/reader

 

All I wanted to do this morning was to add a class to an image in Hugo. At first I thought I needed to override my theme’s image-render hook, but then I learned that could use the built-in Markdown attributes. It required a new setting or two¹, but worked great for adding a style to images in a single post. In lists, however, the styles are applied to the paragraph above the image, even with wrapStandAloneImageWithinParagraph set to false. I couldn’t figure it out, so I just put the paragraph after the images. Not a solution, but solved the problem in this case. This will happen again, I’m sure. Normally, I’d just use raw HTML for this, but the image pipeline in Hugo “bundles” wouldn’t work, and I need that.

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Speaking of raw HTML. Have you noticed how we’re too willing to jump through all sorts of hoops in Markdown just to avoid writing a little HTML.

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A dream of competence, too closely confronted.

I spent hours today working on better blockquotes and other tweaks to my theme. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t find half of my changes. Some combination of git branches and bad hugo module updates and the whole thing was hosed. Then I noticed my theme’s default branch was “master”, which shouldn’t be the case. No clue how that happened. Also, some of the experimental features I was tinkering with (using claude) leaked into the main branch. Took me more than an hour to fix things. At this moment I’m feeling like I should’ve stuck with Ghost. 😒

It was so much fun yesterday working on a BBEdit-based workflow with Hugo. Then, today it was ruined by the theme mess I made.

1. Namely, wrapStandAloneImageWithinParagraph: false and some block settings. ↩︎

 

Deze week was té warm om echt iets serieus te doen op mijn werkkamer. Of waar dan ook. Ik heb inmiddels aardig wat interviews en gesprekken achter de rug. Deels zijn ze uitgeschreven en samengevat. In september volgen nog een paar interviews en dan begint het schrijfwerk echt voor me. Komende week neem ik vrij en ga ik met het gezin naar Parijs. Op zoek naar crêpes, kunst en notitieboeken natuurlijk! Daarom verschijnt volgende week geen nieuwsbrief. Geniet van de zon!

Lees je dit voor het eerst, welkom! Mijn naam is Frank Meeuwsen en ik ben in mei 2025 gestart met een onderzoek/project/boekidee rondom het vraagstuk “Hoe gebruiken creatieve professionals een papieren notitieboek als startpunt voor hun creatieve werk, en welke patronen zijn daar te ontdekken die voor andere kenniswerkers interessant en inspirerend zijn?” Je kunt hier alle details lezen. In dit weekbericht praat ik je bij over de voortgang en wat er aan komt.

We reden snel die veel te hippe en drukke Zuidas in Amsterdam uit. Op weg naar rustiger tijden. Na 10 minuten stappen we 50 jaar terug in de tijd bij Anno 1890 in Amstelveen. In de hoek van zijn stamkroeg van weleer eten we een broodje bal en schuif ik mijn voicerecorder over het Perzische kleed op de eikenhouten tafel. Herbert van Hoogdalem begint te praten en ik hoef alleen maar te luisteren.

Zijn verhalen hoe ideeën tot stand komen om 5 uur ’s ochtends, over snelle schetsen maken op grote vellen papier en waarom hij zoveel lege notitieboekjes uit Frankrijk op zijn werkkamer heeft liggen. Hoe hij oplossingen bedenkt waarvan iedereen zich afvraagt waarom niemand er ooit eerder opkwam. We maken zijsprongen naar zijn eigen opslagsysteem, we bespreken de rituelen van creatieven, het vliegt alle kanten op, maar altijd de goede. Na 2,5 uur zijn we uitgepraat. De hitte heeft keihard toegeslagen en ik ben tevreden. We hebben de polaroid!

Een dag later zit ik in de trein naar Nijmegen. Weer een mooie ontmoeting, deze keer met straatfotograaf Michiel Heijmans. Ik leerde Michiel kennen rond 2001, toen hij een van weinige bloggers in Nederland was. Na veel omzwervingen doet hij nu waar hij voor geboren is, fotografie. Straatfotografie om precies te zijn. En Michiel schrijft. Hij schrijft veel en de hele dag door. Hij heeft een mooie verzameling notitieboeken meegenomen. Van zijn Paper Republic Grand Voyageur, gevuld met meerdere katernen, tot zijn dagelijkse schetsboekjes, losse boekjes voor in zijn fototassen. Michiel heeft duidelijke ideeën over zijn eigen systeem en wat anderen er van mee kunnen nemen. Met een heerlijke lunch en zonnige wandeling door de stad kijk ik terug op een mooi interview. En natuurlijk is er de polaroid!

Een tip als je meer wilt weten over de connectie tussen kunst kijken/maken en de effecten op ons brein. Your Brain on Art verkent dat snijvlak met de discipline NeuroArts. Hoe een bezoek aan museum je minder eenzaam maakt, uitleg over de kracht van geur en emoties. De twee wetenschappers hebben alles verzameld in een boek met dezelfde naam. Ik kreeg het aangeraden door Wouter Groeneveld (Brainbaking) en het staat op mijn lijst!

