bluewoman facing the horse, / the fireweed.” The poem is a relentless loop—repeating this same structure as it churns through as many word combinations as it can find. Rafael Pérez y Pérez’s Mexica uses a pared-down, culturally specific vocabulary and a complex algorithm to generate short fairy tale–like stories. One begins, “The princess woke up while the songs of the birds covered the sky.” The skeletal story structure swaps different characters and actions as the variations play out. It’s like watching a multiversal performance of the same puppet show.
I find that often I am not reading these works for meaning as much as for pattern, which is at the heart of how computation operates. Allison Parrish’s fantastic Articulations brings us frighteningly deep into the core of computational pattern searching. Drawing from a corpus of over two million lines of poetry from the Project Gutenberg database, she takes us on a random walk through “vector space.” Put simply, this is the mathematical space in which computers plot similarities between different aspects of language—the sound, the syntax, whatever the programmer chooses. The result is a dizzying megacollage/cluster-mash-up of English poetry in which obsessive and surprising strings constantly emerge—a vast linguistic hall of mirrors. “In little lights, nice little nut. In a little sight. In a little sight, in a little sight, a right little, tight little island. A light. A light. A light. A light. A light.”
Many of these works are indebted to the wider traditions of procedural, concrete, conceptual, and erasure poetry, while making use of code’s unique possibilities for play, chance, variation, and repetition. Stephanie Strickland’s Ringing the Changes draws its mathematical ordering process from a centuries-old practice of English bell ringing. In Experiment 116, Rena Mosteirin plays a game of translation telephone by running Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” through multiple languages in Google Translate and back into English.
The three most recent titles, released in April, comprise some of the series’s most varied and dynamic approaches to digital poetics. There is an updated edition of Image Generation by the pioneering literary artist John Cayley; as well as Qianxun Chen and Mariana Roa Oliva’s Seedlings, which uses the metaphor of seeds and trees, and “grows” word structures that evoke the dynamics and fragility of plant life. One of the most exciting titles thus far, especially from the perspective data source, is Arwa Michelle Mboya’s Wash Day, in which she threads together transcripts of YouTube videos of Black hair vloggers sharing their Wash Day rituals. The result is an immersive, polyvocal, multiauthored narrative that reveals the unique capacity of data and computation to give presence to specific communities. Wash Day provides an extraordinary contrast to the normalized, bulk-writing superstores of commercial text generators. That deep attention to language—its potential, its limits, its expressive capabilities, its necessity, and its fragility—is the central quality all these authors share. Hopefully works like theirs can help us imagine much more resonant and compelling digital futures.
Jonathan Thirkield is a poet, coder, and digital artist. He teaches computational media and digital arts at The New School, Parsons, and Columbia University. His second collection of poetry, Infinity Pool, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in fall 2024. His poem “Antwerp (2)” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.
(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
I don’t know how, but we are already at the start of summer! I decided it would be a good time to check in on my intentions for 2023 and see if I’ve made progress, if I need to spend some more time/energy or if I need to shift my attention elsewhere. I wanted 2023 to be a year of FOCUS, so let’s see how I’ve done so far.
-- FOCUS in my purchases: As you’ve seen in my pen show recaps, I have definitely bought things at all of those shows and also at pen meetups and of course, online as well. But in general, I have definitely bought fewer pens so far this year than I have in the past. It has allowed me to justify getting some hard-to-find pens (dare I say “grail”?) because I hadn’t spent as much on pens. And in some cases, I did eventually buy something I was eyeing, but I spent more time eyeing it instead of jumping on it immediately (the Leonardo Momento Zero Aloha Blue comes to mind). I still ask myself WHY I am interested in something and whether it’s because of FOMO or “squirrel syndrome”, where it’s just the latest new thing that grabs my attention. I feel like I’ve been doing a much better job of that so far this year, and plan to keep this up for the remainder of the year, which will be difficult as DC and SF shows are coming up, as well as my birthday, planner season and the holidays.
Fewer purchases means I can go for it when a grail pen like this Pilot Vanishing Point Twilight crosses my path!
