How I Learn

Learning the New Game of Daisen

Some mornings in Cambridge MA I have the chance to play Go with the young woman of the house that I visit when I am here. Well not Go really, she is only six, so instead we play Gomoku, the open version of tic-tac-toe played on a Go board. In Gomoku one tries to place five of one’s own black or white stones in a line of five. Some surprising and beautiful patterns can arise in Gomoku, more linear than Go of course, which is the spatial strategy game par excellence, but more intimate as well. This gave us the idea for a new ‘game’ to play on the Go board.

We call the game Daisen from the first three letters of her name and three letters from my own name. There is at least some inspiration from the old Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse and also of playing duets on the piano where one person plays the white keys the other plays the black (yes, I have seen people do this, and it is easier to do when not drunk).

The rules are simple. One player plays white, the other black. Each player takes a turn placing a stone on the intersections of the grid (as is normal with games played on a Go board). No conversation is allowed, Daisen is to be played in silence, or with some friends improvising music in the background. The idea is to work together to create an image.

The first game of Daisen near its end.

There are several strategies. In our first game we riffed off each other playing beside each other’s’ stone. There was a real feeling of give and take here, but also a pushing as each player tried to guide the emerging pattern.

Our second game was quite different.

Here we played away from each other, only gradually making an approach. We both knew, I think, that we were working towards an impression of a dragon. This is not surprising. The year of the dragon was approaching (it is here now) and my partner is closely related to the famous dragon trainer Ysiad.

One can imagine other strategies. Each player could play in a quarter of the board, developing patterns independently until they began to infiltrate the other. Or one could play in much more repetitive patterns, stitching across the board together a is the case with some of the common Joseki. There may even be Joseki for Daisen, though I have no idea yet what these might be.

Could one build sequences of Ko in Daisen? Would the result be a living and changing board, some simple version of the Game of Life? Could the Game of Life be played as a game of Daisen? I don’t know, but Ysiad may.

One can learn more about the Game of Life on Wolfram Alpha.

Will Gen Y Entrepreneurship be a Disaster?

On October 19 Steve Tobak published a blog post on BNet “Why Gen Y Entrepreneurship Will Be a Disaster.” The post has attracted some attention and it raises some real questions. As one who has spent most of my life in start-up land, and who encourages young people to do the same, it made me stop and think a bit. Below I respond to each of Steve Tobak’s points, and end with some thoughts of my own.

Why Gen Y Entrepreneurship Will Be a Disaster (and my responses)

1. The question of necessity versus choice is actually an important one. If it’s necessity - bad economy, no capital, no jobs - then where’s all the capital going to come from to fund all these startups? And who’s got the cash to buy all the new products and services all these new entrepreneurs will be creating? That’s right, nobody.
   
   It is not just a ‘bad economy’ it is a changing economy and where there is change there is opportunity. The Japanese economy has been stagnant since their own asset bubble burst back in the early 1990s and the realities of shrinking population economics sunk in. Nevertheless, many of Japan’s 40 wealthiest people have made their fortunes in this period. People are not going to magically stop buying things, though the kinds of things they buy and how they buy them will change.  
   
   Start-ups do not always, or even usually, require large amounts of capital. Many can be, and are, bootstrapped, grown with sweat equity and through early revenues. And one of the best times to invest sweat equity is when you are young. Lean start-up is becoming a well understood methodology. It takes a lot less money to start many kinds of companies now than it did even five years ago.
   
   
2. If, on the other hand, Millennials are turning to entrepreneurship by choice, what impact will that loss of next generation executive talent and leadership have on corporate America? What impact will that have on a nation trying desperately to compete with China and India in a global economy? Not a good one, that’s for sure.
   
   Some people are suited to be entrepreneurs, others are not. I doubt this is a real problem. And if it is it just reinforces the failure of imagination and determination at large companies. It may well be young start-ups that bring manufacturing back local and who unlock the innovations and potential that we need to compete. Local Motors is an interesting example of this.
3. How about their careers? If you haven’t spent a lot of time with entrepreneurs who’ve spent their entire careers in startups, here’s a dose of reality. Sure, they’ve got great instincts for what their generation wants to see in a video game, but as for management acumen and business savvy, forget it. Where are they going to learn that stuff? Big company experience taught me everything I know about management and leadership.
   
   If “Big company experience taught me everything I know about management and leadership” it almost certainly did not teach you enough. The best career path is likely to move back and forth between larger organizations and smaller ones, between the public or non-profit sector and the private sector, between management, the professions and the skilled trades. As we live longer we will have more and more varied careers.
   
   
4. Sure, startups run by entrepreneurs can succeed, but an important ingredient has always been a rich pool of operating managers with big company experience to complement the entrepreneurs’ lack of management experience and business savvy. If that talent pool is dry or significantly reduced, that’s half the equation for successful ventures, gone with it.
   
   This is a good point, start-ups need to be able to draw from a diverse talent pool in order to grow. But does anyone really think large companies are going to disappear over night? There will be companies of many different scales for many years to come.
   
   
5. Besides the virtual world, Generation Y also has a passion for all things green and sustainable. How do you think that supply will fulfill the demands of a nation of wealthy baby boomers who could care less about video games and whether their cars are gas, electric, or nuclear, but are in desperate need of major advances in medical technology and health care? Not well. Looks like more importing technology and exporting jobs overseas.
   
