Raghav Rao's Blog, page 4

Creation & Direct Perception

I started The Last Stop On The Late Train in July of last year!

62 posts! Hundreds of subscribers! I’ve connected with new readers and old friends.

Today’s post will be a little different. It’s a single quote without too much analysis. There is some connective tissue between J. Krishnamurti and the overall purpose of this newsletter, charting a course through the sea of information that we find ourselves in today.

First — here’s an extended quote from J. Krishnamurti on creation:

You know what creation is? Not the expression, that's fairly simple to understand - as a writer, as a poet, as an artist you want to express, that is not creation. Creation is something entirely different. You know, creation can only come about when there is energy. Energy that is not... that has never been contaminated, that is not the result of effort, will, but that energy which action itself brings. And now all our activities, more or less, are self-centered, centred upon ourselves in relation to various things; and that self-centered activity, which is of the thinker, invariably breeds contradictions; and being in a state of contradiction demands expression - I must escape, I must write, I must do. The man who is in a state of self-contradiction and in a state of self-centered activity, what he does as painter, as an artist, as a musician, he may call that creation but it is not. Creation must be something extraordinarily different. And it is.

Now, as I said, the mind when it is not touched or has understood the whole structure of contradiction, conscious as well as unconscious, it is completely still. Because any movement of energy is a dissipation. It's only when the mind is completely still, with tremendous energy, then there is an explosion, and that explosion is creation, which may or may not need expression.

Krishnamurti & Me

Me. Roughly 7th grade.

For 7 years, 6th grade to 12th grade, I attended Rishi Valley School, one of the KFI schools, a school founded by Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Krishnamurti, as many of my Indian readers doubtless already know, at the tender age of thirteen, was identified by the Theosophical Society as the future World Teacher, and was seen by the theosophists as a messianic figure.

The Theosophical Society established the Order of the Star in the East (OSE) and opened membership to those who accepted the doctrine of the Coming of the World Teacher.

Note the ‘swastika’ in the seal of the Theological Society. This predates the Nazi appropriation of the symbol.

In 1929, at the age of thirty-three, Krishnamurti dissolved the order and rejected the role of world teacher and in a lovely address, he declared that “truth is a pathless land” and asked everyone to eschew religions and sects and to cease to be followers. He dedicated his life to public discussions around the nature of truth and to education designed to develop questioning minds. He founded five schools in India, one in England, and one in the United States (in Ojai valley).

Though he died before I was born, I learned about Krishnamurti briefly at school. His ideas weren’t part of the curriculum. My Dad, who had attended his public lectures, always did a funny impression of his oratory style. In the last five years, I’ve listened closely to recordings of those lectures and discussions on Youtube and elsewhere, and, inspired by him, I try and live free and fearlessly.

What does that mean? It means thinking less. It means noticing that thought is rooted in time. It is always of the past or the future. Thought runs against the present, against the moment of creation.

Krishnamurti and Information Saturation

This is a newsletter about discernment in the age of information saturation. Krishnamurti urged us to not look externally, to the worlds of data, of authority, of doctrine, for truth.

Truth, the pathless land, is not somewhere out there on the endless internet. It is the direct comprehension of the precise moment, it is confronting oneself in the now.

“Truth cannot be given to you by somebody. You have to discover it; and to discover, there must be a state of mind in which there is direct perception.”

I urge you all to think less, to eschew doctrines, and to find moments of direct perception. It’s what I’m trying to do. To find stillness of the mind. And from that stillness, tremendous unthinking energy.

Thank you for a year’s worth of support for this newsletter. Please continue to share it widely. If you have your own thoughts on the act of creation, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The Last Stop on The Late Train will remain forever free, forever un-paywalled. If you’d like to support this work, you can buy me a monthly coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/raghavrao. ☕☕☕

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Computer Is the Enemy

I’ve known for a while that the computer, while undoubtedly an invention of great consequence, is also an impingement. Often, I’m at my best when I avoid the computer, when I work exclusively in notebooks and only sporadically go to the computer to execute a specific task. I was grateful then for an excellent article in the most recent issue of Psychology Today, where a neuroscientist summarized learnings from Sweden’s experiments with digital tools in its education system. Long story short: They found that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning. They are reverting, in many cases, to more analog tools.

The insight I enjoyed the most had to do with attention.

People say ‘time’ is our most valuable resource. But attention, the ability of our brain to filter out certain stimuli, and only concentrate on stimuli relevant to the task at hand, dictates our use of time. Attention is what advertisers want from us. Everyday, managing and deploying our available focusing power is perhaps the most important set of decisions we make. So what did this neuroscientist have to say?

Multitasking is terrible for learning and memory.

Computers are multitasking machines.

You see where I’m going with this? We have designed the most powerful tool of our own psychic oppression. Computers are great. But we use them incorrectly. We use them to consume media. Worse, we hop from stimulus to stimulus. We should instead use them to search for relevant information and then return to our analog materials!

Okay, let me slow down and take you through what’s happening in our brains.

I quote now from Jared Horvath, the neuroscientist who wrote the article I’m referencing, “How The Brain Learns Best” in the August 2024 issue of Psychology Today. (How can they call it an August issue when it comes out in June; I don’t know!)

My copy of Psychology Today. I read it cover to cover on the day it arrives.

“Whenever we engage with a task, the relevant rule set must be loaded into a small area of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortext, LatPFC. Whatever rule set is being held within this part of the brain will ultimately determine what the attentional filter deems relevant or irrelevant.

The LatPFC can hold onto only one rule set a time. This is why it’s impossible for human beings to multitask; the best we can do is quickly jump back and forth between tasks, swapping out the rule set within the LatPFC.”

Quickly jumping back and forth between tasks. Does that sound familiar? Hopping between tabs. Or flitting between apps. Or scrolling through a feed and having to re-attune to new stimuli.

In detail, Horvath takes us through loss in three areas — time, accuracy, memory — from quick LatPFC shifts. In conclusion, rapidly shifting attention between tasks is disastrous for learning and memory in students and presumably not good for adults either.

In that same article, Horvath shares that when students use a computer for homework, they typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. I know adults for whom that’s probably far less than six minutes!

I can hear you saying, “I’ve got this. I know how to use my computer!”

Horvath ends this segment with a caution against trying to “beat the computer” —- “in order to effectively learn while using a computer, people must expend an incredible amount of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing, a battle they lose more often than not.”

So, hear me out. Don’t fight the computer. Ditch the computer. You can still go to the computer as a resource, briefly, like a heavy dictionary. You can still use it for some functions: storage, communication (though probably less than you think), computation (its original use), but when it comes to doing long, hard, deep work, look for opportunities to go analog. Do a slide deck in rough draft on paper, for example. They always turn out better anyway. Do your long correspondence in a notebook and then type it up.

I hear you fighting me on this. Computers are our reality, you say. Raghav, you are advocating something unrealistic. I’m not. Recall a few weeks ago, my post on Solomon Golomb, the man who used shift register sequences to encode data for transmission. He didn’t even have a computer at home!

Let’s try (when possible) to not use our computers as a work surface. Let’s see if we can get somewhere together!

Quick Note: The article I’m referencing is “How The Brain Learns Best” by Jared Cooney Horvath in the August 2024 print issue of Psychology Today.

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Odisha - India in Translation: Reading Through Each of India’s 28 States

I’m returning now to one of my favorite series — Indian Novels in Translation, State by State. Other posts in this series. Tamil Nadu |Karnataka | Andhra Pradesh | Kerala | Telangana | Goa

Basanti: Writing The New Woman by (Nine Authors i.e. a collaborative novel)

STATE: Odisha

Original Language: Odia

Publisher in English — Oxford University Press (2019) - LINK

Translated by Prof. Himansu S. Mohapatra (Author), Prof. Paul St-Pierre (Author)

Basanti cover (OUP) and a cover of an old (1912) issue of Utkala Sahitya (Credit: Odiabibhaba.com)

So far in this series, I have looked at novels written by a single author. Novels are often synonymous with the expression of a single mind. I’d estimate that co-written novels probably make up less than 1% of the overall market. But in the early 20th century, at least in some parts of India (notably in the East, Bengal, Assam, and Orissa), collaborative novels became popular and were serialized in magazines.

A bit like T.V. today where a series might swap directors for episodes to impart a different aesthetic to a familiar set of characters. Take this world. Let’s see what you can do with them.

Context

In the case of Basanti, let’s set the stage a bit:

The year is 1924. We are in Cuttack, the center for a burgeoning Odia culture, irrigated by the feverish learning of young minds at Ravenshaw College. At this point, Odisha is part of the Bihar and Orissa province of British India. Today, that encompasses Bihar, Jharkhand, and parts of Odisha. It is governed by the Bengal Presidency and Calcutta is obviously the dominant cultural force.

Odisha and Cuttack, relative to Bengal and Calcutta, are the provincial cousins. Conservatism and “backwards” ways of superstition and discrimination are the norm. Upper-class Hindu women, the wives of zamindars and barristers, are expected to be indoors at all times, unless accompanied by their husbands. They are expected to cook and to do embroidery and to exist in a state of comfortable languor.