Gisteren zagen we Kneecap in de bioscoop. De film over het gelijknamige controversiële hiphoptrio uit Belfast. De biopic vertelt het verhaal over de drie Ieren die rappen in hun oorspronkelijke Ierse taal, het Gaelic. De start van de samenwerking is een in beslag genomen notitieboekje met Ierse lyrics tijdens het verhoor van een van de twee rappers. Onleesbaar voor de Britse politieagent, maar de opgetrommelde Ierse muziekleraar/tolk ziet er potentie in. Het is de start van een van de meest explosieve festivalacts van deze periode. Met een duidelijke boodschap, niet alleen voor de Ierse gemeenschap, maar net zo goed over de genocide die in Gaza plaatsvindt, in opdracht van de Israëlische regering. En dat allemaal door een notitieboek met losse zinnen en ideeën. Een leuk kijkje achter de schermen bij de motion designer die het notitieboek gebruikte als inspiratie voor de montage en typografie in de film.

Een prima tijdverdrijf is de voorpret voor een stedentrip. Ik haal uit allerlei blogs en reissites de leukste tips voor ons bezoek aan Parijs. Niet alleen de bekende namen, maar juist de onverwachte winkels, bezienswaardigheden en sights worth seeing in deze stad. Ik verzamelde ze in Obsidian, maar dan is het moeilijk delen met de rest van de familie omdat a) Obsidian nóg geen multiplayer mode heeft en b) mijn gezin niet zo van de speciale notitie-apps is. Toen herontdekte ik Apple Notes. We hebben allemaal een iPhone, waar de Notes app standaard op staat. Een gedeelde notitiemap is zo gemaakt en klaar! Sowieso is Apple Notes een verborgen parel op je iPhone.
Check deze video voor de mogelijkheden met de kleine krachtpatser op je telefoon. Ik wist bijvoorbeeld niet dat er ingebouwde handschriftherkenning in zat. Of dat de aankomende versie Markdown zal ondersteunen. Erg interessant voor je als apps als Obsidian en Notion als een tsunami van mogelijkheden voelen maar je wel aan de slag wilt om je notities goed op te slaan en te verbinden met elkaar. Je kunt dan later altijd eenvoudig overstappen van Notes naar iets anders.

Dit was de week van 10 augustus - 17 augustus. Tot over twee weken! Eerdere weekberichten lees je hier op de site.

The first thing we did upon picking up our car is to wind down the windows and turn off recirculation mode. This brings in outside air into the car. Then we set up our air purifier – the air fanta 3, which can run on either a portable battery or a car lighter charger. We plugged ours in the car charger, but I did bring a portable battery just in case. We ran it for a full hour while driving before unmasking. This is the first time in roughly five years we unmasked in a car.

In singapore we mask during the rare times we drive as we use a car-sharing scheme. It felt really weird to be driving without a mask, like we were doing something wrong. It was as though we were in one of those anxiety dreams where we forgot to wear a mask.

Many of the cafes, restaurants and even hotel lobbies are open air, so it almost felt like the before times because we could go from car to hotel lobby to restaurant unmasked. Of course open-air doesn’t mean 100% risk free, but both of us felt that this is what we can accept to make this actually sustainable in the very long-term. It is low season in Khao Yai so there weren’t many people around. We do wear our masks outdoors if there are enough people around. I usually follow my partner because she’s more sensitive to potential risk than I am.

There are many accommodations in Khao Yai that are standalone with balconies or patios, so that added to the safety factor.

We avoided hotels that do not have windows that can be opened. We ran the air purifier perpetually anyway.

Since Khao Yai is known for its outdoor attractions including its famous national park, we could do plenty of things outdoor with virtually nobody around.

At many cafes, the outdoor is the feature. It is usually the other way around in other places: the indoors have great interiors whereas the outdoors feel like an afterthought. In tropical countries like Singapore, sitting outdoors is a form of voluntary torture since it can be extremely hot and humid at 35 degrees celsius. Khao Yai is at a higher altitude. It was the rainy season so there were some uncomfortably hot days, but we did enjoy quite a number of cooler days.

There are also food options available in Khao Yai that is typically unavailable in Singapore due to the hot weather. We even had sushi outdoors.

We usually skip hotel breakfasts because they are almost always indoors with a few rare exceptions – in Khao Yai almost every hotel breakfast has a patio option. Some restaurants are fully outdoors. One place offered only in-room breakfast which was great for us.

Of course, covid cautiousness is a spectrum. Some people wouldn’t travel at all or eat outdoors. Right now it seems like it is going to be a perma-pandemic, so we had to decide where in this spectrum we want to exist. We are quite comfortable wearing n95s on planes and everywhere indoors, and avoiding most human interactions. We cannot pretend that covid doesn’t exist anymore, yet we cannot be isolated hermits either. Thankfully a well-fitted mask works, along with other prophylactics.

