After a 2-month hiatus of Convivium: tl;dr

I’m trying to pull together the fragments I’ve been sorting and knitting, to (a) summarize what I’ve been working on during the hiatus, and (b) to articulate what that activity has taught me (or is it learned me?) about the past, the present, and possibly the always-murky future. The result amounts to an assessment of who I am, and what it is that I do, and what I have been doing all along.

The core is a report of my recent bout of mental and digital housekeeping, but there’s also a reflective side [what It All Means] that has been more and more to the fore in the last 5 years: self explaining self to self by examining the Process. I’d like to think there’s something shareable with the like-minded others out there, something beyond the warm and fuzzy what a good boy am I sense that one gets from conversations with the Mirror.

My Word of the Year of 2024 was Curate, and I’m sticking with it for 2025 as I glance back over 2024 to see what I have and haven’t accomplished as a curator. In 2022 and 2023 the WotY was Narrative (see also the 2022 iteration), primarily concerned with extracting and articulating the Stories that I inhabit. Making sense of the STUFF that surrounds me…

Curation is partly a matter of identifying and addressing messes, working at negentropy by organizing bits strewn about. Begin with the image of library shelves: where do items belong in relation to one another? But clearly it quickly goes beyond linear (2-D) arrangement, and the mental model I’ve used to invoke 3-D (and 4-D) relationships is macramé.

One hopes to construct an eloquent and artful structure for one’s Knowledge —partly to discover what it is that one Knows, and to work out how to map and navigate the construction. There’s something spider-like and web-tendy, though I’m less concerned with catching metaphorical flies than with being able to explore amongst what I’ve collected. Because I am and have always been a collector.

The habit/method/strategy of emailing links to myself (and of course to like-minded others) has been with me for a long time, indeed back to my first uses of email in the early 1990s. HTML gave me the tools to Keep Found Things Found (KFTF) by constructing Web pages to trace my progress/process. Before blogs became a thing, I was making “log files” of my discoveries, and trying to inspire colleagues and students to do likewise. I was more successful for myself than as an inspiration to others. It’s all at oook.info, reaching back 30 years.

And here I’ll invoke Informing Others, and cite the image of the Energizer Bunny to describe how my enthusiasm was received, but temper that vision with a digression into Walt Kelly’s Bun Rabbit, and the broader subject of avatars.

The thing is, all of this Informing is digressive, forever hareing off [gratuitous lagomorph reference] after another promising bit of curiosity/interest. Rabbit Hole does seem an apposite metaphor.

So my most outstanding mess/problem was the overstuffed email inbox of unread sent-to-self links, more than 1000. My Do Right page assembles my progress, much of it in the last two months. And what did I discover in assembling these chronological summary pages? The tracks of my curiosity and kaleidoscoping interests, laid out so they can be explored more easily: a nascent Index of my wanderings. Without such a catalog, it all becomes kind of a blur; but once the task is done, it’s practical to analyze the flow to discover and thus map my expanding and branching Interests. With every thing that crosses my path, there’s the question: how does it fit with and/or extend what I already know? And who of my Information clients would wish to know?

I have a lot of sensors/feelers deployed in Infospace, via print materials (NYRB, LRB, Literary Review, etc), digital subscriptions (paid and otherwise), RSS feeds, and sites I visit regularly (viz. YouTube)

The problem of curating the incoming flood of YouTube videos is vexing, and my interim solution of links displayed on HTML pages isn’t very satisfactory. The chaos could be reduced by sorting according to … well, what? And what’s a sensible workflow to get from lists to appropriate subcategories? Still thinking about THAT riddle.

KFTF 2025 update 1

After 3 weeks of use, a page of links to toothsome things for January 2025 is already pretty unwieldy, but at least it’s in chronological order, with dates for my encounters, and many of the entries have blockquoted extracts of their essence. The rationale is that something linked on that page seemed portentious or exemplary in some way, and so wanted to be at least maybe retrievable at some future time. What the page shows is Serendipities, showing how far I can wander in any given day via incoming traffic from Feedly and several subscriptions. Each link could easily become part of a Project

The January 2025 collection of YouTube videos has sprawled even more messily, the main criterion for inclusion being a sense that I might want to find the video again. The gatheration could be sorted topically (music stuff of many kinds, art stuff, talk stuff…), but for the moment I’ve resorted to splitting the stream into Part A, Part B, and Part C. I suspect I’ll need another Part before the month is done.

Curating 2024

I’m working on the year’s-end curation for 2024, with the intention to enhance retrievability for documents I’ve collected and created in several media and various form factors.

By laying these things out for inspection via web pages, I can derive some better understanding of where I’ve been in the last year, and perhaps develop a map of the landscape of rabbit holes I’ve visited. And maybe even construct a sense of What It All Means, and whither next to wander…

Parking these links in the blog will remind me where I’ve squirreled them away. I mean to update them as they are refined: weeded, sorted, commented… Here’s the current corps de ballet:

toward a 13th Blurb book

I’m beginning to think seriously about another book project, to summarize the work of the last five years. It seems sensible to begin with a web page, where I can collect candidates and begin to build sequence and narration. It starts at https://oook.info/13th/ and may change quite a lot whenever I work on it… but at least this post will make it findable whenever I forget where I’ve parked it…