James Farson's Blog

This is a list of things you can do. A lot of them are things I do. They might help. They help me. 

I got this idea from Milan Cvitkovic, whose list of things you’re allowed to do is great and contains links to lots of other, similar lists, most of which have at least a few good ideas in them.

This might smack of self-help. I have told you about my weaknesses. 

Tell someone when you notice they’ve chosen to change something significant about their appearance: new jewellery, a haircut, a coat you’ve not seen them wear before. Carry a lighter, even if you don’t smoke. Also carry something you can fidget with. It can be a proper fidget toy but it can be something improvised, like a hair tie, or a coin.Maybe don’t make the lighter your fidget toy. Familiarise yourself with the space you find yourself in. Approach it from multiple angles. Where are the exits, the fire call-points, do the windows open?When something happens to one of your friends, make a note of it. Message them on significant anniversaries and say you remember, that you’re thinking of them. (I think I nabbed this idea from Mari Andrew’s list of 100 things she knows.)You can’t build a community on your own, but you can try to learn your neighbour’s names, or at least tell them yours. (And read the 32 Steps to Togetherness, if you haven’t already.) The city I live in has a portal where you can report street issues like broken streetlights. If you notice a problem, you can make sure it at least gets reported. If everyone assumes everyone else has reported it, it’ll take longer to get fixed. You can go for a walk at lunch. You can really go, instead of telling yourself you will, and then not.   Take every second of your lunch break. You can write your MP, and it will make you feel better, even if it doesn’t achieve anything. If you don’t know who your MP is, look it up.If you get a day bus ticket, you can make sure to see if anyone at your last stop could use it, and if there isn’t anyone who does, you can slip it into the windowsill of the stop for someone to find later.You can create your work sentence by sentence, day after day. Start a band. (Try) and give other people the same grace, patience, and understanding that you’d like for yourself.Find the world time settings in your devices and use them to feel a bit closer to your friends in far away places; my friend is preparing for bed, my other friend is having breakfast.Optimise for survival, flog the long tail.Vary your routine: take a different bus, walk a different route. The same ways lead to the same thoughts, and as an added bonus it makes you more resistant to kidnapping. If you can’t write, you can read.Watch speedruns of games you played as a kid and through the novelty of optimal play developed over decades, experience them like you are a child again, except this time hopefully you can’t hear your parents arguing downstairs.  Write secret stories for yourself in hidden notebooks that you will show no-one. (Thanks, Kerouac.)Turn the sound off on your emails, slack, whatever notifications. Your fight or flight response is for dealing with a panther, or an explosion, not Rachel from marketing. Turn your email notifications off full stop. Check them once a day. No one will die. When you install an app, it’ll ask you for notification permissions. Default to saying no. Do you really need Tesco to be able to ping you?Spend your damn loyalty card points.Make lists. Write down words you don’t know, look them up, and build a vocabulary list.If it snows, it is important you go for a walk in it, even if the light is failing, and the snow has already been tattooed by many tiny feet because you’ve been stuck inside, working. You can send your poetry to magazines, enter competitions, apply for grants; open yourself up to the possibility that the next email will be good news. Leave your Christmas tree up until February. 

It’s been a year where I’ve only made fleeting progress on the things I really want to be working on, if I’m entirely honest. That’s fine. Not every year can be a banger. Sometimes you just survive, and learn nothing. 

I’m really wary of making resolutions now. At least, out loud. I want to write and read as much as I can; that never really changes. 

I have a hard time making new habits stick, but who doesn’t? I’m still messing around with commonplacing and with maintaining an Obsidian vault. I’ll probably have some more stuff to say about those practices soon, but I really don’t wanna turn this blog into a bunch of articles on PKM (Personal Knowledge Management). Yeah, it interests me, but these are things that you engage with to enable you to more effectively write the things you want to write and learn the things you want to learn. I am suspicious of anyone whose entire creative output is writing about Zettelkasten the same way you should ultimately be suspicious of anyone whose entire output is writing about writing, particularly if it’s all writing advice. If the advice was any good, or they had engaged with it enough to understand it, then they’d have some output that wasn’t writing advice, wouldn’t they?

This post gets more positive, I promise. 

I did manage to make morning pages stick. I don’t do it the way Julia Cameron suggests you do it, but I don’t think many people do. Taking the time to slow down and reflect in the morning is something I’ve come to value even if I rarely wake up early enough to take advantage of it on the days where I’d find it the most helpful; days where I am going to work. Something to consider for next year. Don’t want to write too much about it as I’ll probably do a longer post on it next year. More writing about writing. Uh oh. Am I a charlatan?

Every now and then I do write about things that aren’t writing. I am an artist and I can prove it. This year I came third in the annual Deepings Literary Festival short story competition and you can even read the story here. I also put together a couple of small one-page zines for fun which you can read here and here. I’ll probably experiment with the form some more next year so as always, watch this space. 

I saw my bloody valentine this year when they came to the Wembley Arena and they were fantastic. When I was a kid I thought I’d never get to see them and now I’ve seen them twice and it was a transcendent experience both times. 

A friend of mine nearly died this year. Tell people you love them. 

I still don’t want to use AI.

Right, now to the reading. 

Longest book: Again, Dangerous Visions, but I’d been chipping away at it for ages so I feel like it doesn’t really count. I did post some thoughts on it here. I read Homicide in its entirety this year and while I can’t recommend it without reservation (it’s a doorstopper and is also unapologetic copaganda), if you liked The Wire you will like Homicide. Some thoughts on it here. 

