This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: There’s no book about right now, referring to the fact that all the books about children’s development have either been written 25 years ago or are written by people who have read the books from 25 years ago and they presume that children have much more freedom than kids have today.

The show title refers to math being God’s Cursive or God’s language because everything is built on math and God doesn’t even speak English.

The audio starts with a 3-second riff of the song Kashmir by Led Zeppelin. John starts the show by singing ”Caribbean Queen” and Merlin replies ”Sharing the same dream” (from the song Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean).

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Accents and pronunciation (RL419)

They shortly talk about the pronunciation of ABBA which is not English like Moog. John doesn’t say ”aunt” or ”ABBA”, but he says ”Moog” because he doesn’t want to seem dumb. Merlin recommends YouTube videos by a linguist and dialect coach for actors and he helps them get very specific. He could teach Merlin how to do a specific Yorkshire accent. There is also a guy who does every UK accent, and friend of the show David Vane (?) has one where he does every New York City accent. This guy just concluded a big 3-part series of accents of America (probably this one). For friend of the show John Siracusa the center of his life is correcting people on how they pronounce things.

John believes that his and Merlin’s English is the English as she is spoke (reference to OM340) because it started in England and migrated to various places all around the world and it kept getting better and better as it moved West until it reached Seattle, San Francisco and Anchorage and that is when it reached its apotheosis. If you go all the way to Hawaii i has gone too far because it is coming from the other direction. Even a bit further out like Neah Bay and Bremerton is where English found its highest expression. The further back East you go, he more primitive the American accents are, think about John Siracusa’s language!

They have a lot of listeners in the United Kingdom and their assorted colonial properties, their principalities. They shake out like when you shake out the bed clothes and all of a sudden there are crawdads in the bed, except in this case it is UK and ANZAC listeners. Some call them crayfish.

Merlin enjoys the specificity of words and he has learned that choosing the wrong word when you mean something else has consequences. He goes around about this with a beloved person in his household, but if you understood what he meant, then you don’t need to correct him. John Siracusa corrects him that certain words have to sound different, like merry, marry and Mary, but Merlin is from Ohio, a place where everything is a homonym, while Siracusa is from Long Island where they learn English from guys who are working on Cameros.

In some High Schools the football coach was also the history teacher. In Merlin’s High School he was the driver’s ed teacher, and in 11th grade he had a very incompetent man who said that the Native Americans will get 2/5th of the land or 40%, whichever is more. He was the JV Football (Junior Varsity) coach. He kept the mimeographs for the tests where he knew people could find it when he went to get coffee. Back East the football coach is the English teacher, which is why they have such a terrible accent.

The spirit of the law vs the letter of the law (RL419)

At the house where John lives he talks a lot about the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Like Merlin was saying: Are you listening to the story or are you trying to find where all the rusty nails are in the story. John is trying to impart that the spirit of the law is not more important than the letter of the law, but you just have to know which one you are talking about. The evolution of that now is to include storytelling and interpersonal things because the spirit of the law also encompasses stuff like: What is the point of this story?

John’s daughter getting into the next level of reading (RL419)

John’s daughter being bored by harder books that she started to read

John’s daughter just turned 10 and he likes that she always wants to be right a little bit. It seems that she is in the doorway to more interesting reading and John is lucky that she has always been a reader. He introduced her to many of his favorite things, all of the graphic novels, comic books, and adventure stories. She is very Star Wars, but that is another conversation. At 10 was the moment where adults got suspicious of John’s reading and started to ”challenge” him by throwing him hard books to see how he will like it, almost as if his reading is something that is fucked up about him that they needed to plumb the limits of.

Merlin’s daughter once had to maintain a reading journal which he did not agree with at all. Don’t worry, the kid is reading! Ken Jennings said the same thing that as long as they are reading it doesn’t matter what they read. John’s daughter is a skimmer and John reads every word, he is a slow reader and always was. If he sits down with a book he is on a long slow walk and he reads every word and he reads a lot of sentences twice or three times, he really spends too much time with the words. His daughter has been he other way from the beginning and she is looking for the meat of the story and all the exposition is just: ”Blah blah blah!”

As her books have gotten more complicated he would ask her at the end of the book what it was about and she will sketch out the story, but as he asks a few more questions it doesn’t take long until you get to a place where she didn’t get or skipped over that part of the book. Merlin runs into this right now with TV shows. Now she started to push back a little bit as she walked into the next level of books and she says that the books are boring and nothing happens. She is used to reading a whole giant spectrum of books where on every page someone fights a dragon or Everyone has superpowers or everyone is running away from home.