-- FOCUS on more ink swatching: Back in December, I was up to 61.38% swatched and I’m now up to a whopping 62.52%. I know that a 1% increase doesn’t sound like much but I tend to add A LOT of inks to my collection at pen shows, and I also get some in for review as well, not to mention I’m a bit of an inkophile so an increase of over 1 percent is actually a lot of swatching! But I have also not bought a lot of inks too! Related to what I mentioned above, I have asked myself “do I need the ink right now” (sometimes yes, because it’s a limited release, but usually no), “have I been swatching”, etc. Any incoming inks automatically get set aside for swatching so if the new ink pile gets too full, I have to get swatching! I often swatch inks while watching TV with the family so I plan to do more “swatching and watching” before I get tempted to add more to the ink stash.
-- FOCUS on Journaling, even if I can’t keep up: My plan for 2023 was to do my short form journaling in my Travelers Notebook with the Weekly insert for the short jots and an A5 Hobonichi for long form. I have done pretty well with the TN, with entries for almost all dates except for a few pages and weekly summaries as well. Unfortunately, the undated A5 Hobonichi never really got off the ground. I kept getting stuck over when to start, and how many pages I should skip since I kept missing days. I have decided to use it for non-date-related journaling, commonplace book or something along those lines, but using it as a long-form journal didn’t work for me. At the Chicago show, I bought an A5 Plotter so that I didn’t have to worry about skipping pages because I could start anywhere I wanted and move the pages around. So far, I have added a couple of postcards that I got from friends and wrote in it a few times but I already feel more relieved that I can start whenever/wherever I want. Let’s see if I can keep this up!
I’m actually caught up through yesterday but last week’s spread looks better completed!
-- FOCUS on Selling or Rehoming items that I’m not using: Earlier this year, I shared a table with Inkdependence Mike at the Philly Pen Show. It was easier to pick some of the pens to sell because they were impulse buys or my tastes/focus had changed. In other cases, it was really tough because I was so sentimental about the pen (usually because it took me a long time to find or because it’s sad to realize I’m not as into it as I once was). I need to use those kinds of pens again or put them in the sell binder. I’m still not making bank on these sales but it’s been nice to have money to put towards other things (like non-stationery items, for a change, lol) and it feels good knowing that someone else is going to enjoy it. Even though selling a single pen or bottle of ink or even a sheet of stickers isn’t going to noticeably reduce the amount of stuff I own, there is still a sense of release and relief knowing that it’s no longer sitting idle and unused. And that feeling makes it easier to keep the momentum going.
Some of the pens that I’ve added to the sale binder (come find me at the STL show!)
-- FOCUS on Rediscovery of currently owned but not currently used items: There have been some amazing pens and inks released this year, which makes this so difficult! But setting aside pens-to-be-inked in a tray helps curb the desire to immediately ink up the new pens and forget about others. If I’m inking up a new pen, I try to use an older ink and vice versa. Continuing to keep track of pen usage (via Fountain Pen Companion) motivates me to write more pens dry so I can ink up more pens. And if I keep seeing pens in my collection that I just don’t feel like inking up, it’s a sign that I need to ink them up or put them in the sell binder.
I also decided to make a concerted effort to use some of the things that I love to buy (and hoard) but am afraid to use, like stickers, rubber stamps and washi tape. It’s hard not to think of some of these things as precious, especially difficult or impossible to replace items. But it has been fun to peel that first sticker off of a sheet and use them to decorate journals or envelopes. It’s even more satisfying to get to the end of a roll of washi tape or sticker sheet. Besides, using stuff up means you can buy more stuff, right? :-)
Some of the sticker sheets that I started using in the past few months. Feels strangely good to see the empty spaces!
-- FOCUS on Stick-to-it-iveness for seeing my projects through to the finish: I continue to make progress on transcribing Meditations (44%) and The Little Prince (59%) but I haven’t touched Hamilton lyrics at all. Oops. Will try to spend a little more time on Hamilton because I am not letting myself start another project until I’ve finished something! Wish me luck!
Still working on The Little Prince (left) and Meditations!
