El Desayuno

I’ve been doing the 30-day challenge on Easy Spanish which is taking place on their Discord channel. Each day of this challenge the moderators ask us to write a little text on a theme of their choosing. I’m finding that these writing exercises are really helpful at this point in my Spanish learning. Today’s challenge was to write a small poem about either a) your breakfast b) your pillow c) dessert or d) your toothbrush. I chose to write about breakfast. Here’s the poem.

Siempre frutas secas
Higos y ciruelas pasas
Albaricoques.
Nueces y granos.
Todos remojando durante la noche.

En la mañana muy temprano
Con fuego azul y olla fuerte
Cocino el desayuno
Y lo disfruto.

Zhuzhing Up Your Handwriting

It’s World Sketchnote Week (it used to be a single day) and I attended a couple of sessions yesterday. One was by a Graphic Recording colleague, Heather Martinez, whose fame as a lettering artist is well known in our field and who has taught me in particular a great deal about different lettering styles, effective for writing at speed and at scale.

Her session yesterday was more about spicing up your sketchnoting lettering, which is a much smaller canvas. But what struck me was that she seemed to think that joining all the letters — American cursive — is faster than other methods.

I remember reading Tom Gourdie’s Improve Your Handwriting long ago — I think I was still in college — and it is long out of print, though digitized versions are available through the Internet Archive among other places. One thing I’ve always remembered is his assertion that any handwriting that loses legibility at speed is useless. (Gourdie was a master of Italic handwriting as evidenced in the image. It has gone the way of the dodo in the UK as well as most other places; this book was published in 1978, when there was still some hope of improving national handwriting among British schoolchildren.) But to do this some ligatures must be lost — it’s not faster to join up the letters when to do so makes an awkward and lengthy detour.

I found the image at right where he is excoriating the Palmer method as illegible — though few people under 80 use it anymore, and indeed few American (or British!) adults under the age of 50 do anything at all that could be called “cursive.” Sigh. Handwriting is a useful skill in order to retain information, much more effective than typing. Get off my lawn.

Birding While Indian

I just finished Thomas C. Gannon’s book of essays, Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir. A riveting, erudite and surprisingly intersectional exploration of what it means to bird, what it means to grow up part-Lakota in ground zero of the white genocide of Native Americans (South Dakota), what it means to be an outsider in what is a very white (and progressively more expensive) hobby, birding. Gannon is an English professor in Nebraska and Foucault, Baudrillard and Derrida rub shoulders with field sparrows, black-bellied whistling ducks and dicksissels.

Many people are familiar with the Central Park Birdwatching Incident during which Christian Cooper, a black birder in Central Park during spring migration, was aggressively targeted by a white woman who called the police on him for asking her to leash her dog. He caught the incident on video and it went viral. This incident took place on May 25, 2020, on the same day as George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, and together these incidents shone a bright light on the extent of white racism in the United States, the fact of which has never been in doubt by neither Cooper nor Gannon.

It is uncomfortable to have this light shine on your face. Yet shone it must be, in this era of ICE raids of people being targeted simply for looking the way they do (remember “Asian During COVID”?).

Leyendo Con Dos Gatos

This morning I went into the bedroom to finish reading Sapiens in Spanish and found our cat Esme ensconsed on my side of the bed, so I settled into the other side of the bed to read. As before, Winston our other cat then entered the bedroom to investigate, hopped up on the bed, and started dozing on my chest. I managed to finish the book while holding it above Winston. I wanted to get through the book so as to add it to my tally of books read in 2025.

This has been a successful experiment in reading a substantial book in Spanish. Reading is another form of comprehensible input in language learning. It is not necessary to understand every word for reading to be beneficial, but one should be getting the gist of what the writer is saying. I will adding other books in Spanish to my reading list from now on.

Leyendo Con El Gato

A friend of ours included the sticker at right in a small Christmas gift bag she delivered today. This was fitting considering my afternoon.

