Scrabble as a Cooperative Puzzle

 For as long as I can remember, my mother and I have played card games and board games together, and we've always done it wrong.

Q. What happens when you get two highly non-competitive people to play games together?

A. Everybody wins.

Well, actually nobody wins, but we're okay with that.

Take Scrabble, for example. I understand that you are supposed to pay attention to the numbers on the tiles and the scores written in the squares on the board?

Yeah, we don't do that. We just try to get every letter on the board in the most interesting words we can think of. If that means occasionally using a foreign word, onomatopoeia or initialism, so be it. It's not so much a "game" with a "winner" as a cooperative puzzle. Often, by the end of the game, we'll even turn around the last few tiles so we can all see them and work together to finish the board.

For games where the "winner" is the first person to do something ("you've played out all the cards in your hand! You win!") we'll often just pick up another hand of cards or tiles and keep going. There are still pieces left to play - why would you stop just because someone theoretically "won"?

Our least favourite games are the ones where you basically have to stop when someone wins. So boring.

I don't know if we started doing this because my mother wanted to teach me that winning isn't a big deal (and thus I shouldn't be a sore loser), or if it's actually my fault that we do this because I just wanted to keep playing until we ran out of pieces.

Either way, it's a habit we fell into many, many years ago, and it's my preferred way to play games. This makes it very difficult to play with other people. They care about winning and all that crap, which is incredibly dull. I care about whether I can sneakily get three different spellings of a homophone onto the board.

If you've never played Scrabble as a cooperative puzzle, you really should give it ago. When it's a team sport and everyone is on the same team, it really does change the dynamics of the game completely - for the better I think.

But if you're a competitive person, you probably shouldn't try playing a game with me. I'll lose just for fun, which tends to really annoy people who are genuinely trying to win.

I'm just calling Luxembourg "Idris" from now on

I've started reading City of Bones, and I'm not sure I can cope with the level of stupidity shown by the characters... and maybe the author.

Let's ignore, for a moment, the "plot that is furthered by people doing stupid things" and look, instead, at geography.

According to an early conversation "Idris" is a country that is between Germany and France that "Mundanes" don't know exists. And "There isn't a country between Germany and France, except for Switzerland"...

So "Idris" is Luxembourg? And "Mundane" is just something rude we use to refer to people who lack a basic knowledge of geography?

The argument can be made that a particular character has a terrible grasp of geography – especially if it's the American character. Everyone in the world is happy to accept that an American character would struggle to remember European countries exist. Most of us are pretty sure Americans can only name three European countries at any given time – and sometimes one of those is Genovia.

But when the other character in the conversation supposedly comes from that part of Europe, you'd expect them to say "well, actually, there are a few countries between France and Germany. There's Belgium, Luxembourg, Idris, Switzerland and then Genovia. Perhaps you might wish to purchase an atlas?"

The fact that the guy from Luxembourg... sorry, Idris, said "oh yes, you're right about there being nothing there – but my magical country is the exception!" just makes be think it's the author who might require an atlas.

This is after the "plot furthered by stupidity" thing already made me want to slap people. Look, I don't care how old you are, teenaged people – if you walk into a room that has clearly been freshly ransacked, you should have enough nous to think "I wonder if the bad guys are still here?" and shut up. Just shut up and stop drawing attention to yourself.

I'm only five chapters in. I asked a friend at work today if it gets better, and she said "nope – but the grasp of geography improves slightly". I don't know if continuing with this book will make me more accepting of the stupidity and I'll be able to suspend disbelief, or if I'll just end up flinging the book across the room (which would be awkward, because I'm listening to an audiobook on my phone, and both my phone and my headphones are too expensive to fling).

(And, yes, I know: Genovia is between France and Italy, not France and Germany. I was taking liberties for comedic effect.)

The Creativity of Weeding

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When I was studying to become a librarian, I had a part time job as a signwriter’s assistant. A big part of my job – actually, I would say it was one of the biggest parts of my job, was a task called “weeding”.

Weeding involved getting rid of any material that wasn’t part of the sign. I’d carefully strip away the excess vinyl that wasn’t part of the design, so that only the actual design and words were left. Everything else was extraneous. Unnecessary. In fact, if we didn’t get rid of the material we weeded, it would render the sign useless. You wouldn’t be able to see the design or properly read the words.

When I became a librarian, I soon learned that a task called “weeding” was a part of that job, too. Items that were too old, were in poor condition or hadn’t been used enough were earmarked for removal from the collection to free room for new items – or to create spaces for our patrons to use for various purposes (sometimes, in a library, empty space is more useful and more valued than books).