Part of the fun of reading is the reading. The words aren’t simply something to get through on the way to having the most skeletal spark of the story which is super-easy to digest. In order to have the satisfaction of the words you have to read them for their own sake, which John is struggling to explain to her. It is not that he wants her to read A Wrinkle in Time (by Madeleine L’Engle) and she just wants to read Adventure Time comics. John didn’t have graphic novels when he was a kid and she has grown up reading graphic novels.

Merlin has the Archie family and the Harvey family, because a parent-approved comic is not going to be a Dark Knight (The Dark Knight Returns) or a Watchmen. They also didn’t have one targeted at pre-teen girls, like Braces, where characters have real-world problems and when somebody is surprised there is an interrobang (‽) instead of two pages of explaining how their emotions were. The visual media does a lot of the heavy lifting. Even reading Beverly Cleary the words have to do the work.

Will kids figure it out by themselves or do you have to push them in the right direction?

John doesn’t want to bee a nooge, a parent who is telling her that she is not reading right, but he does want to help her making this transition. Ken Jennings is just like: ”Whatever”, he is the same way that Jonathan Coulton lets his kids do whatever they want on the Internet, they will grow up to be fine, the screens in his house were like ash trays were in Merlin’s house. John has known a lot of adults who are compulsive readers, but at a certain point they arrested their development in terms of what they wanted to read and they stopped somewhere comfortable.

In our culture if you are reading it is assumed by most people that you are smart and that they are doing well and you can leave them alone, but you can make that choice for yourself and a lot of people are now: ”This is what I like, don’t yuck my yum, I want to read Louis L’Amour books for the rest of my life and when I get to the end of them I read them over and that is what I want!” Watching her John realizes that he has to be partners with her on this and part of his job is to continuing to talk about the challenge that one book is harder to read and harder to enjoy than another book until you decode the language of reading it.

Merlin implies that if you are reading a book by Cormac McCarthy you are not just there for the story, but you are also there for the insane language, which is even true for Stephen King in some cases. Merlin blames some of this on the history of things like SRAs (?) where reading is a quick skills challenge and you get a badge. A lot of people are super-annoyed byt the way Kurt Vonnegut writes, but it really hit Merlin at the right time when he was 16 and he loved his repetition and all that. It is the same as with some movies and TV shows: Merlin could tell you the story or even the twist, but it is still not the same as watching the movie. You have to disappear into it and see how the story is being told, and that is the most challenging part. How do you keep a kid excited about what comes next without making it seem like eating your vegetables.

Eventually you go to college and someone asks what the author meant by this and you are either excited to ask and answer that question or you couldn’t care less. At 10 years old you are not even really conscious of the author as a participant and John has been trying to introduce the idea to his daughter that not all authors are reliable and not all words on a page are true. One of the reasons why Merlin loves Absalom Absalom (by William Faulkner) so much is that each chapter seems to be told by a different person who has a different P.o.V.

When John was watching his daughter at 6 years old he was concerned about things that by the time she was 8 had resolved itself. But reading habits matter so much to John and have made a difference in his life. It is very hard to go back to 10 years old and have any conception of what his relationship was to books other than that he relied on them and he was there with them a lot of the time. It was right around that time in 5-6th grade where he realized that Watership Down (by Richard Adams) is not just a story, but there are other things happening and it was more interesting than he was prepared for.

Reading is not just a thing that you do instead of sports, but it brightens the corners and turns into your life. It is one thing to sit with her and teach her to carry the 9. John has a friend whose daughter at the age of 12-13 the word math made her fall on the floor and cry. Merlin was panicky of word problems for most of his childhood and that is what did it to John’s friend’s daughter, too. What have we done in life that a thing like math that is so native to the world, it is God’s Cursive, everything is written in math, it is the only language he really speaks, he doesn’t fucking speak English, he doesn’t need to speak. ”Paulie might have moved slow, but it was only because Paulie didn’t have to move for anybody” - ”Oh, Paulie… won’t see him no more” (quotes from The Godfather). Somehow we have turned it into hot coals under fingernails.

Teaching kids the wrong way and turning fun things into a chore

John’s kid has just started to say that word problems are a nightmare for her, while John loved word problems, which might be why he had so much interpersonal success in his life and why every relationship has worked out, because he loves a word problem. The word part of it is the hard part and once you decoded that it was usually an easy math problem. For John it was: ”I can decode words! I am not fooled by your fooling foolage, adults! Let me show you how easy it is to decode your dumb sentence!” In a couple of tests John corrected the grammar on a word problem as a component of solving the question. One time John found a grammar error in an Iowa Basic test and he had to convince the teacher, he was that kid.

