Everything wrong with Google Play Music’s iOS app

I’m not much for introductions on such topics. The following is part kvetch and part bug list about the Google Play Music iOS app. It’s a crappy app with a lot of problems.

 

1. Oh Playlist, where art thou?

I like listening to reading music while I’m reading. So one day, I searched for such a playlist (aptly named “reading music”) and added it to my library, marked it for download and started listening to it. After that, I didn’t listen to it for a while and moved on to some other music.

The playlist effectively disappeared. The My Library tab has these options – “Recent Playlists”, “Auto Playlists”, and “All Playlists”. Once the reading playlist was no longer a ‘recent’ playlist, I assumed I’d find it in the All section. Nope, not there.

It’s not my own playlist. It’s a playlist that I’ve effectively subscribed to, downloaded, added to My Library (three separate actions they made me do to ensure I have easy access to the playlist). But if I don’t have ownership, does that mean it’ll not even show up in my library? That’s more horrible a design than Google AMP!

To this day, I don’t know where most of my downloaded playlists are. They’re consuming space on my phone but I don’t even know which ones they are, let alone have a way to play them.

In the end, I had to add the entire ‘reading music’ playlist I like to another playlist I created. That’s the only way to get it to show up in my own collection.

2. When everything is Search, nothing is Search

Google Play Music wants you to Search for everything. The Search button is prominent everywhere but it only does Universal Search. When I’m inside a playlist, it doesn’t search the contents of that playlist. I have a playlist called ‘all’. I dump all my favorite songs in there and then when I’m bathing and listening to music, I know I’m listening to stuff that I like. But every once in a while (once a day) I don’t want to start my music with the first song in the playlist (Taylor’s Look What You Made Me Do). So I go searching for some other song. I have to scroll through the entire playlist and hope to hit on the song I want at random.

Mind you, it took Spotify forever to add in-playlist Search. But isn’t Google supposed to be all about design and iterations and learning quickly? Oh wait, maybe I’m thinking about Facebook (hey google, look what you made me do)!

It’s a simple ask – add Search to your app in a meaningful way. Maybe since they don’t actually listen to anybody, they don’t know that’s an ask.

3. Integration, Integration, Integration!

At the bottom of my ‘all’ playlist is a section that invites me to watch YouTube videos of some of the songs on my list. It’s not a very smart offering – it doesn’t take into account my favorite music, just whatever they want me to watch videos of (I can hit the more button to see loads of videos that might interest me).

So I’m thinking, if they’re so tightly coupled with YouTube, that’s awesome! No. It’s not.

Search for a song that they don’t have and they’re point you to the YouTube video for it. Maybe. This service has gotten better over time but it still doesn’t point me to the right video for a lot of songs. Besides, what’s even the point of this? Do I want to watch the song on YouTube? No, I want to hear it on Google Music. If you don’t have it, just say so and move on! Instead, they show me related musicians, radio stations and then bring up the videos. Also, this brings me to the next one –

4. Competition, Competition, Competition!

Why am I on Google Music? My brother bought YouTube Red’s subscription and liked it so much that he was one of the first people to sign up for the YouTube Red family plan. He got me in and I’ve really started enjoying no-ads YouTube. Experimenting with the options available to us through this, we came to understand that it includes YouTube Music and Google Play Music premium subscriptions too. That’s amazing! But not.

What service would you rather use? Shitty Google Play Music or weird YouTube Music? YT Music is confusing and half-baked. It has nice video/audio modes and background play but it doesn’t support playlists. Google Play Music has tight integration with YT but not YT Music, and it opens the YT app for any video I click on, and starts autoplaying it. Convenient, but irritating. YT Music is essentially Google Music’s own competition and they’re both the worse for it. Neither service is usable. I understand there’s some licensing nonsense behind this, but hey Google, you’re GOOGLE. Getting your way with licensing should be second nature.

5. Tabs. Such useless tabs.

You know what I do when I open the Google Music app? I go to my “Library” tab and look for things manually. If I can’t find them there, I search for them using the universal search. You know what I do not use? Every other tab in the app.

The Browse tab – It has three options – Top charts, New releases, Browse stations. None of these interest me because they’re not suited to my taste. They’re generic.

The Recents tab – what’s the point of this? The Library tab has a Recent playlists section. That’s pretty useless too. So the Recents tab is even more useless. It’s just a list of albums? songs? playlists? I have no idea. There’s no explanation of recent what?

Home – this one is even more weird. It’s got random playlists such as “For fans of blah” and TGIF. No reasoning for these. We’re just supposed to assume that they’re customized to day-of-the-week, listening habits, etc. My top recommendation is Latin Guitar Classics. I don’t know why. I’ve been listening to classical music and I daresay the Guitar is hardly a classical music instrument.

When you look at how good the Google Photos app or the Google Home and Assistant apps (which have some weird overlaps) are, it’s amazing that Google has a division making such a confusing and functionally terrible app.

6. The making of an app

When the Amazon Prime Video Apple TV app came out a few days ago, one of the laments people had was that it looks and acts like a website skinned to work with the Apple TV. It’s not horrible (the Hulu app is horrible) but it’s irksome. The Google Play Music iOS app is a joke. The app regularly forgets state and resets me to Library tab. The settings page is long, confusing and not well sectioned.

The album art is also a joke. Most of the music on there has a YouTube video play button as album art. Is this my personal library scraped over the years or a service run by a multi-trillion dollar enterprise? I wonder.

The display icons for artists under the Library tab are huge and most of the time don’t include any photos of the artists and are either blank or some half screwed up album art. The overall design of the app is not material or bootstrap or anything in between. It’s a monstrosity.

7. Misc.

Can your service one-up other music services? Well, if you can’t sort my playlist by any order (RPM would be nice and Spotify doesn’t have that, but I’d take Alphabetical, frequency, year of release, anything), if you can’t play videos within your app, if your service doesn’t include podcasts (I don’t listen to them. I just know other services have them), if your algorithm can’t predict what kind of listener I am (bollywood music, bhangra, pop instead of OMG this guy is Indian we have no idea what to do) and have music discovery in a meaningful way, what better are you than Spotify or Pandora or, heck, Napster?

Does your service have a landscape view? Most music apps do not. But come on Google. Study your competition and trounce them!

What’s with the name, by the way? Was ‘Google Music’ taken?

