Knowledge is more than a Google search

Google, Wikipedia, and the internet are so great for learning – it’s an external brain, a vast repository of knowledge. For dates, Latin phrases, names, movements, and so on, the internet is astounding. I remember being an undergraduate student struggling to read Barth’s theology and its many terms and Latin phrases, and being so lost. The internet would have provided such a resource for me! Alas, it had not been invented yet.

The great temptation of the internet, though, is to use it as a substitute for our thinking. I see this in so many places – in student writing, public school curriculum nights, and people’s general attitudes. Knowledge has become more of a resourcing than a comprehending and communicating. Public school teachers give us website resources (that then mine us for data). Sunday School teachers show clips from the internet. Students turn to the internet for help in writing papers (we did a version of this, when we as students started a paper with a quote from the dictionary or the encyclopedia, but those resources were much more limited!). While the internet as a resource is not wrong, it is wrong when it substitutes and overwhelms our own thinking and expression. It’s wrong to just use the internet because we are lazy.

The trick is, when are we overusing the internet? That’s a hard line to define, as with many things. It’s why it comes down to taste, which is not just personal taste but a common understanding. We have to develop a good palate for the internet, for its judicious use and quotation. There’s a point where it overwhelms us, just as there is a point where the icing overwhelms the cake. It’s about balance, and education is partly about learning that balance, to have that proper sense of taste. When we are using the internet’s knowledge as a substitute – when we are cribbing from it – then we have gone too far.

Ulysses is a Massive Writing Rethink

What If

Ulysses is a brave, massive rethink of text and writing.

What if all your writing projects were in one place, searchable, viewable, and in sync across all devices? It means that, instead of endless Word documents in various folders (that you have to open and skim to find what you’re looking for), everything would be a simple, clean text file, instantly searchable, in one central place. You can use folders and tags to organize the files.

What if you weren’t tempted to fiddle with fonts, spacing, and formatting, but just worked in simple, unformatted text? Then you couldn’t be distracted by creating paragraph and text styles, and applying them. You could apply a text style with a simple code and keystroke, and move on.

# This could be a header.

> This could be a block quote.

All my various writing projects: class notes, manuscripts, sermons, blog posts – could be in one place. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Ulysses has a way around this. With nested folders and keywords, the database can grow with time while still being manageable. (Over time, it may get a bit crufty with all the files, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ulysses adds some archive sections and capabilities in the future.)

A Clear Focus

What I love about Ulysses is the careful thought that went into it. Many useful things have been rejected, because they aren’t part of the app’s clear purpose. Ulysses isn’t an everything storage system (like Evernote and others). You aren’t going to put PDFs in there, or extensive research notes, or to-do lists. This is just your writing, all in one place, with simple formatting codes. The only thing it’s missing is TextExpander support. For those intimidated by Markdown, Ulysses has simple instructions on the characters and syntax of the system. It also has a dropdown menu to help you if you need a gentle reminder. Do note that Ulysses has its own flavor of Markdown (as do many other applications and systems), so it’s not going to copy into or out of another system in the same way. You may need to learn Ulysses’ slightly altered system.

What about Scrivener?

Scrivener is so great, so powerful, and I truly love it. But Ulysses shows its brilliance in eliminating the distractions. Scrivener is so powerful, and so fiddly, that it’s very easy to get distracted. Further, the rich text editor can get a bit annoying with style changes, highlights, and so on. I find that I have problems with line spacing, or finding features, or having too many document and project notes that create chaos. While Scrivener is more powerful, Ulysses is more focused.

A few years ago, Ulysses didn’t seem appropriate for academic writing because it didn’t support footnotes. But now it does, and I think it will work fine for manuscripts and articles (if you need tables or fancy arithmetic formulas, then you need to look elsewhere). Ulysses’ sync is far superior to Scrivener. I have found Ulysses to be solid with synchronizing everything, despite iCloud’s previous bad reputation. While Scrivener uses the more respected and robust Dropbox sync, it’s also a bit ornery: “do you want to sync now, or later?” it asks, and then shows a sync progress bar that you must wait for. I have had 2 sync errors pop up. While Scrivener did a great job of notifying me and setting the conflicting files in a folder, it meant I had to go and compare the questionable files to the original ones, which is tedious and unnerving. Plus, I couldn’t find any differences! (I have had the same problem with OmniOutliner, which has reported sync conflicts, saved and named the questionable files, and yet I could find no differences). While Scrivener’s system sounds more reputable (since it auto-reports and saves conflicts), it actually feels a bit more stressful, since you are alerted to problems that require comparison. If it ran the comparison for me and highlighted the differences I would feel more confident, but it seems to put the onus on me to find the problems.

Scrivener does have a great research section in its database, which is a feature that Ulysses is missing. But I respect that Ulysses simply refuses to even deal with that. It’s so easy to pile on in Scrivener all these things that require later sorting and evaluating, and Ulysses simply says, like Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” You can have sheet notes and attachments, but that’s about it. Ulysses keeps it simple, and expects you to figure out your own system for research, which could include many different solutions.

