A few days ago I wrote that I want to make peace with the mundane. With that in mind, I decided to update the theme of my blog to a classic weblog format. The new theme is heavily inspired by jwz.org and simonwillison.net.

I have too many books, especially in digital form. Whenever a book piques my interest, I immediately seek it out, acquire it by any means possible, and at least read its table of contents. This of course results in piles of books that I will never manage to read. As my knowledge expands, the pile keeps getting bigger.

This is not an unknown phenomenon for knowledge seekers. Umberto Eco had a huge library, more than 30,000 books. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, describes Eco’s library as the antilibrary:

[Umberto Eco] separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know …. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

In this sense, your library defines the borders of your knowledge. As your knowledge expands, your library grows in size. However, not every inch inside the borders is under your dominion. To exercise control over them, one needs to see them like a state. Just like the sovereign state holds censuses and fractures the land into taxable portions, the antilibrary needs to be indexed and cataloged. Not every pile of books is an antilibrary; most are just decor signaling knowledge.

I have been thinking about how to make use of my antilibrary for a long time. If I put on my engineering hat, I come up with these requirements:

• Having an up-to-date index of all books with accurate metadata
• Ability to perform full text search on all books or a subset
• Ability to reference search results by exact location in the book

Index and metadata management can be handled by Calibre, while full text search is handled by Recoll. I’ve started experimenting with these tools, but I find the user interface of Calibre very clunky and the search results in Recoll hard to parse. The engineer in me wants to build. But I don’t want to be the guy who starts learning LaTeX to write his doctoral thesis and ends up with no thesis and still no LaTeX.

#lazyweb, do you have any suggestions?

the biggest news of this week was definitely the exhibition at OtonomArt. after ~50 hours of work, it was so exciting to put Syzygy on display. it was also thrilling to see my name as the artist on the label.

i’m glad i photographed the sculpture after every session so i could see the gradual process. now, looking back, i find it eerie to look at the first photos. i created this thing from mud with my bare hands!

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one of the most eye-opening videos on youtube for me was anna p. foxen’s exoticizing the impossible, in which she talks about a common spiritual failure mode where the practitioner, being overfocused on the extraordinary, misses the beauty in mundane reality.

i was thinking about this in the context of my relationship with my blogging. i published over 30 posts in all three of my blogs this year. it’s a feat that i am proud of. but i still couldn’t manage to eliminate the friction of writing and publishing. i believe the most important task of the creative is to eliminate friction in creating. maybe quantity doesn’t guarantee quality but lack of quantity guarantees the impossibility of quality for sure.

what’s blocking me from publishing more? the easy answer is lack of time. i’m a busy person with a demanding day job, political duties and ambitions, hobbies, a wife whom i care about… of course, it’s not easy to find time to sit and write. i need at least an hour to write a 600-word, low-effort post. the problem with this excuse is that i know i can find the time.

the real problem is exoticizing the writing. drafts are piling up waiting for me to read three books for each. i am trying to make an elaborate argument tying together jung, land, hegel, lacan while preserving my dignity by not producing utter bullshit.

in the meantime there is a vast world of blogs where people write a few sentences about an article they read or a link they found interesting. they might be mundane but who could say that they are not the building blocks of something bigger? isn’t this the point cory doctorow was making few years ago?

maybe it’s time to make peace with the ordinary.

One day late reflection on the previous week.

Last weekend was so busy that I couldn’t find an hour to sit and write a few paragraphs. Yesterday, we had a Mother’s Day dinner with my in-laws (where did the morning go? who knows!). On Saturday, I watched my first ever American football game. My hometown team, the Halcyons, was playing against the ITU Hornets. Unfortunately we got our asses kicked by the Hornets, but it was fun either way!

On Friday, thanks to my $employer’s FryDay policy where we have a 4-day work week once each quarter, I spent 6 hours in the atelier sculpting. One thing that always surprises me about sculpting is how physically demanding it is. I rarely fall asleep on the couch, and Friday evening was one of those rare occasions. I started working on a new piece: this time I’m doing an (all) female torso.

