Ahead on Differential

Here are ten books I read and liked last year.

1. Roland Allen, The Notebook (nonfiction, 2024). I don’t think there was a book released this past year that was more my shit than this one, a wide-ranging and thoroughly researched history of the humble notebook, from its mercantile origins in 14th century Italy through the commonplace book era to the bujo boom of today. It’s heartening to see that for almost as long as we’ve been writing things down for ourselves, we’ve been using it as a place to figure out the world around us, including ourselves. Every Field Notes has the truth printed inside of it: “I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now.”
2. Sarah Bakewell, How to Live (nonfiction, 2011). This overview of the life and work of French writer and statesman Michel de Montaigne has a very Montaingesque structure: twenty attempts to answer to the titular question. The root of “essay,” after all, is the French verb essayer, or “to try.” The Notebook was in part about the ways we came to exteriorize out thoughts and ideas on paper, and few people in recorded history did so with as much relish and as little regard for internal consistency as Montaigne. Of course, this was part of the process: Montaigne was demonstrating his trains of though to better think through any given topic. This is a refreshing approach to decorticating something in an era of speed and instantaneity.
3. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph (nonfiction, 1975). Oblique Strategies for the Letterboxd set. Something to be consulted, not necessarily read through. Fascinating insights about filmmaking from a legendary and idiosyncratic filmmaker.
4. Roy Peter Clark, How to Write Short (nonfiction, 2013). Writing long has its benefits; just ask Montaigne, who did so to tease out this thoughts about this topic or that. The benefit of writing short is when you know what you want to say, but want to maximize its punchiness. It is clear throughout that Clark (who I always confuse with Roy Thomas Baker, the guy who made Queen sound like Queen) has honed his writing advice over a lifetime in journalism, academia, and coaching. The advice itself isn’t particularly novel: keep it tight, pick strong words, be ruthless if need be. What makes this book interesting is the breadth of the examples Clark uses to make his point: tweets, dating profiles, baseball card copy, engagement-bait Facebook quizzes, poems, puns, T-shirts for sale on the boardwalk. It’s like J-school riff on that Jim Jarmusch quote about originality: “Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows,” it’s all good.
5. Kyle Chayka, Filterworld (nonfiction, 2024). The best thing I read all year, and also the book that made me do the Rick Dalton meme in recognition the most frequently, so specific were the observations and even the recommendations (I know Chayka is my brother because he too is a fan of Hiroshi Sato’s Awakening). Chayka, a writer for the New Yorker whose Infinite Scroll column is required reading, argues that the algorithm, and by extension Big Tech, flattens culture into a mushy flavourless middle, and that our various social media feeds kill our curiosity while fighting tooth and nail for our attention. What we take in is more and more imposed on us, and how we consume it has become more frictionless, passive, optimized. We must revel in the joyous friction of seeking things out for ourselves. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best algorithm is the cool people you know, because cool people like cool things. (Further reading: I also read and liked Chayka’s book about the history of minimalism, The Longing for Less.
6. Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff (nonfiction, 2020). There’s something irresistible to me about a curious newcomer trying to break into a niche competitive domain, and the more niche the better. Consider my fondness for Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a book that in no small part set me on my correct competitive Scrabble path, or the work of the Paper Lion himself, George Plimpton. I found Konnikova’s journey into the heart of competitive poker to be absorbing and alluring; there are through lines about the relationship between skill and luck, what you can and cannot control, and the overwhelming power of cognitive biases. “Less certainty, more inquiry” indeed. Pair it with Jon Bois’ Pretty Good video about poker.
7. Jason Kirk, Hell Is a World Without You (fiction, 2024). I didn’t grow up in the church. But I grew up in West Québec, which is still pretty church-adjacent, or church-adjacent enough for me to have had a high school girlfriend who signed one of my yearbooks with a screed against evolution (Rachel, if you ever see this, what’s up) and came to school armed with literature (I might be conflating two people here, cut me some slack, it’s been 20 years). But one thing I was for sure was a 14-year-old social outcast navigating friendships and romance and my own sense of guilt between sessions of Soul Calibur II and NHL Hitz 2003 with the homies. Kirk, a sports journalist and co-host of the venerable Shutdown Fullcast, writes with great humour and empathy about growing up Evangelical, and gleefully channels his inner puerile 14-year-old in the book’s funnier passage, which are legion.
8. Patrick O’Reilly, Demographics Report, November, 2023 (poetry, 2024). Full disclosure, Patrick is a friend, and Cactus Press put out my own chapbook back in 2021, but if I’m not going to rep my scene, who the hell will? Most of Demographics Report is a long, bleakly funny modernist poem attempting to catalogue, in the spirit of Georges Perec, the comings and goings of a city’s fauna, humans included. This slot could also have gone to Sahand Fariva’s beautiful Thirteen Sonnets or local legend Lou Vani’s Moon Rock Writes, which both feel classical in their own way.
9. Oliver Roeder, Seven Games (nonfiction, 2024). More than a pocket history of the titular seven games (checkers, chess, go, backgammon, poker, Scrabble, bridge), Roeder’s book is especially interesting when humans build machines that end up being so good at playing games that the best of us start playing like them (this is especially evident in the chapter about chess); the existential issue is, as Roeder puts it, the machines can’t explain themselves to us. There’s also the thorough line of computer scientists seemingly treating games as a problem to be solved rather than an elegant expression of human creativity.
10. Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars (poetry, 2011). The best poetry collection I read this year. Works in the same way as the best science fiction: ideas and feelings refracted through future tech and the sheer vastness of the Universe.