Recently, I uncovered another glitch in the app. When the missus tried to airplay a song to the Apple TV, if she airplayed the entire screen, the audio was broken and glitchy, but if she did it from inside the app, it worked fine. You’d think they’d hire a test engineer for these things.

There are so many ways Google Music can be better than Apple Music and Spotify and right now, the only cachet they have for me is that it’s free with YouTube Red. That’s just sad.

 

Epilogue

A few weeks ago, I screamed at Google Music on twitter for these issues. They asked me for feedback but I’d cooled down and didn’t bother to send them the feedback. Now they have the information they requested. Let’s see what they do with it.

You’d be asking me, why are you still using Google Play Music if you hate it so? You know what I hate even more? Paying for redundant services. I’m already slated to get rid of Hulu as soon as this season of Grey’s Anatomy ends. If Google ever gives us the option to drop Google Music from YouTube Red and pay less, I’ll gladly go back to Spotify. Till then, I can kvetch.

Photo by The Logo Smith

A quick review of Dan Brown’s Origin

This is a typical Robert Langdon book, where the hero is the most well-connected, smartest-in-the-room, teacher-of-genius, yet-dumbest-when-it-comes-to-technology larger-than-life persona in the book, for whom women ache and doors open and helicopters fly at will. It was improved by the other two characters in the book, who, frankly, were in ways more important than Langdon himself.

Brown’s final explanation, that beautifully crafted, extremely vivid crux of the novel, which we read his books for, outdid itself this time. It was elegant, very well researched, and perhaps so coherent that Brown may well be a messiah of the times to come!

There was an expected thing that happens towards the end – the betrayal of technology – which you begin to expect almost as soon as you read about the technologies involved in this novel. Yet, in the cold light of the morning, I realize that while Brown had to make it trope-y, he managed to squeeze in an element of elegance there. The betrayal is typical of all science fiction, yet somehow away from it, as it resides in the world of Robert Langdon, and it is done and discovered in Langdon-style. The character’s response to it is also surprisingly Luddite.

All in all, it’s a good read. There were a point or two where it could have been tightened, where obvious spoilers could have been skipped to maintain the suspense. But those side-suspenses don’t matter. The main suspense was enough to whet our Dan Brown appetites!

Photo by quadralectics

Running Compass on Vultr

Intro

Recently, I came across a tweet by Aaron Parecki, where he talked about a lifelogging app he built (and recently released) which tracks our location constantly.

I’ve been using Moves on-and-off over the years and partly due to it being now owned by Facebook, and partly because it’s a very crashy app (first time works fine, doesn’t open ever after that and stops tracking properly soon after; I assume the developer is now working on some darker features for the Facebook apps and so doesn’t spend as much time on his own creation), I’ve never been satisfied with Moves.

So, I downloaded Aaron’s Overland GPS Tracker app (free!) and set it up. The app is rather bare and the functionality is not well explained (within it). But it’s free, open source, a one-man job, and in line with the vision for indie dev, so it’s up to us to figure things out. I asked a few questions, got pointed to the settings explainer here. Well worth a read if you download the app.

The next step of the app was to install a remote server which ingests the data and makes it human readable and useful. As Aaron explains, the quest is to answer the question – “where was I at blah date at blah time?” The app’s official homepage recommends one of two servers to send the data to – a service called Icecondor and a server Aaron wrote called Compass. Compass looks nicer than Icecondor, is self-hosted, and I’ve been itching to play with Vultr.com‘s SSD Cloud, which competes with DigitalOcean in pricing and resources. So, here’s a walk-through for getting yourself setup with Vultr, installing Compass, and setting it up with Overland GPS to start tracking your location as creepily as Facebook and Google do it! 🙂

Vultr

Vultr is a nice competitor to DigitalOcean. At $2.50/mo for their cheapest VPS, it’s half the price of what DigitalOcean offers ($5/mo for the same RAM, storage, and CPU, but DO offers twice the bandwidth and, well, is trusted more). There had to be a caveat, right?

I signed up and the first thing I was told to do was to add money to the account. I had the option of not adding any cash and just attaching my credit card, but I’m going to end up using Vultr for something or the other, so I threw $10 at them (shut-up-and-take-my-money style!).

Then, they told me I can deploy a new server! I picked Seattle as my server location, Ubuntu 17.10 as my poison (which was probably a bad idea; more on that later), and scrolled down to the Server pricing. The $10/mo server was pre-selected for me and the $2.50 option was grayed out! (Seriously though, they should give names to these tiers. It’s silly to keep referring to the price.)

I googled around a bit and found out that they keep disabling the cheapest tier (they call it “Temporarily Sold Out”) as a sort of bait-and-switch model to drive new users to the more expensive options. But that sounds somewhat bullshit. If this was truly the behavior, I’d like my money back. But, and I’m glad I did this, I went back and started clicking around to look for solutions. It came in the form of New York! Turns out, they try to drive users to lesser used data centers while everyone who’s trying to set things up actually tries to use the “Silicon Valley” data center (seriously? Who the heck put a data center there???)

New York and Miami currently have open $2.50/mo tiers (ugh, that naming is so needed! I guess I’ll call it the Micro tier and the next one Mini), and networking is not a problem for me (who cares if a little more bandwidth is needed to get this non-time-sensitive data to New York and back), so I picked New York and threw my hat in the ring.

The server came up within… minutes? (Seriously, it was fast!) and I had an IP address to point to! Yay! But, what’s the password? The usual Ubuntu password didn’t work and I looked around at their docs and there wasn’t much to go by (Vultr’s docs aren’t as awesome as DigitalOcean’s. They’re good, just not there yet. They have a documentation bounty program if you’re interested, dear reader.) Then I checked the email which I would have received on server activation. It said that the password is on the dashboard (silly me!).

As I said before, Vultr’s documentation isn’t great, so I followed a mix of Vultr’s LEMP install here and DO’s LEMP stack installation instructions here. I installed PHP 7.1 with FPM (which, I must admit, was a little leap-of-faith because I wasn’t sure Aaron’s code would work without throwing up legacy issues, which it didn’t) and skipped most of the tweaking that Vultr recommends (YMMV).

Compass

Then, I copied over the Compass files (from here) and started following the Setup. The first issue was the .env file. There’s a few settings in there which are confusing, so here’s what I did –

BASE_URL -> This is your website. It uses HTTPS. More on that below.