I think these are all the things I can mention in the life-updates category. But I also want to share some links:

• My wordy webring neighbor Martha started a substack. From time to time I also think about starting one to be more “discoverable”. It happens especially after writing something that I’m proud of, so it’s no surprise to see her announcement after this post. Then I remember what competing for attention felt like on Twitter and say “no, thanks.” Also, I don’t know when or how it happened, but when I see a substack.com link I start to have the same kind of bodily feeling as when I see medium.com.
• Ironically, I will share a Substack link now, but this is not a mere substack — this is Astral Codex Ten. Scott wrote about taste and art, which I find related to what I obliquely described in Oblique Art.
• Lastly, I really enjoyed this essay questioning the meaning of home by Mikhail Minakov.

Contemporary art is often criticized for being extravagant, farfetched or nonsensical. You might think of the paintings and movies of David Lynch, sculptures of Miquel Barceló or even the banana (Comedian) of Maurizio Cattelan. They are definitely strange and hard to interpret, and in Cattelan’s case, give the finger to Art as an institutional practice. I have no problems with this kind of art. I don’t think the artist owes me any meaning. Even if the artwork seems straightforward, it is still too easy to misinterpret. My sculpting tutor made a sculpture of an anorexic girl with a VERY visible vagina and still, people keep thinking it’s a male…

However, I do have a problem with contemporary artists’ lack of courage. I keep seeing (and hearing!) a lot of artworks that are not too abstract but too vague. As if the artists struggled to accumulate the necessary conviction to breathe something of themselves into the work. This obliqueness of art makes me so frustrated. It feels like the artist hides behind the foggy landscape of the present where meaning is either too atomic to be interpreted by anyone but the artist or too high-level for anyone to hold all its significance at once. It seems to me that oblique art is neither, but an epitaph of the artist’s cowardice.

Last week I went to a concert to listen to a violin concerto composed by a friend of mine. I’ve never had the chance to listen to any of his works. I had high expectations because of the praise I had heard about him and the overall aura of his very likable presence.

(He is not aware of this blog and I don’t think he’ll ever read this. E, if you are, I’m sorry.)

Then I heard the same obliqueness in his concerto.

Before the concert there was a pamphlet with a long exposition about the composition. I found it very odd because, of all art forms, music is the one that requires the least amount of exposition. Of course it’s not that easy to tell a story just with music, but it opens such a direct channel with the listener that the story does not need to be told for music to bloom into emotions.

Then it started. For a minute or two, the violin didn’t even make any sound. We waited awkwardly, watching the violinist sway and tremble while the contrabasses in the orchestra smirked at each other. After a time that felt like an eternity, we heard a few notes from the violin. It was a good melody! Alas, it didn’t last long. Then the orchestra started to hum a very ambient sound. Everything sounded like the white noise tracks I listen to while I read. This all lasted for almost 45 minutes; here and there, the orchestra abruptly made sharp noises which felt like jumpscares. At one moment, I opened my notes app and wrote “are we in a David Lynch movie?” to show my wife. The out-of-placeness of everything definitely felt like a David Lynch movie, but unfortunately not like watching one, but being trapped in one.

Sunday reflection on the passing week.

I charged my car battery! This might sound unimportant to you, but it was a big deal for me. My father was a handyman and I helped him a lot on different projects throughout my childhood. So in theory I have a good grasp of how to use tools. But it was not enough. One also needs to be willing to do this kind of stuff, which I was not. My experiences of doing projects at home with my father primarily taught me that a project never goes according to plan. There are always edge cases that lead you away from the happy path, and it’s always easier to hire someone else to be responsible for them. But more and more I feel like the immortal insight of Ozan Akyol, a Turkish comedian, is spot on: “You call an expert. They come and you immediately realize that they’re just another guy.”

Things didn’t go according to plan this time either. The charger I bought required the battery to be removed from the car. So I needed to find a socket tool for that. Then I needed to figure out how to use the damn tool. Then I needed to figure out how to actually charge the battery at home. Doing so was anxiety-inducing. Can it suddenly catch fire? Will there be acid fumes slowly destroying my lungs? My brain habitually overindexes on failure modes. I think this makes me a good engineer but at the same time prevents me from doing novel things.