-- FOCUS on Health and wellness: I would like to say that I prioritized Health and Wellness this year but the reality is I haven’t done as much as I would have liked. Sure, I can blame the weather (seriously, 3 atmospheric rivers? And an unusually cold and wet spring?) or the travel or just about anything else, but there really isn’t a good reason other than inertia. I have resumed my habit tracker this month, and have been trying to do more stretching and yoga when the weather isn’t amenable as well as doing anything to get outside, even if it’s walking the dog around the block. I’ve also been working on getting more sleep and have added an earlier bedtime to my habit tracker. And I’m repeating this reminder for me and for all of you: there is only one YOU so please take care of yourself. Reach out if you’re struggling, get help from friends, family, professionals. Take that hike, pamper yourself, meditate, stretch, hydrate, etc.
-- FOCUS on Learning/Practicing/Reading: So far, I have made zero progress on the video courses that I had bought in 2021/22, but I have been reading more, both for knowledge, self-improvement and for fun. I’ve also resumed studying Italian grammar where I am using an A5 notebook to take notes and write down exercises. I’ve added “Italian Grammar” as well as “Reading” to my habit tracker, though I also enjoy seeing progress on the GoodReads and Kindle apps. Now to figure out how to fit video courses into the plan.
-- FOCUS on Planning the day ahead of time: The Bullet Journal (BuJo) continues to be the best tool for me to be productive and track items that need to be worked on or completed. I have spent some effort planning the night before but I don’t give myself a hard time if that doesn’t happen. As long as I get a plan going, I end up getting a lot more done. For the second half of the year, I’m going to track whether I plan the night before or the morning of, so I can see which one ends up helping my productivity more.
Now that the first half of 2023 has flown by, it was good to see that I did make some progress on my focus and intentions this year. I do have some more work ahead of me but I am still hopeful that the rest of the year will result in continued productivity, mindfulness, health, happiness and continued enjoyment of this hobby and of life in general.
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(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)
On Thursday, June 8th, I drove two hours to Milwaukee, got on a train for two hours to Chicago, got on another train for eleven hours to Pittsburgh, then got on another train to Altoona for three hours. It was a long night. Then I spent the next five days packing up and clearing out my grandmother's house and loading a few treasured items into a shipping container. Then I got back on the Altoona train to Pittsburgh, and spent five days at the Horror Writers Convention, StokerCon. Then I got on the Pittsburgh train to Chicago and the Chicago train to Milwaukee, and then home again. Ten days on the road that included everything from sitting in the mud in a graveyard to attending a formal awards banquet. And throughout that process, I needed to write. A lot. And without carrying too many heavy things, because train hopping is tough, and there would also be times when I needed to walk 1-2 miles with all my gear on my back. This was the most minimal packing I've ever done, and it worked well for me.
I just got back yesterday as I write this, and I'm still lost in the fog of exhaustion, but here's a list of Pen Addict-relevant thoughts and encounters from my trip.
Trains are perfect for writers. The whole travel mode is less frantic and hassled than flying. If your tray table isn't roomy enough, head to the dining car for unlimited coffee and a table to spread your work out. While most of my long train rides were at night, while I tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep, a daytime train ride of eleven hours sounds almost like a writing retreat in itself. Overall, I found this mode of travel to be my favorite over driving or flying.
No matter how much I write, or plan to write, I really just need one notebook and pen. I brought the Pebble Stationery Cosmo Air Light notebook, my Schon DSGN pocket fountain pen, and the CW&T Pen Type-B as my travel stationery, along with my Mini Plotter with the Kaweco Lilliput in the loop. I used the Pebble Stationery and the Schon for story writing, and I used the Pen Type B for signing receipts. I used one sheet of Plotter paper to leave a nice note for my B&B innkeeper. And I used the Plotter itself to press flowers. It works quite well for that. I pressed clover and morning glories from my grandparents' graves, and two roses from my grandmother's garden. An unconventional use case, but one I am very grateful for. The plastic dividers and elastic closure band make it perfect for collecting small, meaningful blooms. And the day after I collected these flowers, I found flowers that my grandmother had pressed in her own books, from her own parents' funerals. We were always very much alike.