#tenthings

Thrust awake in the dead of morning, as one is when nursing a cold, I was struck by the kind of question that frequently afflicts the Scrabble-addled: is X word valid in Scrabble?

Because I'm me, I've had the Live in Chicago version of Ween's “The Blarney Stone” on the brain for most of the year (I've spent a lot of time with Ween this year, as a future post will attest to). During the final verse of this particular recording of “The Blarney Stone,” as is the case with the umpteen bootlegs I've inhaled this year, guitarist Dean Ween (aka Mickey Melchiondo) ad-libs various ailments befalling our salty-dog narrator, punctuated with mock disgust by the rest of the band. To wit: “I got zits on my back/I got cancer in my crack/I got tumours on my nutsack!”

And because my brain is broken in the specific way it is, on this congested morning after five-ish hours of fitful sleep, I ask myself: is NUTSACK good?

UNSTACK and UNTACKS are the only NWL words in that mess of letters, but NUTSACK# is good in CSW, and I can already hear select people I know chime in with “and that's why Collins is better.”

#scrabble

I don't use my personal YouTube account on my work-assigned computer. This has its drawbacks: nothing gets preserved, nothing gets saved, I’m the mercy of what the algorithm wants to throw my way. One odd advantage to this friction: when my browser decides it’s time for an IT-mandated upgrade or a surprise cookie deletion, my YouTube front page becomes a clean slate. This is when I do what I call “goosing the algorithm,” where I run as many videos I like in as many tabs as my poor work laptop can handle at one time (with the sound muted, obviously). The idea is that it keeps the recommendation engine on its toes; what will the oracle offer me after a steady diet of Jon Bois videos, live Ween bootlegs, stationary hauls, guitar rig rundowns, Criterion Closet videos, videos about spelling and fonts and decentralizing the role of your phone in your creative life? There are worse ways to pan for gold.

One of the nuggets this method has yielded is the channel of Evan Monsma, a young Midwestern maker with a flair for the junky, the janky, and the jury-rigged. He builds shelves out of scrap wood, camera rigs out of spare parts, and injection molders from drill presses. He’s also a videographer and scores his own videos. His mix of rolled-sleeve creativity, broad interests, and unpretentiousness reminds me of Wade Nixon aka Dankpods, the similarly down-to-earth Australian drummer/torturer of automobiles/chronicler of obsolete tech.

A week ago, Evan posted a video challenging his just-south-of-30,000 followers to do something creative every day in October. Hardly a novel idea (Kleon has also championed doing something to this effect several times), but something about the way Evan frames it—“nothing complex, nothing super high-pressure,” just something to keep the creative muscles loose—makes it approachable. Don’t drive yourself up the wall making a perfect thing; just make a thing. One small thing a day for a month.

It doesn’t even have to be thirty-one of the same thing. On the 1st, I wrote two verses of a song about the seasons going out of phase; it still sounds like three Mountain Goats songs spot-welded together. Yesterday, I wrote this very post. Today? Who knows. I don’t want to fence myself in. Like Wade and Evan, I have a few different things I’d like to do (though mine involve about 100% fewer sawblades and oil changes). I’ll try blogging a bit more. I want to restring my crappy beginner guitar and learn Leonard Cohen’s not-so-secret six chords. I want to take the Polaroid I got at Value Village for ten bucks out for a spin. I made a zine for a friend recently and was amazed at how invigorating it was to do. There’s a stack of postcards next to my desk begging to be sent. Scrabble, like every Scrabble player will tell you, can be as creative and beautiful as chess, but this specific kind of creativity and beauty falls outside the parameters of “something small every day.”

What I really want to work on is that long-gestating sci-fi poetry manuscript that I’ve been putting together piecemeal for the last few years. But I fear I’ve stalled out because I may have set the bar too high for myself in terms of emotional ambition; I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that I think I’ve written myself into a corner I don’t have the skill or heart to escape.

Maybe I’ll feel more up to the task by the time Halloween comes around.