We really appreciated our time in Khao Yai because we were able to go mask-free much more than we can in other places. It makes me contemplate more car-centric travel to isolated places. Thanks to the rental car we were able to travel around unencumbered. I won’t pretend to like wearing a mask. I just do it because I cherish my health and my brain more than I dislike wearing a mask.

I can’t help but feel weird writing this post because 99% of people are living as though the virus is harmless. Everyone else has moved on, but I keep on writing about it. But being queer taught me that representation matters. Almost every day I come across research papers telling us about the long-term harmful effects of viruses, so why am I the one feeling weird? This path is extremely lonely, but this is something that feels important to stand up for. If I don’t acknowledge this like everyone else just to feel less lonely, I am simply contributing to the denialism. I choose the loneliness. But thankfully I still have my partner with me. She doesn’t feel lonely though. I guess I have something to learn from her.

credit to my partner for some of the photos.

The bike handled the task well. No squeaking, no other problems. However, I apparently didn’t drink enough or eat anything during the ride, so I was really exhausted afterwards. Unfortunately, I sometimes make this mistake, but hopefully I’ve learned my lesson this time.

The navigation wasn’t ideal this time either. Because the route was based on a published route on Komoot, I made my adjustments on Komoot, downloaded the GPX file, and imported it into Osmand. However, something messed up the directions. Osmand kept telling me to turn left when I should have turned right. This caused a lot of confusion and a few wrong turns.

Nevertheless, it was a nice ride and I enjoyed doing some exercise outdoors again!

Interactions & Comments

We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storage. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, debugged complete API, it's not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need is an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say. #

Billionaire-proof and RSS#

• I would like to get on the record. #
• The only billionaire-proof social network will be based on RSS. #
• The shortest path to being billionaire-proof for Bluesky is well thought-out inbound and outbound RSS. #
• We're going to have some interop based on RSS not too far down the road. A network that will only require an RSS feed for entry. It's what we should've built in 2006 and didn't. #

This update has surprised my parents and many of my friends, since I have historically not displayed much of an affinity for the language or culture from which I hail, and in fact have been openly hostile to both for a long time. I cannot explain this about face myself. I've been telling my friends that I'm sick of being bad at the language I grew up speaking at home, and while that isn't untrue, it doesn't explain why it's happening now of all times, since I've been bad for just about as long as I can remember. I think there are a lot of little reasons that caused the cup to overflow: C's influence on me, an improved relationship with my parents, more frequent trips to China, seeing more use cases for it in New York. Whatever the reason, the desire is here now, and I hope it is here to stay.

I am not so confident I can make learning this language stick as a habit. I am the kind of person that wants to do everything the "right" way, and often in my desire to figure out what that "right" way is I get too lost in the weeds researching and deciding the optimal plan and end up abandoning the whole endeavor before I even start. At first I wanted to focus on improving my reading and writing (which lag far behind my speaking and listening comprehension and need the most urgent attention) and told my teacher as much, only to be find the reading homework she assigned me (that I specifically asked for, mind you) so torturously unpleasant¹ that I promptly retracted that request the next class.

Back in my product days we used to bandy around the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP), or the most basic version of an app or product we could ship to customers in order to get feedback we could use to keep iterating. I have realized that there is value in applying this concept to my own life as well. Sure, my reading and writing skills definitely need the most work, but if for whatever reason I can't get myself to practice them, getting conversation practice is better than all of the nothing I've been doing for so many years. I'm giving myself permission to half-ass it in the name of progress.

There is also the problem of the immense shame and embarrassment I feel when I speak Chinese poorly. I didn't realize how bad it would be until after the first call with my current teacher ended and I had to consciously unclench many of the muscles in my body that had tensed up over the course of the class. I do not fully understand why this is, but my best guess is that because language is so tied with identity, failing to speak one of your own languages is existential, like losing a part of myself. Another part of it is that speaking a language poorly is so humiliating. I feel like an idiot when I can't come up with the words for common things or figure out how to say something simple. In Chinese I am so limited, so awkward and boring on a good day, unintentionally rude on a bad one.

As for the specifics, I'm trying to stick to about an hour of dedicated conversation practice a week, which I squeeze in before work. I'm also paying more attention to Chinese I see written around town: I'll take pictures of signs, labels, and menus I don't understand, look up the words on Pleco, and save them as flashcards to review when I'm bored. It is admittedly not a great strategy — I'm not reviewing so many characters, not reading very long texts, nor writing at all — but if it works I will consider it nothing short of a miracle.

J has also offered to set up a semi-regular language exchange where I go over to her place and talk to her and her boyfriend for an evening entirely in Chinese. The idea of it is equal parts exciting and embarrassing. (They're going to have to listen to me flail around for how long?) Well, there's no way I'll get better without getting over this discomfort first. (Plus, I think it might actually be pretty fun once I get a little better.)

II.

