Kimberly Hirsh

I’m back to cross-posting from my site automatically to Twitter. Everywhere else I’m going to stick with manusl cross-posting.

How are you doing, Internet? I’m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but I’m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. I’m doing pretty well at that.

Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. I’ll say a little more about it anyway. I styled myself for this type of position throughout my PhD program, in spite of having no expectation that such a position would be available. I always live a better life when I just do whatever is interesting or exciting to me and let professional opportunities arise as they may. (Woo-woo types would say this is because my Human Design type is Projector and I would not argue with them.)

My job is to read about what’s making it hard for teen librarians to support connected learning in their libraries, interview them about it, analyze a bunch of data from my reading and interviews, and work with a team to develop tools to help teen librarians with this. It is dreamy as can be. Teen librarians (and librarians who serve teens and others as well) tend to be pretty awesome, based on my encounters with them. On their best days, they want to make space for what lights teens up. (On their worst days, I would guess they probably just want to go home. Being a school or public librarian is really hard as well as being rewarding.)

I do feel a need to figure out what’s next, which is why I’m doing Jen Polk’s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for this as a student, but my consulting/content development work with Quirkos paid enough that I could actually afford it. Yay!

My previous explorations with ImaginePhD have indicated that writing, publishing, and editing is a good career family given my skills and interests, and I don’t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so I’m doing some thinking and planning and learning about what that would look like. The ideal situation for me would either be enough consulting to cover the bills paired with writing as a creative outlet, or some sort of dream job instead of the consulting. I don’t think I want to depend on freelance writing for my income, but I do think I want to get words out of me and in front of human people.

Blogging even on days when I don’t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artist’s Way more broadly. (I’m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

I’m reading through Joanna Penn’s Author 2.0 Blueprint and the posts and books she mentions in it. I’ll probably pick Bird by Bird up soon. I thought I’d read it before, but it’s not on my list of books I’ve read. I know I have a paperback copy somewhere but I think it’s lost in a pile of stuff in the attic, so I’m going to buy the ebook for my Kobo, too.

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I don’t know a way around that, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t have this idea of a person who spends all their time sitting in a garret writing, because as I learned when I was doing improv, you have to go experience life if you want to make art about it. (You could make art about sitting in a garret, I suppose.) When I watched Hamilton, the thing that stood out for me that for some reason had eluded me in listening was writing as a throughline in the whole story. The lyrics “I wrote my way out” and “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. What’s bigger than a leitmotif? I don’t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I don’t know what it is. Definitely the story of Donna Tartt spending so much time on her writing at Bennington College was part of it.

Anyway. I am unapologetically romantic about writing as art and craft, but very realistic about the ways in which it can be a career.

How are things going for you?

Tag yourself. I’m Arcade Fire Dad (sub in improv troupe for band). https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-sad-dad-band-says-about-you

Sent my mom the Six of Crows duology for her Kindle. Pretty pleased with myself. 📚

🔖 Read Julia Cameron Says You Can Get Creative Indoors.

My bedhead is feeling extra goth and channeling Tim Burton a little bit this morning.

🔖Read What is “Dark Academia,” and why is it trending on social media in 2022?

The Empath’s Dilemma: You won’t cry for yourself, but you cry really hard when you start to think how scared and alone the rest of your family must feel (especially because you’re pretty sure you don’t have the capacity to hold their fear and isolation).

My mom was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia this week and started chemo yesterday. If you want details, email me and I’ll send you the link to her CaringBridge site. Please forgive me if you reply and I don’t get around to saying thank you.

Key lines from “Surface Pressure”:

Give it to your sister, your sister’s older

Give her all the heavy things we can’t shoulder

Give it to your sister, your sister’s stronger

See if she can hang on a little longer

Give it to your sister, it doesn’t hurt and

See if she can handle every family burden

Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks

Give it to your sister and never wonder

If the same pressure would’ve pulled you under

🔖 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.

🍿 Watched Encanto.

Lovely.

🔖 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.

W’s aunt gave M an amaryllis and it’s blooming. Big Alice in Wonderland vibes. [Image description: a large red amaryllis flower blooms.]

Peak IndieWeb Eldest Daughter Kimberly: considering for a few minutes trying to do a self-hosted version of CaringBridge before deciding it’s okay to use a silo for that purpose.

I haven’t seen ENCANTO but I gather Luisa is the middle sister and yet her song is the anthem of eldest daughters the world over. 🍿🎵

🔖 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 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 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 Tamsyn Muir Understood the Assignment: The Locked Tomb Series’ Expansive Exploration of Death and Grieving by Emma Leff 📚

I am immensely pleased to be getting so much new Star Trek in the next few months. 🖖🏻

I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from checking or cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most other social media services, with the exception of Micro.blog. I’m doing this right now because I don’t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and that’s most of what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters aren’t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so it’s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I don’t need extra reasons to be grouchy.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@kimberlyhirsh.com or text my Google Voice number at +1 ‪(919) 794-7602‬. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed. If you want to respond to something I post, you can reply by email, join the conversation on Micro.blog, or send a webmention from your own site.

I’m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

Life just ran more smoothly when she got her way. Leigh Bardugo, KING OF SCARS

💬📚

I’m experimenting with building a digital garden via a personal wiki so of course my first page is about Digital Gardens and Streams. I won’t be shocked if I end up going back to putting everything in my website/blog, but I thought I’d try this out.

🔖 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.