However, some writers, many of whom attend or are recent alumni of Ravenshaw College, come together to form the Sabuja movement in Odia literature. They are influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and the reformist visions of the literary magazines of Calcutta. The Sabuja writers have a vision for “a new woman”, someone who fuses the traditional with the modern. To that end, they decide to write ‘Basanti’, a story about this new woman.

The story was decided upon ahead of time. Writers couldn’t change major aspects of the plot or the overall characterization of Basanti and her beau, Debabrata. So, really, writers had to bring their aesthetic to the prose rather than to the story. Together, nine writers, 6 men and 3 women, wrote ‘Basanti’ and the story began to appear in serialized fashion in Utkala Sahitya.

The goal was noble and large — to reform Odisha, to free women from captivity and liberate them to continue attending school instead of simply being married off at puberty and sequestered in the home for eternity. To invite men to see their wives as intellectual companions. To reject the idea that modernity necessarily meant compromised morals.

Summary & Literary Values:

Now, a century later, I was intrigued to read ‘Basanti’. My book is also about a woman, Missy. It is eponymous, i.e., named for the main character. And it is also, in some ways, about the tensions between modernity and traditional forms of self-understanding. What book about India/Indians isn’t?

The plot is effectively a romantic dramedy whose central conflict arises from an epistolary misunderstanding. Debabrata reads a fragment of a letter. Makes a huge erroneous inference. Casts Basanti out of the house. He realizes his mistake. Later, her honor is restored.

The first act is their courtship and it’s very sweet and quite good. It’s centered around their mutual love of learning and the way they support each other after Basanti loses her mother. After their marriage, domestic strife is well portrayed, relying on the tensions of moving from a vibrant city like Cuttack to a gossipy backwater. The animosity sparked in the mother-in-law dead against her new “love-marriage” daughter-in-law is captured in rich detail by the women authors.

But in the second half, the central problem of collaborative writing undermines the book. The characterization doesn’t hold up. People react out of character. Their reactions are outsized to events. Debabrata goes from noble to puerile. The mother-in-law goes from vicious to saintly. The book ceases to make sense.

And? So What?

Frankly, though, it’s okay if the book isn’t an outright literary success. After all, it was meant as a didactic exercise — to teach and preach a better, more just, less discriminatory way of life.

I found that it touched on something deeper in not just Indian culture but globally. Please pardon the half-thought here but hear me out:

In this book, the “mother-in-law” figure is successful in her way of life. That is domestic management. It is protecting her family’s honor in a hierarchy-obsessed rural community. She resents Basanti who is educated in the ways of the city. The conflict is not about the actual ideas themselves. Acceding to Basanti’s ways becomes an indictment of how the mother-in-law has spent her own life. I sensed here some of the same tensions that are playing out globally. Let me try to explain:

Non-Western countries resent the West for their patronizing attitude.

Many Americans resent coastal elites for lecturing them

Too often, those of us who are educated in a certain way of thinking, believe that the self-evident rightness of a thing is all that matters. But when we ask people to change, we are attacking their historical identity, their social standing, and, in some cases, their integrity. The content of the message in insufficient. People will only be won over if you can offer them some way to also retain their standing. How can we do that? That’s the question we need to be asking. I understand this a half-thought but it’s interesting to see that one hundred years ago, similar tensions were being wrestled with in magazines and in cultural production.

3/5. Is Basanti a great book today? No. I wouldn’t say so. The nine-authors approach failed to sufficiently cohere. But it clearly was a book of its time. I’m glad to have read it.

Read the other posts in this series.

Tamil Nadu - Pyre - LINK | Karnataka - Samskara: Rites for a Dead Man - LINK | Andhra Pradesh - Yashodhara - LINK | Kerala - The Legends of Khasak - LINK | Telangana - Sin - LINK | Goa - Tsunami Simon - LINK

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Three Things I Learned From Janet Desaulniers

Point At The Shipwreck || Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic || Metaphor Is Dead

A wonderful mentor of mine, Janet Desaulniers, is retiring from the faculty of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago this year. Janet was brought in twenty-one (maybe twenty-two?) years ago to be the first chair of the writing program, recruiting many of the department’s outstanding writing faculty — Rosellen Brown and Jesse Ball among others. But I want to make this post about Janet and I also want to make it short, and to do both is difficult.

MFA Fiction, Poetry, and Non-Fiction programs are often maligned, fairly and unfairly, but an MFA program at an Art School must have different understanding of itself than one at Michigan or Brown. Janet gave our program its identity, its self-understanding.

