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The over-examined life?

Can Bullet Journaling Save You?

Bullet journaling has taken off as a kind of mindfulness-meets-productivity trend that equates organized journaling with an ordered interior life.

Devotees of the Bullet Journal, a cultish notebook-organization system tagged in more than eight million posts on Instagram, will tell you that there are two kinds of notebook people: those who keep multiple notebooks and those who keep just one. Most of us are multiple-notebook people, living our lives haphazardly, writing things down as we go: a notebook for the office, another for groceries and appointments, one for dreams and doodles, one for furtive rants. The multiple-notebook person maintains a wall calendar, a desk calendar, and two calendar apps. She has scribbled a list of movies to watch on a sticky note that she will never find again. She has an app full of cryptic asides (“Rice bowls,” “Bat room”). She has no idea where her bank details are. The multiple-notebook person lives in a kind of organizational purgatory. Her intentions are good, her approach delinquent.

Ryder Carroll, the thirty-nine-year-old digital designer who invented the Bullet Journal, used to be a multiple-notebook person. Born in Vienna to American teachers, he was a squirmy, distracted child, constantly behind and anxious in school. As a teen-ager, he was given a diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder, and he began to develop small journaling tricks to get through his classes; in college, at Skidmore, he carried around six notebooks to keep track of everything. He also scrapbooked and made collages. He started writing down his thoughts in short bursts throughout the day and found that it calmed him, allowing him to see past his anxieties to their root causes. “When there’s a barking dog outside, you can’t hear anything else,” he told me recently, by way of analogy. “But when you go to the window you realize there might be something wrong, you think about it, you get the context. It’s barking at something. You actually get up and look. And, for me, writing is that process.”

In the years after college, Carroll took night courses in Web design and worked for media companies, mostly in New York. “That’s when the Bullet Journal really started coming together,” he said. He slimmed down and organized his books. He noticed that many of his co-workers kept journals, too, though they did so irregularly. “I was, like, well, I use my notebook in a pretty unique way,” he said. One week, in 2013, he built a Web site and shot a video explaining his method. He hoped, he said, to “mitigate a lot of the heartache I had to go through to figure this out on my own.”

The result was a set of organizational instructions: Marie Kondo for the notebook. Basically, you take a journal, number the pages, and create an index so you can find everything. From there, you can list tasks, write diary entries, and build out a minimalist calendar. Like CrossFit, Paleo, and other hyper-efficient communities, Bullet Journaling—or BuJo, as it is known online—has developed its own vocabulary. Participants identify as Bullet Journalists. There’s a daily log, a monthly log, and something called a future log. There are symbols for notes, events, and tasks, and additional symbols to indicate when a task has been completed, scheduled, moved to another section, or deemed irrelevant. (The method takes its name from the bullet point, as well as the word’s suggestion of speed.) There are collections of related material, like languages you’ve failed to learn or miles you haven’t run. There are trackers for anything you feel compelled to track: sleep, workouts, mood, alcohol. Each day, you practice “rapid logging.” Each month, you review everything you wrote down and move only what is meaningful to the next monthly spread, in a spine-straightening process called migration.

Carroll’s video was picked up by productivity blogs and soon went viral. A few years later, Bullet Journaling has grown into a global community, with subsets of every variation: BuJo for students, BuJo for mothers, BuJo for veterans, #menwhobullet. It has taken off on the Internet as a kind of mindfulness-meets-productivity trend that equates organized journaling with an ordered interior life. It promises to help you achieve your goals and declutter your mind. Carroll released a book, last October, called “The Bullet Journal Method,” which is now a best-seller. He no longer uses multiple notebooks (and he no longer needs other jobs). “It’s helpful to have one source of truth,” he said. “That’s what the Bullet Journal is for me.”

One hot day in July, I met Carroll at the Morgan Library & Museum, in Manhattan. He had been on book tour on and off since October, first in the U.S., then in Europe, and finally in Asia. I arrived slightly late, out of breath and frazzled in the heat, to find him sitting in the museum’s entryway calmly reading a novel. He was wearing a black dress shirt buttoned all the way up and square tortoiseshell glasses. When I approached, he carefully marked his page with a bookmark and placed his book inside a nearly empty leather satchel. How had his morning been? He considered the question. It had been good, he said. He had been practicing some self-care.