My writing students are starting to sketch and draft stories for competition soon. The beginning of that process — coming up with a compelling plot — always makes me feel inadequate. I've never even so much as attempted a work of fiction myself, so it feels like the blind leading the blind. Do you need to decide your entire plot before you start writing? Do you really need a conflict? Two or three characters? A resolution in which your protagonist is changed? For every rule I can find an award-winning story that flouts it. What do I know? And even if I did have an opinion (I don't, for most of these), who am I to say, anyway?

Beyond what I have already tried, which includes reading relevant books and asking other teachers for advice, one last idea looms large in my mind. Write a story yourself. It seems like the most straightforward solution in a lot of ways. Do the things you're teaching your students to do. Can you implement your own techniques? Can you write a good story in a few weeks when no good ideas strike you?

I haven't done this yet, because for one it sounds awfully difficult and time-consuming. (My poor students...) But perhaps more importantly, I think I've shied away from this because I'm afraid that I'll do it and turn out with something miserable. At least now I can simply say I've never tried and not have to face the reality of being a terrible fiction writer trying to teach fiction writing. What happens when I try and fail and can no longer rely on that plausible deniability to keep my imposter syndrome at bay?

Whatever the case, it has become clear to me that there will be many things I cannot understand until I actually try to do what my students are trying to do.

III.

I have also been playing a little more regulation soccer and practicing less on my own than I usually do. A team I played for last year started calling me to sub in for their games again. At first I was more than happy to do so, but after the past two weeks I'm starting to feel a little less enthusiastic about the whole thing.

For whatever reason this team has a lot of players coming and going (though I assume this is pretty common for the amateur leagues), so each week maybe 30% of the team is different from the week before. There is fortunately an identifiable core group of players who are all fairly nice to me, but once in a while bad eggs slip in that make the game a whole lot less fun.

Last week one of the core players brought his friend's girlfriend's dog's sitter's boyfriend (the details escape me, but you get the idea) and a few of his friends visiting from Colombia to play with us. They were technically quite good, as people from that part of the world often are, but played with a disrespect for the rules, the referee, and the well-being of the other players that disgusted me. One player received a red card and two others received yellow cards, all for what I would consider heinous fouls, and when it became clear that we were not going to win (a game we definitely should have won), they started a brawl with the other team. I was so ashamed to be wearing the same shirt I apologized to the other team after full-time. They're not the kind of players I would enjoy playing against, and I don't want them as my teammates either.

Thankfully this week they were gone. In their place one of the core members came. He's nice enough before and after the game but a bit intense during it, and won't hesitate to yell at anyone — including the referee, the opponents, and his own teammates — he feels like has wronged him or made a mistake. Our goalkeeper (the captain) got the worst of it today for a series of errors, but even I got a mouthful after not finding a pass and losing the ball on a promising breakaway. I share the same desire to win, but speaking from experience I don't think people play better after they get yelled at. We know when we don't play well, even when we don't have it screamed in our faces.

The past few weeks I've gotten asked to play I usually sub in off the bench and play for somewhere between ten to twenty minutes. Since I am not so assertive, technically a guest, and a pretty lame one at that, I haven't said anything, but there is some part of sacrificing half of my day to only play for ten, twenty minutes that leaves me deeply unsatisfied.

I read today that during the course of a 90 minute game, an average player will only have the ball for a minute or two. (The rest of the time you are just running around, trying to stay in position.) When you consider that I play only 10 or 20 minutes a game, I probably only get a total of ten twenty seconds with the ball each game. It feels silly, then, that I block off half a day to do this, to make the mile long walk each way to the field, to suit up and foam roll and warm up and cool down, to run around and cheer under the noonday sun.

IV.

The other part I find unsatisfying that I've been mulling lately is that I am objectively quite bad at soccer. We play in what I think is an intermediate or lower-intermediate level, and I am a fringe player that usually doesn't make much of an impact when I play.

Looking back I think I took the feeling of aptitude for granted growing up. After all, it was a given that we were all good at school and two or three other things, an instrument or a sport and some extracurricular activities. Now that I no longer play these instruments, am no longer in school, and not working in a field I even studied, I'm not really good at anything anymore.

The basic desire of a enneagram 5: "To be capable and competent".
Their fear: "Being useless, helpless, or incapable."

*   *   *

Things I have been thinking about recently:

• The Pain Scale by Eula Biss, c/o Jenn Frank (beautiful post, by the way)
• The journalese links in Sylvia's weeknotes 2025-31
• Using Raycast well (inspiration)

Still, it will be a long day and, as I would have to be up for work at 6am on Monday, I decided to take the week off work. It fits in nicely with the August bank holiday meaning I get 10 days off in a row — including the weekends.

There's plenty to do at home but I hope to spend some time in the studio, AKA the spare room, working on some new ideas.

# I've not really had any more thoughts on what I want to do with the site. I'll probably leave the blog as it is — it works nicely and would be heavy work to rebuild. Any changes will be with the rest of the site, especially a new home page and reworked /music page.