Most people who do stuff with kids do generally have good intentions. There are people who hit their kid with good intentions. Our own hangups seep through every page of these books and we are trying to help a kid avoid some kind of crash or terrible oversight that we ourselves either didn’t or just barely survived. Kids can read our anxiety way better than we think, maybe as good as a dog. They know what our hangups are, and if we get too wound up trying to bandage our old wounds we create the opportunity for a new wound on that kid. Teachers browbeating Merlin’s daughter about filling out her reading log turns reading into something she got punished about. Grown-ups with good intentions do a lot of really dumb bullshit based on their own neurotic behavior.

It is exactly what John is afraid of. One of he triggering events that had them take her out of public school and put her into Montessori was that she went to read a book in her class and the teacher said she couldn’t read that book because she had read it already and had filled out the form about having read it and she had to read another book. The teacher had already become powerless. This wasn’t her choice, she would let her read it, but somewhere up the chain the George Bush administration doesn’t want you to read it twice. John’s daughter wants to read a book 3-4 times, partly because she skims it and she can read it again. John’s mom is like this as well: She has read The French Lieutenant’s Woman 15 times.

teaching his daughter to ski, to play piano, and to ride a bicycle

John does not teach his daughter how to ski anymore because he was too invested in it and she felt his frustration, just like his dad used to over-coach him. But he had to teach her how to ride a bike because nobody else was going to do it and he wasn’t going to be able to hire it out and let the neighbor do it, and it was a real problem between them for many years and it took her a long time to learn (see RL377). He had tried every thing imaginable, but a year ago yesterday she finally learned to ride her bike and he had put it in his calendar because it was such a momentous occasion and from that point on she was a bicyclist and it was the greatest thing in her life. A couple of days ago they bought her the first bicycle with gears.

It is the same thing like with John and piano: They said he didn’t like piano lessons, so if he ever wants to learn it he will do it some time when he cares about it, and he did and he plays the piano like a person with six thumbs. His daughter takes piano lessons with his brother and they are the most playful piano lessons possible: no expectations or rigor to it, they just both sit at the piano and make noises. John is super-fine with that because he knows the trauma of piano lessons.

John is very worried about himself because he is not trying to correct a problem by encouraging her to be a better reader because he is a good reader and this isn’t something where he didn’t learn to play the piano and now he is making her to do it. But he is also feeling a responsibility that to be a parent is more than to just be your child’s zoo keeper while they figure out everything for themselves and your only responsibility is to keep them out of traffic and to feed them, and to be more of a guide than he ever had, and 90% of that is to wait for her to ask the question.

The implied question of a 10-year old who walks in, throws a book down and says: ”This book is boring!” and goes to read the same Scrooge McDuck comic that she has read 40 times he heard the chorus of people saying: ”She is a reader! Just let her, she will figure it out!”, but that is not necessarily true and there are 50-year olds who are still reading Scrooge McDuck comics and maybe this is a bell curve thing and only ever become the reader you are meant to be, just as not everyone ends up becoming a ballerina.

John doesn’t think that is what education ever used to mean and so many of the new rules are to not tell anybody to do anything, not make anybody do anything, and everybody just gets to do what they want, increasingly creating a world where everybody gets to do what they want whenever. John is clearly not a tiger mom, he is letting her do everything she wants, and only in moments where her momentary frustration about a thing causes her to force-quit and goes immediately back to the step before. We all have comfort blankets.

For many years John’s comfort blanket was getting high and getting fucked up and risky relationships. For a lot of people in the 50s it is having the television on all the time or podcast or whatever. When his daughter encounters a challenge and hard-quits he doesn’t jump in, but he watches very carefully because there are plenty of people who hard-quit at long division and with the way the world is now it is possible that if you hard-quit on long division no-one is ever of the philosophy that you are going to figure it out, but then you will never learn it and no-one is ever going to make you learn long division and people will say that there are calculators now, so why bother?

What are John’s obligations in helping somebody navigate the world when they say that they don’t want to learn to ride a bike because it is too hard, although there are many good reasons to learn it and all the people around you on bicycles learned to do it and it wasn’t easy for any of them. At a certain point you have to be a shepherd. She still lives on Macaroni and Cheese! When John was 7 years old the streets were filled with kids riding bicycles and that is not true now. In Florida it was the car before you had a car and you were dying to be able to drive so you can do freaking anything if you live in the suburbs so you could pedal to the convenience store and buy a Hulk comic.

