This Week's Question

...is the old reliable "how ya doin'?" with the added twist of "...in this Season?", and my answer is the perennial "just fine, doing what I always do". Which is: whatever I please. At the end of every year I do some sort of reflective stock-taking of what's gone by in the previous months, which often leads to some ideas about what to do in the next year (see last year's). The initial gathering of thoughts happens on those yellow pads, and then some of that gets transcribed in documents like this.

I recognize that the combination of yellow pads and html has been ...sustaining... in the last 3 years, since "everything changed" with COVID, and that the life I had before January 2020 really is very far away, and different from what I was engaged with, vastly more home-focused. The world of restaurants and relatively easy travel were big parts of the 2019 world. In that 3 years people have gotten older, or recognized that they have. We're somewhere on that trajectory ourselves, being in our 80th year, and that needs thinking about.

As the yellow pads record, a LOT happens in a week: many disparate territories ('rabbit holes' seems the best characterization) are visited, most briefly, and then most are put down for pickup later. Something interesting is always asserting itself by siezing my attention, and thus kicking off a chain of associations and expansivist activities (books ordered, library shelves visited, etc.). Hardly anything ever makes it to completion, so it's important to have (make, curate) the wherewithal to pick up where I left off if and when... and in fact I do often loop back to those threads. In a sense it's all One Big Thing, which I've often likened to macramé.

It would be better if the curation was more orderly, if the many rabbit-holes of the last 3 years were more fully documented and productively indexed, and I do come up with schemes for doing just that. Last week's Question re: Zeitgeist made it clear to me that I continue to be an active watcher of things unfolding. Since that Convivium I've been exploring how I do that watching: which media I follow and how I manage what I discover. Some of the elements:

• Most days begin with the coffee-with-iPad ritual: email (Heather Cox Richardson, etc.), NYT, Guardian, Feedly for the RSS feed, wunderground weather, the progress of Amazon orders, the array of YouTube clickbait (which often leads to downloads and outbound links to interested others), and often Spotify running in the background. The scheme for the day's activities often emerges in that early morning time.
• In the last 3 years I've run across and then followed with great /profit/ a number of writers: Maria Popova is certainly one such (via her Marginalian blog, and after reading Figuring), and Omair Haque (via Medium) is a bit on-and-off but continues to be a bellwether. danah boyd is back lately, with a vengeance. And Heather Cox Richardson is another daily read. I remain linked into Blogworld, much of the glue being my RSS feeds, though I've recently been following some via subscriptions to email-delivered links (Adam Tooze and Ted Gioia, for example) and via Patreon.
• In musical realms, Spotify has been very significant in directing me in the array of music I'm interested in. Cliff Fernald's Rootsworld.org brings me obscurities (many of which turn out to be available via Spotify).
• Spotify and Amazon are widely and properly execrated by many people, a clear parallel to MY attitude to the Facebook and Twitter. But for ME the advantages outweigh the ethical/moral questionability—somewhat to do with feeding my /habits/ musically and materially, with my own ease and comfort predominating. The worlds of Kindle and Audible have been very important in the last 3 years, the latter especially accompanying my trash pickup activities.
• Podcasts (Christopher Lydon and Ira Glass especially) have been very significant sources of information and understanding in the last 3 years, though not so much in evidence lately. If we drove more, I'd probably listen more.
• Video (Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and DVDs old and new) remains an important medium.
• Print media: New Yorker, NYRB, LRB, Literary Digest, Atlantic, Harper's, The Baffler.
• I use Zotero to cache significant-seeming web pages, but once cached, I'm less engaged with them than I should be. Here's the year in Zotero for 2022.
• In realms of 'content creation' I see that in the last 3 years I've taken more than 5000 photos with the Nikon Z7 (and almost 9000 since it was new in 2018), many of which found their way to my Flickr photostream and Flickr Albums.

So what I'm doing is hoovering up Information in many forms, the whole baleen whale thing, and following as and when I want. 'Self-indulgent' might be the most accurate characterization, but who's going to know? Or care?

I've begun to track the hoopla around "Artificial Intelligence", which seems likely to balloon in the coming year. Not sure yet what to do other than collect links...

And here's an effort at summary of What It's All About, doubtless repetitive of notions I've belabored before:

Informing Others has been the core of my enterprise since forever, and I figured out ways to "make a living" doing exactly that—with success sometimes, ineptly sometimes, satisfyingly sometimes... and often I was /before my time/. And sometimes mis-aimed, such that the long-term effects are bupkis for anybody but myself and my own learning and pleasure. That's too well established to even imagine some way that it could change altogether.

The above has always had pronounced technological elements ==> epidiascopes, visual materials as slides, self-publishing, html, computers, sound equipment... all of which keep me IN the process of evolution, watching where the Zeitgeist is headed, sometimes scurrying to catch up...

My efforts to nudge liberal arts teaching and learning really didn't create anything lasting, and that ended 17 years ago, in another now-fading era.

So the primary beneficiary is and has always been my own very very self. There has been a long-running search for interlocutors, for others willing to play, to become involved/engaged with my enthusiasms, and occasionally others can be enticed to play, but others have busy lives, and don't really need (let alone want) most of what interests me.