I remember I walked in, wanting to write a commercial book, openly stating, like an idiot, that I’d love to see a book of mine in an airport someday. Meanwhile, a guy in our class was writing asemantically — this means writing without meaning i.e. mark-making. I thought Janet was insufficiently hard on him for his chicken-scratch on paper. Tell him to write! With meaning! But Janet understood that developing a truly original voice often requires rebuilding the meaning of words from the ground up, in this guy’s case, from even below the foundations of letters!

Under Janet’s tutelage, I came to understand that the art-teacher’s role extends past hierarchical dispensing of technical knowledge. The gift with the longest value is often exposure to a certain ‘quality of mind.’

At Iowa, Janet was initially savaged by a faculty that delighted in cruelty. “This is how talented writers waste their lives,” a professor said. (FNewsmagazine.)

But that was before the New Yorker put a stamp on a story. Everything changed, and Janet became a star. This is possibly why they’re always interested in the work itself, and aren’t unduly bothered with reception, insisting always that the culture will catch up. Janet’s wonderful collection of stories, What You’ve Been Missing, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and are amongst the best I’ve ever read and I often study them sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. (Not quite at the asemantic, mark-making level though. I reserve that for Japanese.)

Janet writes stories that “land like a shovel to the face.”

Janet says more smart things per minute than any human being I’ve ever encountered. But I want to quickly (quickly!) write about Three Principles that I have tried to lay claim to:

1) Point At The Shipwreck

The full idea is captured in “All You Have To Do Is Point At The Shipwreck.”

Some writers, myself included, feel we can’t write about certain things because we don’t know enough. While a certain degree of humility is good, of course, this line of thinking can easily become solipsistic. Janet’s words here are intended as permission to free one’s self from “knowing anything” or “saying anything” — writing needn’t always be like a college paper; it doesn’t have to make an argument. It can be enough to see something and say, ‘Look!’

2) Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic —

The full idea is “Embrace The Obscure and The Erratic — they supply the dynamics of association”

Sometimes, there is a tendency in some writers (certainly in myself) to erase the truly offbeat things that the subconscious throws up. Why? Because I’m trying to appeal to an amorphous, large group of readers and I’m worried that some will be alienated? Constantly, writers vanillaize their own work. This is an injunction to not only resist the impulse but to see the obscure and erratic as doing powerful work for you.

3) Metaphor is Dead

This is too profound an insight for a quick paragraph. But suffice to say that a changing world calls for a changing literature. That’s not to say that Robert Burns saying, “My love is like a red, red rose” in 1794 is no longer true. But in a fragmented world, one-to-one mapping is insufficient. ‘A’ does not correspond only to ‘B’. There are multitudes. Perhaps one day I’ll go further into this.

I owe Janet an incalculable debt for their material support and quality of mind. I will forever be an acolyte. My entire writing pedagogy - Mess-making: The Fragmentary Model of Writing (which you can see here in video form if you like) is derived from Janet.

I never thought of myself as an acolyte. But I’ve heard the good word and now I travel and preach it. Enjoy your retirement, Janet. We’ll carry your ideas forward.

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Most Influential Man You’ve Never Heard Of

This post is about a brilliant man you’ve likely not heard of but has a share of responsibility in creating our modern, information-rich world.

Sol Golomb. Photo Credit: The Franklin Institute

Solomon Golomb was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932 to a Lithuanian-Jewish father and a Jewish mother of Russian descent. Like so many brilliant contributors to the world’s bank of knowledge, he came from a lineage of rabbis and scholars.

Before I continue his brief biography, let me share his two major bequeathments to mankind:

1) He is the reason that when you send a text message gossiping about someone, that message is received by your intended recipient and not by some other cellphone in the vicinity. Basically, how does one device identify that a message floating in the air is intended for it? How does one distinguish signal from noise?

Solomon Golomb, by studying Shift Register Sequences, determined how to construct the polynomials used to encode data sent by GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and numerous other telecommunications.

According to Stephen Wolfram, Golomb is, therefore, the man behind the world’s most-used algorithm idea of all time. Wolfram estimates that over an octillion bits (a billion billion billion) have been generated by humanity’s collection of electronic devices.

Golomb was also an avid game designer and linguist. He designed a chess-checkers combo game called ‘Cheskers’ and also described games where collections of shapes can be arranged to tile particular (finite or infinite) regions. He called these ‘polyominoes’ and these investigations and papers inspired games like Tetris and probably down to tiled games like Catan and Azul as well (though that’s speculation on my part).

Returning to Golomb’s wonderful biography:

1) A product of the Baltimore City Schools (along with Prop Joe and Thurgood Marshall. Incidentally, another Jewish-Baltimorean, Leon Uris, failed out of high school), Golomb went on to enroll at John Hopkins. According to Wolfram, Golomb “narrowly avoided a quota on Jewish students by promising he wouldn’t switch to medicine—and took twice the usual course load.”