Kids living in a different environment today than John was in the 1970s

That is not true now, there aren’t kids free roaming like there were, so she didn’t have the same social pressure as John had where he was the last kid on the street who doesn’t know how to ride a bike. Instead she was driven to playdates happening in third locations with 7 parents sitting on park benches around some public square where they got an hour and a half to play before choir lesson.

Now that she is 10 and she wants a little autonomy, although it was not necessary when she was 8 to go out and play with her friends, all of a sudden… John told her that he doesn’t want her to walk by herself between her mother’s house and his house, which is 1 mile, but she can take her bike by herself. She could not have anticipated that she only has that degree of freedom now because she went through that process and the whole argument that John learned how to ride a bike in a different time that doesn’t exist anymore, so it is not necessary, it just makes that transition more abrupt. By the time John was 10 years old he was riding his bike all over the city and he was not aware of acquiring those different rights and freedoms because it wasn’t so abrupt.

It is not just about not learning long division, but the day you stop trying to learn long division you have stopped doing math because you cannot do any math past that. It is not that you decide not to do long division, but then decide to do algebra. This is the beginning of a process, you have to learn this to learn this, you have to know your times tables if you are going to be good at math. You don’t have to know them, you can always use a calculator and you can stop at multiplication and in High School and college there will be plenty of opportunities for you to fake it and to take an elective and to struggle through some remedial math in order to make it.

There are people who graduate from High School who can’t read, but if you are going to do the next thing you have to do this thing, even if at this moment it is not fun. John didn’t prepare for college, but he was that kid in his Junior year where everybody was off filling up their college resumé with the fact that they suddenly were in math club. What even is that? John and Merlin didn’t do that, John didn’t go immediately to college and he didn’t go to Yale and he was never tapped for Skull & Bones and he didn’t reject them because he was a Western man who didn’t believe in East Coast elitism, he didn’t ultimately actually join the CIA and work within a Grunge context, trying to fare out where the Soviet Union was trying to infiltrate our country.

Somehow both Merlin and John made careers for themselves, they are in middle age and they are doing fine, they hopefully made the world a better place in some measures. Ultimately things are fine and John wished that there had been an adult when he was in 10th grade that had told him that he was going to be fine and it doesn’t all start and stop with whether or not you get into the university of Chicago.

One of the problems with quarantine is that John’s daughter spent a year without socialization. There are no cool kids across the street that are already smoking cigarettes, there is nobody to tell her that her parents suck and that The Cure is the only band, but we are also living in a very different world where a lot of kids today are mediated and there is always an adult there because kids can’t do what they want.

By the time John was her age he had spent hundreds of hours unsupervised, playing with fire, sharpening sticks to turn them into weapons, trying to balance on his bicycle seat. The number of closed-head injuries he had by the time he was 10 could fill a medical journal. John sometimes thinks he could be twice as smart if he hadn’t injured himself so many times, if there wasn’t so much blunt force trauma.

Other kids teaching themselves via YouTube videos

Filling that gap with something other than YouTube videos… she is right on the edge of her friends becoming more important than her parents and she is trying to make it in the world and trying to fit in and follow people who have been there already. This starts to take over. John has read all the books, but when those books were written the presumption was that kids had more autonomy than they do today. Those were written 25 years ago. Even those that are being written today are being written by people who read the books that were written 25-30 years ago and they are basing their theory on that. There is no book about right now.

One of the major themes John got as replies during [[BeanDad]]] was: ”Hahaha, this is ridiculous, just let her figure it out on YouTube! My kids would have figured it out on YouTube a long time ago!” There were hundreds of replies that made a joke to the effect of that the real problem was that John’s daughter didn’t know how to teach herself things on YouTube, but it was a very serious joke. John is very grateful that tens of thousands of better parents than John were willing to share their wisdom.

YouTube plays such a large role in how kids are supposed to learn how to do things on their own, they are supposed to search online for a video about it and to not be able to do that is to not have autonomy or to not be a child that is self-educating. John’s reply was that his daughter has never looked something up on YouTube and the whole idea is incredible! There are also plenty of 10-year old girls who watch Disney product unboxing videos with an ASMR component. John knows a woman who still watches pimple popping videos every night after work in order to unwind after a stressful day. The child-rearing philosophies are just not up to date with now John can’t raise his daughter in 1975 and he wouldn’t want to because there were a lot of awful things about being a kid in 1975.

