Quotes

They don’t really know what they’re doing

It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.



The Speed of Thoughtfulness

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued—that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive or faster paced. [...] As a member of the self-employed whose time saved by technology can be lavished on daydreams and meanders, I know these things have their uses, and use them—a truck, a computer, a modem—myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival. I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.



Smells Like Spirit

When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.

Robert Greene
In conversation with Ryan Holiday
(via Austin Kleon)


If you want to sell books, love books

Of course, there’s a lesson here. And it’s not just for books. You could also apply it to music, newspapers, films, and a host of other media.

But I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple.

If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.

[...]

Frankly, I could draw many other lessons from the Barnes & Noble turnaround. I praise its decentralization, and its willingness to empower booksellers at the local stores. I like the way the stores look nowadays, and the improved selection on the shelves. But the key element uniting all of this is putting books and readers first, and everything else second.



Don’t stop connecting

Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.



Attention as a collective resource

In a recent paper, Benjamin Farrer, a political scientist at Knox College in Illinois, argues that we have mistaken the key resource upon which democracy, and perhaps civilization, depends. That resource is attention. But not your attention or my attention. Our attention. Attention, in this sense, is a collective resource; it’s the depth of thought and consideration a society can bring to bear on its most pressing problems. And as with so many collective resources, from fresh air to clean water, it can be polluted or exhausted.

Borrowing a concept from Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Price in economic science, Farrer argues that attention is subject to a problem known as the tragedy of the commons. A classic example of a tragedy of the commons is an open pasture that any shepherd can use for his flock. Without wise governance, every shepherd will send his flock to graze, because if he doesn’t, the other shepherds will do so first. Soon enough, the pasture is bare, and the resource is depleted.

Farrer argues that our collective attention is like a public pasture: It is valuable, it is limited, and it is being depleted. Everyone from advertisers to politicians to newspapers to social media giants wants our attention. The competition is fierce, and it has led to more sensationalism, more outrageous or infuriating content, more algorithmic tricks, more of anything that might give a brand or platform or a politician an edge, even as it leaves us harried, irritable and distracted.



History of the study

The study, it seems, evolved during the Renaissance from a piece of bedroom furniture: the writing desk, escritoire, or secretary, in which a man traditionally kept his ledgers and family documents, usually under lock and key. Personal privacy as we think of it scarcely existed prior to the Renaissance, which is when the wide-open house was first subdivided into specific rooms dedicated to specific purposes; before that time, the locked writing desk was as close to a private space as the house afforded the individual. But as the cultural and political currents of the Renaissance nourished the new humanist conception of self as a distinct individual, there emerged a new desire (at least on the part of those who could afford it) for a place one might go to cultivate this self—for a room of one’s own. The man acquired his study, and the woman her boudoir.

Probably the first genuinely private space in the West, the Renaissance study was a small locked compartment that adjoined the master bedroom, a place where no other soul set foot and where the man of the house withdrew to consult his books and papers, manage the household accounts, and write in his diary.



Live vs. studio recording

One analogy I draw to help people understand is you wouldn’t expect a film actor to go on stage and be a stage actor or a film director to be a theatrical director. They’re two different worlds. People get into one because that’s their passion. For me, the live thing is like theater. What I do is more like a film director because it’s all about piecing things together. Live music is not my thing. It’s not what I do. What I do is recording.



Bibio on feeling stuck

If I’m working on a particular track and I’m not particularly into what I’m doing or not sure what to do next, the natural thing is to have a break, just do something else. I have lots of tracks I’m working on at the same time. That’s changed over the years because I’ve got all these sketches on my phone as well.

I never treat anything as a reject, I never delete anything. It’s just a matter of when I’m ready to work on it again. Having this huge archive of unreleased, unfinished music, I can dip into any of it if I don’t feel like starting something new. It’s good to remind myself that I shouldn’t pressure myself into coming up with new ideas all the time. Sometimes there’s gems in there that just need watering and giving some TLC.





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