Anyway, I did it. The car works now. I now know how to remove the battery, charge it, and put it back. I improved my practical knowledge by doing the damn thing with my hands. This is how you build phronesis, right? With this knowledge I’m better equipped for the future even if I decide to delegate the task to someone else¹.

I attribute some of this achievement to my practice of sculpting. Ten years of solely building in the digital realm didn’t help me grow confidence in working with my hands. But with sculpting I feel like I’m building this confidence. It feels nice.

Speaking of sculpting, my first real sculpture, Syzygy, is completed and due for molding and casting this week. I will exhibit it on May 16 at OtonomArt. I suspect (hope) at least one person is going to ask what syzygy means. The term has too many interpretations and usages—gnosticism, Jung, CCRU… I want to write a post here about it so I can be prepared to talk about it there.

If you’re reading this post and have means to be in Istanbul on May 16, consider yourself invited to the exhibition.

i decided to quit smoking on april 19 almost two months ago. i told my wife, my colleagues, my friends. the week before the 19th, i smoked all my cigarettes mindfully, knowing that i wouldn’t have this sensation soon.

on april 19th, i didn’t quit.

this post is now at a crossroads: i will either self-rationalize not quitting smoking by saying i have this or i have that, or self-flagellate complaining about my weak will or never-ending akrasia.

i’ve been smoking since i was fifteen. it was cool, relieving and connecting. it still is. smoking is always an excuse to get out of a crowded space and look at the sky for 5 minutes. it’s always a chance to talk with a stranger just by asking “do you have a lighter?”

so, why do i want to quit?

i’m worried about my health. i’m thirty years old now. not like i’m old, but i’m at the age where it makes sense to think about this stuff. 30 is an opportune age to quit smoking. but it looks like april 19 was not the opportune moment.

so, is this it? do i give up?

no. but i’ve learned enough about myself not to self-flagellate in these moments. i think i even enjoy self-flagellation. i will allow myself the time and space to stop. but there will be some changes.

first of all, i’m not going to smoke at home. at all. i was primarily smoking outside anyway, but i made it a habit to smoke in meetings. this stops today.

second, i’m not going to finish any cigarette that i’m not enjoying. sometimes i feel like i don’t enjoy 99% of the cigarettes i smoke in a day. if i’m not enjoying it, why should i smoke it?

we’ll see.

I was in Antalya, Turkey for the company offsite last week. This is a reflection on the past week. photo dump.

The worst type of leader is the one who needs to be the leader. The second worst type is the one who just can’t accept that they are the leader.

I’m a leader. Writing this fills me with dread because it sounds megalomaniacal to my ears. However, it’s true. I am a leader. I’ve been a leader for some time—I’ve been the technical lead of my team for the last three years. Although they had been calling me that for some time, I think I never really assumed it. I always treated it like a symbolic title that they needed to give me not because I deserved it but because conditions demanded it. Somebody had to fill the void, and no one else was going to.

Dunno what really changed but this year I started to feel I fit the position. It’s not like I had impostor syndrome and I finally got over it. I was confident with my technical abilities for quite some time.¹ I just started to feel comfortable with the idea of being the leader. This required a lot of convincing for my inner-anarchist who has zero trust for the symbolic capital of the title. My teammates have done most of that convincing by looking up to me and putting their trust in me. Another part was my peers, superiors, and customers, and this never-ending feeling of being the adult in the room.²

Last week was one of the most challenging weeks for my team. We needed to finish a pretty daunting release that required us to work long hours under great pressure. We were at the company offsite which required us to participate in a lot of meetings and discussions. At the same time, the team needed to finish the development and testing of big features for the release. We did it. I am grateful to have wonderful teammates who never hesitate to laugh under stress and never cease to support their fellows no matter how tired they are. And they shape me as well. It’s a dialectical process—just as leadership shapes the team, the team shapes the leader.

I’m writing this in haste before packing my laptop for travel. This will be a short one.

• The bust is finished! I’m calling it “Syzygy”.
• We finished A Knight of Seven Kingdoms. I loved it!
• We started watching the new season of The Boys.
• I talked about my recent inability to read in analysis. Unsurprisingly, I started reading again. I’ll probably finish the current read tomorrow on the plane.