Shortest book: I bought a few comics this year; the first issue of Matt Fraction’s Batman run was pretty good but I am still resisting the urge to start collecting comics because the last thing I need is more stuff. The Grant Morrison Batman/Deadpool was also a lot of fun. I got a couple of issues of Weird Walk for my birthday and the first one immediately made me want to buy the rest of them. The shortest thing I read that you could call a book was Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, which I reviewed here. It’s great. 

Oldest book: Three Men in a Boat, which was published in 1889, but the edition I read was published in 1994; the oldest physical book I read was Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I received a ratty paperback copy of it from 1980 around Christmas last year, and I think that’s the best way to read a travel book. It should have been somewhere before coming to you. I didn’t review it but if I had I would have said the nature descriptions are beautiful and the descriptions of his wife’s passing and his grief found me at exactly the time I needed them, and that I couldn’t pay him a greater compliment than to say he wrote so exquisitely he overcame my innate distrust of books where white guys talk about Buddhism.

Newest book: I got a copy of Bob Mortimer’s The Long Shoe in our Christmas bookswap this year and read it in a couple of days. It’s a mystery in the shaggy dog, The Big Lebowski kind of vein, except it’s set in London and not LA so it’s more like a Martin Amis novel if Martin Amis could ever stop taking himself seriously for a minute. Lots of fun.  

Gender Balance?: By my spreadsheet I’ve read 43 discreet titles; 30 of them were by men and 11 of them were by women. There was also an anthology edited by a woman, and an anarchist pamphlet that didn’t have a named author. I feel like this is probably fine. Funnily enough, I read ten books by women last year but I had read more overall. I addressed the balance this year by keeping the amount I read by women steady and reading less of everything else. Don’t all congratulate me at once. 

Plenty of writing by women on deck. I bought a bunch of le Guin I haven’t read yet towards the end of this year. 

E-books?: I read 11 e-books and everything else was on paper. This is down from 22 e-books last year but again, I read less overall. This number will probably go up a bit. I got a Kindle for my birthday and I am vibing with it.

How much did it all cost?: £145.83, for the books I’d purchased for myself. Twelve books were free, off bookswaps, loans, or review copies. Ten were gifts. I try to prioritise reading books I receive as gifts. I read The Serviceberry recently and Robin Wall Kimmerer put it better than I ever could:

Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

and

Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.

What about library books?: Five physical ones and two from BorrowBox, the platform our library system uses for e-books. It’s always a balance. I’ve catalogued the books I own and now know I own around 600, a big, big chunk of which I haven’t read, so I am always having to try to make sure I read the books I already have while making sure I support the library system. Currently I don’t have anything on loan, so I need to rectify that in the new year. 

The highlights of these would be Dispatches, which was incredible even if in part invented, and Station Eleven, which made me feel a melancholy only truly great post-apocalyptic SF can make me feel, and which I reviewed here. 

Translations?: I read five books in translation this year, the highlight of which was definitely Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver, which I finally got around to reading like, a decade after reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…, which I loved. I got prompted to finally pick it up after reading the collected Savage Messiah, which references it a lot.  

Honorable Mentions: I got Juice for my birthday last year, read it this year, and reviewed it here. It’s really damn good. I love it when an otherwise Lit-Fic writer does an SF novel. I also read some Paul Theroux for the first time (reviewed here) and, grouchy as he is, found him very good company. Having read a bunch of Joan Didion over the last couple years I decided to read some Eve Babitz as well, and picked up Eve’s Hollywood, which was excellent, and I can tell I am going to love reading the rest of her work. 

This is the third year I’ve tracked my reading with my own spreadsheet. I still use Goodreads, and I use StoryGraph as well, but there’s something about keeping your own spreadsheet and paper reading journal. I am more and more realising the benefits of doing things in slower and more analogue ways, and frankly, also of doing things in ways that can’t be infected by AI bullshit. Sam Altman can’t do anything about your physical journal and I think that’s great. 

I’ve got a few subs out and am actively looking for more places for poetry, essays, and stories. A friend of mine is putting out a zine about cats that I am sure is going to be excellent and I’ll let you know about it when I’ve got a copy! 

Here’s to 2026. May it not be quite as horrible. 

Keep reading!  

Is survival a commodity you can purchase? What is it worth? What does it do to you? Sven Holm’s 1967 novel Termush, republished by Faber Editions in 2013 in a translation by Sylvia Clayton, asks these questions to horrible ends, and is more relevant than ever. 

If you read this blog, you already know I’ve got a real soft spot for post-apocalyptic fiction. That all started when I played the original two Fallout games when I was a kid and continues to this day; most recently I enjoyed Rebecca Gransden’s Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group (reviewed here), was in the mood for something in the same area, and remembered I had a copy of Termush that I picked up on a whim a year or so ago. 

The premise is very simple; the world has ended in nuclear fire, and we see the aftermath through the eyes of a resident of Termush, a hardened end-of-the-world bunker that is also a luxury hotel. Everyone has either paid to be there, or is there to serve the people who have paid, and apart from the odd radiation spike from rain or a dustcloud, life in Termush begins as a pretty accurate simulacrum of life in any other standard luxury hotel. 

The peace doesn’t last long, though. 

Termush has a medical staff that remembers the hippocratic oath, so when the odd refugee turns up, of course they decide to help them, but it causes an immediate contradiction; some people have paid a lot of money to live there. Are management going to simply let in a bunch of freeloaders?