Buying and Learning Ulysses

Ulysses is part of the recent movement to paid software subscriptions, like Microsoft Office, TextExpander, 1Password, and DayOne. Ulysses is forcing a subscription, even for those who bought the app in the past (those customers are offered a discount on the subscription). While a cognitive shift for consumers, it’s a sensible response to an era of cheap software. As a child of the 1980s, I remember software being hundreds of dollars per application. The idea of great apps that are easy to find, purchase, and install online for less than $5 (less, given inflation) would have seemed ludicrous back then. Paid subscriptions, while adding a tremendous cost over the lifetime of an application, is the only clear way forward for programmers and designers.

I did enjoy The Sweet Setup’s online class. Like Ulysses, it is tremendously focused and clear. There’s nothing in the class that you can’t discover yourself, but the presentation and production are so high quality and crystal clear, as well as inspiring, that I do recommend it. I found it invaluable; it felt like I was cutting to the front of the line in terms of understanding Ulysses.

Massive Writing Apps

Scrivener and Ulysses are examples of writing applications that are very different from your usual text editors such as Microsoft Word. They do not stress layout, tables, or other word processor power elements; instead, they focus on text that can be outputted in various ways, depending on your needs.

Scrivener and Ulysses are really something like massive writing apps. They allow you to create projects with multiple sub-documents and, in the case of Scrivener, various file types as research. This is useful if you are creating a book, novel, class, series of lectures, and so on. Everything can be in one place, easily editable, instead of switching between various files and folders.

You can sort of get this effect with folders, but it’s not nearly as fluid or simple. If you use a folder and want to move a section from one chapter to another, for example, you would have to carefully work with 2 documents, switching between them. (Scrivener has a really handy “append” feature for this, by the way.) It’s hard to see the various sections in relation to one another, because Word is oriented around the single document structure. It doesn’t work well with a large document with many sections that require constant navigation.

You could also use Evernote or a similar app that allows for multiple sub-documents, but it’s not a great writing environment for polished material. It doesn’t have pagination and footnotes, for example.

Scrivener and Ulysses are so interesting because they are a genuinely different way of writing, as they consider the scope of the project from the outset, and allow for the creation of these sections of material, such as chapters or sessions.

The raw power of Scrivener and Ulysses to hold lots of sub-documents is part of the challenge to using them. It’s very easy to throw lots of ideas into them, and pretty soon the project is unmanageable. Speaking from experience, this is a terrible temptation and problem. Like a good to-do manager, you should keep the project as lean as possible; just because you can add nearly infinite amounts of data does not mean you should. Be circumspect with your ideas and notes, or be prepared for several days of cleaning up.

Book Review: Alan Moore’s Jerusalem

Jerusalem is Alan Moore’s crazed love letter to his life-long hometown of Northampton, England. The massive novel spans much of the town’s history and colorful characters, framed within a particular family across many centuries, an extended vision of the afterlife, and an art show.

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It is useful to compare the novel to Moore’s earlier novel, Voice of the Fire. Both novels focus heavily on vignettes (many chapters and characters are episodic, like individual comic book issues). Both novels focus on Northampton and its ancient and modern history, larger than life characters, the importance of language, characters walking a geographic space and ruminating deep thoughts, and the odd inter-connectedness of things in time and space. Jerusalem goes further in many ways, as it experiments with poetry and drama, and there is a larger plotline connecting Jerusalem that Voice of the Fire does not attempt.

Jerusalem is apocalyptic; it reveals a hidden reality and a hidden truth, that forces are at work to make Northampton (and, presumably, every place) into something redemptive and empowering, despite the realities of poverty, poor civic leadership, ignorance, drugs, and violence. Moore is a long observer of his hometown, and painfully traces its decay and desperation in modern times. As a hippie, he yearns for the creativity of the 1970s and even earlier centuries, for visionaries such as William Blake. He raises thoughtful critiques of modern economies based on this neutral concept of money, the way the poor are consistently downtrodden and without a voice, and the struggle of being artistically creative in such a world. (Moore bravely digs into identity politics, pointing out that it’s always done from a place of privilege, and the poor do not have the luxury of such identities and politics.) All things are deeply connected and never truly lost, which is part of the theme of the book (and an idea he explored in Unearthing, as well as with Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen). This idea of eternalism is significant given the novel’s repeated concern is urban blight and renewal, which destroyed Moore’s own childhood home.