He had come to see an exhibition on Walt Whitman. Inside, we found edits for the poem “Mannahatta” that Whitman had scribbled on a piece of paper. “There’s something about handwriting that just allows you to glimpse a whole different aspect of a person,” Carroll remarked.He said that in his own notebook he switches among four or five different handwriting scripts, depending on his mood (block letters for information, cursive for emotions). At a copy of “The Odyssey of Homer,” from 1863, Carroll examined Whitman’s loose signature. “The curls in his letters are very open,” he said.

Whitman was a multiple-notebook person, an exuberant and haphazard note-taker. “He would write on forms—legal forms, tax forms,” Sal Robinson, a curator of the show at the Morgan, told me later. As a clerk, and then a newspaper editor, “he was sort of awash in paper,” Robinson said. “There are these photos of him just sitting in his chair, and there’s paper all the way up to his knees.” In the second section of the exhibit, Carroll and I found a small journal below a wall text reading “This humble notebook contains a crucial clue to Whitman’s development.” On the pages were several trial lines for “Leaves of Grass,” in which Whitman experimented with using the ‘I’ that characterizes much of the poem. “That’s one thing that’s so cool about seeing old notebooks,” Carroll said, looking awed. “It’s like the origin of thought. That’s when it happened, that’s the moment when that began to exist in the world.”

If Whitman was drowning in paper, Bullet Journalists are more likely to lose themselves in a sea of posts on Instagram, where BuJo has blossomed. As with many social-media trends, there’s a performative aspect to Bullet Journaling. You get the sense, in some of the more beautiful posts, that it took more time to make the to-do list than it would have to complete the to-dos. A page designed for a vacation packing list might include a hand-drawn map. A page listing tasks for a backyard renovation might have a tiny pocket of seeds. But, in the BuJo community, authenticity is prized. Nicole Barlettano, a graphic designer and illustrator in New Jersey, runs a BuJo Instagram account called @plansthatblossom with a hundred thousand followers, on which she hosts a doodle contest and tracks her habits in decorative spreads. “I don’t try to sugarcoat anything,” she told me. “If I didn’t floss all week, I’m not going to hide that.” BuJo post are often photos of diary entries, which lends them a strange intimacy. One user’s skin-care tracker notes, “Struggling with acne breakouts, but was able to get it under control. Not eating dairy = helpful!” A page with a background of vintage ticket stubs describes an allergic reaction to shrimp. NYker

"Dear Sugar"

"Dear Sugar" - aka Cheryl Strayed - sets straight a woman who wonders if her infant daughter's recovery from brain surgery somehow vindicates belief in God.

James and Kipling

“Thank you for your letter, which will run in the September 1 issue of the Book Review.” Thank you for letting me set the record straight about William James & Rudyard Kipling, @nytimesbooks

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 23, 2019

Taking Another Look at the Author of ‘The White Man’s Burden’




By Stacy Schiff
July 7, 2019

IF
The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years
By Christopher Benfey

White men’s burdens are not much in vogue these days; it would be difficult to think of a writer as firmly out of fashion as Rudyard Kipling. The very name seems to waft our way on a plume of cigar smoke. It was an oddity even in Kipling’s time. “Is it a man or a woman?” an early publisher asked, on first hearing it. (Kipling’s parents had fallen in love in Staffordshire, at a picnic on Lake Rudyard. One wonders about their second child, known as Trix.) All the same Kipling endures. In 1942, George Orwell conceded that 50 years of critical derision had hardly taken a toll on Kipling, still intact, by no means only like the “taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life.”

Christopher Benfey, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke, sets out to return Kipling not to the right side of history but to this side of the Atlantic. Like Hemingway’s in Havana or Joyce’s in Zurich, Kipling’s American years make for a fertile foreign chapter. They yielded the bulk of his most popular work. Benfey eloquently argues not only that Kipling’s engagement with the United States made him the writer he became, but that he lavishly returned the favor.