No, don’t worry. Management has a plan. 

Some of the most horrifying stuff in this novel isn’t the descriptions of radiation burns or what’s happened to the world in general. It’s the mundane stuff; new arrivals eating in a place that is separated off, but not so separated off that the paying guests can’t clearly see that the people who’ve begged for help are being served worse quality food. The paying guests are happy to see the refugees when it suits them, but when they are first presenting to the hotel, sick, hungry and desperate, it causes enough disquiet that management quickly designates a separate entrance that is screened off. 

Your outlandish SF novel is actually about something that happens to us, today! Surprise. The residents of Termush are not just trying to keep themselves alive after the end of the world, they’re trying to maintain a grotesque system of exploitation and wealth inequality.

I didn’t know anything about this novel other than the basic premise so I didn’t know which way the story was going to tack. The narrator starts questioning the management of the hotel pretty early on when it becomes clear the residents are either being lied to or just receiving the pleasant fantasy they paid for, depending on your perspective. For a few chapters I thought this novel would go inwards and it would become an authoritarian parable, but as with real life authoritarian governments, outside events and material conditions outrun that possibility. 

I try not to read every post-apocalyptic SF story like “wow it’s so much like Fallout” because… well, a lot of them influenced Fallout and very clearly at that. However, I can’t readily find any examples of the Fallout devs (the original ones or the Bethesda ones) saying that they’ve read it, in the same way you can find examples of them talking about The Road Warrior, A Canticle for Leibowitz, or A Boy and His Dog, and they would’ve had the opportunity to read it: the translation that this Faber edition reprints was done in 1969. 

Termush is a narrative about people bunkering down to avoid a nuclear war and its aftermath, so of course it’s hard not to compare to the system of vaults in the Fallout universe, but considering that the hotel Termush is actually a tower, and not a burrow, and then considering how the story hinges on the question of whether the inhabitants will or won’t give aid to others, it’s hard not to think about the Tenpenny Tower questline in Fallout 3.  

Would you be shocked if I told you this novel has a much more nuanced take on the idea than Bethesda did?

The narrator is unnamed and doesn’t have loads of personality, nor do any of the characters, really, but this just allows them to more easily stand in for ideas and concepts and allows for the novel to become a bit of a puzzle box. This is fine. You could spin it out for one or two hundred more pages including fully realised relationships and the like but I don’t think it’d add much. The narrator mentions spending time with someone called Maria, another resident who, honestly, if you told me I’d missed something and she’s supposed to be a ghost, I’d believe you. 

The narrator is a bit like a frog being boiled. Things get steadily worse, and he knows it’s bad, but he observes it all dispassionately. Yeah, he’s disgusted with the lies from management and with how the refugees get treated, but does he do much? He’s not any different, really, from the other residents screaming to keep the barbarians away from the gates. 

It’s a very straight narrative. I am sure Holm would have been very tempted to include lots of irony and dark humour but I can only remember one image that was hilariously bleak, and that was of the service staff out washing and dusting the remaining plant life after a storm of radioactive particles temporarily stopped the residents from being able to safely walk in the garden. It’s like something out of a Bong Joon Ho movie. 

I didn’t twig it at first but I realised that this novel is kind of a counterpoint to Tim Winton’s Juice, or vice versa but I read Juice first. Holm imagines enclaves of the super wealthy trying to cling on, but he’s really careful not to blame anyone for the nuclear war that ends civilization, or to mention where the people in Termush got their money from. Juice is a story about cracking open those spaces, apportioning blame, passing judgement, and bearing witness. It’s funny how things change. A nuclear war isn’t really any more or less likely than it was in 1967 as far as I know, but seems more fantastic and science-fictiony to me in this moment, the end of 2025, compared to Tim Winton’s world that has melted. 

In a time where the monstrously wealthy are burrowing their way into the earth or trying to blast their way off it while actively encouraging the conditions that are going to make the planet uninhabitable for regular people, Holm’s Termush couldn’t be more of the moment. As sad and horrifying a novel as it is, hopefully you can take some heart in its final image of the 1% being cast down with the rest of us. 

Nothing ever worked for me as a conversational gambit better than two beers, but unless you are very very careful in how you go about it, two beers is not something you can do at work. 

You can, however, talk about the football at work. You can talk about the football anywhere. People expect you to talk about the football. Oh sure, there’s the weather, but that only has so many legs. Now, how many legs Declan Rice has, that has legs. 

I got a job where I hung out in community centres and spoke to people about the football and it was the best job I ever had, truly. 

Nothing will help you speak to people the way football does. There are two ways the conversation tree can go once you ask someone what football team they support.

They tell you. You can laugh at them for supporting Tottenham. You could bond over supporting Arsenal. Maybe you can agree with them that Chelsea isn’t that bad, and that at least you both hate Tottenham. They don’t like football, and will generally tell you why they don’t. Or they’ll talk to you about another sport they do like. 

I used to be a person who didn’t like football and I would have a miserable time in each and every conversation I had to have with a stranger. I didn’t used to like football because all the kids who tormented me played it, and when I tried out I got stuck in goal, and they made us play in freezing mud, and I would refuse to dive for things, but I didn’t know what a sweeper keeper was and so a goalkeeper that prioritised using his feet was not something I could argue I was, which meant I was a substitute goalkeeper, which meant I didn’t play football. 

