For Christmas and New Years, I went to Japan with my wife Z, my mom, my older sister, her boyfriend, and my younger sister.

Z & I flew with Air Canada. We upgraded to Premium Economy to avoid being stuck in a couple of middle seats. It was expensive, but it made our flight much better. I spent the whole flight reading and writing. I read the first 150 pages of Normal People and

, pausing only to eat meals. I couldn’t believe it when it was announced that we were beginning our descent.

I had severe allergies until the early evening. This happens to me whenever I travel somewhere new. In 2017 I went to Europe for the first time and I spent the first full day sneezing and oozing. Same thing this time in Tokyo for the first 24 hours. Reactine didn’t seem to make a difference, just had to wait it out.

The architecture and spatial planning of the theme park was really impressive. It seemed like every corner we rounded we encountered another stridebreaking view of the park. It reminded me of the architectural tactic of constraining the height and width of hallways to reinforce the impact of emerging into a bigger space. It’s a method that’s been employed by Tadao Ando of Osaka and other famous architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Tokyo station was huge and very busy. It felt like being in a beehive. It took me and Z a while to figure out how to pick up our tickets. One machine gave us an error message but then we tried a machine in a different section and it worked. Then we circled through the masses, trying to figure out which screen listed our train’s platform. When we finally found it, we struggled to pass through the gate. Z put in the two tickets as the ticket machine had instructed but that wasn’t enough. We had a confusing interaction with a worker there, who we finally understood was saying to scan our IC card after inserting the tickets. We made it through and with thirty minutes left until departure time, we lined up to buy food and drinks to take onto the train. It’s good we came an hour early.

This was one of the best days of the trip.

A thunderstorm began while we were in a taxi on the way to the Kanazawa train station. Flashes of lightning so bright I thought for a moment our driver had run a red light and triggered a super powerful automated stoplight camera. We tried a coffee shop near the train station but it was closed for New Years, which is the biggest national holiday in Japan. Train station was full of stores and flooded with white overhead lighting. Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift playing in the overhead speakers. We sat in Tully’s Coffee lounge with our bags piled around our ankles. On the far wall a horribly sappy and nonsensical marketing poem for & Tea. I felt like I could be in any other manufactured commercial center around the world. Soulless places like these often have this sort interchangeability, lack of identity. Being there, it doesn’t feel like you’re in an actual place. You’re just temporarily detained in a massproduced commercial limbo.

Grateful to be back in the sun.

It was certainly a mistake to visit Japan in the first few days of January. As noted all over the internet, New Years is Japan’s major national holiday and many things close not only on the first but for a week. I’m sure Z would’ve determined this if we had been more involved in planning the trip. Lesson learned, I suppose.

I had

. Or, I don’t know, maybe I just needed a meal. Or a better sleep. Or to feel like I chose to go there. Or to have had a period earlier in the day where I’d gotten to direct my attention to things of my choosing. Or a period to produce something, so that I might be in a more

. That certainly makes me feel better about socializing aimlessly in the evening, when I feel like I’ve done something productive with my day.

The Digital Art Museum was really cool. It was a dark maze on the bottom floor of a fancy mall where myriad projectors shone moving patterns and images of light on walls, floors, and ceilings. This by itself might’ve been a gimmicky socialmedia tourist trap, but embedded throughout the large labyrinthine gallery were rooms where sculptural elements combined with light, music, and mirrors to create surreal experiences.

My intention was to browse Hands and Itoya in Ginza, but I came across the flea market when I stopped for coffee by Ginza station. There were dozens of stalls selling ceramics, porcelain, kimonos, jackets, bluedyed fabrics, and so on. The orange tinted glass I bought was only 400 yen, less than three dollars in USD, and I could see it selling for tens times the amount at trendy stores in the USA and Canada. I’m still sour about going to the East Vancouver “Flea Market” to find they charge an admission fee and sell priced up secondhand and vintagestyled clothing.

I’ve read seven chapters so far. Here are some thoughts and some excerpts.

Describing Kenneth O’Keefe’s arrival in a coastal Irish village to visit his friend Sebastian Bullion Dangerfield at his home, who greets O’Keefe at the door:

O’Keefe the visitor takes in the scenery:

Delightfully written.

Later in the book, describing Dangerfield’s tiny new home:

I purposefully went into the book blind and I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that its writing style is quite experimental. Stream of consciousness, unquoted dialogue mashed in. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson for its style and subject matter. Lecherous, base protagonists hurtling through life incurring all manner of debts with no regard for consequence and no semblance of restraint. But in this one we catch more glimpses of the desperation and self-loathing that plauge rabid gluttons following their excesses and that trigger further indulgence. Here the aftermath of one of Dangerfield’s odious bursts of verbal abuse towards his wife regarding her family:

In the first sentence of the very next paragraph Dangerfield is no longer at his house but at the bar:

This is one of the objects of the author’s experimentation, time. Even on the lower gear of dialogue the speed is set high with snappy back-and-forth, each speaker on a new line, speech bare but the quotation marks. And when the author doesn’t want to dwell on certain scenes, he accelerates through them by compounding dialogue and action into dense morsels:

The author slows the pace the most when he puts us inside Dangerfield’s head amongst his thoughts. Him regarding his wife:

Like moments of contemplation imply pause. We linger with the protagonist’s thoughts.

It continues:

Soon and without warning the author teleports us into the next scene:

I see many similarities to Cormac McCarthy’s writing. Most obvious is dialogue, written without attribution, qualification, or descriptive supplement. Deft and witty, stripped of boilerplate and stilts. McCarthy took it a step further by dropping the quotation marks.

Another obvious similarity to McCarthy’s writing is the grammatically irreverant use of nonsentences. Declarative phrases stating what there is. Subject only. McCarthy’s use of these is ample yet perhaps more restrained and refined. Donleavy showers us with them. Another choice that quickens the pace of his writing.

A third and more subtle similitude is in the varying order that clauses appear between periods. Sentences structured shrewdly for effect and interest. For example, to withhold predominant details and reveal them at the end to simulate their discovery. From the first excerpt I shared:

Two structural inversions in one sentence but most important is the second. The green door’s position at the end of the sentence grants it importance, intrigue even. We anticipate crossing the threshold.

Donleavy’s sentence structures are most pleasing when they eliminate commas and let his words come into direct contact. Reproducing an excerpt I shared at the beginning:

It’s vivid in part because each detail blends into the next. Instead of being given parts one at a time, we experience the image fluidly as one. McCarthy uses this technique as well. In his magnum opus Blood Meridian he conjures striking images from masterfully engineered sentences. Here is the fourth sentence of the novel:

Sentences like these are carefully configured to eliminate cruft like “there are” and even suffixes like “–ing” that weaken verbs. McCarthy opts for a touch of ambiguity by placing “darker woods” first instead of putting it after “beyond that” and consequently doubling “that”:

He also rejects the “–ing” solution to the problem:

It is up to the writer and their sense of style to evaluate their options. But they have to know how to generate them in the first place.

A fourth technique that Donleavy and McCarthy (and Hemingway) employ is generous use of “and” to string together images. A snippet of an excerpt from The Ginger Man shared earlier:

Blood Meridian contains extreme examples. Here is a single sentence near the end of chapter thirteen:

That last bit is brilliant. Again:

This book seems to be mostly about abuse, often violent, inflicted by men against women. Its depictions are brief, detached, yet powerful. They speak from the victims’ perspectives in a tone that evokes quiet despair, adaptive dissociation, and steely resilience. Protagonists endure brutality and survive it at the cost of deep internal fragmentation. There seems to be no heartening message or moral of sort, just the observation that unchecked narcissism and cruelty abound in men of our world and that the victims however scarred and burdened they may be carry on as the version of themselves that remains alive.

I suppose all of the above serves in no way as a useful recommendation. But I should say that not all stories in this book deal with brutality and abuse, and even those that do have more things than shock and sorrow to offer. Foremost is Scanlan’s unique yet accessible prose, which she assiduously pruned, tuned, and polished into remarkable little language contraptions.

As described in the New Yorker:

Scanlan continued this practice in novel form with

, which came out two years later in 2022. For me, she is one of the most exciting prose writers working today.

Biking around East Vancouver, reading The Ginger Man, finding Z a new apartment, and trying to become a planner.

Biking is a great way to achieve my daily goal of exercising. Seattle is prohibitively hilly but Vancouver has a great network of bike routes allocated on streets with sparse car traffic. They have a detailed PDF file available online that maps their location and marks them with useful information like incline and degree of separation from car traffic. I came up with a great acronym to remember the street names of the main bike routes in the area: W.A.L.K.

I bought a copy last summer and finally started it last week. I can see why Cormac McCarthy liked it. It also reminds me a lot of Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas. After finishing the seventh chapter I sat down and wrote an

of it.

Z’s apartment in Vancouver is a spacious one bedroom with a generous balcony. It is recently renovated with tons of integrated storage but it lacks a crucial feature: a second bedroom. I spend a lot of time at Z’s place and when I do we often both work from home. We have comfortable workstations at opposite corners of the living room but the distance does little when one of us actively participates in a virtual meeting. Noisecancelling headphones help but they also encourage us to speak loudly. And even when we both work silently it’s too easy to call out across the room to ask a question, share a thought, or make a comment. Both of us have a habit of voicing things soon after they occur to us. It makes for interesting conversation and for a disruptive work environment.

We’ve been keeping an eye out and finally we found a good two bedroom apartment in a lively, artsy part of East Vancouver. It costs almost the same as Z’s current place and it offers great physical separation between the two bedrooms. We will be sad to leave Z’s current place and the neighborhood it’s in, but we’re excited for the new chapter.

I don’t mean a city planner. Although I do fantasize about getting involved with municipal politics someday.

I mean I am trying to get better at making and adhering to plans in general. I get a lot of stuff done in my life through what I call

, which have proved effective but lack certain special powers particular to planning. I’ve been ruminating on it and noticing when people make reference to it in their way of working.

Kiefer mentioned in his Approachable Music podcast that he keeps a to-do list and everyday he attends to one item at a time. I assume many people follow this approach. But I don’t. I keep to-do lists but my adherance to them is erratic. I suppose part of the problem is that many items have no inherent deadline and even those that do don’t threaten much consequence. If I for example neglect to plan an itinerary for a trip, I can still show up and improvise as long as my flights and hotel are booked. And that’s what I did in 2019 when I went on my multimonth trip abroad to Mexico, New York, and Europe. I enjoyed the fruits of spontaneity and just-in-time internet searches, but without a doubt I missed out on experiences that research and forethought would’ve produced. I want to reduce these kinds of losses by procrastinating less and planning more often. I want to change my habit. So I’m trying to consciously draw my attention to the benefits of planning and override the anxious avoidance that thwarts my planning impulses.

Jared Henderson, a former professor who is now a literary YouTuber, mentioned that he keeps a list of books he will read. I don’t. I keep track of books that I might want to read by saving them on Goodreads, but I never reference that list when deciding which book to read next. My methods are spontaneous and informally organized. I try out audiobooks on Spotify and Libby and continue only if they stick. I buy books impulsively and add them to my growing library of unreads. When I am ready to start a new book I eye my collection shiftily and grab the candidates my whims command me to and then I bring them to a comfortable seat in my apartment where I select one uneasily and crack it open. Then I read stingily, hesitant to imply by reading more than a couple paragraphs that I’ve now committed to My Next Book, that this is it, I must read this book through now or else I will have

.

I’m trying something new. I’m writing a list of books I intend to read this year. In a way, my dabbling with planning in this way is a sort of coherent impulse. The coherence comes from the deliberate intention to exploit the benefits of forethought and the impulse is the list of fifteen or so books I slashed out based on my current interest and appetite as well as the current contents of my shelves. The list is unordered so I may choose to read them in any order I like and read multiple at the same time if I so wish. I will still entertain my penchant for sampling books impulsively via Spotify and Libby, but my main reading project this year will be dictated by my list.

Keep biking. Continue striving to do every day each of the following: work, read, exercise, write, enjoy, grow, discuss, plan, and socialize

Finalize Z’s moving plans.

Go snowboarding with Z multiple times.

Read the rest of The Ginger Man to keep up a good reading pace for the year. After I finish it I will start Malone Dies unless it doesn’t

, in which case I will pick up one of the other books on my list for 2025.

The premise and the set are both interesting, but for so long I’m just waiting for something to happen. I want to feel like a mystery is unfolding before me, that the answer to each of my questions raises another even more fervently in need of addressing. But instead I feel like the writers are withholding information, stalling for time. My intrigue wanes into restlessness.

The pace jolts into high gear at the end of season one, when the writers finally show their cards. All this time they have been sitting on highgrade, plotpromising bombshells. And as the season finale approaches, it’s finally time to drop them. Yes, what a thrill. But I don’t feel so much shocked and swayed as I do manipulated. Is this any way to tell a story? Create a sudden climax and end it right there, with not even the beginnings of resolution? Why didn’t the writers introduce the same ideas earlier in the season and develop them throughout? We all know the answer already. In the end, Severance is more asset than art. It is, above all, a strategic allocation for growing Apple’s share of the streaming market. And how do you keep people watching? You end on a cliffhanger.

As a viewer, I feel my interest being managed and manipulated rather than being cultivated. I don’t feel like a thrilling story is being recounted for my entertainment, I feel like I’m being sold a product. Please keep watching, we promise something interesting is coming soon. I’m sure there are people involved in making Severance that want to make genuinely good TV but the overall effort seems to me more like hedging than striving. It’s ironic when you consider that Lumon’s closest analogue in the real world might in fact be Apple. There is the cultlike adulation of a heroic founder, the snaking corporate campus enshrouded in dark glass, the obnoxious secrecy, and so on, but the most meaningful similarity is the basic one. They are gigantic tech corporations held aloft by myths of technotopian supremacy and driven by an everincreasing hunger for growth and expansion. (Also, Lumon sounds like Lemon.)

The basics of telling a good story is like playing chess. You can’t rely on sneak attacks or smuggled secrets. The pieces and the tensions between them are all in plain view, brought into position one step a time. The tensions build until there comes a natural point when the deadlock breaks and the inevitable drama ensues. Consequences ripple and trigger further action. There is no need to contrive plot. It flows out of confrontation between agents in the story. If nothing happens its because the people moving the pieces don’t know what they are doing. Or they’re holding back.

The writers of Severance might well know how to write a good story. But I think the problem is that the real chess is being played by Apple, who is mobilizing their pieces – Severance, Ted Lasso, and so on – to corner a share of the market. Their ultimate goal is not to make compelling television, but to compel us to keep watching.

I am twenty percent into the book and so far I’ve found the writing style relatively plain but nice to read. It’s built on fundamental physical imagery like “sharp winds” and warm floors and listed descriptions of each person’s appearance. The story spans generations but the pace of each scene is slow and patient. It gives me feelings similar to those I get reading Steinbeck’s and Wendell Berry’s fiction.

Those who distrust self-help books and who might snort and roll their eyes at this book merely for its subtitle – Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts – might be surprised at the sobriety of Burkeman’s advice. In this book, Burkeman picks up where he left off in his previous one – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – by revisting the grim fact that a lifetime is a prohibitively brief window of time to achieve even a fraction of the things we propose to do. Burkeman’s mention of mortality in the naming of his books is not an empty gesture or a marketing gambit. His writings on the topic of time-management and day-to-day living take death out of the subtext and put it where it belongs, in the text itself.

This book offers a series of cleverly angled perspectives that transform problems by considering them differently. Each chapter begins with a quote and Chapter Three begins with a brilliant one from Sheldon Bernard Kopp:

This is not a fantasy of omnipotence, but an energizing reminder of the control you do have. Reframing my role in this way – from unwilling object to autonomous subject – freed me from the futile and exhausting cycle of resent towards my circumstances and refocused my attention on what I was doing about them. As Burkeman phrases it:

In short, there are two options. Do nothing and accept the consequences, or do what you can to get the result you want. Idle rage makes no sense. If the consequences are unacceptable then do something about them. If they are acceptable, accept them and move on. This directive prompts another liberating insight:

This also helped me enormously. It simplified my conundrum by helping me realize that my primary task was to eliminate risk of actual harm befalling me and reducing the likelihood of costly consequences. That done, as long as I can fiscally, emotionally, and physically afford the potential consequences, there is no reason to worry like I am in danger.