Every book is an entire world, waiting to be explored.

My father had a large library. Many of the books were inherited from a friend. That friend had told him that when he was younger, he would worry:

“I rarely have the time to read these. When I find the time, will I be too old to see the words?”

The answer became “yes”. He did grow too old to read them and so gifted them to my father.

Funny enough, my father said the same thing. And once again, it came true.

But for him, it wasn’t for the lack of reading. He’d always had a book in hand and a pen to mark it up with and act as a bookmark. He lamented reading slowly, but I knew he read thoroughly, deeply exercising his mind as he would his body when jogging.

Books Unread

Now, I have many books.

But I’m not reading them at the pace that I’d like. Well, to be honest, they’ve mainly been sitting there.

I brought a book on vacation and began to get into it. I came back from vacation without having finished it, thinking, “Surely, I’ll continue”.

So, I sat it next to my bed, where “Of course, it will remind me.”

And, of course, it sat next to my bed, barely touched.

Two months later, I took another trip, being sure to bring the book along. I got back into it, right where I left off. And once again, I have returned.

This time, though, I’m making a change. Rather than hope the book itself would act as a reminder, I’m adding it to what I’ve come to call my “Honor Guide”.

An Honor Guide

An Honor Guide is much like many other lists, but the structure is unique. It holds 1-3 spaces for the things that I am currently active with, engaging in daily visits at my pace. There is another small area for things that await activation. There is a third area for things I have already well incorporated into my days, no longer taking deep thought to continue, but can still do with a reminder.

It’s a simple structure, but one that has carried me forward for many years now.

The structure affords a direct meeting place for Past, Present, and Future. There, I practice acknowledging what I wish to add into my life and what I would need to set aside to do so. Things that can wait, can wait. Things that cannot, come forward.

Decisions, big or small, can be difficult. But having a structure to support your decisions, so that it is no longer forced, strained, so that you don’t have to hold onto them in some chronic tension, can make all the difference.

– Kourosh

PS If you are interested in learning more about the Honor Guide, you can read its beginnings in the Navigation section (p565) of Creating Flow with OmniFocus and its latest version in Module 7 of the Waves of Focus.

The post When There’s No Time to Read Books appeared first on Kourosh Dini.

I have a white noise app on my Mac laptop that helps me focus. I noticed it doesn’t have “on” and “off” modes. It has “play” and “pause” modes. Apparently it’s never “off.” You will always listen again. If you’re not listening, you are simply preparing to listen.

As of this writing, these are the available sounds:

Airplane
Beach
City
Crickets
Fan
Fan 2
Fan 3
Fire
Ocean
Pier
Rain – Light
Rain – Heavy
Rainforest
River
Shower
Thunderstorm
Wind
Wind Chimes

Blue Noise
Brown Noise
Pink Noise
Violet Noise
White Noise

I use the “airplane” noise mode, myself. I’ve become so accustomed to its tonality that I’ve been known to use it while on airplanes, which is ironic given that I usually use noise cancelling headphones on planes to block out the actual airplane noise. This is to say, I both eliminate the sound of the plane and then pipe in the artificial sound of the plane. The action is, from one perspective, the sonic equivalent of tearing out your backyard and laying down astroturf. Though of course, it’s nothing like that.

As for the other options, I appreciate the cicadas, but it mostly makes me think of camping, which is not on my personal list of ideal situations. I’ll take a non-reclining coach seat on an airplane over camping.

Of the “color” noises, I occasionally opt for brown, which is essentially airplane noise reduced to a mathematical formula. Brown noise is the airplane noise of a low-polygon simulation of flight.

One thing the app lacks is café chatter — better yet, café chatter in a language I don’t understand (which would be any language other than English, though I’m coming up on a year-long streak in Duolingo German, so who knows). Perhaps chatter will come with a future upgrade.

This first appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.

Just over a year into the pandemic, Kelly Moran marked most electronic music fans’ favorite annual holiday, April 14, in honor of the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th,” with the requisite solo piano cover. She recorded her video with a camera that she set to look directly down on her keyboard, and at first all we see is the piano — even after the music starts playing. Magically, the keys move without anyone touching them, and then her hands — slender, sensual, nails gleaming colorfully — appear alongside the ghost accompaniment and flesh out her own version of the song. 

It turns out that she was performing on a Disklavier, on loan from Yamaha, the same instrument on which Aphex Twin reportedly recorded the original version. “Avril 14th” appeared on his 2001 album, Drukqs; Moran’s cover marked the 20th anniversary. 

More time has passed. In the years since that simple (if deceptively so) Aphex Twin experiment of hers, Moran has come to wield the Disklavier not just expertly but ferociously. She has pushed its feature set further. The instrument allows her to record parts and play along with them, and record that and play along with that. Her deep pandemic studies have yielded impossible, post-human music that is truly hyperactive, with chords that no human could accomplish on their lonesome in cadences no human could play for a prolonged period. The works are crystalline paradoxes at warp speed. It’s absolutely perfect that “Butterfly Phase,” the lead video for her forthcoming record, Moves in the Field (due out March 29), involves figure skating, because aesthetically that’s what Moran’s current music is: calisthenic, showy, muscular, and deeply competitive. (Regarding that last point, the title comes from the term in skating for the tests of a competitor’s abilities.) 