The 2014 World Cup made me fall in love with football. Between James Rodriguez and that 7-1, I was converted to the sport where anything could happen. 

Even if you are determined not to enjoy football, to not talk about it, well, here is what I think you should do. You’ve read this far. You must be prepared for me to tell you I think you should do something. 

Bookmark the front page of BBC Sports, or get the app, and check it once every few days. If you want to really go hard revising, look at the Premier League table as well. If the place you live in doesn’t have a Premier League team, try to make a note of where that team is league-wise, and how it is doing. 

You will suddenly be in tune to moods and rhythms. You will notice everyone on the bus wearing the same colour at 2pm on a Saturday and know why. You will have something to say, and you will make friends. 

There is no need to be totally ridiculous and put together a Farley File if you really want to be prepared to have an easy connection with someone. Just make a note of what football team they support. It couldn’t be simpler. 

This all sounds very crass and cynical, but I’d suggest to you that if you pretend to like football, your social life will improve, and you might find yourself liking it by mistake, which isn’t a bad thing. 

On next week’s exciting blog where I detail things I should have figured out when I was ten years old, I will boil down How to Win Friends and Influence People for you. 

Did you know people like it when you remember their names?

Full disclosure: I was provided a digital copy of Rebecca Gransden’s novel Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group for free after the author contacted me. She didn’t request that I review it, but I enjoyed it, so I’m going to, in line with my previously stated editorial policy. If you’ve seen the kind of stuff I’m into (modernism, new wave SF, psychogeography) and would like your work featured, do get in touch. I’ll put a contact form at the end of this review.

Beginning your novel with the word “And” is very brave, and committing to only using words of a single syllable throughout, with the exception of dialogue, is braver still. Gransden pulls it off to hypnotic effect in Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, a quest narrative with a twist. In Figures, a girl, Flo, searches for her brother, drifting through an England that is losing its mind during an ongoing apocalyptic event. There’s no convenient time slip here, no waking up in a hospital bed to end-of-the-world headlines; she ends up right in the middle of it. 

I think she manages to avoid the worst of the violence until the end, but the elliptical nature of the narrative and how it is told means you can’t really be sure. It’s a bit hard to get into the flow of, but once you do you’ll see why it was necessary. It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, where the invented language acts as a barrier that makes your eventual understanding all the more horrifying. In Figures, the language is diegetic; a mystery contagion spreading through wires and communication devices reduces everything outside of dialogue to monosyllables. 

I’m so grateful she sent me an electronic copy… but hopefully this review proves it didn’t get me. 

There isn’t much of a plot. That isn’t a criticism, I’m just letting you know, and the looseness of that structure creates a great vibe. Most of the novel can be broken down into Flo’s encounters with the people still clinging on, and with weird and mutating nature, in a series of strange, beautiful, unsettling vignettes. This would be a great script for a walking simulator. It’s very Silent Hill, along with the more obvious lineage in disaster novels like Day of the Triffids and their weirder cousins like Anna Kavan’s Ice (which I reviewed here) and Ballard’s early work (a lot of which is encompassed by his short stories; I reviewed the complete volumes here and here). Rebecca’s email to me suggested other reviewers have linked it to Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, which has been on my list for forever and a day and I should apparently accelerate my plans to read considering how much I enjoyed Figures. 

The opacity of the narrative style also stops you getting too much of a grip on what’s going on, on what the scenario is, on what exactly caused all this mess. This has the specific effects noted above, but it also means Gransden can get away with some of the details not being filled in. Good SF suggests a larger world outside of the frame and Figures definitely does that. There’s a section in the middle that contains some more straight narrative, but it’s deliberately forensic. You are given exact, exact, details. X does Y in Z place at 14:37. It doesn’t help illuminate anything. I almost wonder if it was included to deliberately bait the kind of people who want it to make sense. It’s never going to make sense. You have to drift, to flow. 

Figures does not outstay its welcome. It’s a novella, really, and if it was any longer then its unwillingness to offer handholds might come across as churlish, but as it stands it’s exactly the size and shape it needs to be, and implies enough that I’d love to read more stories set in the same space. 

You’ll know, by this point, if you’ll like it. For me, I do love an apocalypse narrative, I love , and it had been a while since I’d read anything that fought me this much in terms of the effort needed to read it, so it was nice to find myself in slightly rougher country for a bit. There’s more information on the author’s website; if I’ve piqued your curiosity then definitely check out some of the physical editions, they do look great!

If you’d like your work featured on this blog, please feel free to get in touch with me!

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I got to see My Bloody Valentine at their London date this week and they were fantastic, transcendent, ecstatic, and just as loud as I remember them being when I saw them in 2013. 

J Mascis was the opener, doing a solo acoustic set of (mostly) stripped down Dinosaur Jr. songs. And you know what? They really worked in that context! He even managed to get through the first song without stomping on his Big Muff, but I’m glad he had it for Little Fury Things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less presuming guy who could be considered royalty in certain circles. He came on stage with an awkward wave and a hello, and he left the stage by literally just putting his guitar down and wandering off. I loved it. 

When I saw mbv in 2013 I had been into them for about six years and they had just released a new album. I’ve now been into them for two decades and even their newest material is over ten years gone. I hadn’t put Loveless on for ages ahead of this show, having failed to do my regular homework, which meant some of the melodies and riffs struck me with the force that only something you loved when you were fifteen and haven’t heard in a long time can strike you. I saw Nine Inch Nails earlier this year and the audience was comfortably my age or older apart from the kids that came with their elder emo parents; at mbv it was nice to see a lot of younger people who were probably born around the time the last album came out, the way I was born around the time Loveless came out. 

