{"id":14205,"date":"2024-04-02T17:56:53","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T17:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14205"},"modified":"2025-03-08T09:22:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T09:22:46","slug":"containers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/04\/02\/containers\/","title":{"rendered":"containers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">[shakes fist at sky] give me the containers<\/p>&mdash; Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1774847973572403621?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 1, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>i\u2019ve had a puzzle that\u2019s been bothering me for about as long as i\u2019ve been writing<\/strong>, though maybe i didn\u2019t begin to properly discern it until about midway through. there are a few ways to describe it. one is the framing problem. how do you choose what to put into the frame, and what to leave out of it? what goes in the background, what goes in the foreground? how big or wide should the frame be? this can also be described as an <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1077735976468832256\">information architecture problem<\/a> \u2013 george orwell said every book is a failure, fran lebowitz said words are easy, books are not. annie dillard said &#8220;every book has an intrinsic impossibility&#8230; the problem is structural; it is insoluble&#8230;&#8221; \u2013 so if these authors struggled with it, i\u2019m not realistically expecting myself to somehow solve it. i suspect it\u2019s more of a tension to be managed. some of the past ways i\u2019ve tweeted about this are, \u201ccurrently my creative challenge is to figure out how many things to say in how many containers\u201d, \u201ci care disproportionately about how a bunch of words fit in some container\u2013 whether it\u2019s a tweet, a blogpost, or a book\u2013 changing the container changes the dynamic of the experience\u201d, and \u201cI think the thing that keeps causing me pain at every scale\u2026 is figuring out the correct number of containers to divide things into. too few containers and you have one massive blob. too many and its chaos.\u201d A sidenote thought I had while writing this was, \u201ccan\u2019t this be simplified into simply asking, \u201cwhat should I write?\u201d\u201d And I think the answer is yes\u2026 but the devil is in the details. I have a lot of answers re: \u201cwhat i should write\u201d in terms of pure subject matter. The challenge is answering \u201c<em>how<\/em> should I write\u201d. I might indulge myself here by thinking of myself as a chef of a restaurant\u2013 the answer to the question \u201cwhat should I cook\u201d can be simple or complex. Simply, edible food, great food, delicious food. Or we could talk about ingredients\u2013 pasta, steak, cocktails\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>the challenge goes beyond the thing, to the making-of-the-thing.<\/strong> for example, each day is a container of time, and within those 24 hours there are subcontainers\u2013 the next biggest meaningful one is \u201cwaking hours\u201d which might be 16 hours or so. I started writing this after getting in bed at about 1:45am. It\u2019s now 2:03am. This is somewhat risky business. I can afford to spend maybe another 30 minutes, maybe 1 hour tops, before I start risking not getting enough sleep, which wouldn\u2019t have been a big deal a year ago, but is now more consequential because I have a 5-month-old baby to care for, and it would be very unfair to my wife if i can\u2019t show up properly for my share of that care because i\u2019m sleep-deprived because i was up writing all night. so i\u2019m mindful of that container of time while I write this post about containers of text. looking back, even when i had seemingly \u201call the time in the world\u201d, i was often mistaken, naive, arrogant in overestimating how much actual time i had. I\u2019d keep pretending like i was someone who didn\u2019t get tired. And the problem with that is that if i start work without accounting for the fact that i\u2019m going to get tired, i inevitably end up at the point of exhaustion with all of my work in a tangled state of mess. and then i\u2019m too tired to untangle it. a lot of this would be solved with better \u201csignposting\u201d. This directly contradicts what I was talking about in <a href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.substack.com\/p\/resonance-over-coherence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">resonance over coherence<\/a> \u2013 I\u2019m basically saying that I oughta be more coherent-as-I-go. Here too is another tension to be managed. I do think it\u2019s possible to get better at both things. They might seem like they\u2019re in conflict, but they don\u2019t actually have to be\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i was thinking recently of doing an overview of my creative output, and it occurs to me that i can do a sketch of that while talking about containers again. i\u2019ve written two books, though i\u2019d say the first one wasn\u2019t \u201creally\u201d a book so much as it is a collection of essays and twitter threads. i was sort of stitching together something resembling a book, but it\u2019s not really a book. the second book is a real book. what\u2019s the difference? in my view, a real book is a cohesive reading experience from start to finish. which isn\u2019t to say you can\u2019t be incoherent or fragmented within it, but those fragments have to cohere in their incoherence. how do you tell the difference? i\u2019m not sure i can actually explain that one very well. i can feel it. <strong>&lt;the grammar of tweets:&gt;<\/strong> when I write a really good twitter thread, and i copy it over into a text document, it instantly feels weird. because when i write tweets, i\u2019m mindful of how each tweet feels as a standalone piece. i\u2019m mindful of how it feels as part of a feed someone might be scrolling through. there is a pacing and a grammar to that. once the text of those tweets is extracted from the context and moved to a blank page, it suddenly feels \u201coff\u201d. the pacing suddenly feels stilted and forced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>cont\/\/ I\u2019ve written in many different contexts. I used to enjoy posting on forums, where sometimes you can \u201cwin\u201d by writing something really short, quippy, clever, surprising, and sometimes the big winning move is to write something really thorough, with formatting and citations and links and footnotes and so on. I also recall quite fondly that I used to sometimes write facebook status essays when I was on the train commuting home from work\u2026 here\u2019s one that I remembered to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2016\/12\/04\/perspective\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">copy over and tag on my archives<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i\u2019m getting sleepy so it\u2019s probably time for me to start wrapping things up\u2013 i don\u2019t think i\u2019m going to publish this now, but i seem to have made a thing that\u2019s worth expanding on. it occurs to me that i could point at jeremy mann somewhere and i could also talk about artful incompleteness somewhere<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Containers (2024apr20)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>sometimes i feel so nimble and dynamic when i\u2019m tweeting and then I open up the page of my drafts for my substack and I kinda freeze up. i feel like this is worth saying, in case anybody thinks both things are equally effortless for me. (if it were, I would be publishing substack essays at a much higher frequency. sometimes it can be, but it doesn\u2019t happen as easily.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>apr2024: why do I freeze up? Because\u2026 It\u2019s not clear what the container is\u2026 it\u2019s not clear what the intention is\u2026 what the context is, what the purpose is, who the audience is. is it just for me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>2024oct15: There are many ways to talk about frames. One is containers. Growing up my parents ran their own business. They had a home office. They had a whiteboard. Dad didn\u2019t have a boss, no promotions, no vacations. They had an office phone even in their bedroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think this shaped me both nature and nurture. To this day age 34 I don\u2019t really know how to partition my days. Now I have a baby so he takes precedence for a lot of things&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2731&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>my projects are not well scoped (0830)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-1-000-000-words-by-visakanv wp-block-embed-1-000-000-words-by-visakanv\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"1LUb0YrdLK\"><a href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0829-0830-snippets-and-drafts\/\">0829 + 0830 \u2013 snippets and drafts<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" title=\"&#8220;0829 + 0830 \u2013 snippets and drafts&#8221; &#8212; 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" src=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0829-0830-snippets-and-drafts\/embed\/#?secret=Fr76dU1uHY#?secret=1LUb0YrdLK\" data-secret=\"1LUb0YrdLK\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>i\u2019ve had a puzzle that\u2019s been bothering me for about as long as i\u2019ve been writing, though maybe i didn\u2019t begin to properly discern it until about midway through. there are a few ways to describe it. one is the framing problem. how do you choose what to put into&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[810],"class_list":["post-14205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-infotecture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3H7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14205"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14555,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14205\/revisions\/14555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}