From the Mind of Trevor Stone

There's all kinds of stuff I've wanted to write about in the last year, but man has the will to write been lacking.

There's a bunch of news in the last year that's been a good hook for a letter to the editor, but I never muster the will to poke around for the coverage in a local paper and then write up a response. (I managed to get enough focus this month to collaborate on an LTE about the passing of George Shultz, Republican elder statesman and climate advocate, but we submitted it nearly two weeks after his passing and the paper probably thought it was old news by then.) Last fall I had several ideas about framing carbon fee & dividends for a conservative audience, and had several days that I intended to write something, but have nothing to show for the plans other than my comment contributions to what some other folks wrote.

At the beginning of the year I was planning to be an active voice for bipartisan climate solutions in the new Congress, but then Donald Trump dispatched a mob to defile one of our country's sacred places. Bipartisanship became a challenging hook, and I was too engrossed in the "WTF just happened" details that unfolded on the Internet over the next few weeks. I was sucked in to watching all the videos posted to Parler around the Capitol on January 6th. It was a fascinating slice of history captured by people who probably didn't know just how big a historic moment they were filming. I spent several evenings and weekend days watching them in chronological order, and had thoughts of writing a blog post about what I'd observed, but then I ran out of steam between 3:15 and 3:30 of the day.

Last summer I had a couple design documents I'd said I would write at work and could barely get a couple paragraphs written. I also have several "Update the documentation with new information" bugs assigned to me that I frequently think about but never address. I was able to write a couple good design documents about things I had clear plans on how to build, but I've been nowhere near as prolific in work writing as I was in the 2011 to 2015 time frame.

I've also been pretty lousy at email correspondence during the pandemic (and for the last several years, to be frank), and social video conferences usually feel like a chore.

Oddly enough, despite all this writer's block, I've been significantly more productive at writing code in the last year than I was the previous four. Writing a five paragraph article takes all the energy in the world, but I can knock out code for hours on end with no problem. Writing English as a hobby is a no-go, but I somehow have the focus and clarity to switch from my work chair to my living room chair and still write code for personal projects.

Two follow-up thoughts to my post about writing systems yesterday:

The obvious advantage of simplified Chinese characters over traditional characters is that they're easier to learn. The People's Educators have taught a couple hundred million people how to read and write a very complicated writing system, so using 门 instead of 門 as the foundation for a big pile of characters makes it a little easier. But there's a more subversive effect: It makes it harder for people to read old books. If the only books printed in simplified characters were approved by the Communist Party, young impressionable minds wouldn't be exposed to the books that slipped through the cracks of the cultural revolution.

In the way that some people form book clubs, I should join a Wikipedia club. Every week we pick a topic and share what we've learned about it from the Internet.


In other news, I seem to get stupid when I'm sick. I've been fighting a cold for four days and just now realized that I have Emergen-C at home, at work, and probably in my backpack somewhere.

Last year I spent three weeks working on a lame novel and then thought of a better story. In ten days, while sick for much of it, I wrote over 14,000 words toward a goal of 50,000.

Next month (National Novel Writing Month 2007), I'm setting the odometer to 0, but picking my I Ching-based story up. I can write 50,000 words in November, especially since I already have a good sense of characters and my chapters are already laid out for me. You can watch my status or sign up yourself and add me as a "writing buddy." When I got to the "Novel Title" section I figured Sixty Four Chapters About Eight People was a good choice. iTunes random comes in handy yet again.

I've got Huang's translation to use as a base in addition to Wilhelm's. Venerable though it is, some of Wilhelm's quirks were starting to get to me. For one, I found it hard to discern what he meant by key concepts like The Abysmal (water). Wilhelm also had sections I could tell were poorly translated because he used words (such as "God") for which I know ancient Chinese lacked an equivalent with the same philosophical baggage. Huang grew up in China and studied with an old I Ching master when the Communists had banned the book. He explains how the ancient ideograms represent the meaning of the hexagrams, explains senses of the words and a bit of their linguistic evolution, and mentions word choices from other notable authors (Wilhlem and Blofeld). His goal for the book (which took several years and 7 complete drafts) is to provide a faithful translation without interpretation and to provide the reader with an understanding of the gestalt of the hexagrams in addition to their meaning in isolation. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this edition by December, but you could certainly do worse than to buy a copy of The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation by the Taoist Master Alfred Huang. (I do object to the term "Taoist Master," but I suppose it helps the book sell.)