STORAGE_DIR -> This is the data directory which is supposed to store your incoming data. Oddly enough, it doesn’t. When you use the application, the GUI prompts you to make a ‘database’ (it should be called a ‘project’ Aaron). This database makes its own folder in the Compass directory, so this variable invariably doesn’t get used. Set it anyways.

APP_KEY -> This confused me a bit. I don’t think this is a password. But I set it to something like a password. It’s a 32 char string, so have fun setting it up.

DB_CONNECTION -> Set this all up as you would any other MySQL application. Use the WordPress tutorial by DigitalOcean as a hint of what to do.

DEFAULT_AUTH_ENDPOINT -> This was one of the more confusing things I saw. Was the idea that this was some generic authorization? To figure out, I found Aaron’s own Compass website and tried to login. Turns out Aaron uses a very neat authorization process. There’s no password. All you do is tell which Indie authorization website you want to use to authenticate who you are and it’ll allow you to login. Specifying this URL will mean that if you can login to that other website, you can login to this website. The default is set to ‘https://indieauth.com/auth’. If you let this remain, it’ll mean that anyone who has an indie auth login anywhere will be able to create an account on your Compass server and potentially use it for their own data. So, I authenticated myself into Aaron’s server and now I have an account there! Of course, I don’t recommend this. I changed this Endpoint to my withKnown.com site. That way, only people who can login to my withKnown site can login to my Compass server. Who can login to my withKnown server? Only me. 🙂

There’s a piece of the puzzle which needs addressing. APP_DEBUG is set to true right now. So whenever there’s an error, Compass spits out the entire MySQL connection string, including password, as well as very important system information out to anyone to see. I suspect that once you’re done setting up this server and you trust it, you should follow the Laravel process of ‘migrating’ the application from dev mode to production. This will help secure your application.

 

After this, I moved on to running Composer to install all the dependencies which I needed for Compass. Here’s all the issues I faced there –

“Composer not installed” – Install using

"apt install composer"

“danielstjules/stringy 1.10.0 requires ext-mbstring” –

"apt install php7.1-mbstring"

“phpunit/phpunit 4.8.21 requires ext-dom” –

"apt install phpunit"

“zip extension and unzip command are both missing” –

"apt install zip unzip"

Now, you can run ‘composer install’ and it’ll work.

 

nginx

I recommend using nginx. You’ve got a small server and you don’t want Apache to drown the memory, so just use nginx.

Aaron’s config for nginx were clear, but not helpful, because it doesn’t go with the usual nginx config floating around tutorials. So here’s mine (relevant portions only) –

index index.php index.html index.htm;
root /var/www/nitinkhanna/html/compass/public;

location / { 
    try_files $uri /index.php?$args; 
}
location /index.php { 
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;    
    fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf; 
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock;
}

At this point, I thought I was done. But then, when I tried to open the site, I ran into some very nice errors in the application. First of all, notice the root. The root of the application is not the compass folder itself, but the public folder inside it. This is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation and was well worth twenty minutes of “what the heck?” and then some. But you have it on good authority that this is what you’re supposed to do.

Secondly, the application wasn’t done making me install stuff. So I also had to install curl –

apt install php-curl

Then, I wanted to digress a little and make my life a little more difficult (or easy, depending on who you ask). Aaron’s own Compass server uses Let’s Encrypt based SSL. I’ve always wanted to secure my own sites using SSL, but I’m lazy. For this, I thought, why not!

I found the CertBot instructions for installing with nginx and Ubuntu here. They’re pretty straightforward, with a small error that I ran into – Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare as my DNS, security, loadbalancer, God of Small Things. Cloudflare provides SSL. It’s literally a one click. When you add a new A record to your domain (such as compass.p3k.io), it adds DNS and security itself by routing traffic through Cloudflare’s network. CertBot doesn’t work with that. CertBot needs direct access to the server. So, I had to disable Cloudflare’s lovely protection for my subdomain and let certbot do it’s job. It did so. It automatically modified the nginx config to accept HTTPS-only connections and to route all traffic to HTTPS. I was even able to setup crontab to auto-renew certs –

43 6 * * * certbot renew --post-hook "service nginx restart"

After this, you run the job queue commands as listed by Aaron and you should technically have a running website. But there’s a catch, as there always is. This server that I’ve got is not a ‘mini’. It’s a ‘micro’. 512 MB RAM is not enough to run MySQL, Ubuntu 17.10, nginx, php-fpm, and actually run an application on top of that. So, I ran into a very cryptic error –

[PDOException]                                    
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory 

At this point, I had the application running and I was able to visit the site and all, but try to login and it threw this error. The php artisan command also started throwing this error (by the way, you’re supposed to run the ‘php artisan queue:listen’ command in the background for this server. Follow the instructions here to set up supervisord to do so). Most people on StackOverflow seemed to think that if you replace ‘localhost’ with ‘127.0.0.1’ in the app’s settings, it’ll start working again. But that didn’t help. Finally, someone recommended (not in real-time. I’ve only once ever in my life used StackOverflow in real-time to get answers to a question) restarting MySQL. Well duh.

Oh? MySQL won’t restart. Why???

It was this community question on DigitalOcean that gave me the answer I was looking for – I had run out of RAM. Turns out, 512 MB is just enough to play with a server, but not enough to run it for reals. Nonsense. Let’s just add a swap!

I used this excellent and very easy DO tutorial to add swap to my VPS. Notice the shade it throws at you for trying to use swap on SSDs. They specifically say that it doesn’t recommend using swap for DO “or any other provider that utilizes SSD storage” and that this degrades hardware performance for you and “your neighbors”. DO recommends upgrading your instance so it has more RAM instead of using swap. We don’t listen.

Added swap and voila! It’s working! MySQL fires up and the app stops throwing silly errors! I ran htop all night on the instance to monitor for Memory and Swap use and it works just fine! At last, we can login!

 

Overland

OK, we logged in using our designated Indie Auth website! Now what? You’re staring at the blank screen that recommends you create a database. Do it. You give it a fancy name and it spits out a bunch of configuration. Now what? First of all, change the Timezone in the settings to where you are. It’s set to UTC right now, but for me, it’s PST. Also, use

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

in your Ubuntu command line to change the timezone of your server to where you are. Remember, my server is in New York. But I told it that its timezone is America/Los Angeles. Because.