   This is silly in several ways. I don’t know anyone who can speak for all or even most baby boomers. I know many, including myself (I am a grandfather) who are passionate about things virtual and sustainable. On his death bed my father was delighted to be able to connect to his grandchildren and his brothers on FaceBook. And many of my peers cycle commute, compost, buy electric or hybrid cars … building a green and sustainable economy is important to at least some of us baby boomers. And it is likely to be even more important to our children and grand children.
   
   In any case, there are start-ups in all sectors of the economy, including healthcare, and everyone from big pharma to the hospital chains have largely outsourced innovation to start-ups. We for sure need a lot more innovation in health care, but it is naïve to think that this is going to come from large companies. If you want innovations in healthcare services and treatments these are likely to come from start-ups.
   
   One of the most interesting start-ups at the October 2011 Vancouver Angel Forum was Aeos Biomedial. A company with an intriguing concept for surgical tape started by a commerce student and engineering student when they were in 4th year at Simon Frase University in British Columbia. They got some of their early financing from doctors.
6. What we really need to do to get the economy growing again is to figure out how to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. Instead we’ll have a workforce that, having been denied those types of jobs, gave up and went their own way. Unfortunately, internet and green businesses only exacerbate our shift to becoming a service nation that outsources all its manufacturing jobs.
   
   It is not start-ups or the Millennials that abandoned US manufacturing. There is a crisis in American manufacturing and the loss of basic skills is a serious thing. But I doubt that corporate America is going to do much to change this. At one level we need to reinvent apprenticeship and trades programs and encourage our children to consider the skilled trades as professions that are as valued as management. We need to learn to think with our bodies and hands and not just our keyboards and calculators.
   
   One of the most exciting areas for start-ups is new models of local manufacturing. See Local Motors (mentioned above) or the coming explosion in 3D printing technologies. Over the next twenty years we are likely to see a renaissance in US manufacturing using new technologies of just-in-time manufacture, user-generated design, and cradle-t-cradle design. I am looking for investments in this area and expect to have at least one company of my own. It may be that we end up thanking China for helping us to get rid of our antiquated plant and equipment and opening the way for the next stage of growth.
7. While small businesses are nearly half the U.S. economy, the vast majority are boring old mom and pop businesses like auto repair shops, gas stations, cleaners, and fast-food franchises. I could be wrong, but how’s that unglamorous, hard working, long hours kind of lifestyle going to play out with folks who grew up dreaming about designing video games and futuristic cars that can drive themselves?
   
   Pretty well I would guess. People at start-ups learn to work long hours, be self sufficient and self directed, to solve problems and to deal with people. The underlying assumption that Millenials are only interested in on-line games is questionable. And many of the Mom-and-Pop business of the near future will weave in sustainable technologies and blend the virtual with bricks and mortar.
8. Startups are indeed the flywheel of corporate America, but for every Google, Facebook, and Twitter, there are hundreds of banking, transport, and consumer goods companies. Who’s going to create, manage, and grow the next Walmart, Starbucks,GE, Boeing, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, or Procter & Gamble?
   
   At least some large companies like to hire people with start-up experience. Why? People at start-ups learn to work long hours, be self sufficient and self directed, to solve problems and to deal with people. Moving from a start-up to a large company (if one is lucky through an acquisition) and after gaining experience moving back to a new start-up is a very credible career path.
9. The virtual world is one of empowerment and entitlement. Everybody’s got a voice, everybody’s got a platform, and everybody’s a “CEO of one.” Well, like it or not, corporate America was built on a foundation of organizational structure, work ethic, and discipline. Sure, flatter organizations where decision-making is in the hands of those closest to the problems and the data are more effective, but only to a point. I’ve written about what a democratic workplace might be like. It isn’t pretty.
   
   Well, this will be interesting to watch. But given the management failures at so many big companies maybe this command and control structure is not all it is cracked up to be. The era of “the visible hand” may have be past its prime. In any case, as we learned from Ronald Coase’s work the reason we have companies at all is because of transaction costs. As new communication technologies change transaction costs we can expect both the internal structure of organizations and the size distribution of companies to change, sometimes radically. None of us know how this will play out, but we can all place our bets by making investments.
10. Finally, my biggest concern: Gen Y entrepreneurship will fuel the mother of all Internet and green tech bubbles. And when those bubbles slam into that brick wall of Baby Boomers who want no part of it, they’ll burst like never before. And when that happens, we’ll look back at our current sluggish economy, high unemployment, and Occupy Wall Street protests, and realize that was just the tip of the iceberg.
    
    Who are these “Baby Boomers that want no part of it”? There are a lot of different people in the Boomer generation, lots of different points of view, different lifestyles and beliefs. In any case, “bubbles” may well be an important part of the economic cycle, one in which many different options and innovations are created and explored, only to be culled when the bubble bursts (in an economic analog to punctuated equilibrium). Bubbles drive large waves of investment and can leave us with important infrastructure. The uses of this infrastructure may be completely different from what the inventors imagined, and the economic advantage may flow to people other than the investors – ah the beauty of ‘creative destruction. The world’s wealthy cultures are entering a phase shift, one driven by shrinking population economics (see ‘demographic trends’), global competition for resources, the threat of resource depletion, and the general failure of old models. An innovative bubble followed by a deep retrenchment may well be coming. We will see (if we live long enough) if this is a good or a bad thing. I am an optimist.

So, I will continue to encourage young people to get involved in start-ups. I will support them and invest in them when I can.