Write letters. Lots of letters. Write them to the people you love, and when you receive letters, keep them somewhere where your granddaughter will find them someday and see how much you loved and were loved. My grandmother saved hundreds of letters that my grandfather sent to her when he was in the Navy. Of all the treasures I found in the house, these were the very best.
When you have to plan a difficult thing, plan a very fun thing for right after. Recovering from an emotional week by surrounding myself with writer friends was the perfect antidote to grief. With readings, and panels, and signings, and talks, and banquets, and bar closings, there's both plenty of time to talk and process, and plenty of distraction. And lots of hugs.
If you go to painstaking measures to pack minimally for a difficult journey, maybe don't acquire 18 new books to carry home. Just some advice for future me.
The best thing you can possibly do before getting on a train for uncountable hours is to chill at a friend's house, especially if that friend has goats. And Smores.
This journey was strange and not linear, much like this post. In two days the pod with my grandmother's things will arrive at my house, and I will literally and metaphorically unpack the artifacts of her life and take these objects soaked in memory into my home. My grandmother gave me my love of reading and writing and sentimentality--all of which are essential ingredients to who I am in general, and are also the things that led me to my love for pens and paper.
I didn't write as much as I needed to on this trip; there wasn't as much downtime as I'd hoped as I moved quickly from task to task. But now that I'm home, it's me and the pages for miles, and I just have to stay on track.
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The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.
“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”
The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.
“When my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of ‘where is this going?’, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.”
A kind of philosophical innocence is the subject of the following guest post by Bradford Skow, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Skow works mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and aesthetics, and has a blog/newsletter, Mostly Aesthetics, on Substack, which I highly recommend.
This is the fourth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
Herbert Morris read an essay titled “Lost Innocence” at the 1975 Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium. In it, he attempted an analysis of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence, when Eve was tempted and they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge they acquired was not, obviously, perceptual knowledge, nor did they draw some new conclusion from their evidence. It is closer to say, Morris thought, that they acquired “a different way of feeling about what had been before them all along”: “[w]hereas one had earlier felt at ease, felt a kind of natural joy, one now is cursed with an absence of joy, perhaps more, with feeling anxious and bad.” But this itself is just a first approximation, and Morris steers us toward, and then away from, several more accounts of lost innocence, until, after a pause at his preferred one, he closes with a meditation on the nature of evil, and on the morally wise people who have “not been crushed by what they have confronted, but have emerged, in ways mysterious to behold, victorious, capable, despite and because of knowledge, of affirming rather than denying life.” Life-affirmation is not an ending that the essay’s opening paragraphs point you toward. Morris announces only that the essay was stimulated by reflection on the story of Adam and Eve, and he acknowledges early on the “serpentine nature” of his reasoning.
Every age has its favored philosophical templates. Readers of this venue are doubtless familiar, either as writers, or as readers or referees, with one in common use today:
I will argue that P.
Lo, notice that I am now arguing that P.
Reminder that Modus Ponens is valid!
In conclusion, I have argued that P.
On top of all this meta-signposting, not to be neglected is the obligatory here is the plan for this paper, placed at the end of the Introduction, and skipped over by every reader. The basic unit of philosophy is taken to be the argument with numbered premises and labeled conclusion, as the proof is the basic unit of mathematics. Of course books and papers in mathematics also have definitions and explanatory insertions, nor do works of philosophy consist only of arguments—not even Spinoza’s Ethics—but everything is built around them.
At sea between college and graduate school, I pursued a self-directed course of philosophical study, and focus on the argument was the straw keeping me afloat. When chance scudded me into Peter Unger’s paper “The Problem of the Many,” therefore, it seemed scandalous. “Although,” he wrote, “I think arguments are important in philosophy, my arguments here will be only the more assertive way for me to introduce the new problem, not the only way.” What an idea, that a philosophical goal could be achieved by other means.