#blog

the moon is two-faced unwilling to answer prayers and made of cocaine

#poetry

1. The word for the shavings left over when someone drills into steel is “swarf.”
2. The laundromat is an underrated third place.
3. You can write about 160 words on one quarter of an A4 page.
4. “Plots are for coffins and pedants.” —Spencer Hall
5. Board game streams are only as good as their colour commentators.
6. It's good to be a local legend.
7. Baseball is primarily vibes.
8. If you're boiling your corn on the cob, six minutes is plenty.
9. If you can't sleep, read.
10. Old notebooks are the cheapest form of time travel.

#tenthings

The great Shelley Duvall passed away today, and all I can think about are the rougher edges of her story. Her agony on the set of The Shining, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil, her years in the whatever-happened-to wilderness. But I don't want Shelley Duvall to live in my memory as a victim, as someone who was yelled at, ground down, and paraded around as a sideshow. A Cannes Best Actress and Peabody Award winner, let alone of the the iconic American actresses of the 1970s, deserves a better legacy in my head.

Duvall was, in short, the coolest, an instant value-added to any movie she was in, no matter how small the role. What her filmography lacks in volume is made up in pure presence. There is, of course, her god run as part of Robert Altman's stock company in the 1970s, but her idiosyncratic TV work in the 1980s, much of it as the main creative force, is well worth your time and attention. After her heyday, she popped up here and there in the 1990s and 2000s, in projects helmed by everyone from Jane Campion to Steven Soderbergh, and retired in 2002.

Then, 14 years late, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil happened, an episode of television so cruel and callow that Lee Unkrich—the fucking Toy Story guy, who's also Shining superfan number one—tracked her down himself to make sure she was okay.

Broadly speaking, she was. In 2021, Duvall was profiled in the Hollywood Reporter and, for the first time in a long time, she got to tell her side of the stories that loomed over her legend. People loved and will always love Shelley Duvall, but this piece, written by Seth Abramovitch, was key in reminding the world who she was. It made clear as day that behind the big eyes and ingenue roles was a woman tough as Texas leather.

But what will linger with me the longest is the audio of her being coached by Harry Nilsson through her rendition of “He Needs Me,” from Big Swing Hall of Fame film Popeye. Any Altman starring Shelley Duvall is worth your time, but Popeye is kind of a weird miracle. The part of Malta where they shot the movie still looks like that.

“Good, Shelley!”

#obit #movies

Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.

1. “It's a-me!”
2. “Hold on!”
3. “Come on!”
4. “Boy oh boy!”
5. “Round and round!”
6. “Here I go!”
7. “Once again!”
8. “Here we go!”
9. “Oh my God!”
10. “Oh yeah!”
11. “All right!”
12. “Be strong!”

This way to the answer key. How did you do?

#music

All right, time to clear the decks.

The arc of life bends long, but I don't know that holding my own writing hostage because I'm not thinking about Mixtape Forensics or Ten Things or (this one is for the real heads) the Ebert Cup is a good or productive idea. Sometimes you just want to write a short missive about what you've been up to.

For good or ill, I often think that I'm pissing my days away doing dumb shit. Then I get in my head about what not pissing my days away might look like. Everyone has their own version of the proverbial “good day”; some of us write legendary rap hits about them. Sooner or later, I start thinking about a post Austin Kleon¹ made in 2017 called “A checklist for every day.” In it, Kleon traces the origin of Goethe's good day—”one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words”—and emphasizes that liking stuff is the first step towards making stuff. But also, doesn't just sound like a nice way to spend your time? Music, poetry, art: what day isn't at least improved by experiencing them?

So how have I been completing the Goethe Haul² lately?

For reasons that can be traced back to the Midnight Special YouTube page, I've had Slade's glam-rock stomper “Gudbuy T'Jane” stuck in my head for most of the last month. Roy Peter Clark's How to Write Short inspired me to keep a book of little poems in my bag. I got reacquainted with the graphic design work of the great Aaron Draplin, a man who loves Dinosaur Jr. and painted signage on corrugated steel in equal measure; as good as his work is (and it is good, peep the archives, read the book), what I admire about him most is his blue-collar Our Band Could Be Your Life approach to working and lecturing. I'm knee-deep in words, reasonable and otherwise: books, podcasts, press releases, Scrabble³, correspondence with friends.

Most of my days are good using the rubric, and that's good enough.

¹ The decks may have been cleared, but one thing that will never change here at Ahead on Differential is most of my good ideas can be traced back to either Kleon or Kottke.

² A “haul” is what soccer fans call a four-goal hat trick, or so Reddit tells me.

³ Not only is Scrabble still an ongoing concern, but I am paying someone to teach me to get better at playing it.

#blog

Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.

The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.

I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.

#music

Okay, this one requires a little table-setting.

There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”^[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle^[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”

There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.

[1] It is absurd how hard “Soda City Funk” goes. I mean, it's just “Got to Be Real” plus “Do You Wanna Get Funky?” at 1.7x speed, but it works.

[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”

#music