Some Books I Was Reading the Month My Father Died

My father died on the afternoon of June 9, 2011. His passing will change how I live in the world, though I am not sure how, and may not really know for certain until I approach my own death. I wanted to pause this summer morning to remember him by remembering the books I was reading in June 2011. My father loved to read and always had a book nearby (the same is even more true of my mother) and he read widely. My own library has many books that he passed on to me, from teen adventure books from the time of WW2 - The Sacred Scimitar by William Dixon Bell (1938) and The Haunted Hanger by Van Powell (1922), to religious texts (last year I read the copy of Thomas a Kempis The Imitation of Christ that was given to him by a teacher in 1947), to many books on sailing and seamanship.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the
古今和歌集 Kokinwakashu edited by 紀 貫之 Ki no Tsurauki

These are two of four major reading projects this year (the other two being a renewed study of renga and a deep dive into The Psalms). Both were begun early in the year (January for Dickinson and March for the Kokinshu) and are likely to continue through the end of the summer. Both are helping me to think about my father, his life, and his passing.

769 (Johnson Numbering)

One and One – are One –

Two – be finished using –

Well enough for schools –

But for minor choosing –

 

Life – just – Or Death

Or the everlasting –

More – would be too vast

For the Soul’s comprising

 

Mothertalk by Mary and Roy Kiyooka edited by Daphne Marlatt

Roy Kiyooka has shaped my imagination from the late 70s when I first read Stoned Gloves and then The Fountainebleau Dream Machine. He was a trickster and elder when I moved to Vancouver in the late 1980s. This book of his mother’s memoirs was one of his last projects, and was in fact completed after his death by Daphne Marlatt (another Vancouver poet worth reading and rereading). I am looking for more copies as I would each of my kids to have this in their own libraries. My Amazon review is here.

Disavowals (Aveux non Avenues) by Claude Cahun translated by Susan de Muth & Agnes Lhermitte

I found this in the damaged section of the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge MA in May. A fascinating book on the construction and deconstruction of self and gender from the late 1920s. This book was being written in the years just before my father was born. One can lose oneself in Cahun’s photomontages.

Split Image by Robert Parker

When I am in Boston I like to unwind by reading a Robert Parker novel. At this best in the 1990s these books are easy to read, like drinking a glass of water, and take you into the city. Parker started to write his Spenser novels about the time I entered university, so reading them in chronological order has reminded me of many parts of my own life. This one is a Jesse Stone novel, and not Parker’s best, but at least it has some sailboats in it.

Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin

I have read the Earthsea Books many times. The Annals of the Western Shore (Gifts, Voices, Powers) is a slower and more meditative work but shares the theme of life choices. In Gifts the protagonists have to understand what their gifts are and how to use them. It sometimes seems to me that a big part of the work of one’s life is to understand what work one is meant to do and to have the courage to do it.

Jeff Wall – Picture for Women by David Campney and Gordon Matta-Clark – Conical Intersect by Bruce Jenkins

I am a big fan of Afterall’s One Work series and living in Vancouver Jeff Wall’s shadow is large. The Campney book gives some good entry points to think about the work, especially its self reference and construction. Matta-Clark’s Paris project Conical Intersect is haunting. The world opens in cracks that close again. Sometimes we can help to open them. Sometimes we can remember them. See …

The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming Medicine by Charles Kenny

Another reading theme for 2011 is healthcare and healthcare reform, especially in the US. This has nothing to do with the care given to my father, his palliative care was extraordinary. He died at home, holding my mother’s hand, with three of his children and one of his grandchildren beside him. This was possible because of who he was as himself and how he had lived his life, and the years of support he and my mother have given their extended family. This book tells the story of how the ideas from quality management have come into the healthcare system. There is a lot to learn here.

How Round Is Your Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin

My father was an engineer all his life and was good at making things – bridges of course, but he once said that anyone who can build a bridge should be able to figure out how to make a dress, and indeed, he did make dresses for my parents. He also taught me how to use a slide rule (I have forgotten) and how to do quick calculations of course and drift while sailing. This book is an enchanting exploration of where math, the physical world, and building stuff come together. In the real world, lines are thick, it is not easy to draw a straight line, and sometimes we need to have circles and squares with equivalent areas. This book opens up all sorts of interesting math by making physical models of mathematical ‘objects’. And it has a great chapter on slide rules.

Icefields by Thomas Wharton

Shortly after my father’s funeral Yoshie and I together with her sister and a close friend visited Banff and went up the Icefield Parkway and walked on the Athabasca Glacier. This revelatory novel is set here. The language captures the beauty and fear of the ice, its changes, and how Jasper itself has changed over the years. My parents had their honeymoon in this area back in 1958.

---

Thank  you Dad, for the books, the love of reading, and the passion to connect reading to life and action.

Inside Room

Coming back to an old house and shuffling through the rooms can uncover things long forgotten. Earlier today I found an old copy of Poetry Tokyo, No. 2 from Autumn 1987. There were translations of Hiraide Takeshi and Yoshioka Minoru (both of whom have been translated by Eric Selland, but in this case the translations were by Robert W. Leutner and James R. Morita respectively). There was also an old poem of mine, "Inside Room," written as my wife Yoshie and I were thinking about moving from Japan to ... it ended up to be Vancouver but we did not know that when I was working on this poem.

.

Your absence wants

a space to fill –

this claim too much

 

you stay an empty room

inside your self.

 

Stay past our decision

to leave. Cherishing

the debt we owe

 

each other. Another’s

place to hide. The rain

silt fills the room

 

with dust white

as skin powder.

 

Your body grubs

and curling in lacks

moisture from the air.

                *

“I love you” a claim

or statement of desire

a wish for peace.