He ended up graduating in 1951 from Johns Hopkins at 19 years old! He then went to Harvard for grad school in math. In 1955, he went to Scandinavia on a Fulbright and returned with a wife, Bo (Bodil Rygaard) from Denmark.

He then worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab where he set technicians to building electronic implementations of his shift registers. There were lots of military and satellite applications in radar and radiation detection. For example, shift registers could be used in designing jam-resistant radio-controlled missiles. In a major contribution to physics, Golomb led a team that bounced a radar signal off Venus and changed what we knew about Earth-Venus and Earth-Sun distances.

Golomb evidently had a great sense of humor in addition to immense erudition. With regard to extraterrestrial communication, he wrote the following:

“There are two questions involved in communication with Extraterrestrials. One is the mechanical issue of discovering a mutually acceptable channel. The other is the more philosophical problem (semantic, ethic, and metaphysical) of the proper subject matter for discourse. In simpler terms, we first require a common language, and then we must think of something clever to say.”

In his thirties, Golomb transitioned into academia, choosing USC despite offers from Caltech and UCLA. He stayed at USC for 53 years, raised a family, and wrote countless papers. More than 10,000 patents have drawn on his work.

Interestingly, this man responsible for octillion bits of information rarely used computers himself. In a newsletter about information-saturation, I feel compelled to speculate if his level of deep work was made possible by the sort of intense focus that devices, computers, emails, notifications, texts can often interrupt.

He and his wife died within two weeks of each other just short of their 60th wedding anniversary, survived by two daughters, Astrid and Beatrice.

I find Golomb’s story to be wonderful, magical, filled with the best of humanity. I particularly like that a man who worked with missiles, radar and cryptography at the height of the cold war also thought that games were a worthy subject of investigation.

On Legacy:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders if, when I’m gone, I’ll leave an impact on this world. Hopefully, with loved ones, some collection of writings, and students, that will be the case. But, in the world of mass media, we often want MORE. How can I touch and change the lives of MORE people?

I doubt many of us will ever hit the dizzying numbers of Solomon Golomb. There’s a freedom in that. We all make our impacts in the world, big or small. Golomb’s impact was massive. But he went through life, applying deep focus to questions, exploring ‘play’ and ‘work’ and ‘language’ all with a sense of curiosity and wonder. He wasn’t bogged down with the practical and yet his discoveries ended up everywhere. Something sufficiently elegant and simple will always radiate outward.

Warmly,

Raghav

Most of the information for this post comes from the writings of the irrepressible Stephen Wolfram, who personally knew Solomon Golomb. Wolfram is obviously an unbelievably accomplished person in his own right. He’s the CEO of Wolfram Research, headquartered in Champaign, IL, and has done so much for the world of computing and mathematics. He’s also a great and prolific writer.

Wolfram’s article on Golomb: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-19322016/

MISSY Pre-Order Information:

Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Value of Virtual Co-Writes

I have hosted 285 Virtual Co-Writes. Firstly, what is a virtual co-write?

Different groups adopt different structures but they are roughly the same:

Log into the virtual meeting

Each participant briefly shares their intention for the allotted time

Everyone goes on mute and, presumably, gets to work. (Mine run for 90 mins)

In the final few minutes, everyone shares how they did.

Simple format. Devastatingly effective. With my teaching load and life maintenance, I would not have been able to finish my novel without these virtual co-writes. That said, you don’t have to be a “creative writer” to use these spaces; we have people who use them to complete dissertations or simply to get through their to-do list.

At first, I thought their effectiveness stemmed from accountability. That is true in a narrow sense. But there is a subtler aspect to them.

The Office of Modern Composition Meetup Group for Virtual Co-Writes

Humans are alone, in our bodies and our consciousness, and yet we are social, in our networks and our shared memories and knowledge. In deep projects, it’s easy to feel lonely, like space shuttles drifting in endless blackness, light-years from each other. Modern modes of work — increasingly fragmented and refusing interchangeability - can deepen this isolation. Sometimes, it’s fun to be on our own, spinning a web that only we understand, but isolation can produce doubt, especially with a long project. Sometimes, doubt prevails, nudging me from my creative work to email, to my calendar — the maintenance of life. Those things are important, of course. But the whole point of allotting time to creative work is to NOT do those things.

The doubt is a consequence of an internal conflict that I will probably never fully shake. I fight the sense that writing is….selfish and pointless. There are countless books in the world. Do people really need another one? And who am I to write it?