As a child, Kipling fell under the spells of Emerson and Bret Harte; he soon discovered Whitman, Longfellow and Twain. It was in large part to pay homage to the last that he first ventured to America, in 1889. The mission was not so simple; “the landing of a 12-pound salmon was nothing to it,” he wrote afterward. The 23-year-old reporter from an unknown Indian newspaper nonetheless managed a triumph, securing a two-hour, two-cigar interview with the esteemed author. In a lovely bookend, the writers would reunite 18 years later when, in scarlet gowns and mortarboards, wilting through a slow-motion conferral of honorary degrees, they ducked out of an Oxford theater for a smoke.

Kipling’s star by that time burned more brightly than Twain’s, based on what he had produced over the decade following the Elmira, N.Y., cigars. The American borrowings began early: a line of Longfellow here, a whole story of Harte there. To them, Kipling added another essential ingredient: In London in 1891 he met and courted a young American. The two married quickly, in what Henry James, who gave away the bride, described as “a dreary little wedding.”

Before heading off on an around-the-world honeymoon the couple impulsively purchased 10 acres of land in Brattleboro, Vt., where Carrie Kipling’s family had settled generations before. They had in mind an eventual vacation home. Months into the epic wedding journey, a bank failure swallowed the couple’s savings. Flat broke, expecting a child, they retreated to Vermont, where work began immediately on what we know today as “The Jungle Book” and the first of the “Just So Stories.” In the dream house the couple built in Brattleboro, Kipling wrote “Captains Courageous” and an early draft of “Kim.” He who had once made starry-eyed pilgrimages now received them. Owen Wister turned up, as did Frank Doubleday, as did Arthur Conan Doyle, with a set of golf clubs, to the consternation of the locals.

If you are wondering how Kipling went from flat broke to building his dream house seven pages later, the answer is literary success, a matter on which Kipling lingers longer than Benfey. He had managed a meteoric rise, one without rival since Dickens. With fame arrived her more seductive cousin, privilege. As many as 200 letters landed daily in Kipling’s mailbox. To avoid the long trip into town, he petitioned for and was granted a personal post office. With the young Theodore Roosevelt, Kipling visited the National Zoo, his favorite Washington address. He spent days with the beavers, admiring their “colonial world in miniature.” (Kipling was at work on “The Jungle Book” at the time.) It struck him that celebrity “was beginning to be worth something” when the zookeepers fitted feeding times around his schedule.

Kipling argued with Roosevelt about the plight of the American Indians; he could not square their fate with the city on the hill. Nor could he see why a country that had eliminated the original Americans was repopulating itself with riffraff. He never lost sight of the brutality, the ruthlessness of American life, which found its way into “The Jungle Book.” (With its congenial wolves as exemplary parents, the volume became a favorite of Freud’s.) Benfey nimbly analyzes the cross-pollinations: Mowgli’s ideal family may have been inspired by Emerson. “Self-Reliance” is recast in “If,” the poem Kipling was to say escaped its bindings “and for a while ran about the world.” It too had an American accent, originally having been attached to a story about George Washington. Kipling shaped the thought of William James, with whom he worked out the themes of “Captains Courageous.”

Kipling never wrote the Great American Novel, as he promised he would. Arguably he delivered something better. With “Kim” Benfey suggests he invented a genre; out of his overcoat tumble Ian Fleming and John le Carré. It is an unexpected literary genealogy, though perhaps one might well have guessed that Smiley descended from a transparent eyeball. “Kim” would become mandatory reading for C.I.A. operatives in the 1960s. Benfey has the Vietnam War fought “according to Kipling rules.” Another of his works lodged at a different altitude in the American firmament. To “The Jungle Book” we owe both “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Tarzan.” He made peace, of a sort, with Edgar Rice Burroughs: “He was reported,” Kipling noted, “to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and ‘get away with,’ which is a legitimate ambition.”

To extract the American years from Kipling’s life is no easy feat. He might one minute be driving his carriage to Brattleboro, smoking opium in Lahore the next. There is a reason he specialized in characters torn between worlds. It is not Benfey’s fault that Kipling flies about in reckless disregard of his subtitle, but it does at times make for something of a disjointed narrative. One gets the sense of a subject straining at his leash, unhappily confined, stubbornly untamed.