 

Holding back your name,

as the sky will not,

I breathe carefully.

 

Carefully let down the

Blinds and the room

Is shadowed as your breath.

 

A gesture at least,

beyond us, beyond

holding – held.

 

The other’s sky not

Our freedom of speech.

Whistling clean. Waiting.

 

Wanting to go on,

to know you too

will stay.

Value Choice Identity

Some time ago a friend asked me “How much is your day worth?” I didn’t have a good answer at hand. I could have mumbled something about how much I charge for a day of consulting, and there are some companies that even pay me this, but I am not primarily a consultant. I could have done a back calculation from my pay, but I make a lot of choices about how to spend my time that have no obvious financial measure. So I thought I would spend some time thinking about the choices I make each day. It is our choices, more than what we do for a living, what we consume, or where we live, that really say who we are, what we value and what our time is worth. And it comes down to time, as that is my scarcest resource.

A typical working day in Cambridge, MA

I spend a lot of time in Cambridge MA where LeveragePoint is based, so I thought I would start by looking at the kinds of choices I make in a typical working day. In Cambridge I actually stay in a room in the house of a very generous young family in Somerville MA: husband a musician and writer, wife a business leader, 5-year-old daughter, new baby.

Wake up between 4:30 and 5:30. First choices: stretch out or just get on with it; what to read first. I decide to spend half an hour stretching and doing core excercises about half the time. I know I should stretch every morning and that I feel better the rest of the day when I do. Why don’t I always stretch? Perhaps just too lazy or too distracted, or sometimes too rushed. I almost always begin the day by reading a few poems from whatever book of poetry I happen to be reading. At the moment, mid-October 2010, I am rereading Louis Zukofsky’s Complete Short Poetry (as Kenneth Rexroth said,  “crystal  cabinets full of air and angels.”

I go down to the kitchen between 5:30 and 6:00, make tea, read for a while. These days I generally eat plain yogurt with honey and read non-fiction. Most mornings I choose to wait until the five-year old shows up and we play a game (Goblet Gobblers usually, or Hang Man, and I have started to teach her Go Moku, which she beat me at this morning).

Around 7:30 I head out to work. I almost always cycle, so the main choice is whether I take the direct route (4 km) or the scenic route (15 km).  This is about a 50/50 split and the main driver is how nervous I am feeling about work – when I am worried I want to get to work right away. Thinking about this, I should probably take the long way in when I am worried, as the ride settles me and gives me time to think. I never listen to music on the bike.

At work, I shower, change and wake up my laptop. I check e-mail, tweet for my corporate and personal accounts, check my priorities for the week and organize my day. Work is pretty much meetings or calls, interlaced with e-mail, solid through to 5:30. Lunch, when eaten, is eaten at the desk. From 5:30 to 7:30 I read up on work-related themes, sometimes on-line, but if the thing I need to read is more than five pages I usually print it out (bad for my carbon footprint) and try to get some writing done. A couple of times a week I will go out for a drink (alone or with a colleague) or a dinner out. Those nights, or when it is raining, I take the direct route home (rain does not impact my morning choice). Some evenings, especially when the weather is fine, I will do a long looping ride up the Charles River, maybe 20 to 30 km and get home around 9:00. I have a snack – fruit usually – and read until I need to go to sleep. In the evening I usually go back to poetry or pick up whatever novel I am working through (at the moment it is Oe Kenzaburo’s The Changeling). Sometimes I read about art, history or philosophy instead of a novel. And recently, I have been addicted to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels (He started to write them about when I had just started university and he passed away this year. So by reading them in chronological order I get to relive the arc of my life to date.)

A typical weekend day in Vancouver, BC

I spend most of my time in our old house in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver. The house and garden always need work – fixing or cleaning, planting or weeding, but there is a lot happening these days in Vancouver so we like to get out as well.

Most weekends I am up by 6:00 AM. I think about stretching and by the time I finish thinking about it I am already doing something else.: usually deep in a book or listening to music. I will read or write from 6:00 to 9:00 and then at 9:00 AM I listen to the CBC’s programme on Canadian politics The House. I make breakfast for whoever is up while The House is on, usually some type of omelet with what ever we have in the fridge.

At 10:00 it is off for a bike ride and I have to choose a route and a bike. Most of the time I will take my Brodie, which has gears, and head out to UBC then on around to Sea Island for a ride of about 65 km. Once in a while I will venture up one of the local mountains, Cypress or Seymour, to test myself. Or if I am going to meet someone downtown I will take my Viva fixed gear, a present from my wife. The Viva has a track geometry and is edgy to ride.

In the afternoon it is either into the garden for a few hours or off for a walk or gallery stroll with my wife (depends in part on if it is raining or not, I don’t mind biking in the rain, but we seldom work too much in the garden or go for long walks if it is pouring). At some point we will need to do the daily shopping (we shop for food most days, and I have been known to sneak into a bookstore).

Around 6:00 I will generally start to cook. Slowly at first, putting in anything that needs time, and doing some prep while I drink wine and read a few more pages of a book. Around 7:00 people begin arriving and organizing for dinner (we generally have dinner guests, usually friends of our kids, but often a variety).  By 8:00 we are usually eating and drinking, by 10:00 the people who did not help cook are washing dishes, and most people are either heading out for their Saturday evening, or crashing in the living room to watch a movie and to watch me fall asleep on the floor. Around 2:00 AM someone usually sends me up to sleep in my bed.

So what do I value?

