i’ve been watching a few marvel movies with the director’s commentary– if you have disney+ it’s in the “extras” section. not all the movies have them, the earliest ones don’t– but i’ve watched infinity war’s, endgame’s, black panther’s and i’m halfway through wakanda forever’s. it’s pretty illuminating. i find that all of them make me appreciate the movies more. and i’m thinking about my own assumptions with regards to work and commentary on the work. i often find myself wanting to include the commentary on the work in the work itself. sometimes this is doable through some clever tricks, like you might have a side-character be a stand-in for the author, who’s experiencing his own creative struggle maybe. but oftentimes it feels overwrought, and there’s a case to be made that the work itself should be its own commentary, and it should not explain itself. but i do personally love work more once i witness it explained. and it doesn’t necessarily need to be the director or the author of the work themselves. sometimes I love a work more after seeing it through someone else’s eyes. i like to think that i have performed this role for some people by excitedly talking about the work that i’ve enjoyed.
i also think this is part of how scenes flourish. getrude stein raving about picasso. vasari raving about da vinci. appreciation has to be taught. it can sometimes come across as tacky or ‘self-aggrandizing” if the author is celebrating their own work. but that’s kind of unfortunate, because… if the author doesn’t love their work, why are they doing it? i’m reminded now of a recent interview with anne hathaway where she’s asked to rewatch scenes from movies she’s done, and she goes on a little segue about an outfit in the devil wears prada, before apologizing for getting carried away. like, that’s the whole point of the interview! thinking about this makes me once again feel strongly that there is so much opportunity to make culture better. we are so clunky and ham-fisted in the way we deal with problems of narcissism, selfishness, etc. we use such blunt tools and mostly end up hurting good people. the narcissistic sociopaths are hardly deterred by shaming tactics, they often even enjoy it.
from the time i started this wordvomit project, part of the point was to examine it and revisit it and reexamine it. initially i started out trying to do summaries every 10 wordvomits or so, but that started to feel cumbersome and i gave up on that. i have a “reading project” on my roam where I appear to have read about somewhere between 300-400 wordvomits. writing a million words is a big project, deciding to then read those million words is another big project. i’ve had to teach myself some forms of indexing and partitioning just to progress without losing myself. now i’m reminded of when i was watching some timelapse videos of people doing jigsaw puzzles. they have all these interesting little tricks and tactics to make their lives easier, little sorting algorithms of sorts. obviously you do the corners and sides first if you can, and any obvious/distinct parts. but what about when you get to say, a large patch of sky or sea, where all the pieces are very similar? one thing i’ve noticed people do is they lay out all the pieces and sort by the type of piece. the most common jigsaw piece has two “ins” and two “outs”. but you can also have pieces with 3 ins and 1 out, or 3 outs and 1 in, or 4 ins, or 4 outs. Oh, and some pieces have 2 ins and outs but they’re side by side rather than opposite each other. Anyway these pieces are rarer, and sometimes if you can tell from context that the piece is NOT a regular piece, it’s much easier to find the match if you have the all the rarer pieces laid out. Also I’ve seen people use pieces of cardboard as a “staging area” for some pieces.
These all strike me as little tricks for partitioning up otherwise difficult-to-manage volumes of pieces. This is also for example why some books have indexes at the end, which function as a primitive sort of search tool. Think also about how libraries of books are sorted and tagged and categorized. This wordvomit project has been slightly more challenging to categorize because I often don’t know what a wordvomit is going to be about when i’m writing it, and it’s often about a bunch of different things all at once. having too many tags or categories can be almost just as bad as having none. one of the things i’ve noticed is that dealing with the challenges of finding stuff, has led to me making stuff that’s more easy-to-find to begin with. there are versions of this in all sorts of domains, like when pitching a book or movie to a publisher, they’ll often appreciate it if you can point out the marketing angle. how will readers interpret this? what genre is it? i know lots of authors, myself included, would like to do something that’s “genre-defying”, “a little bit of everything”, etc. so many people’s blogs are titled something like “my scattered thoughts”. which is fine from the perspective of a creator just looking to make stuff, but if you actually want to be read, it helps tremendously to have some sort of promise. i’ve found this to be true even of my own body of work, with regards to myself. i try to write my stuff more deliberately out of consideration for future reader-visa. not always– sometimes i just want to not care about anything and just write whatever. but there’s only so long i can do that, only so many times i can do that, before I start to get bored of myself.