Jerusalem is rooted in a visionary dream, like Dante and Blake. For Moore, there is a higher, Einsteinian plane of existence, outside of our four-dimensional space-time, which enables his larger plot of angels, invisible connections and structures, and the afterlife. But was it all just a dream? There is a feeling of being cheated, that one has spent so long in this upper world that may not exist at all. With all the time the novel spends in the afterlife called Mansoul and the work of the angels in constructing Northampton’s connections to Blake’s heavenly city of Jerusalem, I did expect the novel to climax with some sort of apocalyptic battle, or a final building of Jerusalem that would manifest its hidden realities and bridges. But Moore oddly abandons that ultimate cosmic vision and angelic builders, leaving the novel’s climax with the art show and more current characters. It feels a bit limp after the grandeur of the middle part of the novel; while dabbling for so long in the supernatural and the cosmic, it turns sharply prosaic.

The opening chapters are really lovely prose, evocative and meditative. The larger middle section of the novel dealing with Mansoul and the terrific, mischievous childhood gang (the Dead Dead Gang) are gripping, as is the pun-ridden, linguistic insanity of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s mentally ill daughter (“Etes clare tlu ci dottthe-haws missintentified her”: It’s clear to see that he has mis-identified her, p. 893). There are great chapters in different voices, such as a sad, lonely political villain, a deranged actor, and a homeless ghost. There are great elements of forgotten history, including Northampton’s first resident of color, the deathmongers who delivered babies and prepared corpses for burial, the Destructor incinerator, the Northampton castle, council flats, and the linguistic nuances of the Northampton. The glimpses into Moore’s mind are engaging, with lots of presumably autobiographical material. Moore has been a writer for some 40 years, with periods of commercial success with DC Comics and then quieter years as an independent writer, and characters such as Alma Warren and the struggling poet Benedict Perrit trace his struggles to be creative despite resistance, Hollywood, and urban decay. These are fascinating glimpses into his own mind and thoughts on his art.

One of Moore’s consistent interests throughout his career is in words and language, in his understanding of magic as creative linguistic possibility. He has experimented with language before, as in the Voice of the Fire where he writes as a neolothic settler, and he returns to some of these themes here. Language, like magic, imagines reality, constructs reality, and it is language that is the true magic and the true magical power. This shines forth in Mansoul, with its odd turn of phrases (where once must learn to talk anew), and with Lucia Joyce. Moore is a gifted writer, with a tremendous capability for beautiful prose.

The novel has its frustrations. Physically, it’s an unwieldy book to manage, with small print and thin paper that does not make for the best experience (the 3-volume paperback edition may be better in this regard). The cover is fantastic, considering Moore drew it himself and it reflects people and stories from the book, but it’s small and difficult to see; I think it would’ve worked better as the frontispiece across two pages. At times there is a lot of over-explanation, as the mechanics of the afterlife are established (one can travel through time in the afterlife, which enables Moore to explore the history of Northampton through his characters). At times, it does feel like many of the characters are simply mouthpieces for Moore’s own political and economic thoughts. There are similar conclusions spoken by various protagonists about the failures of the modern world, and it all ends up sounding like Moore. There is also a strange moral laxity amid the pages, as Moore wants everyone to be forgiven everything. Yet then where is the basis for Moore’s moral outrage against grasping politicians, the destruction of the Northampton castle, and the constant oppression of the poor Northamptonians who live in the Boroughs?

Jerusalem is a terrific, long read, and one that is fun for new and old Moore fans. It’s not his best work, which is to be found in From Hell, Providence, Watchmen, and The Voice of the Fire. But it is Moore being a mature Alan Moore, thinking deeply about our world, its complexities, its violence, and its losses.

Jerusalem
$20.21
By Alan Moore
Buy on Amazon

Technology is a Means, Not an End

One of the many things that Apple gets right is putting technology into people’s hands to achieve things. We see this in their ads, where people are exercising, making a video, capturing special moments with someone else. The technology is not front and center, but ancillary to the human moments of family, friends, and creating something. There’s that emotional connection that so many feel to their Apple devices, and we get those sorts of connections in great commercials like this one.

You can see the difference in other technology advertisements. The people in ads from Spectrum and Verizon seem lonely, cut off, or distracted by technology. They are in a room with other people, but they are wearing headphones, or they are immersed in a screen by themselves. They are not sharing, connecting, or creating, but escaping. This is what Apple wants to avoid (even if it happens in real life, in restaurants and all sorts of places where kids and adults are tuned out).

I see the difference in the Apple Store as well. Apple employees never demonstrate the technology for you, for example. Instead, they get you to engage with an iPad or MacBook, and let you discover and connect with the device. In contrast, when I was at the Microsoft Store last year, the nice but geeky employee quickly commandeered the Surface Pro from me, and then demonstrated what all it could do. This left me feeling marginalized and helpless. The technology wasn’t empowering me or gaining my confidence, it made me feel small, the way technology in the 1980s and 1990s often did for many people.

Apple has made a conscious shift away from manuals, a technological elite, or a demonstration model. Instead, the focus is on engagement, discovery, fun, and empowering our creativity. This is part of why Apple products, and the Apple Store, are simply fun. Their empower us, as a means to an end, and not an end in and of themselves.