Looking at my choices, I wonder how many are due to habit and how many are based on necessity. The choice to cycle every day while in Cambridge has become a habit, but it took some effort to make it a habit. I believe I work because it is the right thing to do, “a day of no working is a day of no eating,” I enjoy it, and I owe it to my family, but why I work and why I have chosen to work is a topic for another day.

My days have value to me in that I am

• Working with people
• Being with family, friends and kids
• Reading and writing, sharing what I read and write
• Spending time on the bike, in the garden, out on walks
• Cooking for people

And I hope these have value for others.

What I Cannot See From Where I Stand

 "5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this." (Wittgenstein TLP)

 

One of my current side projects is a workshop at the University of Toronto applying scenario thinking to urban futures. I am working on this with Bruce Stewart (Director of the iSchool Institute) and Kyle Dionne-Clark. As part of our preparation for the workshop Kyle and I are doing a series of blog  posts on scenario thinking on the iSchool Institute website.

A couple of weeks ago, Kyle suggested that we include a post on our own biases, which we did here. As part of this post, I reached out to people who know me reasonably well in a number of different frames: business, writing, cycling and family and asked for their views on my biases. I have tried to factor this feedback into some expanded thoughts on my own biases.

My life has been shaped by living at the intersection of cultures. I grew up mostly in Montreal in the 60s and early 70s, a time when language was a charged issue (to put it mildly) and teenagers challenged each other on the streets with linguistic slurs (I hope this has changed). I learned a rough street French and had some of my complacent middle-class Anglo assumptions thrown in my face. In my late teens I began to spend a lot of time in Japan (my parents were stationed there), moving to Tokyo when I was 19. Over the next decade or so I lived immersed in Japan and it was in Japan that I began to grow up (still working on this). I learned the language, lived very local in an old house in Kohoku (on the edge of Shitamachi), worked, got married, began to raise a family. As a result of my early life in Montreal and my immersion in Japanese in Tokyo I became suspicious of any one language’s ability to be complete – all expression is partial and it is in the gaps that the most interesting possibilities can be glimpsed. It may be a fault, not to be able to see completeness in any one thing.

This doubt of any one language (or system’s) ability to grasp the truth runs deep. I suspect that there are (infinitely) many internally consistent systems of mathematics, but that there is no one meta system by which one can interpret all the others in a way that makes them consistent. Beyond that, I suspect it is the inconsistencies and contradictions that blast open the space that allows anything to exist at all.

I am a committed learner, and how I learn is a filter through which I see the world. My learning style is abstract (I need to understand the model and how the parts fit together), historical (I like to go back to the very first germs of an idea and see what paths were not taken and how the selection occurred), connected (I try to find unexpected relationships) and social (I learn best through conversations with others). Oh yes, I read way too much, but cannot tolerate being told what to read (hence I have had a very limited academic career). I can get a bit anal about my reading, and for the past six years have kept track of all the books I read (I will share this with anyone interested).

Narratives are one of my many weak points. Stories are not my natural way of understanding the world or of being with others. My imagination and relationships are much more spatial and tangential; I am as likely to follow an implication or connotation as a deduction-I am easily drawn into adductive reasoning. Working for a living and managing companies, I have taught myself to tell stories, and more importantly, to listen to other people’s stories, but this is a conscious and learned behavior. I doubt I will ever write a novel or direct a movie, I may write a renga (if I can find the right collaborators) and I enjoy growing a garden.

Reading I like to be challenged by books that force me to uncover and build up new ways to read. The same is true for music, or even walking/riding through a city listening to its sounds. There are many ways to read any one book, and more ways to read several books together. Recently, I have begun to read translations of Japanese poetry into French (mostly haiku) and French poetry into Japanese (Mallarmé). My understanding of both languages is imperfect (as is my understanding of English) and my occasional failure to understand helps me read closer and to pay more attention.

I am always looking for things that force me to pay attention: reading poetry, listening to street noise, riding a bike downtown, sailing (especially in light winds or heavy weather), Yoshie's photos, working with a knife, following what people are saying to each other. Attention is, I suppose, at the heart of much of what I practice and not something I find easy.

Physical activity is critical to paying attention and I need to be physical or to find physical analogs in order to understand (when I say my learning style is abstract I should also say that it is physical, and that I need to express myself physically and encode knowledge into muscles and nerves). I like to sketch systems and then act them out (like a dance, though I am a poor dancer). If I was a better coder, I would want to code what I think about, and then to break the code.

By temperament I am an optimist, I believe things can be made to work out. When I think about the deep changes facing us - climate change, a post-oil economy, massive immigrations, species loss - I assume that we will find some way to work things out. I know that assets cannot continue to compound indefinitely (that is one root of bubbles) and that all funds must fail at some point, but I assume we will find other options.

My optimism leads me to be aggressively anti-ideology. For me, markets are a human technology and not a natural law (although I have learned a lot from Geermat Vermeiji’s application of economic theory to ecology in Nature: An Economic History). I am attracted to technologies that have mechanisms to distribute decisions as close as possible to where the decision will have an impact, and then integrate the decisions at a higher level to find insight and direction. Markets are one example (many individual decisions about value set prices and the prices provide information to the market), Google’s PageRank is another (individual decisions about what to link where determine relevance in search). The competition between alleles that partly determines subsequent phenotypes is yet another (I side more with Dawkins than Gould). I am convinced that the correct answer to most questions that start “What is the best way to ...” is “We don’t know and if we did know that in itself would change the answer.” Accordingly, I prefer evolutionary and adaptive solutions – encourage variation, force selection, repeat. I try to apply this to my own decisions as well – make a decision, see how I am wrong, correct.

