Reading
What I am reading and what I made of it. Books I put down stay on the list — abandoning a book is also a verdict.
Bach's Goldberg Variations
A bar-by-bar walk through the variations. Slow going, and worth it for the running argument that the theme is the bass line, not the tune.
The structural claim is the interesting one: what all thirty variations share is not the melody but the harmonic skeleton underneath it. Every variation is a variation on the bass.
Which reframes what a variation is for. Not “the same idea decorated differently” but “the same underlying structure, with a different surface asked to sit on top of it”. I have been thinking about that in relation to how the posts here work.
The Craftsman
The best account I have read of why "just make it work" and "make it well" are not in tension but are the same instinct at different time horizons.
Sennett’s claim is that skill is developed by a rhythm of problem-solving and problem-finding, and that any system which removes the finding half produces workers who cannot get better. He is writing about bricklayers and goldsmiths, but the chapter on the limits of computer-aided design has aged into something uncomfortably specific.
The part I keep returning to: resistance is not an obstacle to craft, it is the medium of it. A material that gave no resistance would teach you nothing.
Seeing Like a State
Recommended to me three separate times by three people who do not know each other, which I have decided to treat as a signal.
The Design of Everyday Things
Put down two-thirds through, not because it is wrong but because I had already absorbed it secondhand. Everything in it had reached me before the book did.
Abandoning this felt like admitting something. In the end the useful realisation was that the book has been so thoroughly metabolised by the field that reading it in 2025 is reading a summary of its own influence.
Still worth having read the first third, for the affordances chapter in its original wording rather than in the version everyone quotes.