Finished reading: The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi by Susan Ichi Su Moon 📚

At the Ocamora Library, my eyes were scanning the spines of the books when this one jumped off the shelf. When I saw the name on the spine, Tofu Roshi, I had to know if that name was for real.

Reading the first sentence of the introduction by Gahan Wilson, I started to laugh in amazement. “Many teachers, in their pride, vainly boast that they know nothing, but it is Tofu alone who has truly succeeded in achieving total ignorance.” I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I immediately loved it.

The refreshing thing about this book, the thing that kept me reading, the reason I want to keep it in mind for my own writing, is how it skewers and roasts the genre of spiritual book to make it something delicious. Fictionalizing. Satirizing. So appropriate for a book about spiritual questions and gurus and enlightenment, etc.

Finished reading: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

Like 30 related New Yorker pieces all strung together, this book is mostly a series of easy-to-read, quickly told stories about the rises and falls of various Attention Merchants, whose general M.O. is to draw our attention with apparently free stuff (entertainment, diversion, or even just email) then resell our attention to advertisers, but whose methods and means change as media technologies develop. The fundamental pattern is that a small number of nameable people with huge amounts of economic ambition and power have, for two centuries now, continually offered “grand bargains” to anyone whose attention is up for grabs, and most of us keep accepting their terms, which are typically not great.

And merchandising attention is socially corrosive in the long run.

I’m really on an attention kick this spring, since reading Attensity!, about attention and how it gets hijacked. Dopamine Nation was about the way our nervous systems can tend toward compulsive overconsumption that gets us stuck in ruts. The Attention Merchants paints a broader picture of massive attentional “markets” or contests (economic, political, moral and intellectual) where powerful people are playing to win the public mind via mass attention capture.

This book helped me get an historical perspective that mass production of the industrial revolution NEEDS mass attention capture, because it’s easier and easier to make more and more consumable goods, and the people who make them need consumers… Maintenance of Everything had a helpful outline of the developmental path of mass production, which is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos…

Also helpful to be shown that many successful attentional captures have inspired revolutionary reactions. One way to look at the 1960s and early 70s is as an attentional revolution. Leary and Alpert had the “International Federation for Internal Freedom.” Herbert Marcuse suggested the “Great Refusal” might lead to the ultimate freedom of living without anxiety. The counter-cultural vision was that “public mind would attend to non-commercial stuff—nature, spiritual paths, friends, family, lovers… media would maybe be live concerts or public interest programming.” (159) That’s the milieu in which Feldenkrais first came into public prominence at Esalen in 1972, and that’s the same vibe that inspired me in Attensity! And yet, the book also shows that every revolution, so far, has ended up perpetuating the status quo, once a new technology comes along…

The book ends with the point that any economic or political or moral or intellectual contest or “market” actually consists of two: the competition “on the merits,” but PRIOR to that, the contest for attention that determines what options or choices seem available. So the availability of our attention means there is the constant risk that the contest for attention will make the contest on the merits irrelevant…

Finished reading: Maintenance of Everything Part One by Stewart Brand

This is a beautiful book, like the actual materiality of the book is really nice, cover has kintsugi veins of gold, page layouts with interesting margins for captions and commentary, blue highlights whose meaning and function gradually dawn through reading. Some of the marginalia comes from people who helped Brand during the writing of the book by reading and commenting through a public drafting website tool called books in progress. Just seems like innovative, well considered book design.

The reading of the book was nice. Yet the shape of the argument or maybe just the shape of the content felt weird to me. Banger first chapter of three interlocking stories about solo boat racing (and maintenance). Then a much longer, more varied, subdivided second chapter, nominally about vehicles, but full of (well labeled) digressions… Good fun, but no feeling of beginning, middle, end, or where it’s going. No conclusion, i guess because it’s only part 1, but neither any cliffhanger or much effort to tease future parts.

Abstractable quotes:

“Just owning and using something is not yet mastery—we need a basic intelligibility of our possessions.” (58) That’s Crawford (Soulcraft) quoted by Brand. Ouch… so few of my possessions do i understand well enough to fix or maintain

“The power to maintain is the power to improve.” (63) Means that knowing how to maintain something means knowing how it works means seeing opportunities for improvement.

The developmental path of mass production is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos… And i want to pair that with the rise of advertising (attention merchants).

So much of this book was about military history, which makes sense for the topic but also makes a different kind of sense after learning Stewart Brand was “a professional rifleman in the early 1960s, serving for two years as an infantry officer teaching basic training.” I had to update my model of him cause i had only ever heard him talk about himself as a flower child.

”Old systems fail in familiar and prepared for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared for ways.” (112 and 27)

Sustainability is a concept built around aspiration for the future. In contrast, sustainment is about getting to work now. (165)

“The opposite of maintenance mind is neglect mind. Neglect mind is part laziness, part ignorance, and part surrender to fantasy. Maintainers are realists.” (179-180)

“Sustainment is everything it takes to ensure prolonged endurance of capability.” (180)

Finished reading: Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

Compulsive overconsumption. That’s the phrase. That’s what we do with almost everything now, including digital drugs like youtube and “social media.”

Dopamine is used as a scientific currency to measure the addictive potential of experiences.

The companies that benefit from our addictions exploit our brain chemistry. ”Dopamine Economy” and “Limbic capitalism.”

The way to find balance again is to abstain or at least self-bind, so homeostasis of our pain-pleasure equilibrium resets.

Hedonic set point. Strangely, hedonism leads to anhedonia. Even frequent exposure to “natural highs” is related to anhedonia. Hamster wheels are addictive (pump tracks are a drug).

Binding ourselves is a way to be free.

“Compulsive overconsumption of high dopamine goods is the antithesis of human attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference.”

Interesting stuff at the end of the book about “club goods,” which are the rewards of belonging to a group with strict rules that reinforce “pro social shame.”

Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto

This is a very helpful primer on how to make notes that lead to writing.

I just finished reading: Shu Ha Ri by Richard Griffiths @writingslowly

I liked how short it was. I think it would fit in well with other books from Tracy Durnell’s In praise of the hundred page idea.

Shu Ha Ri is about learning through lineage, then keeping lineage alive. I liked the weave of examples from different ways (dōs) that run through the book. Most touching was the story of Jigoro Kano, founder of Judō, whose final request in life was to be buried wearing his white belt. I had already heard a fair bit about Kano because Moshe Feldenkrais studied with Kano, so Kano feels like an ancestor in the Feldenkrais lineage I’m practicing in. But I had never heard this detail about Kano’s intention to maintain beginner’s mind even after going through death.

I also appreciated the explanation of Keiko, a word for training that includes reference to 10 generations of practitioners before. It had me thinking about how lineage holders actually want an endlessness for their practice, for the “living knowledge” or the meme of the practice to go on and on.