Work experience shapes our biases. I have been either self-employed or running my own company since I was 26, apart from a two-year stint at the consultancy Monitor Group. As I am normally directly responsible for my own successes and failures I tend to assume that most problems have solutions and that the solution is to be found by building a team and having at it. Freedom matters, but with freedom to make a decision comes responsibility and accountability. I can be harsh in how I hold myself and others accountable. But I also believe that with every responsibility comes the right to freedom to determine how to meet those responsibilities.

My long term goal is to weave double-loop learning into everything that I do:  not just to learn, but to learn how I learn; not just to have goals but to have movement towards any goal change the goal; not just to connect (with people, places, ideas) but to have my connections become part of what I am connected with.

I have said too much here to really make sense, even to myself, but what am I not seeing …  ?

 

Shitamachi Ramble

While in Tokyo in late April my youngest son Kenji and I were able to escape for an afternoon on bicycles and go for a ramble through the Shitamachi 下町 area.  Shitamachi is the former downtown of Edo (an older name for Tokyo) and it is still a maze of narrow streets, canals, and shops mixed with workshops and small factories. Most of the houses are small and jumbled on top of each other, rebuilt quickly after the war then rebuilt again and again with new buildings fit into the odd left over angles.

We were riding borrowed mama-chari, the most common bicycle in Japan. These are inexpensive and easy to ride. They have given up the classic double diamond design for a simple bent tube: structurally not so good, too much bending, but cheap to make. Ours were single speed with baskets and disk brakes. One rides these sitting bolt upright, like most urban bikes. They are easy to stop and get on and off, but rather slow and hard to handle at anything much above 20 kph. Riding them feels free and fun, sort of bouncy, like being a kid again. I used to have one of these when I lived in Tokyo in the 1980s, and I would carry all three of our children on it with me – Kaito on the backseat, Kasumi on a front seat hooked to the handle bars, and Kenji slung on my back.

We began by going out Kanna-dori to the Arakawa River, crossing over to the west bank and riding the excellent bike path that runs pretty much the full length of the river. Much of the flood plain has been developed into parks, sports fields and gardens, but there are still swaths of reed beds concealing birds (we saw a heron, wagtails, some swallows and sparrows). You can really cruise along here, and there were a lot of people on road bikes who blew by us. But there were also people poking along, riding, listening to the radio, drinking a beer. We kept south along the river until the Sky Tree was more or less to the right of us and then cut into the city.

In Tokyo you spend most of your time riding on the sidewalks, especially on the main streets. Bikes and pedestrians seem to mix pretty well, much better than they would in Boston or Vancouver. Of course one rides slower, and it is easy to pause on a mama-charin.  Pedestrians accept the bikes and the bikes are careful of the people walking and know that a child can dart out at any time. In general, bike pedestrian and car traffic in Tokyo flows in and out pretty well, with each mode accepting and respecting the others (well, I did notice that cars tend not to stop for pedestrians at crossings).

Meandering through side streets and cutting through alleys eventually got us to the foot of the Sky Tree. This is a soaring structure, at 370 meters it is already the tallest thing in Tokyo and it is planned to go up to 634 meters. The design is a woven tube of steel with a central core for stability and to hold services like elevators and communication cables. My nephew Hattori Tastunori, a jazz percussionist, feels this is an egoistic waste of money, but I was kind of impressed with the daring. A new 634 meter tower built in a relatively poor part of Tokyo, in the flood plain of a river in an earthquake zone. The engineering is impressive, the woven steel  providing flexibility and a deep foundation providing stability.

We followed the little river downstream to where it flowed into the Sumida River. This is not the Sumida of wood block prints, with reeds and birds and low wooden bridges. The banks are solidly encased in concrete walls and until recently it was purely industrial, with large barges, concrete plants and warehouses. But now they are building an embankment where people can stroll the river and they are even trying to recapture a bit of its history as an entertainment corridor for the old city. The new embankment is intermittent though, and as the Sumida has many branches as it enters Tokyo Bay we quickly got lost. Wandering about, we eventually found North and then signs for Nihonbashi. Traditionally distances to Tokyo are measured from this bridge so as far as Tokyo, a city of villages, has a centre Nihonbashi is it.

Our route took right through the business center of Marunouchi, just by Tokyo Station and then up around the old outer moat, the walls are still visible in a few spots, past the solid presence of the Bank of Japan. We got on a roll here, moving from the sidewalk to the street, and made good time up to Ueno Park. Hauling our bikes up the stairs and into the park, we cycled past the museums and into the back streets of Uguisudani. This is a much quieter and more elegant neighborhood to be lost in than shitamachi, there are still some imposing buildings in the Meiji style (based on European forms) and houses surrounded by earth walls capped by tiles through which one can glimpse formal gardens.

We emerged from this pool of quiet near Nippori Station and were able to ride under the monorail, the Nippori Toneri Liner as it is called, all the way back to Yazaike. People had been talking about building this monorail for years, decades actually, but this trip was my first chance to ride it. It is great fun to stand at the front as it glides at roof level through eastern Tokyo. It  was also a good guide to get us back to where we started, and after four hours continuous cycling we were starting to get tired.

Crossing back over the Arakawa the sun was getting low and lit the river in silver and dull orange shades. On the eastern bank a group of homeless people had built what was almost a little village. For or five shacks and the odd lean-to. They looked well made and pretty weather proof. I wonder how the local police regard these settlements, traditional along the Arakawa to be sure, but these were more substantial than what I remember from the 80s, where most of the homeless men lived in cardboard boxes with a tarp to protect from the rain.

