The Bowl of Curiosities: 31 January 2019
In the Bowl of Curiosities, I keep the objects that catch my attention or peak my curiosity. In 2019, my intention is to be disciplined about curating and publishing the things I find interesting.
The image for this post is by Sagar and is available from Unsplash
Article(s) of Interest
This section has articles that I read, and thought were interesting.
Sam Knight, The Search for England’s Forgotten Footpaths, 12 January 2019.
This is an insight into British ramblers who hunt down and map Britain’s lost paths. I love that in Britain you can make a new legally recognised path by simply trading up and down it with a few friends for a period of 20 years. Rambling, access rights, and finding lost paths is all quintessentially British.
In 2004, a government project, named Discovering Lost Ways, was given a fifteen-million-pound budget to solve the problem. It ended four years later, overwhelmed. “Lost Footpaths to Stay Lost,” the Daily Telegraph reported. Since then, despite the apparent impossibility of the task, the 2026 cutoff has remained on the statute books, leaving the job of finding and logging the nation’s forgotten paths to walkers, horse people, and other obsessives who can’t abide the muddled situation.
Heather Berlin, What Time Feels Like When You’re Improvising: The neurology of flow states, 7 June 2018
Don’t look at the clock! Now tell me: How much time has passed since you first logged on to your computer today? Time may be a property of physics, but it is also a property of the mind, which ultimately makes it a product of the brain. Time measures out and shapes our lives, and how we live our lives in turn affects how we perceive the passage of time. Your sense of time is malleable and subjective—it changes in response to changing contexts and input, and it can be distorted when the brain is damaged, or affected by drugs, disease, sleep deprivation, or naturally altered states of consciousness. However, a new set of neuroscience research findings suggests that losing track of time is also intimately bound up with creativity, beauty, and rapture.
Philip Glass and Fredericka Foster (Introduction by Beth Jacobs), The Smaller the Theater, the Faster the Music, Composer Philip Glass talks time with painter Fredericka Foster.
Two artists talking about time. From the article above, ‘Time is not a property of physics’.
Greg Beato, How To Waste Time Properly, The right distractions boost creativity, 21 August 2014.
Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor timed the exact number of seconds that Bethlehem Steel workers took to push shovels into a load of iron ore and then draw them out, maximizing time efficiency has been a holy grail of the American workplace. But psychologists and neuroscientists are showing us the limits of this attitude: Wasting time, they say, can make you more creative. Even seemingly meaningless activities such as watching cat videos on YouTube may help you solve math problems.
From the Library
There are so many leadership and management books produced every year. Most, in my view, are filled with meaningless drivel. So, I am revisiting the books that shaped my thinking about people, work and organisation.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, 2003.
This may be one of the most thoughtful and interesting books on national culture and identity I have ever read. Reviews of the of book say it best.
Focusing on three seminal cases of military defeat--the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I--Wolfgang Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of loss on the battlefield. Drawing on reactions from every level of society, Schivelbusch charts the narratives defeated nations construct and finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a brilliant and provocative tour de force of history.
Ghost Stories
I have had a copy of ‘Ghost: 100 stories to read with the lights on’ by Louise Welsh on my bedside table for, maybe, three years. I don’t remember buying it. I only dip into Ghost infrequently and have made no progress in getting through the 100 short stories. In 2019, I intend to work my way through this book and document my progress here.
The Yellow Sign, Robert W Chambers from a book of horror short stories The King in Yellow (1895)
The story is about an artist who becomes increasingly entrapped by a sinister watchman who is described as looking like a coffin worm. Through the story the watchman is a repulsive figure. The watchman is in human form but not human. There are dreams, stories of other encounters with the watchman, an a question from the watchman to the artist: ‘Have you found the Yellow sign?’ There is a black onyx clasp with ‘a curious symbol or letter in gold’ given as a gift. It ends in death and weirdness. It’s a very good short story that led me to want to read The King in Yellow, which apparently is famous amongst horror buffs and chambers is something of an inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft and writers like him.
Progress on Projects
I stared 2019 with three projects I wanted interested to advance. I am reporting my thinking and progress here. It’s an accountability thing. The rationale for the projects is briefly outlined in the 1 January 2019 edition of the Bowl of Curiosities.
Project 1: Finding Meaning at Work (with Sally Dorsett)
Sally and I have had a number really good conversations about the topic arriving at the working title : ’A Good Working Life’. We hit upon the thought that the British sitcom of our era ‘The Good Life’ was a good worked example of the many dilemmas that we had been talking about. The series opens with Tom Good (on his 40th birthday) deciding that he can no longer take his job as a draughtsman seriously, so he and his wife Barbara out to live a sustainable, simple and self-sufficient lifestyle in their hon in the suburbs. The turn the yard into vegetable patches, acquire pigs, a goat and chickens. This contrasts starkly with the Leadbeaters wo live next door who are locked into a career and social status. The friendship and contrast in lifestyle sand values of the two couples creates tension, and it was funny.
As the tile suggest it was a look at what constitutes a good life but the vehicle for that was, now that we look back on it, different views of work and where meaning comes from. Anyway, anyway our title makes that connection.
Project 2: Trust and Technology
This week I was thinking about how technology extends our senses, for example, telescopes extend vision and stethoscopes extend hearing, and there will be others that extend our sense of taste, touch, and smell. But we get a lot more information from our sense than just seeing or tasting. And, they get combined. We trust our sense (even when we know they are easily fooled). Do we trust the sensations that come from technology-enable sense more? Is it a different type of trust (maybe narrower and more defined)? What makes up ‘sense trust’ and what is lost or gained from technology-enable ‘sense trust?
Project 3. Meditations on Faith, Hope, Leadership and Management
I listened to podcast on the playwright Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot and Endgame). Beckett was deeply interested in language and, it seems to me, the way things fall apart slowly. Failure, inevitability and people trapped in a moment in time all seem to be themes. His characters seem to be in some hallway house between hope and faith. There are only discrete moments that don’t aggregate to give meaning.
A Thought to End
I would like to end with someone else’s thought. In this case, Samuel Beckett.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” Waiting for Godot
“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.” Waiting for Godot
“Nothing is more real than nothing.” Malone Dies