Social media and streaming subscriptions encourage us to gorge on the glut of information (Harjas Sandhu describes “hoarding type scrolling” that sounds veeeery familiar), promising that the algorithm will feed us the best. Instead of helping us practice discernment, corporate platforms offer us an all-you-can-eat buffet of candy. Yet as Olga Koutseridi writes, “low-quality info is designed to leave us craving more instead of leaving us feeling satisfied.” We keep eating and eating, but there’s nothing of substance to sustain us.

I think curiosity is innately good, and that there’s value in learning about many aspects of the world for no more reason than that it is interesting. At the same time, I have limited time and capacity for thinking — I need some sort of filter for what to read, especially as I make efforts to slow my pace. The morass of information online is what brought us algorithmic curation and now pushes genAI — but corporate algorithms encourage rage and polarization and create “curiosity ruts”, so I avoid them.

How can I create my own mental algorithm for choosing what to read?

For me, reading and blogging are interconnected; what I read influences what I write about. I’m working on flipping that around, with the goal that what I want to write about determines what I read. But how to decide what to write about, if not by what I read?

What I’m trying is using my Big Questions as a structure for curiosity, a way to practice more intentionality in what I spend my time thinking about. I’ve been working on this for a few years, but I feel like I’m getting a better handle on it now.

tl;dr I’m basically doing research projects for fun 😉

Since I started this experiment, I’ve noticed I’m less driven to read random stuff online because I’m so excited about this playful approach to reading. The carrot method — giving myself exciting things to think about — has worked way better than the stick method of deleting my feed reader from my phone so that the only thing I had to read was my Read Later app, which instead drove me to read the Bluesky and mastodon.social Discover feeds (do not recommend) in a desperate quest for novelty and news. Glad I dodged that becoming a habit 🙌

The Big Questions framing

I got the framing of Big Questions at an Oliver Burkeman workshop. I recall it as a tangential mention but it immediately sent me spinning. As simple an idea as it is to identify some key overarching questions in your life, sometimes we need to put a name to something to really get it.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff recounts advice Richard Feynman gave “to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind,” and describes favorite problems as “a curiosity engine”:

Your favorite problems form a prism that separates incoming information into a spectrum of ideas — a frame that allows you to deliberately filter distractions, direct your attention, and nurture your curiosity.

Last year, I wanted to do more self-directed writing, but it was challenging not to be reactive. This year, I’m discovering that self-guided reading is the other half of the equation.

Big questions give me a reason to seek rather than simply receive, and are broad enough to provide direction without constraint.

Turning directed curiosity into big questions

Reading towards questions gives purpose to my curiosity. Curiosity comes in two styles: receptive and directed. Receptive curiosity is openness to learning; directed curiosity is more active, and invites you deeper. Allen Pike observes that the internet primarily serves our receptive curiosity:

By occasionally picking things to go deep on, you balance out the otherwise broad information diet we all get by default by being on the internet, consuming media, and just kind of being a modern human.

My big questions coalesced out of my receptive curiosity reading; I identified my first big questions in 2023 by reflecting on what I’d been thinking and writing about and looking for overarching themes. I first listed off a bunch of smaller questions within that theme, then worked backwards to find a bigger question uniting them all. Defining these questions made me enunciate for myself exactly what it was I was wondering, a process I found helpful in itself.

Last fall, I realized that my big questions didn’t align with my main interests anymore, so I created a few new ones and retired a couple. Updating my big question pages a couple-three times a year also nudges me to notice which questions I’ve been neglecting and might like to put some attention towards, or retire.

Big questions are a self-created tool that serves my thinking, not the other way around. I don’t treat them as a boundary to my curiosity, but can expand or add to my questions when I need. The questions are big enough to keep exploring within for a year or more, still offering plenty of the novelty I crave. I think of the Big Questions as high level themes, and blog posts as a way to explore sub-questions within them.

How this changes my reading

The feed reader and beyond

I subscribe to a ton of feeds, ever-changing, which showers me in riches of information that satisfy my broad curiosity, some directly from topical blogs and some shared by cool people. Earlier this year, I reoriented the way I think of the topic-specific blogs and newsletters I follow, and moved them from my blogroll page onto my big question pages. It’s now easier for me to unfollow and refollow topical feeds as my focus shifts between questions.

I’ve also been more proactive in seeking out online articles related to my questions — I’ve been using Search My Site, Marginalia Search, and appending Reddit to DDG searches to seek out opinions and recommendations. These smaller, weirder information pools yield some intriguing results. (There are so many personal websites out there guys!)

Choosing not to read *good* online content

Marco Giancotti points out that weeding out the bad stuff isn’t the hard part of deciding what to read (emphasis mine):

Filtering out spam and slop is relatively easy with the right tools and a little thought, at least at an emotional level.

The much tougher job, I think, is giving up on things that would be good, meaningful, fulfilling, and useful in order to do things that are even more so—or, to be precise, to do things that are better aligned with what I really care about right now. The hard part is dealing with the fact that, whatever I may try, I will never get to do the vast majority of those amazing activities.