As a liaison librarian in a university, I was only tangentially involved in the weeding process. The resources team had a series of criteria for works that would turn up on the regular weeding spreadsheets. My role involved checking items that had been marked for weeding to see if they needed to be kept or replaced and occasionally scanning through the collection to find superseded editions that were too old to keep, even though they were too well used to turn up on the lists.

While weeding was less central to my role than it had been when I was a signwriter’s assistant, it was still central to the ecosystem of the library. As a team, weeding was a big part of what we did – and an important one. In order to keep the collection healthy, vibrant and relevant to our patrons, we had to have a “healthy” weeding programme.

As much as people freak out at the idea of a library getting rid of books, it’s the same principle as weeding in the signwriter’s workshop – or even weeding in a garden: you have to take out what shouldn’t be there so that it doesn’t detract from or obscure what should be there.

A good library isn’t full of books no one is using. There are some libraries that keep works for historical reasons, and we all work together to make sure we don’t throw out the last copy of something – but we don’t need to keep a book that no one wants to read. And we shouldn’t keep a book that no one wants to read, because a) it will make it harder to find a book you *do* want to read, and b) it means we won’t have space for the new books you might want to read.

But this post isn’t actually about weeding in libraries, it’s about weeding in general.

I briefly mentioned gardening a moment ago. Over the past few years I’ve been getting more interested in gardening, but I don’t come from a gardening background and (between work and family commitments) I keep stupid hours, so I don’t really have the time or know-how to get as into gardening as I want to. Most of the time I’m lucky if I can find the time to weed.

This has been a source of great frustration to me, because I’ve never really seen weeding as gardening. Weeding is a chore – a task. Gardening is a creative process. Weeding is taking plants away, while gardening is about adding plants and growing them… isn’t it?

A few weeks ago I looked at my overgrown and shaggy garden and realised that gardening is a lot like sculpture – the carving-figures-out-of-marble kind of sculpture. To butcher an old adage: you carve a sculpture of a lion by taking away all of the marble that isn’t a lion.

I suddenly realised that a large part of good gardening is weeding (and pruning – which is a kind of weeding, if you think about it). Yes, by all means gardening involves planting and designing, but to a large extent it involves carving away anything that isn’t the garden. Weeding isn’t just a chore that we do because we don’t like weeds. Weeding is something we do to make our gardens “intentional” spaces. We take out what isn’t part of the garden, so that the garden can be revealed.

Not too long ago I read a book written by a Zen garden designer. Now, when I say “not too long ago”, I mean “long enough ago that I’ve forgotten what that book was and who wrote it.” However, I do remember that it was written by someone who designed gardens for Zen Buddhist temples, and I remember that one of the pieces of advice that he gave was to go into the garden and think vary carefully about what needed to be removed. Do you need to sweep the paths? Do you need to prune this particular branch of that particular tree? Do you need to cut the grass over there?

There *is* a kind of creativity in weeding.

When you walk into a space and think of it as a sculpture, you ask yourself, “what needs to be removed so that what remains is improved?” This is absolutely a creative process, and one that can be done with only a few minutes to spare here and there.

It’s also a process that can be applied to so many aspects of our homes, workplaces, jobs and activities. In every domain of our lives, we could benefit from a bit of careful weeding. What is getting in the way of this space being better? Can you see the intentional design, or is too much of what is unintentional getting in the way? Can you strip away something extraneous and unnecessary to improve what remains?

On Essays, Features and Columns

I'm currently reading a book that is touted as a "collection of essays". 

It's a book I had to put down and come back to, because I bought it thinking it was one kind of book, but it turned out to be a different kind of book, and I had to wait until I was ready for it. You have to be in the right headspace for books, or they just don't work at all.

When I bought the book I was working off a brief description and the title, brief author bio and the description of the contents as "essays" made me think it was going to be the kind of non-fiction book where you learn information about a topic. Perhaps one of those books university lecturers put out that are assigned to students in courses to make sure someone buys them, although they're really just a researcher's love letter to their field of research.

Once the book was in my hands, though, I realised the real clue to its nature was in some of the blurbs on the back cover that didn't make it to the website I found it on, and the description of the genre above the barcode: Creative non-fiction, which tends to get appended to the more autobiographical side of non-fiction.

The book (Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, by Linda LeGarde Grover) is a collection of memoirs that touch on wider (but very personal) themes. It reads like a collection of "slice-of-life" columns from a "smart" magazine or "literate" newspaper – you know the kind, the ones that are written for people who might also read the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. I noticed one of the "essays" actually referred to itself as "this column", and I've since learned she does write columns for the Duluth News Tribune, so perhaps quite a few of them started their lives as "columns".