We were glad to get back to Yazaike, put away the bikes and go upstairs for tea and sweets. Our faces had a film of salt from dried sweat and city dust. Hot water felt good. Then it was back to work, Kenji on an essay on The Woman of the Dunes (his final undergraduate essay) while I got caught up on e-mail and did some tweeting (@StevenForth).

.

Salt dust after

Four hours cycling

Sore wrists

March Sommerville MA

.

Salt crust

On the floor under the bike

Unused for a month

. 

Oil crud & salt

Along the gutters

Early March

.. 

Pain evenly

Distributed along the back

More pain

 .

Making time

Across distance

Along a path

 .

Some snow

Fallen given a delicate

Wind chime

 .

Cough not cold

The road jitters

Skin raw

 .

After a long ride

Licking salt from her face

Broken skin

 .

Alcohol exhaled

Harsh breath bone bruised

Lip split

 .

Shirt sour

After two days riding

Continued effort

 .

Flat pain

Dull light missing Yoshie

Possibly morning

 .

The cup cold

Until water heats it

Tea steeps

 .

A hot shower

Then dry towels and

A clean pressed shirt

 .

Silence not

Memory as night angles

Fade to light

 .

You are here

As much as I can bear

You not being here

(Patricia Highsmith The Price of Salt filtered through Michael Snow’s Wavelength).

Back in Kitsilano

October 2009

eyes getting old

I want more light

in the corners

…

slow burn rust

the iron’s strength

bled off

…

rock rubbing

circles in sounds

still here

…

blackberry morning glory

tangle still some small

dried berries

…

getting older

nails & hair grow faster

as thought slows

 …

morning soft

strained like tea the

tannins stiffening

…

late day light

autumn yellow fading red

eyes extinguished

…

listening closely to

the space between each raindrop’s

continuous sound

…

tea water molecules

random drive sequencing

shared warmth

…

vague expectation

that water tastes of traces

other than water

…

lying in

the morning bath water

until its tepid

…

lying in the morning bath

until the water is tepid

getting up

…

first back twinge

lying out on the floor

waiting again

…

washing each glass

the water hot to scald

held up to the light

…

some mornings

the colder the water the cleaner

the skin dries

…

after a few seconds

the water runs colder

filling a glass

…

rain spaced morning

time finding some other

method of sequencing

…

eating an apple

drinking apple cider

eating an apple

…

hair shorter

seen thinning

skin clean

…

trying to say

something simple enough

it need not be said

…

tea in the night blue cup

so dark its transparency

swallows itself

…

From Wittgenstein

“to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” PI 19

The miracle of the world

Expressing nothing within language

Is the existence of language itself

The existence of language

Wonderment at the existence of the world

Our shared debt

Some form of continuance

…

dead wasps

a few dry leaves

bitter tea

…

some word for another

some thing for something else

an equivalence held

November 2009

the rain lifted

morning caw sounds

eyes heavy

…

a few hours after

the water rested in the glass

a layer of dust

…

I hear rain

although I hear rain

I hear rain

…

skin shared

after long separation

sharing breath

…

eating white rice

a trace of plum then

eating salt plum

…

Mulamadhyamakakarika

.

we speak together or

do not speak

and not speaking speak

as we neither speak nor not

.

the cold in the air is part of the rain

or not, just cold, just rain

when there is neither cold nor rain

and the cold not cold the rain not rain

.

some evenness in the numbers

not produced or destroyed

neither permanent nor annihilated

this smoothness discrete in

its difference over unity

having come and gone in the same movement

.

your hand moves to touch

is still

between our space its movement

allows time or not, to exist and not

…

when feet get cold

in November rain it’s hard

to get warm until spring

…

late November

still some apples too high to pick

and happy birds

…

cobwebs taste sticky

and basement dust fills with its own light

spiting out

…

rain weight constant

into the soil’s variable depth

the roots tighten

…

the sun not tired

of shining shines across

the cloud white

…

the boxwood cold

broken and distorted spent

the summer growing back

…

rain continuing

into the day made tight

and so on

…

hbnh

(from a tag cloud of this text in November 2009)

air along breath

clean cold dust

glass hard ice

.

known may ride

river road salt

sand shape shared

.

skin snow soft

south theme turning

water white wind

…

December 2009

.

sky still waiting

for snow to break

the balance

…

drinking water

from a wine glass

no taste of wine

…

drinking water

from the tea cup still

a trace of tea

…

after heavy rain

and melt the tap water

tastes of here

…

rain blotting

the frost a few minutes

and it’s gone

…

(may the year rest as it circles)

Calls This

This blog seems to be difting towards being a poetry blog. If I knew myself a bit better this would not be surprizing, as poetry has long been an important part of how I learn. I have also reengaged with writing over the past few years, part of my response to being in a new situation, living in Boston and working in Cambridge MA with an interesting and engaged group of people. At the same time, some of my children's friends engaged in writing as well, and I have been able to learn a lot observing this.

A few weeks ago I was doing some work in the basement of our old Vancouver house (the house is 100 years old in 2010) and I can across a box of old manuscripts. One of these was a poem sequence Calls This that I wrote while in Tokyo in the mid 1980s. It was published in 1987 as issue 24 of Peter Ganick's magazine Abacus.