But then I saw a teenager in a Slint t-shirt and my bones turned to dust. 

My Bloody Valentine aren’t really an arena band, but the fact they managed to pretty much pack out the OVO Arena Wembley is a testament to their legacy. I don’t have the fortitude to push too close to the front anymore (bones, dust), and from where I was near the back, the sound was a bit echoey and splashy. But then, it was mbv, and their entire sound is a blur. It was almost as if their music was water, and took a while to fill the space; the volume and intensity only climbed throughout the show. There were a few flubs, restarts, spaces where I’m sure on the record there’s fewer beats, but does it matter? You’re paying to see something unique done by real people, and I’ve always wondered how they keep to a count. 

And I did see someone on Reddit reminding people that they used to do what they do in pubs and clubs. I can only imagine what it was like. 

Of course you notice different things about a band when you see them live. This time around I felt like the core of Debbie and Colm was super strong. Debbie in particular absolutely had it locked down and her bass translated through better than some of the other stuff can, live. 

A common reaction to hearing Loveless is to wonder how the hell they did it, because it does sound like a million guitars. They’ve said for ages that it’s often just one guitar track treated in a particular way. To hear Kevin recreate some of those textures perfectly while Bilinda sings and cradles her own guitar gently, not playing a note, is to swear you’ll never doubt Kevin again.

Seeing them live did highlight that, for all the ways the records are seamless, there is a bit of inherent tension in their music between stuff you can dance to and stuff that you can only engage with in a trance. It was a bit odd seeing a few people bopping away in a crowd of transfixed, motionless people. There was a guy on a balcony who just didn’t stop waving his arms and gyrating the entire time. I have a joke with a friend where, whenever we’re waiting for an unlikely occurrence, we’ll say something like “Release the jungle album, Kevin!” We got a preview of just why he didn’t, why the world still might not be ready for it: Wonder 2 was the penultimate song and led to an exodus of people getting in a last drink to fortify themselves for what they knew was coming. 

There is nothing on earth quite like experiencing You Made Me Realise, live. It’s like a jet engine, a train, a piece of artillery, and it makes you so glad you wore earplugs. It’s something rare in the modern day, as well; something that forces you to be totally present, to surrender. You can’t think about work, and you can’t even share a “Wow, isn’t this crazy?” with whoever you went with. It’s the pure noise contrast that makes you realise (haha) just how melodic and pretty all their other work is. 

You will leave different, and it’s almost worth going for, alone. 

God I hope they have another album in them, but I’ll definitely take them having blessed us with touring the greatest hits again.

I got asked the other day how I allocate my tasks and manage my time. I was wrong-footed for a second, not wanting to say the obvious, simple, true answer, so I mumbled something about how I am used to using CRMs, followed by some less intelligible noise, before I realised it was better to answer the question and look like a simpleton than not answer the question at all.

I told them I make lists. I make notes. I make sure to review them on a regular basis. I get things out of my head and onto paper. I gestured to the notebook in front of me to make the point.

I should probably tell you not to come to me for productivity advice.

But, there are a couple of things I do when I make lists that I think are useful or interesting elements of practice that I’ve developed over the past few years of doing it, and I wanted to share them.

First of all, I think it’s best to just do a bullet list, and then cross stuff off. I experimented for a while with borrowing some symbols from bullet journal methods, where you turn the . into a x to denote a finished task, turn the . into a > to denote a task migrated from last week, that kinda thing, but I noticed it was depriving me of the feeling you get when you strike something off your list, lining it through, so I went back to doing that.

Yes, it makes reviewing tasks you’ve completed slightly harder at a glance, but does it matter?

The second thing is something I learned from Homer Simpson. Always make the first entry on your list, “Make a list.” That way, once you get to the bottom, you can go straight back to the top and cross it off. Your productivity is no measure of your worth, but all the same, it is a good feeling to immediately have accomplished something.

Thirdly, try to break tasks down. Sometimes I get an email with a few different asks in it, can’t immediately get to it, and then end up sticking it on my to-do as “Get back to X.” I don’t know why I do this to myself. It isn’t helpful. My eyes start to glaze over it and I end up favouring the smaller, easier tasks. Fix this by making the big task smaller and easier. You don’t have to go crazy making it granular; separating the email into the separate asks is often enough.

Lastly, include a fun, or more philosophical, entry. It’s good to have a reminder not to take yourself, or the work, too seriously, and to get some perspective. Here are some examples:

Remember that you are just energy condensed to a slow vibrationEat lunch. [Listing this can help stop you working through your lunch. Eat away from your desk!]Remember that it is not your duty to finish the work, but nor are you at liberty to neglect itLook outside. Are there birds?Go for a walk

If you’ve been stuck into a task for an hour or two and finish it thinking, “God, what next?” and glance at your list, seeing one of these can remind you to prioritise your own wellbeing, or take you out of yourself for a moment. I’m generally grateful that my past self at least spared a few thoughts for how my future self’s day would be going.

Go forth and make lists!

I don’t wanna

Every time someone tells me to just get AI to do it, I want to scream. 

If AI was just an ocean-boiling plagiarism machine, I wouldn’t want to use it, but it’s not just that. 