OK! You’re good to go! You can throw some data at this server! Head over to the Overland GPS app and add this endpoint to it. Only, what’s the endpoint? I added just my compass server’s URL and that didn’t seem to work. Then I looked at the app screenshots and there it was –

https://compass.p3k.io/api/input?token=E6ncEYWxT...

That’s your Receiver endpoint! But, where should I find this? In your Compass ‘database’ settings, You’ve got a read token and a write token. Next to the write token is a link which says “show API endpoint”. Click it and out pops another line which shows you the above. Simply copy this and magically move it to your phone (I WhatsApp myself these things) and you can plug it into the app and start sending data! The first time you plug it in, the app will collect all the data you’ve accumulated till then (I had some 25000 points of data to transmit) and smoothly move everything to the server (Aaron really has done a great job with the app). After that, it’ll move the data in batches the size of which you can specify (God knows why).

But. You’ll see some odd things. For example, in the afternoon, the server’s map changed the date over to the next data (I suspect this is because my server was still on UTC time. Running the tzdata command above should solve this). Also, whenever there’s no data (or the data hasn’t loaded yet), the map points to Portland. I get that Aaron is from there, but I think we should be able to configure this (Seattle, woooo!) because it’s a little jarring. Finally, this will teach you how bad your GPS data is anyways. Most of the time, the map has me squarely in the water, or swimming out and coming back, or has me cross the I-90 bridge by, well, not crossing the bridge but swimming along it). But, that’s just the world we live in.

 

Questions/Issues
  1. Why does this server need MySQL? The Compass documentation says that the data is stored in flat files. Then is the MySQL database only used for temporary storage of data before it’s processed and saved to flat files?
  2. Is HTTPS a requirement of the server or a nice-to-have? I am not sure about this and I just took the safer route.
  3. The app, in debug mode, spits out way too much information which it shouldn’t. I’d like clear instructions on migrating it off debug mode.
  4. Did I decipher the meaning of DEFAULT_AUTH_ENDPOINT correctly? Not sure. Also, Aaron, if you’re reading this – what do I do with my login on your Compass server? Can you allow people to store their data on there, just for visualization (and wiped every night so as not to flood your server).
  5. I still don’t know what the best configuration is for the app (battery-use to tracking). If you’ve got pointers, throw them in the comments below!

Thoughts on a required reading page for blogs

I’ve been following Colin Walker’s thoughts on a ‘required reading’ page since Monday and have been thinking about it myself. His own thoughts were based on Dave Winer talking about the idea.

What is a required reading page to me?

Dave Winer seems to suggest a page which would link to articles that deeply affect the blogger, or explain their motivations and give context. Colin took the idea further and talked about old posts which the blogger would want to highlight. There could be external links which the blogger would want the reader to get acquainted with before weighing in on the subject the blogger talks about.

Why are we talking about it?

Two years ago, Derek Sivers and party introduced the idea of the /now page. It’s an easy way for bloggers to talk about what they’re doing right now. There was a marked effort to explain that this page would not be automated, so that the blogger frequently updates it and nurtures the page as a window into their lives. You can read my /now page here.

These ideas – a now page, and a required reading page, are extensions of a blog and a way to empower bloggers to build a blog as an extension of their lives. Sure, you can post what you’re working on on Instagram, and rant about it on twitter. But when it lives on your blog, you care about it more, and so does your reader.

When I was thinking about it, I felt that the required reading page is better implemented by the blogger simply choosing to write about the topic they care about. If you want people to notice a certain article, just blog about it, quote it, and explain your take on it. Ask the reader for their takeaway too. Perhaps, in that sense, a required reading page is every page on your blog. If you care about it enough to write about it, I’ll know that you recommend that I read it too. That is how it works right now, and that’s why I read Dave Winer’s post – because Colin Walker was talking about it.

But when you look at the way people blog now, a lot of bloggers have, since a long time, maintained a page of reading which they want to highlight. Famous bloggers often have a page which lists their most popular blog posts (a great example is this page by Leo Babauta) and others often point to external reading that they value. It’s time this too is formalized into a format and a ‘named’ page, so as to guide future bloggers (and current bloggers) and help leapfrog the blog from a stream of thoughts and articles to a centerpiece of activity and a deeper reflection of the blogger’s life.

p.s. Named pages are useful in both kickstarting a blog and maintaining it for your readers. Examples are the About page, the /now page, the Colophon page (which talks about your tools, your blog’s history; sort of an extended About page; here’s an example), and now, hopefully, the required reading page. As Colin says in his post about the Required Reading page –

I’m going to spend some time considering what I might have on mine.

Twitter backlash, again

Every time twitter changes something, it faces backlash. That’s not new, that’s common to all consumer tech companies. There’s a set of users around the world used to things the way they are and some who are looking forward to the change. Whenever Facebook makes a change, they get floods of comments attacking them. Perhaps that’s why Facebook has gone shadowy about all the changes they make to their algorithm. They’ll talk to the public about it, but not really explain anything.

When twitter changed the look of their app and service a few weeks ago, many liked the change and I got upset about it. It’s not that I use the official app or site a lot – I don’t care for it. But it seemed like such a useless change when there are so many other things to deal with.

The same happened yesterday, when twitter announced that they’re increasing the tweet chars limit to 280 for some users, as a test. I’m not part of the small group, but I’m one who’s been saying for a long time that this should happen.

Others, as John Saddington, over here on his blog, believe this betrays the fact that twitter is ending up like the next Yahoo!, having lost its soul a long time ago in the many quagmires it failed to defuse in its long march to infamy.

While I agree that the service is, in general, in shambles and begging for someone to whip some sense into it, this change is not anything which will destroy twitter. If anything, it’ll give users such as me some breathing space.

Yes, I can be pithy and reword my tweets to be exactly 140 chars or less. But who wants to? “Brevity is the soul of wit”, said the man who wrote 884,647 words in his career. Well, I don’t want to be witty all the time. I want to get my point across, and if it takes 145 characters to do so, so be it.

Yesterday, while discussing this change, twitter made a feeble attempt at giving a technical reason for this change. They explained on their blog that the reasoning is that some languages, unlike Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, are more visual in nature and can explain a lot more in one character than others, such as English, Spanish, and French. Therefore, they are making this change available for the latter languages. They also explained that only about 9% of all tweets reach the 140 characters limit.