Both “Butterfly Phase” and another track, “Sodalis (II),” are available as previews in advance of the full album’s release:

https://kellymoran.bandcamp.com/album/moves-in-the-field

Hey, real quick, what’s something you always wanted to do, but only just started to learn how to do in the last year? I always wanted to learn how to play guitar and last year my son and I started taking guitar lessons together and now I can sort of play guitar a little.

If you’re trying to convince yourself to learn something you should just do it because you might still be shitty at whatever you’re learning 6 months from now, but you’ll be much better than you’d be if you didn’t start until 6 months from now. I think I saw someone say this more eloquently (obviously), but when I tried to find it, all I could find was someone saying imagine if you started 6 months ago, which I think is a recipe for making yourself feel bad, and I bet you don’t need any help doing that, do you?

So, what’d you learn how to do this year or if you haven’t learned anything new yet, what are you going to start learning how to do this year?

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This is the 31st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Adrianna Tan and her blog, popagandhi.com

Adrianna's blog was suggested by Winnie Lim in her interview, back in February. I love discovering new blogs thanks to recommendations. I especially love to see how the various blogs all connect and influence echother. The web, the best social media platform.

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Take a beloved contemporary play by Tom Stoppard, cast starring actors from the Lord of the Rings films, and finish it off with some of Canadian theatre’s best Shakespearean actors, and you’ve got an assured box office hit. But star power isn’t the only reason Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead shines — instead, it’s the clever use of contrast between the large and small that lights up the stage, and these contrasts extend through every aspect of the production. Director Jeremy Webb’s vision is clear throughout the play, and utilizes the complex demands of the script to craft a dance between elements of decadence and distress.

The play’s premise is simple, yet opens a world of possibility: it’s Hamlet, told from the perspective of the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tom Stoppard’s famed 1966 script weaves in and out of Shakespeare’s familiar text while filling the audience in on what “R and G” are up to when they aren’t on stage. For the most part. that’s trying to figure out what the heck is going on with that tricky Prince of Denmark, a task made a little harder when they can’t even seem to remember how they ended up here in the first place. 

Even if you’re not familiar with Hamlet, the title provides you with the key information: These guys are going to die. The play is about the journey.

The show opens with Rosencrantz (Dominic Monaghan) and Guildenstern (Billy Boyd) in complementary blue and green suits that seem just a little ragged, alone on a stage decorated to be… well, a stage, albeit an abandoned one. The two sit on a set of sparse metal risers, while tattered curtains hang haphazardly behind them, in shadowy light that leads us into the metafictional world of this play, where reality and performance blend together.

Immediately, contrasts are at play: Boyd’s Guildenstern is thoughtful, chatty, usually talking himself in circles, while Monaghan’s Rosencrantz punctuates his ramblings with occasional insights and physical comedy. Boyd and Monaghan play off each other like old friends — their characters have clearly known each other for as long as they remember (even though they seem to have forgotten when that was). Their dialogue is snappy and almost dizzying, both to the audience and themselves, but the confusion of the characters is the comedy, in true absurdist fashion. The inherent appeal of this production is in this dynamic. Webb captures the comedic pace of Boyd and Monaghan that is familiar to fans of the celebrity duo, but utilizes that pace to pull the less theatre-minded easily into the absurdism of the script.

The mid-stage curtain then rises to reveal a troupe of actors who call themselves the Tragedians, led by Michael Blake as The Player. Blake perfectly complements the leading duo — he slides easily into the scene, matching Guildenstern’s snappy dialogue with his own witty rhetoric, and Rosencrantz’s large physical movement with bold, extravagant movement. The players begin to further blur the borders between reality and representation as some of them transform into characters from Hamlet, and the more familiar plot begins to unfold. Pasha Ebrahimi as Hamlet is an intense inferno, ferocious and assured and grounded, the starkest contrast to the shadowy uncertainty of our titular characters as they try to puzzle out what exactly is going on around them.

The scenes with the rest of the cast feel incredibly decadent, with the company of 11 actors in layers and layers of fabric and masks gesticulating dramatically in the light. At first, this felt strange to me; why are there so many people on stage? Such a large cast feels almost jarring against the simpler scenes where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are alone, but Webb’s choice for a large cast is not simply to have bodies in the space. As the play continues, the high energy of the full company scenes allow for the quieter, introspective moments of the piece to feel all the more poignant, as the two contemplate their existence, reality, life, and death.

Webb continues to build contrasts between the simple and the extreme through the rest of the production’s aesthetic. Kaelen MacDonald’s costumes, built from shining fabrics, are shape-shifters — under certain lighting they seem glorious and indulgent, while in others they seem to show wear, dirt, and grime. The sound design by Deanna H. Choi swings wildly between comedically hollow echoes of certain lines, to a more subtle reverb to demonstrate scale as the Hamlet characters declaim their iconic lines. Andrew Cull’s set moves constantly, creating everything from an actual theatre to a moving ship, all from what seems like fragments of a theatre that has fallen into shambles.

The play showcases many such contrasting beats and design elements, to great emotional effect. It is heart-racing when the story moves into the familiar world of Hamlet, and then heart-wrenching as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come closer and closer to their inevitable fates, and whatever may come after. The result is the ride of a lifetime, so strap in and hold onto your hats.

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Neptune Theatre’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead runs until February 25 in Halifax, before moving to Mirvish Productions from March 5 to 31. You can learn more about the production here (Halifax) and here (Toronto).

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Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here and here.

The post REVIEW: Neptune’s <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead</i> delights in dichotomy appeared first on Intermission.