Our Christmas and Thanksgiving tradition is to feast on Indian takeout for an early afternoon lunch. After the lunch (I had a chana saag thali plate) I go off to the bed to read more of Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens in Spanish. After a little while Winston, one of our cats, shows up, investigates, and settles in to doze on my chest. This is very nice — reading while snuggling with a purring sleepy cat. Winston is not as snuggly as our other cat Esme, who often comes back to sleep on me after her breakfast at 5 AM, and it is special to have a nap with him.

Sign of Error

A month ago (back when we had sun) I was walking by the old church associated with the Newman Center near the university and noticed a paperback book stuffed into the empty bulletin board box in front. The book was Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

I have not read this book, though I’d like to. It is a classic work of French history about the lives of the inhabitants of a small village in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the 14th century in the wake of the suppression of the Cathars. The history is based on a set of records set down by the Inquisition (the Fournier Register) between 1318 and 1325. Historiographically the book was a famous study from the Annales school of historians and was an important example of writing microhistory. I do not know if the person who placed the copy in the display case was making a commentary on the inquisitorial legacy of the Church.

Sapiens En Español

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens in Spanish translation for language practice. This was inspired by Andres, one of the guides on Dreaming Spanish, doing videos on the book chapter-by-chapter. He is up through chapter 7 now as am I. Sapiens was originally published in Hebrew so if I were to read it in English it would still be in translation.

This is the largest book I’ve tried reading in Spanish to date. So far it’s going well — I don’t understand every word and don’t try to look them all up but I’m certainly getting the gist of his arguments. So far it is a very good popularization of an extremely wide sweep of human history but I don’t think it’s nearly as groundbreaking as a couple of books I’ve read in recent years with a similar theme: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and James C. Scott’s Against The Grain.

Most of the books I read are history books so it makes sense for me to look for some in Spanish to read too. I’m thinking Eduardo Galeano might be next?

Transcribing Catalan With My New Workstation

Thanks to the Easy Languages folks, I learned the power of target language subtitling of video content in language learning, and this has been a big part of my Catalan studies. The Easy Languages approach is to do double subtitling e.g. for Catalan this is subtitles in both Catalan and English. But it is also very helpful to watch videos that are singly subtitled in the target language, e.g. Catalan subtitles for Catalan video, and I have watching these where I can find them. The YouTube channel Català al Natural does this specifically for language learning, and as I’ve described earlier I have watched many episodes of the TV series El Foraster this way.

But most of the Catalan content on YouTube has no subtitling available, which limits its utility to a beginner in the language. What to do? I came up with a plan for adding automated subtitling to the video content, and tried this out yesterday with much success. The workflow is as follows: a) download the YouTube video to my workstation b) run speech-to-text software over the audio channel of the downloaded video and c) add the transcribed text as subtitles as one watches the video stored locally.

This approach came together very easily using my new workstation. The details are as follows. First, I used the program yt-dlp to download the video from YouTube. The next step is the speech-to-text conversion. I used Whisper here, which I believe is the best open source speech-to-text converter, at least that is what I gathered from working with the AI institute a year-and-a-half ago. This is software from the belly of the AI beast, coming from the company OpenAI. It is multilingual, and Catalan is one of the better performing languages in the software. The output from this program consists of transcribed text with timestamps. Finally, I watched the video in the program Celluloid, which turns out to be smart enough to take the text-with-timestamps and overlay the text on the video as subtitles at the right times.

It greatly helps the accuracy of the transcription not to have to do it in real time, as the software can take advantage of looking at the language context around the current timepoint to produce a better transcription. My new workstation is very helpful here, having a graphics card with 12 GB of VRAM memory. It still takes a while: it was transcribing at a rate of about 4x real speed (that is, a 12 minute video was taking about 3 minutes to transcribe). The output seems very good, though as a beginner in the language I am not the best one to judge.