I am just old enough to have had passed down to me, like myths of a lost age, other templates that were once more common. After his death, various collections of Wittgenstein’s notes and lectures were published, under titles like Remarks on Suchity-Such. A tradition began in which the basic unit of philosophy was—at least in presentation—the remark, sequences of which were presented in numbered paragraphs. On the surface this practice was more collegial and less aggressive, gentlemen (remember this was decades ago) lounging in tweed coats and exchanging thoughts between puffs of their pipes, but of course in reality a seemingly-anodyne “I would like to make a few remarks” was usually a preface to something devastating, or anyway intended to be so.
Because philosophy is so old, and because the ideas of the earliest philosophers are still alive today, it can seem that finding new philosophical positions, or new arguments for existing ones, requires a gold-medal performance, while those practicing other, newer disciplines languorously pick low-hanging fruit on their lunch breaks. I sometimes joke that, because of this, a career-making philosophical achievement can now consist in something as small as drawing a distinction. Or even in erasing one: I was once present when a famous philosopher complained, to the students in his graduate seminar, that one of his undergraduates could not grasp the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, and I complained back that that student might just be a philosophical genius, seeing clearly that the alleged distinction Mr. Famous was trying to draw was not real. When Amos Tversky was a student, he chose psychology over philosophy in part because there were far fewer giants over whose shoulders one needed to see. However their eventual publications compare to Tversky’s Nobel-worthy life’s-work, I tell philosophy graduate students, they should take heart in the fact that he was a coward who could not muster the courage they have displayed.
Premise, premise, conclusion is the Freytag’s triangle of philosophy, and its de-throning in literary criticism may inspire. Jane Alison, in her book Meander, Spiral, Explode, explores a bunch of alternatives to the exposition, climax, resolution form, including the titular ones, which also makes good philosophical models. If Morris’s essay is a controlled and steady navigation by an experienced hand through a carefully surveyed territory, Arthur Danto is a great meanderer. In just the first few pages of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he riffs on Euripidean and anti-Euripidean art, the imitation theory, and Sartre, and when my younger self complained angrily in the margins with scrawls of “where is this going?”, he missed the sights and insights that the journey itself provided.
The point is not, or not just, to have more fun, or to unleash unruly intellectual impulses that academic disciplines try to discipline. Form can be expressive in ways that matter aesthetically and even philosophically. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus sometimes achieves an austere oracular beauty that the philosophy-as-lab-report genre cannot equal and to which it cannot aspire. It is also, to some, offputtingly arrogant. To their temperament the Philosophical Investigations may be more congenial. “Bear in mind,” Kripke observed in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,
that Philosophical Investigations is not a systematic philosophical work where conclusions, once definitively established, need not be reargued. Rather, the Investigations is written as a perpetual dialectic, where persisting worries, expressed by the voice of an imaginary interlocutor, are never definitively silenced… the same ground is covered repeatedly, from the point of view of various special cases and from different angles, with the hope that the entire process will help the reader see the problems rightly.
If for Herbert Morris the loss of moral innocence was “like the loss of peace of mind accounted for by acquiring anxiety,” the form of the Investigations—as it struck Kripke anyway, as it presented itself to him—is expressive of a loss of philosophical innocence, and the—possibly appropriate—gnawing philosophical anxiety and uncertainty that some of us cannot shake, but may hope not to be crushed by.
The post Some Remarks on Form in Philosophy (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Over the past few months, in the lead-up to the publication of my book, I’ve used this space to share brief excerpts. Now the book is out! If you want a copy, you can order it from the University of Michigan website (or other popular book ordering places!). In case you haven’t decided whether this book would be a good addition to your library, here’s a brief overview.
I wrote Thriving as a Graduate Writer because I believe graduate students can reframe their experience of academic writing. We all know that writing is at the heart of the academic enterprise. It is both how we communicate and how we are assessed. That combination can be brutal for any writer, and it’s particularly fraught for graduate writers, who must learn disciplinary writing practices while being judged on their early efforts. Recognizing these challenges is valuable; graduate students are better off knowing that their difficulties with academic writing are entirely legitimate. This recognition, however, is only the first step. The next step must be to find ways to ameliorate those challenges.