You’ve seen the studies about how using AI makes us stupider. I won’t link them, because it’s almost besides the point; if you’re all-in on AI then whether something is a fact or not won’t matter to you, and if AI makes you feel the same revulsion it makes me feel then you don’t need to see the numbers to know how you feel. 

And it’s that feeling that makes me want to write this, in the hope someone else sees it and can at least know they aren’t the only one, because revulsion is exactly what it makes me feel. Intellectually I know generative AI is bad and wrong, but the feeling I have every time someone tells me to just do it with AI is unmistakable: it’s disgust. 

If AI does it, That Means I’m not doing it

I like doing things myself. 

Not everything, of course, but I have enough self-knowledge to know that I like doing the things I like doing, and a lot of the things I like doing are the same things people tell me to get AI to do for me. 

Problem solving can be fun! Learning things is fun! Have you ever diverted an afternoon trying to do something and failing, going to Google, iterating on your process, trying again, failing again, reflecting, puzzling, Googling again, finally getting it to work and feeling like a fucking champion?

That’s learning, that’s growth, that’s self-apprenticeship; that is how you become agentic. If I have learned anything about myself over the last few years it’s that I will go to almost any lengths to maintain my own autonomy and agency. Pathological demand avoidance or pathological demand for autonomy, take your pick. 

I don’t want to deskill myself

It’s the ability to go through the above process and document it that makes me employable. I am passionate about sleeping indoors and meeting my calorie requirements. I am very interested in learning and developing new skills; prompting is not one of them, and for a reason. I fear that everything I defer to AI is going to be something I forget, a muscle that atrophies. The things I would do with the “extra free time” that AI is supposed to give you are things people want me to replace with AI. 

It is tempting to be able to throw a bunch of figures together and ask something to put together a report for you and then marvel at the way it formats the tables, but that is something you can do yourself. Every time I put together a report or an infographic, I’m practising writing for a particular audience, I am getting to know the software better, I am applying what I’ve learned about page layouts and graphic design. 

One way or another, you have to do the work

I absolutely agree with you that crafting a paragraph to meet your needs and the needs of your audience is a necessary skill, but if you’re going to put the time and the effort into writing and editing the prompt, just write the fucking thing yourself. 

I am error

If you make errors, you catch them and learn from them. If your AI makes errors, oof. 

If it matters so little you are happy to have a machine do it for you and make factual errors, why are you doing it? If it is important, why are you getting a machine to do it for you?

(We aren’t ready to acknowledge how pointless most work is, but that’s another essay.)

My thoughts have been replaced by a series of moving images

It’s fun to look through pictures. It’s easier than ever to find images that are in the public domain. It’s fun to take your own pictures. It’s easier than ever to take your own pictures. The bar is there, but it is so, so, low. If you’re reading this, you probably have a smart phone. 

It is not hard to take a reasonable photograph, and you might learn something while you do it. You might even know the rule of three without consciously knowing it. Just do it, get started, jam econo. It’s so much better for you. 

Why do we take notes?

We take notes to externalise our thoughts and turn those thoughts around to fix things in our heads. Taking the notes and reviewing the notes; what else do you think learning actually is? If we feel better knowing that some entity somewhere has made notes we feel no obligation to review then it’s better we admit it up front. 

The evidence of your animal body

You can’t talk your way out of a belly laugh or an erection, and I can’t get around the fact that people recommending I use AI makes me want to puke. 

Line goes up technology

This essay is a stone thrown at a bubble. If belief can make the number go up, it can make it go down. 

I was reading In Patagonia towards the end of last year and can recollect almost none of it – perfectly drawn anecdote after anecdote apparently slid straight off my smooth brain. I remember enjoying it. Flicking back through the paperback now a few pages generate sparks, but I am pretty sure I could read it again from the start and experience it as if I’d never read it before

You want to know what else I noticed?

I hadn’t taken any notes, or made any annotations.

I know what happened. I was burnt out at the end of a loooooong year and just wanted to read a book I’d been looking forward to without any of the added friction or work of marking it up or copying bits out. Keeping a reading journal or a commonplace book is a great exercise for remembering what you’ve read, but you can’t escape the fact that it’s extra work. Remember, a large part of the role this blog plays in my life is that it is supposed to help me remember what I’ve read. I like remembering what I’ve read.

I worked through In Patagonia over a couple of weeks, put it down on literally 31/12/2024, and promptly forgot about it until I picked up The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux, which is a recounting of his experiences travelling from Boston to Patagonia almost exclusively by train and in which he can’t help but talk about the travels of his friend, Bruce Chatwin.

Which I also forgot about, in the sense that I didn’t bother to write about it here. But, but, guess what I did do? I took notes, I marked it up, I copied passages of it out into my Obsidian vault. I don’t even have that book physically with me, but I can glance through my notes and a clear mental picture of the story comes to me. Hooray for notes! If nothing else will save you, your notes will save you.

Theroux agrees, take this from the introduction:

I looked closely, listened hard, sniffed around, and wrote everything down.

Or this passage as he reflects near the end of his journey:

But because I had no camera, and had written so much, my impressions of what I had seen were vivid. I could call up Mexico or Costa Rica by glancing at the conversations I had written, and from the particularities of the railway journey from Santa Marta to Bogotá I felt I could reinvent Colombia. Travel was, above all, a test of memory.

Or take the fact that a lot of the book is taken up with him detailing what he was reading, what he thought about it, if it suited being read on a train journey; a kind of roaming book club made up of one person. If you want to remember what you read, write about it. He gets it.

