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…
…which seems to be an effective means to keep track of links I grabbed and imagined I’d get back to sometime.
…where we find the personal inner resources to stay balanced,
to avoid unhealthy anger and depression,
and remain engaged in the world…
My response to the problem yesterday was to write Advice du jour and send it to a few like-minded others. Today, part of my answer is to MAKE stuff, to bring things into being… which is what the last blog post was all about. So here’s something from today:
Positively jovial, jovially positive. But this one might better reflect the sensations of doomscrollers:
And one wants to collect Zeitgeisty images as they flitter by…
I scanned an aerial image of Grand Pre dykelands from 1955:
and then it occurred to me to rotate the image 90 degrees:
And damme if Glooscap doesn’t put in an appearance, breathing Boot Island into being. YCMTSU, folks.
After a week away, a lot has accumulated in the form of links sent to myself, and collecting them here seems …efficient as a means to be able to find them again:
I also happened upon a piece I wrote in 1993, in the early years (30+ ago) at Washington & Lee:
Mindful that my Word for the Year was Curate, what can I say about how that has gone as we near the cusp of November, with prospects that are at best uncertain and fraught? While I haven’t been systematic about Curating, there have been some interesting developments on the remote edges of the mountains of things-retained, and I want to put some links where I can find them more easily. Thus:
Philosophy of Teaching and Learning ca. 1995
Hollows and other toponymy bits 2000
Sabbatical Fall 2002
Walls in China ca. 2003
Doubtless other toothsome bits will surface. These (mere Ears of the Hippopotamus) remind me of how I was using html to keep track of and summarize projects during the Washington & Lee library years.
The photographic archives are vast and full of surprises. Consider these from a 2022 excavation, and Horton Landing bozos, 1973. Every photograph has a backstory, of course.
There will be more in this vein.
I just got Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, a massive brick (900+pages) of A Journey Through Global Music (the subtitle). The first encounter with the text inspires me to look at my vinyl music holdings more analytically. A few years ago I serially numbered and photographed the covers of 2000+ ‘albums’ (as they used to be called), and began the process of making their content accessible. And a long process it would be to “complete” the project… but an overview of the Vinyl Catalog is at least a start. The subcategories I’ve broken out as separate genres [perhaps too high-flown a term…] are neither systematic nor exhaustive, and are really pretty disorderly, but gotta start somewhere.
The last few months of blog entries have mostly turned into Convivium texts and handwritten conversation on the yellow pads that follow me everywhere. I mean to be more attentive to the blog in future.
How did this happen? The blog is 20 years from first post, and lately my attentions have been aimed at texts for weekly(ish) Convivium. I vow to figure out how to get the blog back into my day-to-day operations. Real soon now.
My Images for Maine Photographers Showcase, 2024
Boothbay Harbor, March 28 – May 3