I’m of two minds here: I don’t want to ignore everything that isn’t immediately useful, but recognize that I read a lot of things that leave me with nothing more than “cool🤷‍♀️” (or political stuff that ties me in a knot of nerves and anger). I don’t want to fall prey to utilitarianism, reading only what has a tangible, immediate takeaway, but also find I do get more satisfaction from going deep.

Oliver Burkeman writes about accepting our finitude in Four Thousand Weeks, commenting (emphasis mine):

“Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.”

I cannot care about everything, and trying to prevents me from going deep on the things I care most about. Wendell Berry puts it: “To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance.”

Accepting my own interests

I use my Read Later app as the filter point between my shoulds and my interests; everything I encounter online and want to read gets saved there. I tag articles with key topics and themes (including “mindset of more” for articles related to this series) to let me see only articles related to my questions. When a bit of time has passed from saving the article and I am less emotionally invested, I can more easily let go of the things that I imagine “someone like me” ought to read. Looking into these “should” articles often exposes tender spots of (typically unwarranted) inadequacy, or what-if’s around choices long since made.

What this ultimately requires is self-knowledge and self-acceptance — to release our imagined selves and “navigate by aliveness.” We must not judge our own curiosities as unworthy, or torment ourselves that we ought to be different people than we are. Whatever we are interested in, however idiosyncratic, holds meaning for us, and that’s what counts.

Curating reading lists

After reading around a question for a while online, I start to get a better feel for where I should dig in to books. The internet primarily produces breadth, but books offer depth.

In the past, I would pick a single book as representative of a topic I was broadly curious about and call it good. Now, I’m going more research-style, collecting a stack of books on the same topic, knowing full well that I won’t read them all*.

I start off by browse-searching the library catalog for books related to a question that’s been niggling at me — this spring one has been: in the age of generative AI, what’s the value in craftsmanship? — and collecting potential titles into a list. Of course, I have my own answer to this question, but the meaning of making can be a tricky thing to describe, so I wanted to see how others have done so, and explore some different angles:

• What’s the value of art and craftsmanship to the creator, to the receiving audience, to society?
• How have we dealt with similar challenges to craftsmanship in the past, and how is generative AI different?
• What do artists, writers, academics, craftspeople think?
• What is craft, and how do we learn it? How is what generative AI does different than what human creators are doing?

I try to keep the lists generously open-ended — since these are library books I don’t have to pay for, I have nothing to lose from trying something a bit out there besides a bit of time. (I had been keeping a single list with all my questions crammed together but have finally taken the time to separate them out 😉) Art books, poetry, memoirs, all fair game. Celine Nguyen observes, “Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.” I’m trying to turn my “ooh?” energy towards intriguing books than enticing online articles.

When I’m requesting books from the library (we get free holds — 25 on ebooks and I’ve never hit the limit on physical), I skim through the library list and try to think about which would be most helpful to read next based on where my thinking is now. (This is also influenced by what has a wait list.) Although I like reading fiction as an ebook, I prefer to read non-fiction in hard copy. I benefit from having a non-fiction book in sight — it’s easy for non-fiction ebooks to get pushed below the digital fold so I forget I have them borrowed — and a due date so I actually get around to reading it 😉

Although I’m reading the book or article towards a particular theme, I’ll still write down unrelated connections — if I can’t use it for the post at top of mind, it might apply to a future question or post. Despite starting off with a vague idea of the question I’m getting at, I find that my original question often shifts and becomes more compelling, and I develop new questions. I’ll write more than one blog post, and explore more than one question, based on what I’ve been reading this spring and summer.

How I’ve been choosing books to read

Here’s a demonstration of my selections across four library runs (you’ll see I’m still grabbing books for entertainment, other interests, and broad curiosity, but also focusing on a particular topic):

When writing is the point of your notes — when informing your writing is the goal behind reading — Richard Griffiths proposes that it’s most useful to “develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book. That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making.” I do this by periodically ducking into my collecting grounds (draft blog post) for a particular question and developing a starter outline of declarative statements. I organize the material I’ve already collected (initially from online readings) into those headings, then continue to read more based on the parts of my argument I’m not sold on yet, or where I don’t feel comfortable making a declarative / interesting statement.

Reading with purpose

Sometimes I like to read for the sake of reading, and sometimes I enjoy more purposeful reading. Knowing that I’m planning to write about a question changes how I read by defining my idea space. Instead of reading according to receptive curiosity, I’m using directed curiosity to seek what of the text relates to my question. It makes me pay closer attention to language that I might quote in a blog post.

When I read non-fiction, two levels of interpretation are happening in my mind at the same time: first, I am directly intaking the language and interpreting the author’s intention; at another level, I am processing it analytically and relationally, trying to understand what it means to me. Johan Hari describes it: “If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.” This is an unfocused, connective mode of thinking that uses my brain’s default mode network. I use reading non-fiction as a commitment to spend time thinking about a subject; the book itself is a tool towards that.