A lot of Patagonian Express reflects on how best to capture and portray the experiences as he is going through them. To write a lot and engage with the world the way Theroux suggests, you need solitude:

It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone is close by thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seem in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest.

Theroux has, as I perceive it, a lot of respect for the communities and lives he moves through, and epic disdain for the people who clock him as a fellow traveller and attempt to be friendly with him. He is delightfully bitchy; and between the books he doesn’t enjoy and the travellers he finds boring, isn’t shy about expressing it.

Which is not to say all he does is complain. I’ve seen people highlight his grouchiness and can’t entirely dispute it, but in writing as in life, you can get away with a lot if you’re funny, and Theroux includes some hilarious stories, of which I’ll quote part of one:

Once, on an Amtrak train not far from here, I had had a book which no one had queried; and yet it had aroused considerable interest. It was the biography of the writer of horror tales, H. P. Lovecraft, and the title Lovecraft had led my fellow passengers to believe that throughout a two-day trip I had had my nose in a book about sexual technique.

For all I’ve highlighted his self-reflection and telling of capsule stories, I think Theroux’s broader technique is one worth mentioning. Patagonian Express is good nonfiction, which means, of course, that it’s structured like fiction, beginning quietly in a blizzard and immediately contrasting it’s content with its title. Theroux continually points out that his book is supposed to be one about the journey and not the destination, but he includes a richly detailed set piece towards the end where he recounts a couple of evenings spent in the company of Jorge Luis Borges.

Maybe that’s just the order the events happened in, or maybe Theroux knew that there’s a certain kind of person that will read impatiently on to hear about your encounter with a genius.

It’s me, I’m that kind of person, and it makes the book.

Conversely, the frame is one of the things I do remember about In Patagonia; the quest for the mylodon skin animates the whole thing. I remember enjoying it, so I’ll just assume the fault was mine. I’ve got a copy of The Songlines that I’ll try be much more diligent with.

I never really thought of myself as someone that would enjoy books about travel, but I’ve kinda fallen into it because it’s adjacent to some of the other reading I’ve been doing on walking, psychogeography, that kind of thing, and I absolutely love a lateral move. I sometimes think I’d get a lot more done if I just made my peace with always working on the project next to the project I really want to be working on, going round in circles, getting there eventually.

I’ll always have my notes to come back to.

Stop Apologising

Sorry it’s been a while. I think I lead with that in my last post, too. Sorry for repeating myself. I promise this won’t turn into one of those blogs where someone posts every six months just to apologise for not posting and to say how crazy their life has been. I promise I will abandon this blog sooner than do that. Or just make one substantive post every two years. I have no idea when one of my favourite bloggers is going to post and I kinda like it. 

My life has been kinda crazy. I am still adjusting to a new-ish job, and we had our kitchen redone, which meant suddenly having to fit two rooms worth of stuff into the rest of the house (because we have a kitchen diner; it’s big), and then having the fucking fridge in the living room for two weeks, like the monolith from 2001.

Seasonal Reading 

But, I did get some reading done. It was the summer, and I feel like that’s the time for reading a comic novel or two, so after I put down Scoop I picked up a copy of Three Men in a Boat that I’d had hanging around for I think a decade now. I struggled with it at points (the narrative does not move fast), but I did also spend a lot of it nodding along. So much of it is still true; packing for a trip, organising people, travelling with a pet. It was a bloody nightmare then and it’s a bloody nightmare now. This novel also contains one of the all-time comic set pieces which I won’t spoil for you but which I can tell you involves a fishing trophy.

I do also love a story that corresponds to real life in a significant way. I mean, come on, Ulysses is my favourite novel, of course I do. Three Men chronicles a journey you can really undertake and a whole bunch of pubs and inns that are really there (all but one of which are still open, according to Wikipedia).

A Bit of Harlan Ellison Goes a Long Way

I also read, or more accurately finished, after chipping away at it for checks notes four and a half years, Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison. I am not entirely sold on Ellison as a writer (I am suspicious of male writers who cannot seem to write without including sexual violence in their stories, and Ellison for me is similar to Alan Moore in that regard), but as an editor he’s hard to avoid if you want to read New Wave SF, and I did enjoy the previous anthology he put together, Dangerous Visions. 

What seems to qualify most of the stories selected in Again is that they discuss, more or less frankly, sex, which I suppose is always dangerous. It’s kinda weird for me to imagine the publishing landscape then as compared to now, when anyone can write pretty much what they like on the internet. Fiction that frankly depicts sex is also more popular than ever, but at a time when payment providers can lean on platforms to minimise adult content, whatever that means, so I’d say this anthology is still dangerous, but in a way it wouldn’t have been ten years ago. 

As before, each story is prefaced by Ellison and afterworded by the author. The afterwords are great; I don’t care if it spoils the magic, I want to know what they were thinking and how they did it. I am the kinda guy that takes pictures of pedalboards when he goes to gigs. It does lead to some hilarity, too. People will write about alien sex but won’t write about their own lives; leading to this desperately sad aside from James Tiptree Jr,

“What to do? A pseudonym and a P.O. box and start over?”

The preface to her story, The Milk of Paradise, is also sad, in its own way. Ellison has this to say, 

“Tiptree is the man to beat this year. Wilhelm is the woman to beat, but Tiptree is the man.”

