Make things complicated

Feb 17, 2024

These articles caught my attention this week:

Spotify laid off the person responsible for making this really niche music site, complete with genres like “hardgroove” and “raggatek”.
This Kyle Seibel short story about a house next to a roller coaster is a good quick read.
How to remember what you read, at Farnam Street.
Books don’t enter our lives against a blank slate. Each time we pick up a book, the content has to compete with what we already think we know. Making room for the book, and the potential wisdom it contains, requires you to question and reflect as you read.
How does reading affect the brain? by Jack Close.
When we open a book, images of the individual words are captured by the eyes. These are converted into electrical signals and transferred to the back of the brain, where they are processed. The letters within each word are recognised as symbols in the 'letterbox' of the brain—this means that we can recognise them in any font or case. Now that we have processed the combination of letters, the frontal and temporal lobes tell us how the word is pronounced and what it means.
How to make a 12 page zine from a single sheet of paper by Austin Kleon

(Here's my article on zines from a few months ago.)

Nothing I like to do pays well.
I sent this in the middle of the week, and it includes a mini-essay on that topic.
The no-fluff fallacy by me on Medium.
Your writing needs more than just the facts.

Book Notes & Other Media

Finished “Masters of Atlantis” by Charles Portis. Read it if you’re into Confederacy of Dunces or Catch-22.
Started “XX” by Rian Hughes. It’s about AI and aliens as told by “transcripts” and fake news articles and more experimental artifact style pages so we’ll see where it goes.
Still reading (er…listening) to this Peter Biskind book on peak TV.
Caught up on True Detective: Night Country and I’m keen to see how they finish it on Sunday night
I watched that movie “Yesterday” that came out a few years ago, and it’s very kind and sweet and made me feel like “that’s the kind of movie they don’t make anymore” though I’m not sure they ever did. Anyway, it’s about an accident in the world and only one musician remembers The Beatles and he claims all of their songs as his own
Let’s close it with Spotify, too. Me and Jay Filson ran in some similar Nashville circles and now he’s recently released a couple of slowed-down, but great covers.
- “Complicated” (that old Avril Lavigne song)
- “All the Small Things” (Blink 182 with a slow piano)

Keep going,

-Josh Spilker