I'm not complaining – I love columns. They're usually my favourite part of a magazine or newspaper. Heck, sometimes they're the main reason I buy that magazine. And the "creative non-fiction" books I most enjoy reading are the ones where most of the chapters started their lives as columns. This book was accidentally right up my alley (I'm also really enjoying it) – it just wasn't what I was expecting when I bought it, so I had to wait until I was in the mood for the book it actually was.

But it has me thinking about the way we use the word "essays". 

As an academic librarian who teaches into workshops on how to write essays for university, my first thought when it comes to "essays" certainly isn't magazine columns. Nor is it short stories (that happen to be non-fiction), or feature articles, or memoirs – but all of these things are described as "essays" once they get into a book that's for sale to the general public.

The word "essay" contains multitudes (as you can see if you look it up in Wikipedia), and I know that both Stephen Jay Gould and David Sedaris have their works classified as "essays", even though they are very different genres... except that they aren't. Both Gould and Sedaris were columnists, and many of their collections started out as columns (Gould in Natural History magazine, Sedaris in The New Yorker).

The genre I teach people to write is an "essay" – but it has absolutely no resemblance to the genre I read when I pick up a book of "essays". The latter is mostly things I would think of as feature articles and columns.

But while I would have been a little closer to the mark in my assumptions about Grover's book if it had been described as a collection of "columns", the words "feature article" and "column" contain multitudes as well. They can be wildly and widely different from each other.

All of which makes it hard to see the word "essay" or "column" and know what you're going to get.

I feel like we need better words to describe non-fiction of this kind. More subgenre terminology out in the world. I used "slice-of-life" above, but that's just my personal way of describing a piece in which the columnist tells me about their own lives.

You know the publishers of magazines and newspapers must have terminology for this, as it's their bread and butter (and when you go looking specifically for "types of columns", there are plenty of options). They'd know exactly what the tone and genre and audience is for X as opposed to Y. But when those articles find their way into a collected book, what does the book-buying public get to see? "Essays".

What is the point of an abridged book?

I was looking for advice on how to do a decent abridgement of a book, and I came across a blog post in which the author (A.S. Thornton) was asking why abridged books even exist. She felt reading abridged books was a bit of a cheat, and wanted to know what others thought. I tried to leave a comment on her blog, but Wordpress was uncooperative, so here are my two cents:

I used to be all "abridged books are for literary wimps and losers!", but I also used to think the same thing about audiobooks. I'm now an avid audiobook listener, and I'll sometimes read an abridged book if it's available. One reason is that I'm a fan of short fiction, but hardly anyone writes novellas for a popular audience (this is picking up a bit more with self publishing on Amazon and their "quick reads"). And, let's face it, a lot of books would make very strong novellas, but make pretty flabby novels. This is especially true for a lot of classics that were originally written as serials back in the day – the authors were trying to make the 19th Century version a TV series, and there's a lot of filler. The story really does benefit from having a few subplots or rambling descriptions of moorlands removed.

Another reason is that my attention span is garbage these days. I want to know the story, but I know I won't even start the book if I have to try to get through the whole thing. I work in a "word-heavy" job, and sometimes by the time I get to read for pleasure, I'm at a point where books pitched at second language learners are closer to what my brain can deal with. Which brings me to another plus point about abridgements: they're often easier to read for people who have English as a Second Language or trouble reading for some other reason, so it makes the story (and "reading" in general) more accessible.

But I think the main reason abridged novels exist is because the 20th Century was pumping these suckers out for a mass market. Remember, the average reading level of the general population is around 8th Grade, and people are looking for a quick read while they're taking the train to work or sneaking in a few pages between putting the kids to bed and going to bed themselves. They want to know the story of Robinson Crusoe, and they *want* to read... but ain't nobody got time to read the actual novel. The first few chapters of the unabridged version are an absolute slog, and it's easy to get moored. So time poor, book hungry would-be readers will gladly read the shorter version, and the publishers will gladly make it available for them.

Speaking of moorlands, I have never been able to get past the first couple of chapters of "Wuthering Heights". I once borrowed the abridged audiobook version of it to see if that helped, and it didn't. I still couldn't get past the first few chapters. Which just goes to show that a book can be abridged and still keep it's "natural charm".

The freedom of limitations

 

Photo by Gaelle Marcel
on Unsplash

When I was a child my mother and I made regular trips to the local library to change our books.