In the book, I offer a discussion of principles, strategies, and habits that I think can help. (The table of contents can be found below, so you can see the breakdown of this material.) The principles point to a way of thinking about academic writing. Since writing takes up so much time and energy, it is worth exploring foundational ideas that can ground a writing practice: writing as thinking; writing as revision; writing as reader awareness; writing as authorial responsibility. Those principles lead into concrete strategies that can transform the experience of creating and revising an academic text. The heart of this book is the five chapters that unpack these approaches to working with text: managing structure; managing sentences; managing punctuation patterns; managing momentum; and building a revision process. The final element of the book is the consideration of writing habits. Even with a solid approach to academic writing and range of useful strategies to hand, we all still need to find ways to get writing done. Graduate writers, in particular, need exposure to writing productivity advice that is rooted in their unique experience of academic writing. This chapter provides a range of strategies to help build a consistent and sustainable writing routine: prioritizing writing; setting goals; finding community; developing writing awareness; and grounding productivity in writing expertise.
This book is a short (only 226 pages!) self-study text. You can read through the whole book—in whatever way works for you—and then use it as a reference. The manner in which you refer back to the book will depend on what you currently need to concentrate on. Most readers will benefit from returning to two chapters: Establishing a Revision Process (Chapter Eight) and Developing Sustainable Writing Habits (Chapter Nine). Those chapters are organized around charts that are distributed throughout the chapter (and that appear again at the back of the book). Since every writer has their own challenges and their own optimal writing process, I urge readers to take those charts and rework them—on an ongoing basis—to suit their needs. In addition to the charts, you will also find other resources at the end of the book: guides to using the book in a graduate writing course or graduate writing group and brief account of the blogs and books that I most recommend to graduate writers.
Overall, this book aims to inspire graduate writers to think differently about the nature of writing and then offers concrete strategies for managing both their writing and their writing routines. It was a labour of love to craft the writing advice that I offer everyday—here and in the classroom—into a more coherent and enduring form. I hope it gives you the capacity to approach this indispensable part of academic life with more confidence and more enjoyment. I look forward to hearing what you think!
Thriving as a Graduate Writer is now available from the University of Michigan Press. To order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
The temptation to chuck out the old is strong, but can only be part of the answer
As someone who writes books, lectures on teacher training courses and spent 15 years teaching English literature, I’m often asked what I think should be included in the literary canon or what should replace the existing canon. It feels like a trick question.
First, a definition might be useful. When we say canon we’re referring to an established selection of works that have been dyed into the fabric of British education. It’s the familiar roll call of names that have featured on the curriculum seemingly for ever, and may well continue to do so. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Orwell, Blake, Priestley, Owen, Larkin … the parade of (largely) dead white men whom successive generations of British students are invited to meet and grapple with on their academic journeys.
Continue reading...
Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee provided English tutoring this year for 404 elementary and middle school students with the increased funding.
Consider two truths: (1) it’s usually easy to tell what the next step of a project is at the end of a working session, and (2) it can be incredibly hard to figure out what the next step is at the start of a working session. Part of the reason we can get entranced with our best work is that, once we get on a roll, it’s really easy to keep it up. Likewise, part of the reason we avoid our best work is that the colder the project is, the harder it is to get started.
Charlie shared this in Chapter 9 of Start Finishing before he went on to explain the idea of leaving yourself breadcrumbs (thanks, Hansel and Gretel) as a way to address this tension.
For me, it’s always been a core piece of the book but also how I now approach my work (well, try to). I recently shared this with Charlie along with my frustration that we didn’t have a blog post about it so he challenged me to write one. So here I am.
Like many of the concepts we share here at PF, the practice of leaving yourself breadcrumbs is a relatively simple one to apply and a powerful tool you can use to move your best work forward.
I found the power of it lies in three areas: 1) there are different times you might put this into practice, 2) the many (some surprising) benefits it brings, and 3) learning the art of leaving yourself effective crumb trails.
Here are the best times to leave yourself a crumb trail. (If you think of others, let me know in the comments!)