When I read towards a question, I concentrate my connection-making within that question space, but it remains loose. I am reading for ideas, not information per se, so the dialogue between me and the book is what matters. Roland Barthes writes, “[The text] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” Just as writing doesn’t only look like typing, reading doesn’t only look like rapt attention to the page. A big question offers a frame for my reading, like the viewfinder of a camera; framing is a way of sense-making.

Further reading:

How Small-Town Public Libraries Enrich the Generative Research Process by Nick Fuller Googins (LitHub)

More search, less feed by Austin Kleon

See also:

Choosing between ideas for blog posts

How I approach crafting a blog post

Shout-out to James for asking about my Big Questions last December and (eventually) prompting this!

 

Last week I read two books about the supply chain: Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle (high-five if you were among the “late-night friends on Mastodon” mentioned in the acknowledgements) and Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit. What I want to talk about here, though, is Kurt Vonnegut.

Late in the Madrigal, he mentions a story Vonnegut once told in an interview on PBS—it shows up so much online that it’s been fact-checked. (He mentions it as well in his recent appearance on the Newitz’s podcast with Charlie Jane Anders, Our Opinions Are Correct.) It’s a story, ostensibly, about envelopes.

BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I’m getting — I’m going to buy an envelope.

VONNEGUT: Yeah.

BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know…. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

It’s well established here that I am financially dependent upon my mother, my sole remaining parent, who for some time now has lived in her own quarters, so to speak, in the home of my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew back east. Once that support is gone, as it stands now I’ll have less than six months of financial support left until everyone expects me to take her place although that doesn’t actually “solve” anything but the matter of not instead simply ending unhoused somewhere on the streets of Portland. Given the methodical destruction of what little safety net we have in this country anymore, we can’t even expect that I’d anymore even have the food stamps required to actually feed me.

The word “solve” is in quotes there because for me it isn’t any kind of a solution at all, and the reason is somewhere up there inside Vonnegut’s envelope.

If there’s one thing I have despite the financial dependence and the welfare support, as stunted as sometimes it can be what with the autism and the fatigue, it’s independence. I’m temperamentally unsuited to live with other human beings (just ask those I’ve lived with as an adult), and in fact I’m emotionally unsuited to have a social circle of what you’d term friends (versus intermittent acquaintances), but my relative sanity itself does depend upon the fact that I live in a Portland neighborhood that’s somewhat akin to a small town where I easily can walk to coffee, or brunch, or a movie without needing to stroll beyond a six-block radius.

I don’t need close attachments but I do need these loose, sociable if passing and fleeting connections of the kind Vonnegut valorizes as being of such fundamental human importance.

Those quarters foreseen as passing from my mother to me, it’s no exaggeration to say, would be among my worst nightmares, as suddenly I’d be forced to life in very close proximity to others when really I’m only as self-regulated as I am because I don’t have to closely (I’d argue, for me, claustrophobically) navigate a life of other people, and I’d be entirely and completely dependent upon those very people—whose mere presence would be dysregulating for me—to ever see and experience anything at all outside the home.

Those daily, weekly, or monthly routines of coffee, brunch, and movie in effect are my pacific circuit—regular acts of sociality if not direct sociableness that help regulate my nervous system and, for lack of a better term for it, my general levels of peace.

This all is further fed by the fact that recently I was thinking again about how the disability determination consultive evaluation after my post-diagnosis Vocational Rehabilitation job placement showed work was impossible for me yielded a report which instead said that while due to that job experience I had acute adjustment disorder, because I did so well on during two-hour exam clearly I can work just fine, and definitionally screwed me forever. There is no path ahead that results in me obtaining disability benefits, because of this original sin on the part of Disability Determinations Services that now and forever presents an insurmountable hurdle.

Complicating the idea of my pacific circuit is that through either resilience or resignation, as my world shrinks due to the still-undiagnosed fatigue, I keep marking most days as having been “neutral” (my general target for overall state of mind) despite, for example, not having been to the zoo—a once weekly, then monthly, activity—since May and not having blogged—until right now—for two months, when those things were of a self-regulatory nature. It’s entirely possible that through such resilience or resignation I’d continue grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England, but as much as this dynamic makes me sad now it would only make me all that much sadder then.

The other day I received the news that The Belmont Goats had lost another member of the herd, bringing it down from its high of fourteen to just nine. Bambi, a Nigerian dwarf goat and the first (along with her brother, Cooper) who joined the herd as a kid and bottle baby (which made them the go-to goats for taking to events), turned twelve in April. She could ask for attention like a cat, and insisted on being a lap goat for as long as she could, until she had to be content with just sitting in chairs by herself. Bambi’s passing comes in the days and weeks before the project moves into my neighborhood after seven years just across the railroad cut, to a space intended to be where that nine will live out the rest of their lives. That project itself for several years was a not insubstantial part of my pacific circuit.