At that time the library had a number of limits placed on borrowing: you could only borrow ten items at a time, and you could only borrow them for two weeks. You could, of course, renew the items you hadn't finished with (provided no one had placed them on hold), but there were limits to the amount of times you could do that, too. If I recall correctly, you could only renew something twice before you had to bring it back in.

So we had a regular day when we would go through the library and pick the 10 things we wanted the most. If there was anything we hadn't finished before we went back to the library for our next visit, we had to think carefully about whether we wanted to keep it for longer (and thus have even fewer new books to choose) or call time on it and look for a better book.

When most of the books I borrowed were picture books, I'd chew through those quite quickly. As I progressed to longer books, it started to become more of a challenge to finish the books I borrowed before the next library trip - but the limit of 10 books always meant there was a fighting chance I would be finished with everything I actually cared about before our next visit.

Then the borrowing allowance increased, and so did the borrowing time. At the same time fines were removed, so there was less incentive to actually pay attention to due dates.

Like most voracious library users, I saw this as a good thing, but I realise now that the old restrictions gave me something that the "new" freedoms took away: focus.

To be honest, the old restrictions weren't a burden. They didn't restrict the number of books you could read or finish. Just the number you could have on your "To Be Read" pile at any given time. At any time, if you wanted more books, you could get them. You just had to bring back the ones you were done with first. The whole library was still your playground. Just with more structure.

When you can only have 10 items at any given time, you think about what you actually expect to read this time. You think about what is most appealing to you. You think about what you're going to read next.

Now the current limits in the public library are 25 items for 1 month, which doesn't seem like a lot extra, but it oddly is. It's more than enough rope to lose track of what you have and how long you've had it - and more than enough to encourage me to borrow a book in case I get around to reading it (which I might not). And since they don't have any real consequences for ignoring the due date, I'm less likely to notice when it's due (yes, I'm the kind of person who needs incentives to make my brain pay attention to things). 

The library I work in (which is a different library) is worse. Staff and students can borrow unlimited books which automatically renew an unlimited number of times (as long as no one requests them). I realised, at one point, that I had almost two shelves worth of books that I had checked out to read "at some point", which I had barely looked at for months - some I'd had for years. When I looked at my account recently, I noticed that I had checked out a book in 2019 that I still haven't finished. It's just sitting in my house, waiting for me to get around to it.

When the sky is the limit, what's to keep you from floating away?

As I have been going through my house trying to wrangle it into some kind of order, I noticed a large part of the "clutter" that was weighing on me was the number of books that didn't belong to me that I had to get around to reading so I could return them.

So I've recently started to impose my own 1980s borrowing limits. I'm a little over (I currently have 11 books from each library), but my goal is to only ever have 10 items on loan from any given library, and to return them by the due date without renewing them (it's going to be tricky with the autorenewals, but we all need goals).

To help me focus on only what I actually think I have time to read, to give myself the incentive to borrow only what I most want to read "next", and to stop filling my house with books that don't belong to me, I'm going to take away the "freedom" that my libraries have given me and go back to the limitations they so kindly removed years ago.

Perhaps the limitations will set me free...

All That Can Be Contained: A Book Reflection

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(This is Part 3 of a group of book reflections about the same book. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.)

As you may recall from the previous posts in this series, I've recently listened to the audiobook version of Decluttering at the Speed of Life, by Dana K. White (read by the author).

One of the central tenants of White’s book is something she calls the Container Principle.

The Container Principle is both incredibly simple and obvious, and deeply profound. I suppose most fundamental principles are, whether they were discovered by a monk in a remote mountain cave or a mother of three with a clutter problem.

The Container Principle states that any given container (be it a drawer, a cupboard or your whole house) has two fundamental aspects – two things that make it a “container”. The first is, obviously, that it holds things. The second is that it limits what can be held. It contains, in multiple senses of the word.

We have a tendency to forget about that second aspect. We keep trying to put more into our containers than they can hold, but you can’t really do that. If you try to put more into a container than it will hold, you will put the container and everything in it under stress, which could lead to damage. Or it will overflow, and everything will spill out, and then gets out of control.

White’s definition of clutter (and I am very much paraphrasing at this point, as it has been several weeks since I listened to her book and I can’t remember the exact way she phrased it) is something that is out of place, out of control and causing stress. If it has a place to be, but it’s not in that place, then it is clutter in this place where it isn’t meant to be. If there isn’t a place for it to be, then it’s just clutter.

If it doesn’t belong, it’s clutter. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Things that are spilling over the confines of their container are, in a very real sense, out of place and out of control. When your threshold for this kind of clutter maxes out, you find yourself under stress. It’s very likely that the “things” that the container is supposed to hold are also under stress (you can’t squish too much into a given space before something gets squished), and the container might very well be under stress as well.

When the stuff you're trying to fit in the container gets beyond what the container can hold, then the best and most sensible thing you can do to make sure things are properly cared for and don’t get damaged is to scale back so that you only have what will fit in the container.

Take it all out and evaluate it – as a whole, and in relation to everything else you wanted to put in that container. Don’t just look at each thing on its own and say “I want this”, look at each thing in relation to all the other things and say “I want this more than that”. Prioritise the most important, the best, your favourites – these go into the container first.

When the container is full, everything else that isn’t already in the container doesn’t fit. It wasn’t a priority, or it would already be in the container, and therefore it doesn’t have a place. It doesn’t belong in the container. So, if it doesn’t belong, it’s clutter.

If you want to avoid putting the system under stress, you have to be able to accept that you can’t keep everything all the time. If this thing that doesn’t fit isn’t more important, more loved or more useful than the things that are already in the container, then it has to go. And quickly – don’t leave it to become a burden.

Whenever you think of adding anything new to that container, you have to consider it on a “one-in-one-out” basis. Is it more important, useful or loved than something that is already in the container? If not, don’t bring it into your life. If it is, then the less important/loved/useful thing has to go.

You might think the obvious solution is to get a bigger container, but space isn’t infinite. A bigger container for this means there’s less space for something else. If you dedicate a second drawer to hold what doesn’t fit into one drawer, then you have less drawer space for what would otherwise have gone in the second drawer – you’ve moved the problem, you haven’t solved it.

White was talking about drawers and cupboards, but many things in our lives are containers.

Time is a container. Your mental or physical capacity is a container.

Any given container can only hold so much. You can only do so much in a day. You can only make so many decisions. You can only keep on top of so many tasks.

It’s harder to see these containers and their capacity (and certainly a lot harder for other people to see them and respect their limitations), but it’s actually quite easy to tell when they’ve been overstuffed and can’t hold what you are trying to contain: they are under stress, over flowing and getting out of control.

If you get to the end of your work day and you feel you have to stay back and keep working because you could not do everything you “had” to do today, then there is too much in your work day. It spills over and puts the system under stress. There are only so many hours in the day, so if you spend more time at work, there’s less time to spend doing all the things you “have” to do at home. You have a smaller container to try to fit your domestic tasks into. And so that spills over and takes time away from unwinding so you can get some rest…

So of course you feel like your days are overflowing and you have so many things you couldn’t get done today. You’re trying to fit too much into your day, and there are limits to what your container can hold.

If you find you are doing this every day, then there’s a bigger container issue at play. You’re trying to fit too much into something else. Perhaps your job has too many tasks to complete? If it’s more than you can do in the time you have available, then it’s too much work to fit into your job. If the “job” is supposed to fit all of this work into it, but it doesn’t, then perhaps that job doesn’t fit into your capacity – it doesn’t fit into your life.

We don’t like to think about this – we don’t like to admit it. We think we should be able to fit these things in, so we refuse to accept we can’t. We think we need to keep cramming stuff into the container until the container finally grows enough to accommodate all of it.

But that’s not how containers work. There are limits to what they can hold. If you keep pushing them beyond their limits, something is getting damaged, even if nothing obviously breaks.

So we need to look at everything we’re trying to fit into that container. We need to see everything in terms of whether it is more deserving of a place in that container than something else. We have to prioritise what is most important, most useful, most loved. And when the container is full, we have to be willing to say “there is no place for this – it wasn’t a priority and it doesn’t fit.”

And then we have to find a solution to that which doesn’t involve us continually trying to cram it in. Something that leaves us with enough space in our lives that we can actually enjoy what we have, rather than stressing about what is overflowing.

We also have to look at every new thing in relation to what is already in the container, and be honest about whether it’s more valuable to us than something that is already in there. Then we have to let something else go.

And that’s the hardest thing, I think. We’re so used to pretending we can do it all; we struggle with admitting we can’t and telling people that this is beyond what we can do. Also, we know everyone is in the same boat – everyone is stressed out trying to fit it all in and do all of the things. For some unfathomable reason we see that as a reason for why we should keep struggling, instead of realising we’re all making a mistake.

What if…

What if we gave each other permission to only do what we can – to stop trying to cram in more than our containers can hold? What if we gave ourselves permission to do this, and extended this kindness to everyone around us?