Reading

I wanted to understand conservatives better, so I picked up The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin. Definitely learned a thing or two, mostly from the intro essay.

Before reading it, I had always heard about how reactionaries value hierachy. That always felt a little abstract to me. This passage kinda hammered it home:

This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his own way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: “To obey a real superior … is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting.”

The reactionary sees society as a “federation of private dominions” (husband > wife, master > slave, employer > employee), where the deserving ‘excellent’ hold all the cards, and everyone else has to lick their boots. The state’s job is to uphold these dominions, and anyone who threatens them is decadent, subversive, outright evil.

I personally find this pretty illuminating. That said, I didn’t finish the book. Found it a little repetitive. I honestly don’t need to read anything else about Ayn Rand. I know all I need to know.

After putting that one down, I got to three — count em, three — books about dead / missing / absentee fathers. Trying not to psychoanalyze that too much.

First up was Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. The book went out of print for about 20 years. That, plus reviewers calling it “postmodern”, made me worry that I was in for a lo-calorie Ulysses kind of experience. But I found it brisk, engaging, and charming.

Also charming, and an extreme bummer, was Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Sort of a floaty, disocciative, edge-of-death poetic novella. A must-read if you like carpentry, Massachussets, or cancer.

Right now I’m working on Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus, which both enthralls and frustrates me. It’s a cool story, but the language is a little over-reachy. Trying to find bizarre ways to express mundane things. Pet peeve of mine.

Piano

Interleaving practice has made such a difference for me in the last month.

For those who don’t know, that refers to tackling practice tasks in short, 5-minute bursts, which you stack together. So a single half-hour practice session looks like:

  1. 5 minutes of scales
  2. 5 minutes of sight-reading
  3. 5 minutes of a repertoire piece
  4. 5 minutes of scales
  5. 5 minutes of sight-reading
  6. 5 minutes of a repertoire piece

I’ve heard that this is optimal for developing a skill in your brain. I refuse to fact check this. Though I can defintely report that interleaving has made me feel much more competent at the keyboard.

A perhaps-intended consequence of these short little practice stints is: I have to get very specific with what I work on. I can’t just say: “Oh I’ll work on this Bartok piece for 20 minutes.” I’ll squander all my time that way. Instead I have to dive into the details: “Oh, you struggle with the second half of measure 15, because there’s a skip on the left hand, and an octave on the right, and you’re supposed to be playing the right hand staccato, but you’re playing it legato.”

Getting that granular is magical for me. The solution to my probelm suggests itself. I have a concrete thing to work on, instead of an amorphous, unsatisfying “gee I wish I sounded better.”

Judo

And of course, as always happens when I pick up some new piano learning technique, I try to imagine applying it to judo.

(I sometimes wonder if this is a bad habit — overgeneralizing my “learning” ideas, when they may not apply across domains. Oh well.)

I can see the potential in describing my issues with precision. Not “my o-uchi doesn’t work” but “I attempt o-uchis without enough access to my opponent’s reap-able leg; I need to set them up better”.

It’s a lot harder to train these specifics on a live, resisting opponent, though. I’m going to give it a shot and see how it goes.

Fitness wise, I’m feeling good. Stronger than I’ve ever felt, and not at all depleted by rounds of randori, like I used to be.

Techy nonsense

Welp. Mozilla killed Pocket. Which killed my dependable way of getting web articles / email newsletters into my Kobo.

Thankfully I found KoReader + Wallabag, which is enough to get New Yorker articles onto the Kobo. For email newsletters I’ll probably have to dream up some lamda solution or something, which is so annoying.

Another thing is that I love using my 8bit-do micro controller to turn pages in the Kobo. This works in the default (Nickel) reader interface. But not in KoReader. Yet. I entertained the idea of writing a plugin to make my controller work. But then I realized I’d rather…not?

Personal stuff

Went back home to Omaha, to see family. Had a friend visit from Japan. Wife and I are giddily anticipating a trip to Italy in a couple months.

And, hey, I wrote this blog post!

More – and better! – posts to come!