But when I look up and on my screen I see five or ten people diligently working on their own projects, I think, “Well, if they value themselves enough to invest in their own endeavors — and I respect them; I don’t think they’re selfish —  then maybe I can keep at it for the next five minutes.”

Inevitably, those five minutes become the whole session.

This solidarity I call ‘round-the-fire energy.’ To me, it calls to mind ice-age nomads huddled around a fire. It’s the sense that we are not alone in this star-filled universe. Though the world out there is large and dark and impossible to know, you can surround yourself with like-minded tribespeople. You can draw on them for warmth and energy. And together, you will survive the ice-age.

That is the value of the single virtual co-write session. You can find, from others, the energy to stay focused when, by yourself, you might have succumbed to distraction.

But what is the value of several hundred co-writes?

“Community” is often talked about but the word can lose meaning through overuse. For me, it had become a buzzword that meant little. The virtual co-writes allowed me to rediscover its fuller meaning.

I have seen my fellow co-write members show up week in, week out, honoring their craft. I’ve seen their highs and lows (acceptances, rejections, book deals, completed dissertations). I have seen them put in the hard yards. Seen them have 4/10 sessions, 6/10 sessions, joyful 9/10 sessions. So, when good things come their way, you know how the sausage was made, and you get to celebrate their victory as though it were your own.

If you are at all inspired to give this modality a go, please don’t hesitate to join the co-writes that I host — Office of Modern Composition’s weekly co-write. It is held at 5-30pm CDT, Mondays and 10am, CDT Thursdays.

If you’re looking for a more frequent fix, Shut Up and Write hosts countless Meetup groups.

I hope you do give this modality a try.

Warmly,

Raghav

A Reminder to Pre-Order My Book:

Apologies if you have already done so. But they do say, it takes 7 reminders to actually prompt a decisive action.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again. If you ask me what my preferred retailer is, I’d probably say Waterstones just because it’s such a big retailer and a big pre-order number might make them more likely to stock my book in their stores.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Warmly,

Raghav

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

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The Chicago Street Named After A Fascist

Not click-bait. Just a fact.

Balbo Drive is named for Italo Balbo.

Italo Balbo was a senior member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF, of Italy. He was the youngest (26) of the four organizers of the 1922 March on Rome that led to Mussolini’s ascension to power.

(Incidentally, I’m sure many of you know that I like to bike the lakefront trail. Balbo Drive goes across Lake Shore Drive to the lakefront trail and is the scene of some of the most egregiously criminal driving I’ve seen in the city. In 2022, Geraldo Marciales, a 41-year-old CISCO engineer and recreational biker, was killed at that intersection. He was due to be married later that year, I believe. In 2023, a driver then drove into the ghost bike set up in remembrance of Geraldo).

Back to Balbo Drive —

In 1933, Chicago hosted another World’s Fair (The Century of Progress), not to be confused with the more widely known World’s Columbian Exposition.

During the time the city held this fair, Italo Balbo arrived in dramatic fashion as the leader of the greatest mass flight in aviation history at the time, when 25 Savoia-Marchetti S.55X seaplanes crossed the Atlantic Ocean in formation, making stops in the Netherlands, Iceland, Canada, before hitting Chicago.

On July 15th, 100,000 Chicagoans cheered the arrival of the future Axis Air Marshal.

He brought with him a 2,000 year-old-column as a gift to the people of Chicago from Benito Mussolini. The column, which I have passed many times on my rides along the lakefront trail, bears an inscription in Italian which when translated into English says the following:

Changing The Name:

I have no qualms with the Chicago Park District keeping this monument as a historical quirk. It’s not the same as a hundred-foot Robert E. Lee statue. That said, why is Balbo Drive still named after Italo Balbo? Our street names connote value. They are commemorative gestures that carry meaning.

Yes, Balbo was a debonair airman. But he was a fascist, an Axis general, a brutal subjugator of anti-fascist clergy, labor unionists, and other non-fascist elements. Surely, we can keep the monument but find a better name for Balbo Drive?

I’m not the fist person to suggest this. Periodically, over the years, there have been calls to change the name. In 2018, people suggested having the street renamed for Ida B. Wells however she later got Congress Parkway and besides we already have a Wells St.

But it turns out that the Italian-American community, or at least some of its members, have vigorously protested the name change. Some people like Balbo, it seems.

In the past, it was suggested that it be renamed after Sister Frances Xavier Cabrini, another prominent Italian-American, and the first U.S. citizen to be canonized a saint by the Catholic Church. But she has enough stuff named after her and lacks the Chicago connection.