That last bit surprised me. I thought about it a bit and realized that this number, 9%, is probably flawed for various reasons –

  1. Twitter has a lot of spam. Like, a lot. So, when someone talks about 9% of all English language tweets, they’re probably counting a lot of bots, crap, spammers, and the general noise you see on twitter. Remove all of those and the number might actually jump into double digits.
  2. Most people who want to express themselves better have gotten used to the idea of tweetstorming. They know that twitter’s not going to fix this issue, so they use tools, or just hit reply manually to post things in a better way. If twitter counts tweetstorms as one tweet, I’m sure, again, that they’ll tip over to north of 10% easily.
  3. Everyone else who ever faced the predicament of having a red negative number blocking their tweet just went ahead and reworded the tweet to fix things. Had they any method to tweetstorm from the official app, they would have done so, and, again, twitter’s numbers would be more truthful.

Given these factors, there’s not less reason to implement 280 chars, but more.

But, here’s a prediction, if I could make one –

When twitter revisits these numbers in a year or two, they’ll see that the number hasn’t really shifted a lot. If they see 9% now, they’ll, maybe see 10-11% a year from now. The reason is simple – when we’re given an arbitrary limit, our thoughts go towards meeting that limit instead of finding ways around it to fully express ourselves. Now that twitter has gotten everyone used to 140 chars, when the noise settles, those who need a few extra chars to express themselves will take those and use the space. Others will not. Simple.

This new limit is nothing to fret about. It’s not going to destroy twitter. That’s already to job of twitter’s bad advertising, political hand-wringing, and spam. All this is going to do is give some breathing space to people like me, who need a few extra chars once in a while.

Side note – I noticed that tweetbot took the 280 char limit and presented it beautifully since yesterday. I haven’t had to update my app for it. No good twitter app has a hard limit of 140 chars built into the stream display. That just shows that there’s no real reason for twitter to go back to 140 chars. The endless stream of tweets that people are used to will work exactly the same way as before. Don’t worry about it. Worry about everything else that’s still wrong with twitter.

p.s. – My thoughts are partly explained by Colin Walker here, funnily enough, in fewer words.

Photo by mkhmarketing

A note about Indian restaurants in the US

So, we are at an Indian restaurant again last night, and as usual, for a table of four, it got crowded really fast. Indian eating joints have this exquisite property of always seating you at tables not quite big enough for all the food you’ll order, and it is sad since their property is very big from https://www.williampitt.com/. 

But it’s not their fault. Indian food is community food. A central platter of dishes, and then our individual plates. Compare that to, say, American food, where everyone orders their own entree and all the food in contained within individual plates. That saves on space and consequently allows for smaller tables. That is space saved per tables which allows for a roomier restaurant or more tables per eating joint – especially useful for fast food joints. 

What’s the solution for Indian restaurants? How can they provide for the right amount of space for patrons? Well, they can swallow the cost of having fewer tables and just provide bigger tables – seating four at a table meant for six and two at a table meant for four. But we know they won’t do that. 

What can we as customers do? We can order thalis instead of entrees. Thalis have all of the food on the same plate, in small portions, providing a variety and a more complete meal. They’re also individualistic, so it’ll ensure everyone can get the dishes they want. But there’s two problems there – 

  1. Most restaurants don’t have a lot of varieties in thalis. They’ll have a maximum of two options. So even if we as consumers make this change in our eating habits, it’ll end up only hurting our choices. There are, of course, some restaurants which specialize in thalis and those are definitely worth visiting, but they’re few and far batween.  
  2. As a North Indian, I am geared towards larger portions of fewer dishes. That’s not going to change. 

There’s one more thing which need to address – naan (or as they’re affectionately called, ‘naan bread’). Naans are usually cooked individually and tossed into a metal bread basket which consumes an inordinate amount of space on the table. If you’re ordering a few different types for the table, those baskets quickly take up too much space, often spilling over and causing a great deal of wrangling to place everything on the table. The solution often ends up being that you consume your naan partially and then stack the baskets until someone comes along to take them away. This whole business is messy and commanded by this idea that if someone orders a garlic naan, a butter naan, and a parantha, they need to come in separate baskets, so as not to intermingle their aroma, even though most people end up sharing naans. This situation is further exacerbated by the difference in sizes of naans between different restaurants. Some make their naans huge, wherein people have to share their ‘breads’ while others serve smaller portions, making it difficult to know from the get-go whether we’ll be sharing naans or not.

I believe the solution is midway – a new kind of offering that is a cross between a thali and entree. This offering would let you pick your entree and naan but offer smaller portions for the same, to specifically cater to a single person. Some restaurants would choose to offer some options with it – raita or plain rice (which, to my utter amazement, is considered a freebie in most Indian restaurants in the US). This complete package would be constructed in such a way as to fit within a single plate, taking the right amount of space to allow for a comfortable dining experience. 

There is only one place where I’ve seen this kind of offering – Azitra in Broomfield, Colorado. Their lunch options were wonderful and the portions were filling. They too made the mistake of tossing the naan into a separate basket, but by saving space on the dish (the curry came in a beautiful boat-shaped dish), they allowed for a much cleaner and spacious table. I would like more restaurants to pick up this offering and improve our dining experience. 

Vice News Tonight should not have covered these two topics on April 27th

We watch Vice News very frequently. Every few days, we’ll sit and watch the Vice News Tonight for the last few days. It’s almost become a ritual now – a few days of Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, then one night of Vice. It’s a good way to get a very different perspective on world news.

I’ve never had any problem with the way they cover their topics. But recently, I saw the April 27th episode and I have a request and a complaint. Vice News Tonight made a mistake with these two topics –

  1. Milo
  2. The writers guild strike

The Milo topic should just not be covered. Why give a vile man any more screen space than he deserves – none? The entire segment was just dedicated to giving him as much time to show his face as possible. That’s just offensive to anyone with any sensibility.

The writers guild strike is an important and interesting topic. But after the initial explanation of the topic, the Vice News reporter launched into a story about how the writers’ strike has helped Donald Trump in the past. There are many different perspectives from which this topic would be very interesting and I’m sorry to say but this was by far the worst of them all.

I understand that Vice must give a certain level of creative freedom to their reporters and must also consider a lot of variables when thinking about how to best present a story. But among all those ways to cover the story is also the wrong and untimely one. Had the question been about Donald Trump’s rise to celebrity, this would have been the right approach. But it wasn’t. It was about how the writers’ guild strike would affect people – viewers, writers, and those dependent on the writers to churn out scripts. The segment ignored all of them to focus on the one man who could easily not have been brought into the topic.