By the recent, long-awaited return of the phenomenal podcast NeuroDiving to discuss empathy I was reminded of how to a significant degree I live my social life through a sort of process of “out of sight, out of mind”. For reasons, I think, of self-regulation even if entirely unconscious, whenever I need to make a break from something—family because I moved west, fandom because it just sort of wound down, from the goats because of an ethical dispute—I make sharp breaks because I’ve never had the mental temperament or dexterity to mix and match or compartmentalize. In the never-ending battle of resources versus demands, what’s in sight is about all the demand I can manage.

(The autistic person with whom NeuroDiving discusses empathy at one point says—although I’m not really convinced this has anything to do with empathy, per se—that when they move away from somewhere, they don’t miss anyone. This is significantly the case for me, although it can be somewhat moderated by time and distance. To wit: I don’t spend my days missing my family back east, but I might sometimes miss the old Comic-Con crew—the difference and distinction being that I was attending Comic-Con ever year for some time but once I’d moved west I basically only went back for my father’s death.)

This was on display when I was texted about this most recent death in the herd, because I generally don’t really have the bandwidth capacity to maintain acquaintances beyond the lifetime of the circumstances in which they were formed—or, at least, especially when the nature of the break with those circumstances were negative, even if not all acquaintances were directly implicated in that negativity.

(Contrarily, this also is why whenever I was broken up with I had an aggravatingly difficult time letting go: they weren’t “out of sight’ so I couldn’t put that no longer valid version of them “out of mind”. This is all pre-diagnosis, so I had no concept of autism’s monotropic tendency and the challenges of getting one’s mental and emotional processes off one track and onto another.)

While I appreciate getting advance word when a goat passes, this is one-sided sociality, and presumptively unfair, but I simply don’t have anything to give back.

How does all of this square with my views on kindness, though? Late in Sue Burke’s Usurpation (the best in her Semiosis series), a character makes an observation that stopped me in my tracks. “You were kind to me,” they say. “That’s how I knew you were real.”

It’s true that I’ve two favorite literary quotes: one of which is about the need to be kind, especially given the other which is about being dropped down halfway. It’s true, too, that I believe everyday courtesies mean something, given living in a universe in which nothing we do matters and so the only thing that matters is what we do. Which, however, is less kind: to cut people off because you know you can’t manage the reciprocal demands, or to try to fake it so they don’t feel cut off?

To what degree is that incapacity a result of knowing that I’ve a tendency to become too overwhelmed by the states of others to be able to navigate either their state or my own? I’ve got to take care of me, else there’s nothing to go around. My own particular variety of autistic empathy perhaps necessarily is one that only can operate at arm’s length.

Even absent specific, circumstantial breaks, my acquaintances tend to become intermittent appearances over time, and there are parts of my pacific circuit which I’ve come to travel on longer timeframes than the daily, weekly, or monthly.

Just last week I thought to put this year’s Portland Polish Festival into my calendar well in advance so I would not somehow forget. For more than a decade, there’s been a fair to middling chance that I’d run into a longstanding if increasingly intermittent acquaintance who stretches back to my MindVox days more than two decades ago. In the past, there were at times several, different such yearly touch points: the Adult Soapbox Derby, National Pie Day, the Polish Festival, and the occasional birthday.

Imagine the dislocating disorientation, then, when on Tuesday evening I logged into Instagram to see said Ryan Lloyd in the list of recommended accounts (I only use the site for knowing what my local, neighborhood businesses are up to, since they constitute almost the entirely of my world), and upon clicking through finding what at first appeared to me to be a flyer to a birthday celebration but turned out instead to be the notice of a memorial gathering. Anything I did over the next hour found itself interrupted by the sound of my own voice exclaiming, “What the fuck?!”

Quite the opposite, then, of a birthday.

Following the death of David Lynch, I took a walk in the woods. Next month, at the Polish Festival, I suppose I’ll have to grab a placki.

(Incidentally, he also once saved me from an unfortunate confrontation with a corporate landlord by repairing the hole in the drywall of an apartment I made when I threw a shoe at the wall because my neighbor for the umpteenth time was playing his keyboard at one o’clock in the morning. While I say this is incidental, if you follow the chain of links on Instagram you find that seemingly half the bars (and a piercing shop) in Portland are waxing nostalgic about the fact that Ryan could, and did, build or fix just about anything.)

I’ve talked here before about my occasional bouts of death anxiety and existential angst. Late last month I’d somehow managed to follow up a podcast episode about the philosophy of weirdness with one about why the universe began, the former of which essentially concludes that whatever underlying physics or metaphysics you choose to ascribe to existence cannot help but be in some profound and underlying sense deeply weird and beggaring of belief. It’s the nature of what happens when you try to eff the ineffable.

Two deaths of different valences in a matter of days, then, each substantial in its own way, is nothing if not a thanatophobic gut punch. Ryan’s death necessarily implicates all my own thoughts about mortality and meaning, and has somewhat colored, complicated, and confused how this post about my pacific circuit (notes for which actually go back almost a week) eventually came together, or in some ways did not. It doesn’t, for instance, actually have much of an ending.

In fact, like life, it just stops.

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