Sometimes, audio is the superior medium. It’s easy to forget this because audio is often just a supplement or alternative to video. The audio show Random Tape is a good reminder. It’s a collection of audio recordings that don’t have much to do with each other than having all fallen into the hands of man named David Weinberg. I cherish it as a testament to the power of pure audio as a medium.

Recently during my routine cleaning of Google storage forced by their 15GB max and my determination to stay in the free tier, I came across a video that was all black. It was 1 minute and 34 seconds long and had retained its place in my Google Photos purely due to its audio. I had recorded it purposefully with my phone in my pocket during a recent Christmas trip I took with my mom and younger sister to Puerto Vallarta. In it you can hear only our voices and the sound of the beach. So I lifted the audio and scrapped the video, reducing the file’s size 100 times. Here it is:

Inspired, I tried the same for a video I took that same trip of a live band at River Cafe, where we had dinner. It was blurry, a bit shaky, and not much to look at. I figured keeping just the audio would be a good compromise. Footage of the band lost, but their music conserved and in a much smaller file. But then I listened to it and realized that I liked it better as pure sound. It wasn’t a compromise, it was an improvement.

Admittedly, part of my satisfaction was in finding an efficient way to conserve the memory without paying for cloud storage. But I think the audio version is better because it omits sensory details – visual, in this case – that would’ve otherwise made the moment seem more ordinary. By making it difficult to know exactly what is going on in the scene, by slightly disorienting the listener, and by forcing them to sharpen their focus on the limited source of sensory information, the audio version heightens the feeling of being transported to a particular place and time. Feeling around to get a grip on what’s going on, you find yourself pulled in.

A writer creates meaning in collaboration with the reader by manipulating their attention. They curate bits of experience and bring them into sensory focus for the reader to notice and experience. The literary writer’s job isn’t to explain experience, but to

and thereby provoke the reader to reckon from it their own understanding.

Making art is in part an act of calibration. Creating

depends on the omission of details just like it does on their inclusion. A good writer, a good storyteller, a good filmmaker, good artists of all kinds withhold things from us so that we lean in closer, listen more carefully, read between the lines. An artist’s greatest resource is not words, images, sound, or any of the elements of their craft. Their greatest resource is the human body, the magnificent biochemical machine wherein all experience real or artifical takes place. Artists use their own to intuit what stimulus and how much of it will evoke something in their audience’s brains and bodies. Insufficent information renders a blurry image, but so does excess. Clarity lies in between.

I started buying houseplants about four years ago. No research went into it, I just picked two that I liked from the grocery store and brought them home. This proved fatal for one of them. I think I overwatered it. Or maybe it got infested by malevolent insects. I don’t know. I didn’t try very hard to save it. I wanted my apartment to have that leafy, green look but I didn’t want to sink time and effort into making it happen. I wanted the reward, but not the work.

Apart from that early casualty, however, my approach of low involvement has worked pretty well. The other plant – a lemon-lime dracaena – has lived and thrived in the years since I brought it home. Multiple times I’ve repotted it and today it stands at two or three times its original height. I’m proud of it, somewhat. Several of its leaves are at their edges browned with decay due to some reason I’ve neglected to investigate. Nonetheless, it lives on.

Every now and then I get the motivation to watch YouTube videos to learn how to perform certain tasks of plant care. The people who make these videos tend to chat at the camera for a while, stroking and poking their plants as they slowly approach the subject at hand. I watch these videos impatiently, jumping forward with irritation until I find the bits of information I need. I want to get the task done as quickly as possible. Plant care for me is more chore than hobby.

It’s a funny thing to find yourself resenting chores you created for yourself. Nobody and no thing require that I have plants in my home and yet I have several. Five in the bedroom, one in the living room, three in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, and seven in the office. Many of these are second or third generation houseplants that I planted from snippings I trimmed and propagated in water.

I stopped buying plants a while ago and yet I keep accumulating more of them. The list above is almost twenty in number without including my biggest and oldest plants, which are back in my apartment in Seattle, 238km away. Over there I have my lemon-lime dracaena, a sizeable monstera, a growing ficus, a tentacled pothos, and several other smaller plants. The better job I do at caring for my plants, the longer they live, the bigger they get, and the greater my responsibilities become.

Watering plants is a surprisingly effortful task, especially when you water them all on the same day. For some, I stand on tiptoes and extend my arm rigidly overhead to let a stream of water arc into the pot. For others, I do a mini deadlift and lug their fragile figures to the tub. Any spills I mop up on my hands and knees. A long way from lounging on the couch and enjoying my living room. Sometimes, I feel that the work their upkeep demands has surpassed the pleasure they give me.

For a long time I accumulated plants and grew them with the aim of making my living room lush with green leaves. Eventually, I realized the vision. And I loved it. But, as is often the case, the happily ever after is a lot more tedious than its still image suggests.

I am living a strange life. It isn’t one I dreamed up for myself, but one that has developed bit by bit over the years from my circumstances and how I’ve chosen to adapt to them. Enviously I’ve held onto everything in my grasp and years later I find myself sprawled across two countries, in two apartments, both full of houseplants. This abundance has enriched my life and encumbered it as well. Perhaps it’s time to lighten the burdens I’ve put upon myself.

In his video essay Why The Movies Will Never Feel the Same Again, Thomas Flight shared an idea that should’ve occurred to me already. The idea of Media Ecology, which looks at the physical, cultural, and psychological environments wherein we consume media. Already for the better part of a year I have been thinking about

, an idea I found ingenious for taking Ecology out of its native context and applying it to the psychological phenomenon of Attention, and yet it had not ccurred to me to reproduce that same trick with something else.

Through the lens of Media Ecology, Thomas Flight analyzes how the circumstances of moviewatching dictate what it means to watch a movie. Once, watching a movie meant commuting to a certain place at a specific time to see something that you were likely never to see again. It was an occasion and often a communal experience among friends, loved ones, neighbors, and other locals. Today, a movie can be something insignificant and something entirely private. It can be nothing more than a stimulus for alleviating restlessness as one does house chores or waits for sleep to come. A movie is no longer just a public event. It can be like a flavor of digital chewing gum, a substance waiting in our pocket for a moment of boredom. The default mode of watching movies has changed and going to the cinema is now an unusual one. Consequently, movies today play a different role in our lives.

This is true of music as well. In the past, it may have seemed inconceivable to divorce music from its social aspect, but now the primary way to consume it – at least in my “Western” reality – is in personal privacy. We put devices in our ears that acoustically shut out the world beyond our heads and pipe into our consciousness a private sountrack. Books function in a similar way. They are technologies that encode into symbols for the solitary consumption of readers ideas, stories, and facts that might be otherwise shared in social spaces through means like conversation and lecture. These mediums are layers of communication that open a gulf between people and fill it with alternative, virtual experiences. With one hand media brings us together and with the other it sets us apart. As a supplement, media is a tremendously enriching substance, but problems arise when it becomes our primary means for connecting to the world.

Technology is not evil. But it gives us power, and power corrupts. Who can blame a human that, when anxious feelings spring as they do so readily in the kind of lives we live, reaches for the anesthetic device always at their disposal? We need barely lift a finger and our mind is cast out beyond the preoccupations in our head and into a virtual source of stimulation tailored to our taste. Mindless escape is a bad habit and it is a common one because technology gives us the power to indulge it so easily.

Chastening and berating ourselves to resist stimulation that is so easily accessible is a poor strategy for countering the negative effects of digital technology. A much more efficient and productive one is ecological, one that looks to the nature of the organisms and to the nature of their environment. What we need to preserve the magic of moviewatching and more generally to neutralize the ills of unadulterated access to infinite digital streams is to reintroduce limits that were removed not for our benefit but in service of the profit motive. We must contrive restraints to create new default behaviors. Put simply, we can change our behavior by changing what we interact with.

The possible tactics are many. Leave your phone in a different room, somewhere out of sight and reach. Use a purpose-built alarm clock instead of the equivalent feature your phone offers. Delete problematic apps from your phone. Configure it to render in black and white. Exchange it for a flip phone or for a “dumb phone.” The methods I find the most satisfying are cheap and simple. Market solutions for problems created by the market feel the worst. And they’re unnecessary, anyway. The most relevant technology for shaping our reality is the one in our head. Sometimes, changing our environment and therefore our behavior is as simple as introducing a paperthin layer of mediation between ourselves and the technology we use.