At the end of a focus block
As Charlie mentioned in Start Finishing, knowing your next step is easier at the end of a working session than the beginning. Yet, often we run out the clock (sometimes overrun the clock ) and jump right into our next thing. Breadcrumbs can ease the transition between working sessions. The key is intentionally leaving time at the end of a focus block to do so.
Trust me, I know how easy it is to fall into “but I just need to do ONE more thing!” (It’s never just one more thing and likely you won’t finish it in the next five to ten minutes anyway.) We think we’ll seamlessly pick up where we left off because it’s clear to us now. Because we won’t have that same clarity later, we’re better off stopping and leaving notes to come back to.
When you need to put a project on hold
It happens. You’re into a project and then plans or priorities change, new circumstances pop up, something happens that means you need to hit pause. Whether you know when or if you’ll be able to come back to your project, leaving yourself notes before you file it away will help ease the process. When you pick up the project again a week — or year — later, those notes will help you more easily dive back in.
And in the event it becomes a dropped project, your notes can serve as the After Action Review that might inform another project down the line. Either way, the act of capturing notes will allow you to set the project down to focus on the project that needs your attention now.
You have a “not yet active” project
The Five Projects Rule states “no more than five active projects per timescale”. But what do you do about those miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, and tasks that come to you related to a project you’re not actively working on but hope to in the future?
A client recently asked me what to do with character and plot points for novels she wants to write but simply doesn’t have capacity to work on right now. (The creative muse does not often follow the Five Projects Rule.) This is where breadcrumbs can be incredibly useful. The client created a folder where she stores the notes as they come to her and built a monthly routine to go in and sort through, connect pieces, and leave herself notes on where her characters might go next. Now when that novel project is ready to move into “active” she’ll have a great head start.
Before AND during vacation.
Breaks between work sessions are sometimes extended breaks with the intention of disconnecting from our work. During these times it’s especially beneficial to leave our future selves notes so we can pick up where we left off. But as Charlie has shared, your mind can have a hard time slowing down even when (maybe especially when) you’ve slowed down your physical pace.
Don’t fight it; plan for it. Have a space to drop these thoughts quickly and get back to your vacation. When you return to work, add these notes to the breadcrumbs you left yourself prior to vacation and smoothly transition back into work mode.
How often have you spent half (all?) of a focus block trying to retrace your steps? Trying to figure out where you saved that file? Or maybe most frustrating of all, spending your precious time, energy, and attention (TEA) redoing all that work you either forgot you did or can’t find? When done consistently and with intention, crumb trails can save you not just time but a lot of frustration, too.
Accelerates your path to Flow
You’ve built focus blocks into your schedule (hazzah!!) because you know they fuel your highest-value, deep work. But there’s a caveat here: you need to be able to get into that deep focus to move your project forward. If you spend too much time figuring out what you need to do or retracing your steps, you’ll find it really hard to get into that blissful state of flow where you tune everything else out and hone in on the work. Crumb trails guide you straight back to the work, which means you’ll be less likely to wander off the path, get distracted by something else, and get to the end of your focus block dissatisfied that you didn’t actually do what you intended to do.
Use your precious TEA on the work, not figuring out what the work is.
Be ready no matter your mode
We can’t always dictate the type of work we’ll be primed to do when we come to a focus block. As much as we can do to plan them around our typical energy cycles, sometimes we hit up against resistance and no matter the effort, we just can’t seem to make ourselves do the planned activity.
Making a practice of leaving yourself breadcrumbs gives you options.
Feeling creative? Open up that writing project and pick up where you left off.
In more of an intake vs. outtake mode? Grab that list of items you wanted to research and hit the books or one of those YouTube videos you’ve bookmarked.
Just need to do something but don’t have creative energy? Find one of those admin projects that you never seem to get around to, consult your notes to figure out the next steps, and get going.
See your projects from a new perspective
When you come back to your project (and breadcrumbs) fresh, whether that’s an hour or a month later, you may just see things you couldn’t while you were in it.
This is especially true when we take an extended break from our project like a vacation or longer. That time away can be a blessing, allowing us to come back to our project(s) with a clearer head and a lighter heart. We can more easily prioritize next steps and projects without worrying that we’ve forgotten something.