Vice also ensures that when we see a topic, we look at the money behind it. The report about bats and the white nose disease told us how bats save billions of dollars worth of crops a year. The report about Nollywood told how it is a $3 Billion business, instead of just focusing on the cultural aspect of it. The report about Bananas and monocultures showed us that depending on a single clone of a crop is just bananas. But when it came to the writers guild topic, they went off on a tangent.

Hopefully Vice will not make such editorial mistakes again. I love every TV offering by Vice and feel they really hit the mark every time. Which is why it’s irritating when they missed this one time.

Facebook’s biggest mistake with Snapchat

Facebook has a problem. No, not Snapchat. Snapchat is competition.

Facebook’s problem is SnapCreep. After failing to buy out their competition, Facebook has steadily been trying to steal the best (or worst, depending on who you ask) parts of Snapchat and integrate them into their own apps.

This invasion has been reflected on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and now the main Facebook app as well. But for all that work they’re putting into copying for their competitor, they’re rather unsuccessful in making it obsolete.

This is because Facebook doesn’t seem to understand that the markets they’re looking at are different. People who want the notorious features of Snapchat doesn’t want it in the same apps as they use to keep in touch with their high school frenemies. They want to keep those worlds separate. Similarly, people who want to use WhatsApp to communicate with family and close friends don’t want to post silly photo updates. They already use the camera functions rather well.

Facebook seems to think that it can meld certain features into existing apps and wish away Snapchat. But that’ll not happen because of the way these apps are setup and used. That’s Facebook making a big bet and trying to change the rules on the racetrack after the race has begun. WhatsApp is a cure for traditional SMS. Facebook is the social network of default. Instagram is photo-sharing on drugs (which is why people certainly seem to be taken by the daily stories features, but they’re loathe to use things like disappearing pics or face filters). All of these have set functions, set features and that’s why they sort-of go together. That’s also why Facebook has been able to integrate the users in all these apps together, though I do have a complaint about pushing the same users over to WhatsApp and Instagram as I already have in my Facebook lists.

Snapchat is a slightly different beast. It has a precedence, no doubt. Yahoo Chat, melded with Omegle. But neither the use case, nor the customer base lends itself to a traditional keep-up-with-your-friends social network. Which is why Facebook will not beat Snapchat by pushing similar changes to their current customers through these apps. They’ll only end up alienating smart users who have looked at Snapchat and notice the pattern.

Instead, Facebook needs to do something they’ve not done in a long time – start from scratch. Take a page out of Meerkat’s book (no Facebook, this does not mean go and buy that company) and build something from the ground up, the app and it’s user base. Let your experiments go under the radar, and fail often. But please, keep these out of the glaring view of the media and your own idiosyncrasies until it’s actually a product and not just patchwork.

Your problem with Snapchat isn’t that Snapchat exists, it’s that you’re trying to replicate it, without actually making the effort of building something new. The solution is clear to your users – go and build it. They might come.

[Book Review][Book Notes] A Room of One’s Own

I read this book, over the course of a month and a half, starting on July 1st and finishing it on August 13th, 2016. I read it because of the Bechdel test. I wanted to know the background of that idea. Woolf, unaware of the webcomic she would inspire almost a century later, gave a couple of lectures which are transcribed and expanded upon in this book.

I did not read the foreword of the book, for forewords are for and by editors. People do not need to know how to decipher the hidden meaning between the lines in order to enjoy prose. I dived directly into Woolf’s thoughts on the subject and her winding arrival at the conclusions presented in the book. There are things I agree with and things I slightly disagree with. My notes will say as much.

These notes are presented here, more for me, than for you. I want a record of the things I read and the thoughts I… thought… while reading this book. I hope to come back to this page often and review and revise my thoughts and notes.

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

“And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

Woolf notes a very curious thing – that food is rarely ever mentioned by novelists. She believes that luncheons and dinners are not just for the witty things said, or the interactions the characters experience. So she challenges that norm by describing the food she had at a particular lunch and the effects it had on her. But she had an ulterior motive to it – she wanted to show the almost pedestrian food women’s colleges had in her time, so as to show that even something as important as lunch is rationed and poorer than it would be for a men’s college.

p.11

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction.”

Oh, such a wonderful line, and so true. This book is technically marked as fiction (even though it is an essay and is thus non-fiction). Yet almost everything in it is fact, which makes it all the more wonderful. It reminds me of The Mezzanine, a book by Nicholson Baker, where he painstakingly describes a lunch break. That book too, is fiction, but it is almost entirely based on facts, which makes it a strange and wonderful read.

p.16

“All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword.”

A lot of my notes are just about wonderful imagery.

p.17

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Ah, another maxim.

p.18

(How to describe gossip)

p.19

“We burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex.”

That is the centrality of Woolf’s issue with the current state of affairs regarding women. They are indeed poor. Once the woman was pushed into the kitchen and the home, there was no need for them to have money of their own. Man became the provider of goods and money and that was where women lost so much power and control. It’s coming back, slowly.

p.21

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p.23

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p.24

“Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?”

p.25

“London was like a workshop. London was like a machine.”

p.26

“… the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.”

She’s talking about how long it would take her to read all the books written by men about women. Indeed, men are obsessed with writing about women, mainly to prove them wrong.

p.27

“les femmes sont extrĂŞmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que hommes”

translation – women are extreme, they are better or worse than men
Oddly, it is true. Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned. Yet, when women are better, they are infinitely better than men, as is proven often by the Indian school system.

p.29

“Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl?”

p.31

astrachan
Noun
  1. a fur of young lambs, with lustrous, closely curled wool, from Astrakhan.

p.31

“They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”

All those books written by men about women are worthless to a woman trying to study women because they are colored by the resentment those men have towards women.

p.32

On this page, Woolf feels angry towards the men psychoanalyzing and expounding on women. She feels that their constant categorizing of women as inferior is wrong and hurtful. So she rejects their theories outright and says that their books are worthless to her.