Many times I’ve sat down to watch a movie with friends and we found ourselves browsing torpidly through a streaming library so vast that no single movie seemed to have much luster. To neutralize this unpleasant effect, I might employ a tactic I’ve used successfully this year for books. I prepared a short list of books to read throughout the year. Each time I finished one I checked it off my list and each time I wanted to begin a new one I perused the remaining options. With satisfaction I watched the checkmarks accumulate one by one and each time felt rekindled my motivation to continue progressing. I felt the value of each book on the list because it was one of a handful and I spent very little time feeling like I was missing out because I had mentally eliminated an endless library of options. If I was reading one book, I was only ignoring a few others and I would get to those soon enough anyhow.

It’s startling how powerful a contrived rule can be. It seems silly that the human mind could be duped so easily, but then again it is a testament to its power that it can take an idea and construct from it a reality. I suppose it is precisely our adaptibility to virtual domains that gets us into trouble in the first place.

I’ve been reading Tinkers by Paul Harding because I enjoyed listening to him speak about his writing process, but his writing style has somewhat disappointed me.

One of the many vignettes in his book begins with this modest sentence:

This is a good sentence and, in a sense, a perfect sentence. It has no flaws. It does its job and nothing else. It states two facts in plain terms and allows all meaning to arise from their juxtaposition, the irony of personal grooming at the edge of personal oblivion.

We learn that, for all his adult life, George kept a daily habit of shaving to stave off his beard of mangy patches. (Supposedly, only a day’s stubble lent him the look of an invalid or a large child incapable of taking care of his own needs.) But in his dotage and ill health, George’s shaving routine has faltered. So he asks his family if they might shave him, and one of his adult grandchildren, Sam, volunteers.

Harding gives details like the bowl of scalding water and the cheap disposable plastic razor that are relevant and meaningful because they foreshadow Sam’s carelessness and invoke us readers to sympathize with George. But Harding also includes details that seem irrelevant and consequently dilute and distract from the meaningful ones. He mentions that the razor was found by the grandmother in a basket beneath the bathroom sink that was filled with various disused, soap-crusted toiletry. I think soap-crusted is the most excessive detail here, but I think the entire phrase could have been removed. Harding is giving us too much. Only to a certain extent do vivid descriptions make things more vivid to the reader. At some point, they stop deepening the feeling of immersion in a fictional world and start drawing attention instead to the author and his stylishness as a writer.

We readers have already a reservoir of vivid images we draw from when reading fiction. It is enough to say that the grandmother found a razor in her own house. That alone can conjure an image of a bathroom cupboard full of nonessential toiletry. And even if it does not, it conveys the relevant facts. Firstly, that George’s usual shaving equipment will not be used. And secondly, that for some bothersome reason George’s wife does not know where that equipment is or has neglected to find it. These subtle, meaningful implications are more salient to readers when the author does not distract them with other, irrelevant information.

Fiction is a collaboration between author and audience. Readers experience the same work differently, sometimes drastically so. The same reader returning a work encounters it with new eyes. To write with restraint is to withhold one’s creative surplus to make space for the reader’s reflections and ruminations. Every word, every detail the author provides is an invitation to the reader to consider something and therefore also a dismissal of their considerations. Detail and specificity become eventual enemies of depth and expanse.

A few sentences later in Tinkers comes another example of overwriting:

The word excavated is a needlessly stylish alternative to the typical and sufficient “dug up.” Even a simple “taken” would’ve served. More indulgent than excavated is guts, which is an empty metaphor for “inside.” It suggests a deeper meaning that is not there. In indulgent moments like these, the quality of the novel degrades from vivid to lurid. (In context of the whole book, this particular choice of guts suffers further from the fact that Harding had already used it metaphorically twice when referring to the internals of clocks and goes on to use it in such a way another three times. It’s an evocative description but Harding washes it out with overuse.)

It’s not a sin to flex your muscles as a writer if you do so by building something compelling. But I think Harding succumbs to the temptation of making pointless flourishes and embellisments all too often, especially for a novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.