Move Slowly and Mend Things 📚

I’m re-reading Jeff Goins’s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to “put a dent in the universe”

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

I’m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a “tend and befriend” approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

Hands can blog today, but brain won't, so have some stuff from other people that's great. 📚 🖖

  1. Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”

  2. Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.

  3. Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)

  4. Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)

📚 I just finished reading Alexandra Rowland’s (@_alexrowland on Twitter) A Choir of Lies and I’m not a little weepy, feeling seen & thinking about partings and stories and ugh. ♥️ 😭

Finished reading: The Addams Family: An Evilution by Charles Addams and Kevin Miserocchi 📚

Happy World Goth Day! I’m GothEnough and if you want to be, so are you! If you are Not-a-Goth or not goth, you can still celebrate. 📚

Want to read: Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde by Thomas Wright 📚

🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.

📚 Reading Notes, Having Trouble Reading, and a Read What You Own Challenge

I added a page to the index section of my Bullet Journal that tracks Reading Notes. I don’t like to use collections; I inevitably end up ignoring them. So Reading Notes get stuck in my notebook on the day that I did the reading, and then I add the book title to the Reading Notes bit of the index, along with the numbers of pages where I’ve taken notes on that book.

Here are all the books that one might consider me to be “currently” reading right now:

  • Getting Started in Consulting
  • Dracula - a gorgeous edition illustrated by [Edward Gorey]
  • Ghostlands
  • Moby Dick
  • Writing with Power
  • A Choir of Lies
  • How to Do Nothing
  • Jim Henson: The Biography
  • The Artist’s Way
  • Steal Like an Artist

I’ve actually finished reading at least 5 books in the past couple of months, which is impressive, I think. But I’m really having trouble deciding which one to read at any given time. So I still count this as having trouble reading.

Austin Kleon has some advice for if you are having trouble reading. I think I will pay attention to it. I’ve been doing some of these things, but I might benefit from doing even more.

Leonie Dawson challenged herself to only read books she had in her home before buying any new ones. I’ve been flirting with this challenge but I think it might not be right for the current moment. I don’t know. I do have a lot of awesome books lying around.

Low energy + high pain = reading about ghosts while lying on a hammock. 👻📚

📚 finished reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

This is a re-read; I read The Elements of Style when I was Managing Editor for LEARN NC. I picked it up again because I’ve created a writing/editing/research comm syllabus for myself (more on that in another post).

Most of the rules here are things I do in my writing intuitively and have for years, but there are always a few gems to pull out, especially from the final chapter about style.

Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. (p. 15)

This is such a strong argument for freewriting and Ann Lamott’s shitty first draft. You get the thoughts out of you and only then do you figure out what order they should be in. (Huh. I didn’t realize Peter Elbow developed freewriting as a practice. I’m currently reading his book, Writing with Power.)

Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. (p. 70)

This reminds me of Austin Kleon’s exhortation to steal like an artist, as well as his thoughts about the relationship between input and output.

With respect to the place of feelings in writing, Strunk and White argue that a design, or structure for writing, tends to be incompatible with feelings, because

one’s feelings do not usually lend themselves to rearrangement. (p. 71)

This can certainly be the case, but I don’t think emotion-driven writing and highly-structured writing are incompatible. Poetry is a good place for structure and emotion together. (Joss Whedon once said in an interview that his writing process is about structure and emotion.)

Look at sonnets, for example. Whether Petrarchan, Shakespearean, or otherwise, they are highly structured and often draw on emotion. See for a specific example, my favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or a more modern sonnet my friend wrote, or Sir Patrick Stewart reading a sonnet a day.

Revising is part of writing. (p. 72)

I know. I know. I really struggle with this. For all that I’m a proponent of freewriting and an initial round of revision, I really struggle with later rounds.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. (p. 84)

Yes! Trust your audience to be smart.

The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. (p. 85)

This reminds me of another bit of Austin Kleon advice, to write the book you want to read. I recently finished reading Wallace J. Nichols’s book, Blue Mind (more on that in another post), and joined a Zoom call he had to discuss his upcoming plans for 100 Days of Blue Mind. He said that Blue Mind was a book he’d wanted someone else to write so that he could read it, but he couldn’t find it, so he wrote it. (He also said, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might start out studying marine biology and end up studying neuroscience.")

I’m glad to have re-read The Elements of Style. I feel like people joke about it a lot, but I think it’s a useful little book.

📚 Just found my copies of Making Sense of Qualitative Data (Coffey & Atkinson) and Writing the New Ethnography (Goodall). I’ve been looking for them since November and my little qual researcher heart is SO HAPPY right now.

🎵🎭📚 You know that feeling when you’re irritated that you have to feed your family instead of just reading Stephen Sondheim’s annotation of his lyrics for the rest of the night? No? Just me, then? (If you haven’t yet, go watch this concert.)

📚 Finished reading:

📚 Abandoning Blue Mind for now, but I definitely want to come back to it.

Want to read: Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil 📚

My three-year-old is over here writing fix-it fic for The Velveteen Rabbit. 📚

📚 The library is closed, limiting my book borrowing options, but the gym is also closed, freeing up some book buying funds, so…

It’s nice to see that Alexandra Rowland has written a book for/about me. 📚

Want to read: Fibershed : growing a movement of farmers, fashion activists, and makers for a new textile economy 📚

📚 Want to Read: How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard

📚 Want to read: Wheat Belly by William Davis, MD

📚 Want to read: Carpe Diem: Seizing the Day in a Distracted World by Roman Krznaric

Found this on the Wikipedia page for Memento mori. Drawn to the neologism “nexistentialism.” Here for mementoing mori.

📚 Set aside for now with plans to pick back up later:

  • Total Immersion
  • Swim Ultra-efficient Freestyle
  • eBay for Dummies
  • Paperback Crush
  • Reinventing You

📚 Currently reading: The Immune System Recovery Plan by Susan Blum, M.D., M.P.H.

📚 Currently reading: Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier by Terry Laughlin and John Delves