Meanwhile the mysteries accumulate. We get little sense of Kipling’s actual presence; why did he strike Henry James as “the most complete man of genius” James had known? Not for my life could I speak to the Kipling marriage. Out of the blue comes a violent confrontation with Carrie Kipling’s feckless brother, a collision that sends both men to their lawyers. A trial ensued, depressing Kipling, the less popular character in the courtroom, where he appeared a “priggish killjoy.” Benfey has him leaving abruptly for England as a second hearing approached. The family would return for a brief visit in the wake of the Spanish-American War, when Kipling urged Roosevelt to make the Philippines an American colony — here came “The White Man’s Burden,” with which he pressed his case — and when the couple lost their 8-year-old daughter. “I don’t think it likely that I shall ever come back to America,” Kipling wrote that July, 1899, and he did not.

From Canada eight years later he would marvel that “safety, law, honor and obedience” reigned on one side of the border, “frank, brutal decivilization” on the other. He remained always the man who dressed for dinner in Vermont, as if to keep the howling wilderness at bay. It was not lost on him that the locals believed he had profited from America without demonstrating sufficient gratitude to the country. Benfey reminds us of our debt to a category-demolishing, globe-striding man who indeed contained multitudes, the author of an immortal ode to equanimity who fled America because of a sordid brawl with his brother-in-law.
==
Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal and Hysteria in 1692.”

Zinn on socialism

It's the birthday of Howard Zinn, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1922). He's the author of A People's History of the United States (1980). It has sold more than a million copies and continues to sell about 100,000 copies each year.

Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including the memoir You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994). Last year, he said: "I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism."

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2010%252F08%252F24.html

Vrroom!

How an E-Bike Changed My Life
Riding grew harder as I grew older. Then I got an electric bicycle.
By Jennifer Finney Boylan

...Although they’ve been around since the 1990s, until recently e-bikes were sold mostly in China and in Europe. But now sales are through the roof; in 2017 over a quarter-million of them were sold in this country, a 25 percent jump from the year before.

The principle is fairly simple: You plug the bike in at night, and it charges a battery that provides an extra level of support as you ride. You still have to pedal, but the battery silently doubles the amount of power provided by your muscles to the wheels.

For older riders like me — I’m in my 60s — the assist makes all the difference in the world. I’ve been riding all my life, and while I’ve never been a competitive cyclist, biking has always been my favorite form of exercise. In part it’s because I like the solitude of riding, especially on the remote trails where I take my mountain bike. I’ve encountered moose and deer and bald eagles during my rides in the Kennebec Highlands Reserved Land, eaten my lunch by a rushing stream, explored blueberry barrens high atop Vienna Mountain in Kennebec County... nyt

Richard Ford

Tuned in to BookTV this morning, as I often do on the weekend, just in time to catch the unveiling of Richard Ford's Mississippi Writers Trail marker. Video

Here's what he said about that in the Times last year.

...In the mid-1980s, the novelist, a former sportswriter, lived in Clarksdale, a small town in the Mississippi Delta 150 miles from Jackson. There, he spent days at the Carnegie Public Library writing “The Sportswriter,” his 1986 novel about a failed fiction writer turned sportswriter whose son dies. (He followed it up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Independence Day” in 1995.) In the end, Mr. Ford wanted his marker at the library in Clarksdale, not his childhood home.

“The Delta is where I chose to live,” Mr. Ford said. “Carnegie Library is a refuge. They offered me a haven. I want to be remembered in a place where people could go read books. Literature can be a way for society to address what it doesn’t want to address.”

One of those issues is systemic racism, which persists in America despite the gains made in the 1960s. Mr. Ford, who now lives in Maine, said he recently taught a class in which students had neither read nor heard of “Black Boy,” Mr. Wright’s seminal work that painted a grim picture of race relations when it was published in 1945.

“I have no right to be surprised,” Mr. Ford said. “But that is a book people need to read so that historical anomalies will not be allowed to persist.” nyt

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Miss., and lived in the same neighborhood as Eudora Welty. “It’s like sacred ground for Mississippi literature,” said Malcolm White, executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission.

Frida Kahlo

Saw the Kahlo-Rivera exhibition at the Frist yesterday. Delightful!

 

“What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.”

“Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”

“I hope the exit is joyful and i hope never to return.”

“I paint flowers so they will not die.”

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”

Saw this at the Frist this afternoon. There IS art all around us. John Dewey would be pleased. https://t.co/FkaJ1MuMPJ

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 17, 2019