Month: September 2017

• Playwright David Mamet on speaking.

“People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That’s the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.”

• An article about silence and encountering John Cage’s “4’33.”

“And because the ‘silence’ I was hearing wasn’t something else, had no hooks to distract me from the purity of what it was, although that sounds pleasant, in the actual act of sitting there, I noticed anger arising.”

• An article about pursuing flow in an age of digital distraction.

“In our digital age, loud with bottom-feeder commentary, the ping of incoming emails and bleating social media, the pursuit of flow is all the more urgent.”

(In this image from an atelier in Kishangarh, India in the early eighteenth century, the female entertainer plucks a tempura, a drone instrument used in Indian music.)

(Curious about the sound of the tanpura? Go to http://upasani.org/home/Welcome.html).

• An article about Facebook. (I recommend reading this in its entirety.)

“Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though?”

• An article about Rafael Nadal’s coach and learning.

“’I’m interested, most of all, in the question of learning,’ Toni Nadal, 58, said. ‘For me the only thing that makes me stand out from some other coaches is that when I go into the locker room, as I did just now, I might tell Rafa he played very well, but my idea is always what can we do to make him better, even better. I’m telling him, look at Federer, look at the way he’s playing. You need to be more at the net. You need to be more aggressive from the start, and this approach I’ve applied to everything in my own life. It’s a question of principle, really.'”

• An article on exercise, reality distortion, and time perception.

“Time is flowing in the usual way no matter how deep you dig. But what about perceived time? Is your ability to estimate how long it takes, say, five seconds to pass distorted?”