2024-08 | Dzięki bardzo, policja wszędzie, dobranoc
Dog days of summer, indeed. Some months are just really nice -- make hay whilst the sun shines, etc etc.
• After years of intermittent planning, I. swam across Lake Garibaldi and I followed on an inflatable kayak that we named
the HMS Lachtan, occasionally heckling and offering M&Ms. It was brilliant and fun and surprisingly low-key
(well, for those of us paddling idly, anyway). He is now writing a trip report that involves satellite imagery - stay tuned.
• Swimming takes longer than kayaking, so I read With Chatwin, which was both a great portrait of someone
unapologetically extra and unafraid of it all, and a portrait of a bygone world - Chatwin just went off to
wherever he wanted on retainer, fell off the map for two months, and came back with
travel writing that was published in leading publications. Good for him!
• I have a new, so far somewhat successful, approach to reading research papers, which is an important part of my
job that's often easy to put to back-burner. It involves 2 key components:
-- 1) I have a silent alarm set on my watch at 3 pm, and unless I have a deadline within 48 hours, I quit everything and try to
spend the next hour reading (Thanks to M for the succinct "try to save an hour a day for learning or creativity" tip).
I chose 3 pm on purpose: starting the day with reading feels "unproductive" (even though it's really not), and at 3 pm, I've typically been
doing a large amount of the rest of my job, so a switch is welcome.
-- 2) I have a stack of index cards, one index card per paper, with author name/year/journal on the front, the subtopic (which lately has been, uh, "winds")
listed along one side,
and a nice box to check once the paper is read. Every time I'm doing a lit review, I make an index card for any paper I actually want to read.
When I read the paper, which I typically do in Zotero, I put any notes on the back of the card, and file it away under its subtopic. I finally enter the paper in my
Notion-Zotero interlinked database along with the most important notes. (This last step is mostly a backup,
because I live in two places and am variously divergent and don't trust myself to not eventually lose the ziploc of index cards.)
-- So far, I've found going modularly-analog in my note-taking satisfying, both because physicality of pen-and-paper is great, and also
I think because it's a little bulwark against the overwhelm of the digital world. I work with climate models; at any one time
I have too many terrabytes of grids sitting on various remote clusters, and a good amount of my time is spent writing scripts
to extract something like human-intelligible meaning from them (before throwing them out to avoid overflowing the quota
and getting someone mad at me). Google scholar feels similarly overwhelming: there is more relevant literature in
my field than I can realistically read. Making a physical stack of things to read and then reading them feels better
than making a digital list in another digital corner of the digital infinite. Rereading notes this way is also somewhat more helpful.
• (Related-unrelated: Various friends have had copies of the card-deck of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, and I find them on the
nice side of pretentious.
(Clickable here,
printable here)
• I followed some of these instructions to reduce the intensity of my phone
(mostly simplifying interface, deleting apps, changing to greyscale). It seems to make a modest difference - my phone
feels less overstimulating. The majority of the effect is coming from the switch to greyscale.
• I visited Warsaw by night train from Prague, which is easily my favourite way to travel, leaning heavily into "the romanticism of being
rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the tracks as the landscape flickers by" (I have not figured out how to say that particularly originally;
whatever, take all the
night trains you can). Did I sleep particularly well? Well, no, but I got to see the Bohumín
railway station at four in the morning, so there's that.
• Warsaw is dynamic and extremely fun to walk around (and, compared to other Vyszegrad cities, modern/modernist, for obvious reasons).
J recommended me this instagram of
what it looked like before the Nazis smashed it. I failed to make it to this
cultural landmark, which I feel like we wouldn't preserve in Prague.
• M recommended this
concert series in a Finnish house in the centre, which was free and which I came late to and which was maybe the nicest surprise of
late summer - one of those rare concerts that made perfect sense, musically, energetically - everyone was just stoked to be there and
surfing a collective, sense-making late-summer wavelength. The set I caught was two dudes from Gdansk in windbreakers on drums and synths, called Lasy
(which just means forest, so they are effectively impossible to google; you just get pictures of birches around the Baltic.) At 10:30 on a Wednesday we ended
and the organizer got on stage and announced with a laconic charm -- Dzięki bardzo, policja wszędzie, dobranoc.
• The people around that label seem to do any number of nice things, and also engendered maybe the most poetic Google review I've ever seen:
»
Wybitne zacisze artystyczne. Inicjatywa koncertów w tym miejscu, to jedna z najlepszych rzeczy,
jaka mogła się przytrafić temu miastu zmęczonemu jak ja, gdzie wiadomo kto zrobił co swoje,
gdzie wiosna spaliną oddycha.
«
(There's a decent Google translation to English, but I guess I have a specific (and extremely pleasant) vantage point of not really speaking
Polish but catching the pan-Slavic drift, something something liminality of understanding,
I'm sure someone has written a CEE studies paper on it at some point.)
• V rozmezí osmnácti hodin jsem byla vlakem ve třech největších městech České republiky, což byla trochu magořina ale hrozně milá. (Při té příležitosti jsem udělala
neformální komparativní terénovou studii dvou zastávek MHD Náměstí Republiky; musím se podívat jestli nemají nějakou i v Ostravě.) České dráhy už najely na
podzimní pumpkin vlnu, dýňový krém s pomerančem velmi doporučuji. (Oproti tomu Mad'arský jídelák razí i nadále mírně komické fuck the customer vibes,
ale zase si člověk může dát samostatnou porci okurek.)
♮ Relistening to Charlotte Cornfield this month a lot whilst staring out of train windows:
It's never been easy // with you on my mind, // but I am in yr corner // and you are in mine.
♮ The Baltic tree boys mentioned above. Cześć!