Rereading these poems after a long absence they still, surprizingly, work for me. Some of the language is a bit sentimental and naive, but I am still obssessed with many of these themes - voicing, silence, faltering communication, observing the other ... I may try to rewrite this sequence next year. As part of the rewriting, I want to share it here.

Calls This (1987 Version)

 

Water not the same

not of me

nor yet given completely

to its other

The water’s other self

(its surface) blind to chance

will not accept refusal

but shares its qualities completely

A quality of self

as fluid as

its source

knows no distinction

 

Completes all chances

equally alike

like death the water

bland to taste

 

that what I said was, and after

you took that from me

and went away.

part of the sky found

without light

and less distance

to believe in.

I followed anyway,

wanting to find

a way in then.

some fault in your voice,

a high note after rain,

that would let me remember,

escape,

all I had said.

like that dead chip

off the sky

you had kissed

then brushed away

in the silk

of your desire.

but what I said was

always held

and now

there is no way back.

for after

 

when after your looking

    you paused

covering your eyes

there was

    this again

this again after

the darkness passed

in pieces

broken from rain

the ability to place

mine in this

you the place of

a dry sound

part in sedge

the trembling

again

time for speech

I not kept

to this loss of air

or

 

a gesture might

    given

have been offered

like the present.

I, offered

a way past this

or testimony.

and taken, swallow.

eat. that too

is done.

the offer allowed

for appraisal

like some of us

imagined hope –

the will to drive back

necessary failure.

the taken places

present.

    this sembles a fictional

------------------------------------- gift to this

    dry stick in the mud

want holds a sacrifice

of part’s integrity

to a lesser whole

(a measuring

Against itself)

and what you want

you take

of what you need

you give but part

is isolate

and draw a thread of cotton

from your nose

down through the anus

made whole the measure

of your need

 

innocence or incoherence in the attempt,

I have a shelter.

The air too thin

To carry sound.

I’d not intended that.

a person placed

above me on the stair

has fallen, damaging his throat.

I call,

I call his loss

towards me

for the words it gives

he does not close his eyes.

nothing to hear,

the air is farther from our want

than we can give.

what I want from him

what he needs

the blood between us

innocent.

 

here is enough.

this a flatter part

of what is called,

not the suggestion,

endurance,

to what is borne.

what is part of a place

when that

cannot

be found.

ever found.

there was a sense

that here,

but enough was taken.

the soil

thinned

till duration.

like the film of your face

after death

is

mine again.

possession a last

part of place

belonging

for what is not.

 

I cannot speak

and say less

but there is no protection,

those who love me

repeat my failing.

injured figures

beckoning

across the pale,

the order of words

fixed

in the moment of light

and we are caught.

no accusal taken.

the white

impartial

gives nothing of itself

‘I love you”

fulfills our possibilities,

and you and you.

are taken from me.

what I would say

not say

that I might give to you

 

light no longer to the room

what thought was once to the skin,

the table bare apart from its utensils

resting

still water in a glass

sleeping

our skin marred with images –

like naming flowers in the darkness,

their scent

remembering weight.

a knife a heirloom a fork

arranged,

always arguing

balancing

water in the glass.

‘keep the light off’

broken,

there are enough names.

‘enough’ I said ‘I’ve had

enough’

‘it’s the pressure in air

causes silver to tarnish’

eventually even bone decays.

its fine edge of water

against roses?

 

(after Satie)

if a square of light on the page

is called yellow

what is blue?

or not blue

but refraction at the boundary.

a place to breathe.

the yellow square cut out

and glued to the sky

Denies its brilliance

while blue remains on the table

modulating

into black (or one of its sisters).

never enough light

in the room or vanishing sky

as dinner ends

to forgive the blue or make it

speak for itself.

a tinkle of cutlery against china.

I would allow the blue its yellow

with the tea.

the yellow speaks of black

but is this memory

or prophecy

(as sky is liable to).

the sky is yellow.

the sky black.

blue a variation on black played after

our melody is complete.

or in some place lost

between dinner and sleep.

 

an interval held

too long between breath

the intention to speak

your breath on my throat

or water in a glass

remain

part of what I know

the blood

quieter than water

the first sound

slips from your throat

onto my tongue

like a perch

unconscious in

the air we speak

I swallow the sound

of your refusal

and breath

draws blood

from my tongue

the interval

in our bodies

aged with water

a fish

gelid in the stream

would speak

 

may have this light

or other

shadow in it

shape of a hand’s

grey drift

a small room

without windows

clasping the shadow

of a hand

fixed on the wall.

searching the shape

of a door

some flaw in the light

as distance

in time

of a room’s shadow

edges into decay

a slip

in the shadowed light

like memory

of a door

the hand of memory

of past light

so severe

it blanketed distinction.

 

the occasional need

to accept disturbance

into one’s breath

and grasp a fragment

of the day.

the day a fragment of the self,

its broken mirror

of the other’s desire

for self

without its other.

and breath never alone.

always

as it is

filling

into a sky

the other, breath’s absence:

flight

allows the I

trilling

its right of refusal

to pass into pieces of sky

like cloud.

as cloud sky’s breath

the trill breath’s tool

to embroider absence

with intent.

and pass

in spaces of a day

the air drifts free.

 

that too and

something less

listening

a reed bunting

too far off

listening to

the to

gaps

is there

water by water.

the bunting pauses

closer

pausing

repeats its

call its

flighting

    are

there are

threads of reed

bunting its nest.

listening to

water

trip

drop by

again

 

the other day

today like

wisps of

nimbus of

the sky

to close

give

a reed bunting

by water

that too

and

you to

listening.