what is this particular wordvomit then, a meditation on reader-friendliness? directors commentary, scenes, partitioning, reader-friendliness. we just hit 1000 words. should i try to write another 1000 to try and make it better? or should I try to wrap up by searching for an interesting trapdoor to fall through? let’s not worry about the target and just keep going.
one of the things i like in the director’s commentaries is to hear about their influences. i love it when a film recommends other films. this might be a little too much for some people. i suppose it’s a little too much for me too. and yet i find that it makes things feel more alive, i feel like we’re in a larger universe. and sure that’s the line that samuel l jackson’s nick fury says to RDJ’s tony stark in the postcredits of Iron Man, setting up the ‘marvel cinematic universe’. but really all movies are part of a cinematic universe, just as all books are part of a literary universe. some things reference other things very explicitly. but even when they don’t, we pick up all sorts of things from each other. that’s one of the fascinating things about culture. it happens in everything– dance, food, photography, tattoos, fashion, any form of human expression is subject to inspiration from others. we develop languages, conventions, things that are familiar. casual viewers may not realize just how much they’ve actually learned the conventions that they take for granted and might not be able to describe– but they know when the conventions are being violated, because “something feels off”. i’ve particularly enjoyed witnessing this in the realm of video games, where longtime gamers turn out to have very sophisticated understandings of what to expect in video games, what an interface means, what something is likely to do, what objects can likely be interacted with, what each button is likely to do. this becomes very apparent when you try to teach a non-gamer how to play a game for the first time. you didn’t realize that your experience has taught you a particular way to navigate space, to move your camera around so you can see what is going on. these things can take a while to teach!
the same is also true for words. recently i was reading a transcript of a conversation i had with my ex-boss dinesh and i found it interesting how easily i could tell which passages were him speaking and which were me, even though we were talking about the same things. our vocabulary is slightly different, our grammar is slightly different, and when i read his words i start to notice his voice. and yet at the same time i know for certain that i have picked up some of his style, and i wouldn’t be surprised if he picked up some of mine, too. similarly(?), someone once listened to a podcast of me and my wife talking together and remarked at how my wife and i sound so much alike. which is unsurprising, considering that we’ve known each other for ~25 years now, and talk so much with each other.
one of the things i’m trying to learn is that there are things you can only figure out by doing. i saw someone tweet something like “imagine thinking you’d be a better basketball player if you only thought about it more or read more books about it”, and that really hit. “trying to learn” is not quite precisely the right frame, because… i feel like i actually do have an understanding of it already, but i’m obscuring it somehow. i know from tweeting that my thoughts get refined from the act of tweeting, and particularly from witnessing how people interact with it. why did i ever think that my substack would be any different? when I think about the books i’ve written too, i’ve learned so much more about them after having published them than i could possibly have known before publishing them. i do wish i suppose in hindsight– ohhhh this is interesting– I wish I had written essays about them as i was writing the books, because people’s responses are so clarifying. i wish i had called more friends and spoken to them about the things i’m working on. man, this is 100% what i still need to be doing, and i’m still avoiding for some reason. what is the reason visa? right now i feel like i’d make up some excuses about how it’s tedious, i don’t want to bother people, life is complicated because i have a newborn… but my baby isn’t a newborn anymore, i do have hours of time in my day, i have friends who are thoughtful and understanding… and i care about my essays, right? the best thing i could do for my essays is to have conversations with people about them. if i really wanted to make a series of breakthroughs, one of the fastest ways to do it would simply be to talk to someone every day, or every other day or so. heck, i do it so little that even doing it once a week would be a huge leap for me. so… why not do it? what can i do to make it likelier to happen? i could text some people. i should make a list of people i want to text, and text them.
If that’s the only thing I get out of this wordvomit, it would be a really valuable, powerful thing. but i’m not convinced that i have successfully convinced myself. i don’t feel that “click” or “drop” feeling I get when I realized I’ve changed my view, which is more of a ‘change of heart’ than changing my mind. alright i’ve just tweeted about it which should compel me to at least followup with people and not ignore them, i hope. i could also make more youtube videos i suppose! I wonder why I haven’t made any recently? I guess I haven’t been on a walk in a while? and I haven’t gotten a setup at my computer that i like? that’s also things I could fix. we’ll see how it goes