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🔖 Read The Homebound Symphony by @ayjay
I’m trying to be the Homebound Symphony. Just one person sitting in my study with a computer on my lap, reading and listening and viewing, and recording and sifting and transmitting – sharing the good, the true, and the beautiful, with added commentary.
This is what I would like to do, too.
🔖 I highly recommend Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up as a tool for managing daily living when things feel hard.
🔖 Read As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
This 1945 essay by Vannebar Bush is one of the first texts they had us read when I got my MS in Library Science.
Notes and highlights
A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,
every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine
Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.
There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Bush points out that indexing systems and rules do not duplicate the human mind - we must convert our own mental associations to a form we can use to search them - but that the human mind works by association. I extrapolate from this the idea of hypertext as a model of how the mind works. I’m going to keep an eye out for other instances of this idea.
if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.
How many people use Evernote as a Memex?
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.
This is tagging.
There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.
It me! This is kinda what people who operate as web librarians do. Web librarian isn’t my job title or description, but it’s just kind of who I am.
His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
This is one of my difficulties. I put a lot of stuff in my blog-as-memex but don’t have a good way of surfacing them again. Theoretically I could do this with categories, but that gets overwhelming fast. This is why I’m thinking about using a blog and a wiki together for this purpose.
He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.
I fear this is so.
Related video
🔖 Read Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing.
Awesome piece with an excellent argument. I’ve been tacking this direction for a while and it’s nice to see more scholars talking about it.
🔖 Read We Are All Hostages to Anti-Semitism by Yair Rosenberg
Excellent piece about how anti-Semitism is not individual prejudice, but part of a vast, centuries-old conspiracy theory that undermines people’s faith in democracy.
🔖 Read Hypertext Gardens.
Efficient traversal provides the information readers think they want, but may hide information readers need.
I love the 1998ness of this essay. It’s given me a lot to think about, though it’ll be a while before I figure out how I’d like to apply these ideas.
🔖Read What happens when we die.
Beautiful notes from Maria Popova on the novel Mr g.
🔖 Read The comedy of survival.
🔖 Read “I Feel Very Uncomfortable When People Call Me A Writer”.
Great conversation between Sara Fredman & Dr. Merve Emre. WRITE LIKE A MOTHER is a newsletter fave for me right now. Highly recommend.
🔖 Read Lost Time in COVID.
Overall, we have, of necessity, learned to value the quality of our time over the quantity of it, and to work with the rhythms of our energies.
🔖 Read Everyone should blog.
🔖 Read Celebrate by Writing.
🔖 Read True gender-neutral clothing must go beyond fancy sweatpants.
I love the idea of a shop where clothing is arranged by type (shirts here, dresses there) and silhouette (narrow shoulders over here, broad hips over there).
🔖 Read 6 ways to deal with anxiety and uncertainty this winter.
One way to embrace radical uncertainty is to develop coping mechanisms. This NPR piece suggests some possibilities.
🔖 Read What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good life.
This is an excellent way to think about how to live.
🔖 Read There Is No “Best of” List From Me This Year. 📚
Beautiful writing from Kelly Jensen: how books impacted her this year; where she is in her journey as a writer, book blogger, reader. I’ll revisit this as I think about how I want to engage with & around books in 2022.
🔖📚 Read
All Your Followers Will Not Buy Your Book - by Kate McKean katemckean.substack.com.
🔖📚 Read
Yes, Social Media Can Sell Books. But Not If Publishers Sit on Their Hands | Jane Friedman janefriedman.com.
🔖📚 Read
Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ - The New York Times nytimes.com.Read: www.nytimes.com
🔖 Read How your brain copes with grief, and why it takes time to heal.
This time last year, my grandmother was in the hospital. She’d been non-responsive for several days but had just started indicating that she was aware of what was going on around her. She recovered enough to talk to my mom on the phone and to be transferred to hospice. She died on January 2. I didn’t go to her memorial service because it was in a county with a very high COVID-19 positivity rate. Not gathering with my people has delayed my grieving significantly.
Mostly, at times when I would normally call her, I forget that she died until I start working out the logistics. I wanted to invite her to watch my dissertation defense. My graduation. To call her and tell her about the postdoc.
I only called her for big things: getting engaged, being present, Christmas, her birthday. There are many granddaughters more communicative than I ever was. But I made sure she always knew about the big moments.
I have to trust that if her spirit persists in some form, she still knows about the big moments. But it’s really hard not to actually hear her talking to me about it.
It’s hard knowing I’ll never again sit in her bedroom and talk with her and my mom late into the night, or lie in bed and watch TV with her until we both fall asleep, or sit out by her pool, or insist she come to the beach. Never amble about the little neighborhood market Wal-Mart around the corner from her house with her picking out groceries, or go to the Chinese buffet with her. There are so many little mundane things that I miss.
She didn’t die of COVID-related illness, but it’s COVID that kept me from seeing her for a scheduled visit in April 2020, that kept my mom from rushing down to Florida to bring her here to visit before Christmas or to be at her bedside when she was in the hospital.
I really appreciate how this article ends by urging people to remember that those of us who have lost loved ones in the past 21 months have traded everyone’s safety for the last moments with the people we love, and that in making that trade we have shifted our own grieving processes in ways we’re still discovering.
🔖 Read if we’re all about to get Omicron, here are 5 tips from a long-hauler (via @agilelisa on Micro.blog).
This is sound advice for living with any chronic illness.
🔖 Read The Scholarship of Sexy Privilege: Why Do I Love Dark Academia Books?
…there will always be fringe groups who parade their complete rejection of the source material and make it their own. This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries.