These are some working notes on my experience of learning the Alexander Technique. I've found it hard to explain what it even is and what I'm doing, and I also found most explanations confusing before I started. I think that part of the reason it's so unusually hard to get| Lucy Keer
This has been stuck half-written in my drafts for three years because it was a bit too much like yelling at depressed people for being depressed, and I was having trouble finding a framing that avoided that. I still haven't solved the problem, so sorry in advance if this post| Lucy Keer
A 19th century public school technique for cheating on your homework| Lucy Keer
This is a bit One Weird Trick but it's worked really well for me so possibly it's useful to someone else. Short version: while I'm on a video call I roll something under my foot. Normally a cheapo massage roller I bought on Amazon,| Lucy Keer
The upper personality has a name. It is called S. T. Coleridge, or William Shakespeare, or Mrs. Humphry Ward. It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, and so forth, and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very| Lucy Keer
OK, I finally feel like doing this. I’ll keep the normal categories, but there are two other new things that feel important. The first is that I fell into maybe the most intense internet rabbit hole of my life, where I went from idly typing "galant music&| Lucy Keer
While I'm posting C. S. Lewis quotes, two more striking ones from his lecture De Descriptione Temporum: ... we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment| Lucy Keer
I'm currently reading a load of C. S. Lewis (see also C. S. Lewis on AI art). Here are some bits I wanted to save from The Discarded Image, which is about the medieval understanding of the universe. Three walks at night First walk. Replace abstract distance by height, and| Lucy Keer
I normally read an enormous amount of text on the internet. Blogs, newsletters, Discord, giant Hacker News threads, weird PDFs I fish up from Google Scholar, whatever. I’ve tried temporarily banning myself from specific parts (like blogs or Twitter) before but thought I’d try a more| Lucy Keer
I'm still really enjoying partimento practice (an 18th century teaching method for musical composition – see my newsletter post for more than you want to know about it). The further I get into it, the more I appreciate how clever it is. I've been trying to understand what makes it so| Lucy Keer
Today I saw a post about outlining on Hacker News, How To Build Anything Extremely Quickly. It made me curious about what I do when I write, and I ended up writing this quick post to explain it. I don't exactly outline, but I do write in some sort of| Lucy Keer
I'm starting to come out of my 18th century music obsession (see here for an infodump on what that was about) but I wanted to get one more notebook post in on a nice paper I found by Robert Gjerdingen that has some funny stuff about Rousseau. Partimento, que me| Lucy Keer
As with last year, I'm not feeling this but also it would annoy me to drop the habit. So here's a late, half-arsed review. At least I'll find out what I did. Notebook This went pretty well in the first half of the year.| Lucy Keer
I was talking to David MacIver recently about David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. I read (most of) this a few months ago and for whatever reason it went in one ear and straight out the other, so that all I remember now is “it’| Lucy Keer
I'm trying to get back into using the notebook, so I'm digging through my drafts for posts I can rescue. This one bogged down because I made the mistake of doing some reading and deciding that it was More Complicated Than That. Anyway, this seems like one part of the| Lucy Keer
I was watching a talk by Brian Cantwell Smith a couple of years ago, and for some reason the bit that stuck in my mind was where he briefly quotes John Haugeland on digitality: ... he said digitality is an engineering notion, root and branch. It's a method for coping with| Lucy Keer
The Current Macroeconomic Climate has given me a lot of unexpected free time, so I'm busy shaving some very stupid yaks. Two of them are oddly convergent. First one: * I was thinking about writing a proper blog post about Derrida, gathering together some of the threads from this notebook and| Lucy Keer
[Clearing out my drafts, this is from a couple of months ago. I lost the thread of the paper halfway through but got through enough of it that I may as well post this.] Sometimes I like to type keywords into Google Scholar to see if I can fish up| Lucy Keer
I've been meditating fairly consistently for, hm, coming up to a year and a half now. Nothing particularly intense, but 30 minutes a day more days than not, following the shi-nè instructions in the Aro meditation email course. I've had a couple of attempts to get into meditation before, but| Lucy Keer