Put down the (mental) load
Our minds, our own personal supercomputers, don’t like open loops. So while you may have stopped working on your project, your brain has not.
While I can’t promise this practice will completely stop you from waking up at 3am trying to solve a problem, it will drastically reduce the occurrence. Leaving yourself crumb trails frees up your attention so that you can be more present for the other projects, people, and experiences in your lives. And it gives you the ability to come back to this project at an appropriate time (hopefully allowing you to sleep a little more soundly.)
Put your subconscious to work
Crumb trails not only reduce our conscious cognitive load, they also free our subconscious minds to work the problem, turning information over and looking for new connections.
When we create crumb trails we’re also leaving ourselves mental notes to come back to. We can rest easy now that the project is no longer front of mind taking up valuable processing space. That doesn’t mean our minds aren’t working in the background.
Those ideas that come in the shower or washing dishes? That’s the work of your subconscious.
Helps us see what needs to be deferred, delegated, or dropped
Capturing breadcrumbs forces us to think through our next steps. Doing so, we may find a blocker or new opportunity that could impact the project plan and timeline.
A crumbtrail may reveal a need for resources or another project standing in your way that require you to put the current one on hold (defer). Or maybe you’ve hit a roadblock you don’t have the capacity or capability to overcome, but you know someone who does (delegate). And sometimes, our breadcrumbs give us insight into projects that we’re holding on to because they serve a past version of who we are but don’t serve us today (consider dropping).
Now that we’ve covered when to leave yourself breadcrumbs, and why it’s a valuable practice, let’s talk about how to do it effectively.
Find your Goldilocks level of information
The amount of detail you’ll need to leave yourself will depend on two things: 1) what serves you, and 2) the length of time between work sessions.
We all have different thresholds for just how much information is helpful vs. overwhelming.
Speaking of “future you,” consider when in the future you might be picking this back up.
If you’re planning to come back later in the afternoon, a few quick bullets will suffice. But if you’re putting this down for the day or week (or longer) make sure you capture:
Make a habit of it
As I shared above, there are a lot of different times and uses for breadcrumbs. The more often you do it, the easier and more intuitive the practice becomes. Try adding it in as a regular feature of your day:
Experiment with different capture and storage methods
Breadcrumbs are only useful if you can find them when you need them. The method you use to capture them and where you store them may depend on the type of project you are working on.
But Maghan, what about those miscellaneous ideas and tasks that pop into my brain at random times? We’ve got you covered here too! Our Action Item Catcher (in PDF, and now a feature inside the Momentum app) allows you to get these out of your head and into a central place. Then when you have time, you can move these notes into your relevant project plan or project breadcrumb list.
Like I shared at the start: simple concept, powerful tool.
What’s one small way you’ll incorporate breadcrumbs into your day today? Future you will thank you!
The post Breadcrumbs: How to Find Your Way Back to Your Project appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
New York City is mandating that all of its elementary schools change how they teach reading. Some may not make the change willingly.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Looking Productive
Any discussion of productivity must consider the aesthetics of productivity. Could you be working in ways that you think look like what hard work should look like—starting early, avoiding breaks, denying yourself things—rather than in ways that you have found effective? A good approach to productivity must pass a real test: Does it make you more productive, in the sense of making you feel in charge and stimulated by your work? Don’t think of a midday walk as a guilty pleasure; think of it as crucial to the overall health of your embodied mind. Rather than finding it random that you have great ideas in the shower, build in ways to capture those ideas. If you are helped by napping, then a nap is probably a good idea. Mindfulness or meditation breaks may do far more for you than would just sticking with your task. Your goal is positive writing experiences, not the appearance of hard work. The greatest hazard of trying to appear productive is the push toward long days; those sorts of writing endurance tests can be inhospitable to writing because writing is often too draining to be an all-day thing. Recognizing and respecting your limits might make you look less productive while nonetheless allowing you to build a sustainable and satisfying writing routine.
Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Over the last two decades, thousands of New York City children have struggled to pick up reading skills. Now, schools will be forced to change how they teach reading.
FreshRSS 