Archie Comics (RL419)

John’s daughter is happy to tell him about the relationship between Archie and Betty and how Betty is a superior choice for Archie relative to Veronica. She expresses a lot of confusion about why Archie keeps choosing Veronica while she herself identifies as a Betty. They will use Archie to talk about people she knows in life, she has established that John is half-Archie, half-Reggie, but mostly Jughead and they both agree. She identifies as Betty because of he gender role and the blonde and wanting to be nice, but when she really thinks about herself she will say that she is a jughead, too. Merlin loved to think of himself as a very low-status Betty, but he was closer to a pretty mean Veronica. A lot of people are Veronicas and don’t know it. They continue to talk about Archie comics.

Book about easy calculus (RL419)

Merlin changes the topic. Yesterday he saw a screenshot of a prolog from a calculus book that purports to be from 1914 and he reads the prolog on the show, talking about how people try to teach you just the difficult things instead of the easy things. Procrastination is based on fear of something. If you can understand what you are afraid of you can begin to address it, but you don’t do that by creating new fear, that has never gotten rid of procrastination in anybody.

New Yorker article about Merlin: The rise and fall of getting things done (RL419)

John read a New Yorker article the other day about Merlin and John didn’t know had been published just a couple of months ago and Merlin didn’t mention it for John because that is his style and he just wants to be left alone. For all of the events in the story John was there for and yet they were occupying an alternate universe. They talked every Monday and saw each other in person, coming off of a period of 10 years where they saw each other all the time, the 10 years that led to the revelation.

John was there when Merlin started 43 Folders, he was there when Merlin gave the talk to Google, and yet that was all happening in Merlin’s life in a way that John never fully understood, partly because Merlin was reticent to self-promote and Merlin was in a shame-spiral how the book he was supposed to write went, that was icing on the cake of ”What kind of monster have I become, vending tips about time management to people who are addicted to tips about time management” John and Merlin talked about the book a lot, although not on the show.

John remembers the excitement in Merlin when he first discovered that stuff, he came into his office and saw the fucking post-it notes. He likes to brag that when he met Merlin Merlin still had a PC up and running, and old 386 on a piece of plywood that was technically still running. By reading this article John was filling in gaps for himself and for their relationship and Merlin’s arc. They have a tacit agreement that they don’t dig too much in each other, but they what they know about each other is what they tell about each other about themselves and they are content with that, they tell each other what they want to tell each other.

The article is a conversation that they would never have had because Merlin knew John wouldn’t want to know about 43 Folders, they had two conversations where Merlin said: ”If you want to know about how to streamline your work process…” - ”Hard pass!” - ”That is what I thought!” John realized in this article that he had always known that Merlin was a star somewhere in a place. They would go to bars and parties in San Francisco and people would come up and drop a bouquet of white lilies at Merlin’s feet and then back away slowly, bowing their heads.

It was truly a moment when Merlin used to be Merlin Mann like it was for The Long Winters, it was an Indie Rock career for Merlin, he was a big band, and in the same way that John just didn’t keep doing it Merlin didn’t keep doing it either. Merlin naturally talks about his frustrations with John instead of his triumphs, partly because of Merlin’s humility. By reading that article John got an inkling of Merlin’s triumphs, which was really good and made John glad because he learned that Merlin was in love with this and the world loved him for it, but then Merlin quit it and realized its limitations, when he realized that the point wasn’t to be addicted to tips about tips.

Merlin is practically a professional Holden Caulfield (from the novel The Catcher in the Rye), he is always looking for phonies, but he was not shooting himself in the foot. John was there for the book and felt that Merlin did not want to write a phony book and that he was now being pushed into a corner where the only thing he can do is turn in a phony book or no book at all. John realized that Merlin made those decisions really affirmatively and not passively and that also felt like a triumph.

Having a song stuck in your head (RL419)

John has the song Would by Alice in Chains stuck in his head and singing Billy Ocean is one way to get it out of your head. Merlin has heard about a universal cleanser, but he doesn’t remember it. His first guess would be Ramones and his second guess would be ABBA.

In a Finnish study they talk about INMI, Involuntary musical imagery, the fancy term for an ear-worm or a song stuck in your head. Certain songs seem to trigger it more than others, like songs by Queen or Lady Gaga. When the study asked for people's cure songs (not songs by The Cure like Boys Don’t Cry or A Forest), the only one song that came up twice was Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.

One time Merlin made out to that song under a blanket and it was extremely memorable. John woke up this morning with the song Would by Alice in Chains stuck in his head "Into the flood again. Same old trip it was back then" He sings those two lines and Merlin tries to be louder with "Caribbean Queen - Now we're sharing the same dream!"