I tested this system today with a couple of recent videos from VilaWeb, and was pleased with how it helped. I might try experimenting with double subtitling a la Easy Languages, since I think that is supported by the video playback software after some fiddling.

Loving Handwriting (Again)

Calligrapher Tom Gourdie wrote in Improve Your Handwriting that any handwriting that deteriorates at speed is useless. I remember working through his book when I was at university in the UK — basically he was advocating for a monoline italic, where some letters are joined but others aren’t, depending on where they sit in the word — the aim always being efficiency/speed without sacrificing legibility. (This is different than the cursive children are/were taught in the U.S., where every single letter is supposed to be joined up, a legacy of Spencerian/copperplate and modified and developed into the Palmer method, now largely discarded as students, if they write by hand at all, mostly print.) My own handwriting was transformed under Gourdie’s gentle prodding and I still write like this; in fact seeing handwriting from when I was at school is jarring to me now.

There is nothing like the tactile pleasure of writing with a good (not necessarily expensive) fountain pen on good, smooth paper. I am a fast typist. I am also (undiagnosed) ADHD, and could type out complicated philosophical ponderings while thinking about my shopping list. Writing by hand slows down my monkey brain and demands sequential thought. (When word processors came into common use in the late 1980s, the average length of book manuscripts went up by a third, at least those submitted to the Harvard University Press where I used to work; when cutting and pasting is easy, people do it instead of thinking through their ideas beforehand.)

Various studies have shown that there is different cognitive process between writing and typing, and that writing wins the cognitive battle, as described in this recent paper:

Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.
bq. —Marano et al., “The Neuroscience Behind Handwriting: Handwriting vs. Typing — Who Wins the Battle?” (Life (Basel), February 2025).

There’s more, of course. I recently realized that most of the jobs I’ve done in my life can already, or will soon, be done by artificial intelligence, a sobering thought. I have already disengaged from popular social media outlets because my drawings, such as they were, were being used without my permission to train AI. I am in no doubt whatsoever that every key stroke I make is somehow being monitored, studied, and spat out into an algorithm for something. So far, they haven’t figured out a way to track what I’m writing by fountain pen, though there are certainly pens available that can convert handwriting to typewritten text as you go.

Zettelkastening Away

I am almost a month into my project of writing into a Zettelkasten and am quite pleased with how it is going. When I initiated it I didn’t know where to start so I just began with an article near the top of my Vivaldi browser reading list and took notes on it. I think this first article was an excellent piece in The Guardian by Shaul Magid entitled The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. From there the following themes have emerged in my Zettelkasten note-taking:

• American Jewry following the Gaza war
• The rise and fall of the nation-state
• Post-growth economics
• Neolithic history.

So how do I get to taking notes about Neolithic history? Thinking about Zionism leads me into pondering the nation-state — I need to revisit what Hannah Arendt has to say about nation-states in The Origins of Totalitarianism — and in turn I discover a piece from 2018 by Rana Dasgupta also in The Guardian entitled The Demise of the Nation-State. Dasgupta will have a book coming out next year on the same theme, and he put together a related reading list for the upcoming book.

The first book on Dasgupta’s list is Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by the political scientist James C. Scott. He makes the argument that when agricultural grains emerged in the Neolithic as a major food source, they proved easy to tax and this led to the first states being coercive rather than voluntary assemblies. Anyway, I read Scott’s book in the middle of October, put it aside, and last week I decided I had better take notes on it for the Zettelkasten before I return it to the library.

It is a much bigger project to take notes on a book than an article and I need to work out the best methods for doing so. It will depend on the book of course: for Against the Grain I am proceeding chapter-by-chapter. But I am astonished with how much more I am retaining when I write down notes rather than just reading the book and moving on. And the ideas from books can lead in so many directions.

When Pica went to Berkeley last week my stepmother suggested that Pica write a book as a memoir. And she thought that I should write a book as well. I am a long way from knowing what such a book would be about, but I can now confidently say that Zettelkastening is the way to get there.