I have a suggestion though, an Italian American who actually lived in Chicago, who contributed to the city and the world. A Nobel Laureate who, in 1938, repudiated fascism. Someone who actually contributed to the war effort against fascism.

Enrico Fermi.

Surely, a Fermi Drive is as acceptable to the Italian-American community as Balbo drive, no?

There’s a lot more to say on the subject but I’ll stop there for now.

A Reminder to Pre-Order My Book:

Apologies if you have already done so. But they do say, it takes 7 reminders to actually prompt a decisive action.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here’s the pre-order link again. If you ask me what my preferred retailer is, I’d probably say Waterstones just because it’s such a big retailer and a big pre-order number might make them more likely to stock my book in their stores.

For more info about my book and why it’s currently only available for pre-order in the UK or to share it with other interested parties, please see the previous post on this subject.

Warmly,

Raghav

Thank you for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

UPDATE: Debut Novel Cover Reveal + Pre-Order Link!

Hi, Everyone.

Apologies for the duplicate message on the same day but I’ve received a few messages from people attempting to pre-order my book (thank you!) having difficulty with the Amazon link in particular.

If you are already logged in to Amazon US, my book may not appear as it’s currently only being retailed by Amazon’s UK arm. However, you can still pre-order my book from the UK retailers such s Waterstones, Blackwells, and Hive.

Here’s the pre-order link again. If you ask me what my preferred retailer is, I’d probably say Waterstones just because it’s such a big retailer and a big pre-order number might make them more likely to stock my book in their stores.

Original Post Below:

So many moments have accumulated to this one. I’m teetering between reflective and overwhelmed.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here is the Pre-Order LINK for a number of retailers, including Waterstones & Amazon UK. Please note that the Amazon links may send you to weird places depending on where you are accessing it from. You may be better off purchasing from Waterstones or Blackwells.

If you are interested in pre-ordering a copy (and I hope that you are!), please note that since my book’s rights have so far sold only in the UK, Commonwealth, and India, if you are purchasing from the U.S., you may incur additional shipping costs.

The book officially releases in September and will ship out then but pre-orders mean a lot and I’d greatly appreciate your material support.

Finally, I can divulge all this information! I can’t wait for readers to meet Missy. Further along in this post, you can read a synopsis.

What This Means To Me:

Obviously, this is the culmination of many years of work. But it’s also a beginning. I have to thank all my loved ones, as well as, Hera Books, my UK publisher, and my peerless agent Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane. There’s many more people to thank, too, but that’s what the Acknowledgments page in the book is for.

Today, simply put, I’m happy. Happy that finally I don’t have to say “You will be able to buy it soon” and instead I can say “Yes! You can order your copy right now! And then in late summer, you’ll get it and can leisurely read it by the beach, in a hammock, on your couch, in bed, on the train, on a plane, in your garden, in a park, in a bar, in a coffee shop.

Synopsis

She’s chosen her own future.

Madras, India: The orphaned girls of St Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants but seventeen-year-old Savi dreams of escape. Responsible and good with languages, she’s taken on as governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate.

The horrific events of a single night force Savi and her love, Ananda, into a dangerous journey, re-emerging in America under new identities, their homeland forever in their rearview.

But the past is never far away.

Forty years later, Savi, known to all as Missy, is the embodiment of the American dream – successful business owner in Chicago, pillar of the South Asian community, and mother to two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa.

Until Varun, a charming doctor, enters their lives, setting off a chain of events that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy with the revelation that you can never truly outrun your secrets…

Share This Information

Obviously, buying copies means the world to me. If you are interested to know how you might support me even further, if you are so inclined, the best thing to do is share the pre-order link with friends who you think might enjoy MISSY.

Pre-order link: https://geni.us/nHlIB

QR Code:

Pre-Order Your Copy Of MISSY

Thank you all for your support. Increasingly, book marketing and promotion have become the purview of authors, though it is not our natural skillset. Its readers and lovers of literature and future-readers and possible-readers who keep the industry alive and bring new debut authors into print. Please continue to support writers.

As ever

Raghav

PS: It’s tradition for debut authors to share their Publisher’s Marketplace announcement on social media. Well, substack is my chosen platform. So here I’m sharing it below. Thank you for including me as part of your information diet.

Publisher’s Marketplace & Bookseller Announcement

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

My DEBUT NOVEL - Cover Reveal + Pre-Order Link!

The day has finally arrived! You can pre-order my book!

So many moments have accumulated to this one. I’m teetering between reflective and overwhelmed.

Missy by Raghav Rao - Hera Books UK - Cover Reveal

Here is the Pre-Order LINK for a number of retailers, including Waterstones & Amazon UK. Please note that the Amazon links may send you to weird places depending on where you are accessing it from. You may be better off purchasing from Waterstones or Blackwells.

