Dear Log,
"Avoid trying to create songs. Create them when you're not looking." -- Eno, Year with Swollen AppendicesSo I'm learning weiqi/go/baduk while making a point of not learning it consciously. No learning of all the corner strategies, no nada -- doing it entirely visually. It's sort of like learning Braille late in life: you'll never be good at it because your brain just won't work that way all that well; but it's great fun.
So, of course, this means no looking at the books on weiqi that I've got (Go for Beginners et al). Except once I got three books in Japanese, about weiqi. I got them because they were remaindered at a local used book store (books in Japanese about weiqi do not exactly sell big in New Mexico) and I liked the diagrams for the sheer aesthetics of the patterns, in a game I at the time knew nothing of. But since I've learned the basics of the game, it's occurred to me that I can look at these books now -- but note that I can't read a word of Japanese, so that I'm still managing this entirely visually. So I'm just looking at the pictures, trying to puzzle out what's going on. It's very strange, very Zen, very Chan. Very wu-tang.
BTW, Eno's Year with Swollen Appendices, quoted above, is the best book I found all last year. Buy it.