He was right about one thing, her story is the best one in there. Other highlights include The Word for World is Forest, which is among a few novella length things to appear here and is by Ursula K. Le Guin so you don’t need me to tell you how good it is. Stoned Council by H.H. Hollis was a surprise and really fun. The Big Space Fuck by Kurt Vonnegut would get 8/10 based on the title alone and manages, somehow, to live up to it. 

It’s hard to recommend Again because it’s a big commitment and, like all large anthologies, very uneven and as such hard to justify reading if you’re not at least getting historical interest and context out of the stories you don’t enjoy. If you like New Wave SF and haven’t read Dangerous Visions go and read that first, and then you’ll know. 

Seasons of Your Life

Speaking of seasonal reading, I had a flash of sense memory when I wrote above about The Word for World; the smell of carpet, the feel of an old polyester covered couch, a window barred on the outside. I’d been reading Again, Dangerous Visions for so long that I was reading it during a period of my life that is now a fading memory, a half-accessible recollection of a job I quit years ago and a break room that had probably looked the way it had since they built the place in the ‘70s. 

There are advantages to reading on your phone; let’s face it, you’re gonna take your phone everywhere, and that means you can take a book everywhere. It also means you can carry around titles that would otherwise be inordinately imposing, like Again, which was split across two volumes when it came out in paperback. 

Just mind the whiplash. 

[My God, I’ve just had a flash of insight; is Remembrance of Things Past a machine for generating Proustian-madeline-moments of recollection of yourself reading Remembrance of Things Past? Trippy, man.]

Seasons in the Abyss

I read Play it as it Lays over a couple of days in late July and knew the whole time it was going to carve out a little space in my head and stay there forever. It is perfect the way a room painted black is perfect. I have yet to read a sentence by Joan Didion that wasn’t immaculate. It immediately joined the pantheon in my head of novels like The Bell Jar and My Year of Rest and Relaxation that Get It. Depression sucks, but if you take enough notes you’ll at least get a novel out of it. I’ve discovered I have a real soft spot for stories about an individual just absolutely losing their mind that I can trace back to reading Note from the Underground for the first time when I was a kid. 

Less Than Entirely Engaged

I was in the mood for more Didion after, so I picked up Let Me Tell You What I Mean. It’s a late-career anthology, which is to say it isn’t as consistent as some of her other collections, but that is not to say that any of the sentences don’t clear her very high bar. 

As usual, her writing about writing is masterful; both Why I Write and Telling Stories are fantastic, particularly the latter. Short fiction is such a particular artform and requires things from you that no other endeavour asks, and Didion captures that, and why you might choose to acknowledge that and back away. 

Does Didion get enough credit for how funny her writing is? A lot of it is stark, precise, matte; yes. But consider this quote from Last Words, her essay on Hemingway and posthumous publication more generally:

“It might seem safe to assume that a writer who commits suicide has been less than entirely engaged by the work he leaves unfinished, yet there appears to have been not much question about what would happen to the unfinished Hemingway manuscripts.”

Less than entirely engaged, my God.

Polite as Fuck

A compulsion I refuse to give up is that everything is knowable if I do the reading, and it is that sense that I keep approaching self-help books. How to Make Friends and Influence People was a lot of fun, even if it was just codifying and going over stuff I knew already; please believe me when I say knowing it already does not mean I apply it consistently, so doing some reading helps. 

I think there was a Van Neistat video where he talked about some formative influences, maybe it was the one on not being a late person, either way, he was talking about etiquette, and mentioned Emily Post. and her manual on the same. It’s in the public domain. I’ve been chipping away at it. Some of it is hilariously out of my wheelhouse, like what kind of hat to wear to the opera kind of stuff, but I am Very Working Class and most of the manners I have that my mother didn’t give me (and she gave me plenty) I have had to learn through painful experience. Any shortcuts appreciated. 

There’s a piece I read about Emily Post a while ago that I now can’t find and it occasionally keeps me awake. The author talks about how they deliberately taught themselves to be excruciatingly polite, unnervingly polite, and how that habit had kept doors open for them and bridges unburned, giving them opportunities they might have blown up if they hadn’t taken real and deliberate care with their interpersonal connections. I wish I could find it. Please tell me you know what essay I mean. 

Dear Boy

On that note, I’ve also been reading some of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son.

I am fun at parties, I swear. 

I wasn’t in a position to receive much fatherly advice growing up, so they are comforting in that sense. Is this what it’s like? I can say to myself. And the comfort comes not just from wisdom I haven’t had a chance to learn yet, but from the sheer joy of not having had a father who was Like That. Lord Chesterfield was constantly pushing his son to take things seriously, commit himself to study. I read this piece by Visakan Veerasamy recently that included this line that made me think of the letters:

“Parents often try to demand seriousness from their children, and fail.”

Lord Chesterfield’s son appears to have become a diplomat much like his father. Not failure, I’d say. Unless it was a failure to become who he really was. 

Each letter starts Dear Boy, which I find very funny. 

These letters are old, so for every bit of timeless advice, like, 

“Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is”

there is a bit of advice that betrays an, um, outdated attitude,

“Women, then, are only children of a larger growth.”

Fatherly advice, indeed.  

Sources

Didion, J. (2011). Play it as it Lays. Flamingo. ISBN: 9780007414994

Didion, J. (2022) Let Me Tell You What I Mean. 4th Estate. ISBN: 9780008451783

Ellison, H. ed. (2014) Again, Dangerous Visions. Open Road Media. ISBN: 9781497604957