This should be our response to Western attacks on Indian religions and mythology. Ignore them and forge your own. If the framework to be followed has been defined by them, so be it. But instead of trying to explain their flaws, simply make your own assertions and let those stand the scrutiny of people. Add a new voice, instead of parroting their claims and then defending against them.

p.32

This page has a wonderful description of how Woolf sees the anger of men and we can see her anger rising in response to that anger. This is the face of feminism as we see it today. It is just anger, legitimate anger. But it is seen as anger. It is not seen as the just response that it is to the anger of men towards women. Why have men been angry with women for so long? Do they want no progress for women? Do they never want to see a woman have the morals of a man? Even that question puts women in the light of men and so, is wrongly put forth.

p.33

“The professors…were angry.”

p.33

“When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself.”

This is the key to what Rajiv Malhotra does and he is criticized even for that. Why should he not psychoanalyze the psychoanalysts of Indian culture? What gives them the right to do so but doesn’t allow him to do the same?

p.34

“Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token.”

p.34

“Life is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle.”

p.34

“There is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination.”

p.35

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

p.35

“…was not merely the cry if wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself.”

That is what men are most afraid of when a woman stands up for herself – that they will be suppressed by the simple act of her trying to define herself.

p.35

“And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority…over other people. “

This is the perfect example of how the British felt that they had the right to rule over the rest of the world. Frankly, raising this feeling in a people is very important for a country.

p.35

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An unintended consequence of feminism may well be that boys will actually mature, instead of growing up to be manboys who are mollycoddled by their wives as much as they are by their mothers. From this passage, it would seem that Woolf is trying to show how feeble men really are. They are emotional wrecks just waiting to happen. Well, bring about a culture of equality and men will have to learn to fend for themselves emotionally, maybe even learn to share their feelings with other men.

p.36

“How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?”

Man’s dominion over his home is as much a definition of himself as how he operates in public.

p.36

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.”

That is a shame and a blessing. Fools like Trump can easily control them for their means and men like Gandhi can rouse them into rebellion for the greater good. Can not a body of people each think for themselves? Not often. Man is a social animal, true, but an animal nonetheless. Animals think in packs and often, one animal’s flaws take the entire pack down a path of destruction.

p.38

“Moreover, in a hundred years, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

This is an interesting passage, for its predictions. Let’s see if they come true. Supposing this was written around 1927 (copyrighted 1929), the due date is 2027 and already, most of what Woolf writes about has been achieved by women.

p.40

“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.”

Such a sad plight – being the centerpiece of a magnificent story, but flung to the side as soon as a man arrives on the scene.

p.43

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This passage right here is what inspires me. It is not just the Elizabethian woman who faces this dire situation – that in which she does not record in her diary, or write poems and plays, or describe her house – it is also the everyman of almost every generation. My father and brother and mother and wife, none of them have a diary of their own. No means do they have of passing on any knowledge of their existence to our children. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are not going to be around forever and they do not suffice as records of our existence. We need more. We need to fall back on the traditional ways of recording our lives and we need to find new ways of telling our tales to our future generations. That is the only way that some time in the future someone, somewhere will have our names on their lips when they want to refer to our lives. That stranger is very important to me.

p.45

“Mary Russell Mitford”

What enmity did Woolf have to this woman?

p.45

“Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.”

People sure have never liked cats!

p.46

“Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

Beautiful use of hyphens.

p.48

“Ce chien est Ă  moi”

Translation – this dog is mine
Men wants to own everything, want their name on everything.

p.50

“The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of – Pericles”

Why is it that being talked of is as negative thing a thing as any? Why must men assume that if a woman is famous, she must be famous for the wrong reasons? Why do men assume that women are always pure and worthy and need to be hidden behind curtains? I’m watching a TV show nowadays with the missus – Criminal Minds. The protagonists work for the FBI and go around catching serial killers, child abductors and rapists. Almost always, if the villain of the episode is a woman – which is rarely the case – a solid reason is given for the woman to turn to crime – a lost child, a rape, a vicious trauma. Men, however, seem to want to kill and rape and destroy for no good reason. They are supposedly of the mindset to want to do these things. That is a rather wrong thing to assume.

p.50

“Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.”

p.50

“To write a work of genius is almost always a feat if
prodigious difficulty.”

Ah, so true.

p.51

“The indifference of the world which…men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. “

A genius man faces indifference, a genius woman, hostility. Almost as if the public asks, “Why must this man be smarter than us?” and then, “How dare this woman be smarter than us?”

p.52

“And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do. “

Is Woolf suggesting that Mr. Oscar Browning is having an illegitimate affair with a boy?

p.53

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That is the sad thing about bad things said by people about others – someone else down the line tends to use those words for their own purpose. Something I was reading recently, though I don’t remember the source – words are a weak source of information, because the person who writes them is not there to defend their meaning somewhere along the line. I think this was Socrates, critiquing writing as a means of knowledge transfer.

p.54

“Her mind must have been strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that.”

This happens even to this day and age. Actresses in India are asked to defend themselves in strong roles, or asked to comment upon someone else’s criticism of their art. The answer, ‘I have no comment’ is not accepted and reporters hound them for a comment. Why should a woman have to defend a good role? Why should an actor have to defend any role? Why is the answer, ‘let my art speak for itself’, not enough?

p.55

“Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone.”

What did Keats have on his tombstone?
Answer – “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”

p.56

“Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. “

p.56

This page is an excellent example of how a writer can copy down an entire work of some other author and thus have it live on, both in the original and in this form, so that if for some reason the former may be destroyed, the latter can bear witness for future generations of this wonderful writing.

p.59

“The adulation of the toadies”

p.60

“Mrs. Behn was a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage;”

p.63

“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

If you get it for free, you don’t appreciate it enough. Money gives it a stature, a dignity.

p.65

“This, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle class woman began to write.”

p.65

“Earn five hundred a year by your wits.”

This, more than anything, is Woolf’s appeal to women, according to my reading of this book – do not wait for someone to open that door for you. Go forth and push it yourself. Do not wait for an aunt to give you an inheritance. Earn that wage from your craft and you will suddenly have the freedom to be who you want to be.

p.66

“To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice.”

p.67

“She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.”