If you are interested in pre-ordering a copy (and I hope that you are!), please note that since my book’s rights have so far sold only in the UK, Commonwealth, and India, if you are purchasing from the U.S., you may incur additional shipping costs.

The book officially releases in September and will ship out then but pre-orders mean a lot and I’d greatly appreciate your material support.

Finally, I can divulge all this information! I can’t wait for readers to meet Missy. Further along in this post, you can read a synopsis.

What This Means To Me:

Obviously, this is the culmination of many years of work. But it’s also a beginning. I have to thank all my loved ones, as well as, Hera Books, my UK publisher, and my peerless agent Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane. There’s many more people to thank, too, but that’s what the Acknowledgments page in the book is for.

Today, simply put, I’m happy. Happy that finally I don’t have to say “You will be able to buy it soon” and instead I can say “Yes! You can order your copy right now! And then in late summer, you’ll get it and can leisurely read it by the beach, in a hammock, on your couch, in bed, on the train, on a plane, in your garden, in a park, in a bar, in a coffee shop.

Synopsis

She’s chosen her own future.

Madras, India: The orphaned girls of St Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants but seventeen-year-old Savi dreams of escape. Responsible and good with languages, she’s taken on as governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate.

The horrific events of a single night force Savi and her love, Ananda, into a dangerous journey, re-emerging in America under new identities, their homeland forever in their rearview.

But the past is never far away.

Forty years later, Savi, known to all as Missy, is the embodiment of the American dream – successful business owner in Chicago, pillar of the South Asian community, and mother to two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa.

Until Varun, a charming doctor, enters their lives, setting off a chain of events that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy with the revelation that you can never truly outrun your secrets…

Share This Information

Obviously, buying copies means the world to me. If you are interested to know how you might support me even further, if you are so inclined, the best thing to do is share the pre-order link with friends who you think might enjoy MISSY.

Pre-order link: https://geni.us/nHlIB

QR Code:

Pre-Order Your Copy Of MISSY

Thank you all for your support. Increasingly, book marketing and promotion have become the purview of authors, though it is not our natural skillset. Its readers and lovers of literature and future-readers and possible-readers who keep the industry alive and bring new debut authors into print. Please continue to support writers.

As ever

Raghav

PS: It’s tradition for debut authors to share their Publisher’s Marketplace announcement on social media. Well, substack is my chosen platform. So here I’m sharing it below. Thank you for including me as part of your information diet.

Publisher’s Marketplace & Bookseller Announcement

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Great North American Eclipse

New Harmony, IN

Raghav and I went to the small town of New Harmony in southern Indiana to view the full solar eclipse in April. Raghav’s grad school advisor grew up in a town located close to New Harmony. She thoughtfully organized a long weekend for a group of us.

I will not go into great detail about the founding of New Harmony, IN, although it is worth looking into (Wikipedia link here). It was founded as a spiritual community in the early 1800’s by German immigrants who had split from the Lutheran church. After about ten years, they sold the land to Robert Owen*, a Welsh-born mill tycoon who attempted to establish a commune. The Owen family, particularly Jane Blaffer Owen, became the engine of New Harmony turning it into an enclave of art and culture.

*Note from Raghav — Robert Owen reportedly coined the phrase - “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”

The eclipse viewing

Simply put the full eclipse was a fantastic phenomenon to witness - and also quite short-lived. It was a beautiful, long weekend ultimately devoted to catching 3 minutes of the 6000+ minutes that we were there. Spring had arrived in southern Indiana and the blossoms were abundant. The day was perfect.

** Interjection from Raghav:

The eclipse was a story in itself, leading to total dramatic climax. One formulation of story structure is ground situation, inciting incident, ups-and-downs, climax, denouement, resolution. Sometimes, with stories, the climax is not one defined point. But with the eclipse, there is a clear, singular instant of climax, the disappearance of light and the experience of total blackness. All light collapses into a single point. It shrinks and you think it can’t possible get to nothing. It gets there in a sort of whirling circle building the tension. But it doesn’t dissipate the tension. It delivers on its promise. It actually arrives at that dramatic point of nothingness. That was the point when the people around me seemed to involuntarily scream. I might’ve, too. I frankly don’t remember.

**End of interjection.

After viewing the full eclipse I wrote a haiku to linger in the moment. I’ll end here by sharing two of them.

Haiku #1

Tangerine sun glow
Invisible moon, stealthy
Round and smooth-edged.

Haiku #2

Lively spring day
Not a cloud in sight - eclipse!
The world goes still.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support Raghav’s work.