Woolf says that Charlotte Bronte wrote too much of herself in Jane Eyre instead of writing more about the character. This would be because Charlotte’s frustration with her life and its limitations would drive her to ‘write in rage’. It is important for the author to divest completely of their frustrations and issues and start afresh with their characters, because those characters are completely different people from the author and must be treated as such. Good writing advice.

p.69

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Excellent commentary about how we perceive novels as readers

p.71

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p.71

“what holds them together in these rarest instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honorably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth.”

p.72

“They wrote as women write, not as men write.”

p.74

“It was a flaw in the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.”

p.74

“It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. “

p.76

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Universities are funny places. They had odd rules in
Woolf’s time, such as – women were not allowed into libraries without permission.

p.76

“Habit facilitates success”

Now there’s a good quote!

p.76

“Sedulous
Slovenly”

Nice words.

p.76

“Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.”

p.77

“A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built into arcades and domes. “

p.77

“But these are difficult questions which lie in the
twilight of the future. I must leave them, if only because they stimulate me to wander from my subject into trackless forests where I shall be lost and, very likely, devoured by wild beasts.”

p.77

“There are Jane Harrison’s books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee’s books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell’s books on Persia.”

p.79

“It seems to be her first book, but one must read it as if it were the last volume in a fairly long series… For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

p.80

“…because novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand…”

Anodyne means painkiller.

p.80

“For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea in an open boat.”

Woolf is not kind to this woman author, and why should she be? If the expectation is to write with as much greatness as Austen, why should the average be tolerated?

p.81

We finally reach the discussion of the Bechdel test.

p.82

“This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle.”

I’ve never read any reasoning for a particular form of writing, any history of how and why a form of writing arose. But it is an interesting subject. Why, after all, are all our books still not great poetry? What spurred the invention of so many other forms of writing? I’ve never thought of that!

p.83

“The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women,” which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.”

Some class A behavioral analysis here, a la Criminal Minds.

p.84

“”Highly developed”-“infinitely intricate”-such are undeniably terms of praise, and to praise one’s own sex is always suspect, often silly; moreover, in this case, how could one justify it? One could not go to the map and say Columbus discovered America and Columbus was a woman; or take an apple and remark, Newton discovcred the laws of gravitation and Newton was a woman; or look into the sky and say aeroplanes are flying overhead and aeroplanes were invented by women. There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures, neatly divided into the fractions of an inch, that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter, or the fidelity of a sister, or the capacity of a housekeeper. “

That is no longer the case, thanks in part to Woolf. After all, women are leading in so many fields today.

p.85

“…and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.”

A change of pace and a conversation with someone with different cares in the world can do wonders to refresh your mind.

p.86

“Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity;”

Would Woolf be happy with the number of sexes we acknowledge today?

p.88

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?”

p.88

“For all the dinners cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children set to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie.”

That is what is truly sad about human life. It passes by without any record.

p.89

“Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting. “

Some more amazing writing advice.

p.91

There is a thinking here that Woolf believed in – that there is a collective consciousness which somehow improves as generations go by. She proposes to give Mary Carmichael another hundred years and she may well be a poet. I believe Woolf was both right and wrong here. She was wrong in that there is no collective brain to women or men or anyone else. The works of today’s authors are littered with terrible art, just as it is littered with amazing gems. Just like that, I’m sure there is at least one of Plato’s contemporaries who we do not know the name of because he did not write as well, and thus was not worth mentioning.

So Woolf was wrong in thinking that women in latter centuries would just write better – genius is not an arithmetic progression.

However, she was right too. She was right because the same issues and worries which affected the moods and writings of women in her era are not the same in this era. Women of today know nothing of suffragette, for example. They are beyond that and that will reflect in their writing. At the same time, there is still a long way to go. So today’s women talk about new struggles and pay equality and other things which color their lenses.

p.94

“One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favor of the theory that the Union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness.

Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous.

He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

p.98

“Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But… She has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I page after page very fast, feeling the crisis was approaching, and so it was.”

Clearly, the male-only mind has a problem – that of writing only about oneself. The hallmark of good writing is the ability to think and describe more than just yourself.

p.100

“…but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life. “

p.101

“They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.”

The problem with writers who do not try to understand and use their other side is that half the readership cannot absorb the writing as it should be.

p.102

“All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, before Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.”

p.103

“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex.It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”

p.104

“”This great book,” “this worthless book,” the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

p.106

atropos
Noun
  1. the Greek goddess of fate who cuts the thread of life

p.107

“We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into the intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.”

p.107

“That Is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have
had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress
on money and a room of one’s own.”

p.108

“There runs through these comments and discussions the conviction that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings. “

p.109

“…every speech must end with a peroration. “

peroration
Noun
  1. a flowery and highly rhetorical oration
  2. (rhetoric) the concluding section of an oration; “he summarized his main points in his peroration”

p.110

“…the streets and squares and forests of the glove swarming with black and white and coffee-colored inhabitants…”

p.112

“… If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality…”

p.113

“…and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”

p.114

Marriage

I woke up sweating three days ago. I had been having a very intense morning dream, in which I was constantly repeating to myself the following words – “I’m getting married.”

“I’m getting married!”

“I’m getting married!!”

“I’m getting married!!”

The idea had slowly percolated through my conscious to my subconscious and finally reached my dream state. I am now fully, mind, body, and soul, aware that I am getting married to Jahanvi, the love of my life.

I’ve tried to write this post about twelve times now. I’ve written something funny, sarcastic, philosophical, and even a treatise on bachelorhood as a gateway to marriage. But every time I wrote, I felt as if something or the other was missing. Deleted, revised, edited, no draft seemed to come close to the idea and tradition that is marriage. 

But when I woke up three days ago, I knew I had the instruction that I needed to begin. The final key to the puzzle, though, came a little later. When panditji sat me down yesterday with relatives, old and new, he explained what was happening here. As the mantra washed over me, the real import of this ceremony came to mind. The idea that this is a prayer, which talks about our lifetimes, which begs the blessings of everyone who surrounds us, and which includes the creation of bonds which we forge with our own hearts and minds, spoke to me of the strength of this undertaking. 

Up until it was only about the preparation of the marriage, or when I was with relatives who joked about life before and after marriage, and the effect of marriage on people, I felt closer to my community and to the power that those family ties hold. But as the venue and the occasion changed, I felt the power of the ties that I, with every offering, was creating myself. 

Marriage means in terms of the coming together of two people, two families, and two communities. But what it means to the people at the center of it is the coming together of two souls. That bond, which creates something glorious together, is what I’m feeling since the ceremonies started and which I’ll keep feeling for the rest of my life, because while I’ve seen Jahanvi as my beloved till now, I have now seen her as my self.