This is a blog.
It s been a busy few months, personally, professionally, socially, bike-ally. The randonneuring season has started. There was travel for work, and then non-travel work that nevertheless took up a lot of time. I ve seen friends often, thankfully, and we ve seen some good shows (LCD Soundsystem, a highlight). I, myself, played a "show" with some friends (i.e., Somerville Porchfest). There are always…
I ve got a copy of John Ashbery s Some Trees on my phone, that I sometimes pick at while waiting for a train if I do not have another phone-book going. I read the book some years back in paper ("Dead Trees"), but am always tickled pink by the "Publisher s Introduction" in this copy, this version, which tells how: Unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type…
When I lived in St. Louis at various points in time I would go to a place called Shaw s Coffee, particularly that summer or two I interned at an office down the street. They had beautiful blue ceramic cups if you were drinking in and delicious dark roasted coffees. At some point I bought a mug, and it was my favorite mug, and at some point it developed a crack along one of its sides, and it became…
There are good reasons why you might want to be able to run asciidocr on your phone. Or rather: there are good reasons why I want to be able to run asciidocr on my phone. Specifically, I want to keep an appropriate separation of concerns between my personal and work computers; I do not want to have to bring a personal computer when traveling for work. I can write on my phone just fine (more on…
The last time I was working on a novel manuscript I wasn t thinking as much about it as a product that will need to be somehow sold as I was just trying to get the fucking thing done. (Spoiler: it has not sold.) I think this was, is, fine. But it meant that when it came time to write my query letters, my one- and two-page summaries, I was playing catch up. In particular I struggled to find "comp,"…
The advantage I had going into the conference this year was coming in already exhausted and a day and a half late. I d spent the first 4/5 of the work-week, starting Sunday afternoon, traveling for work. It was a good trip, I met, in-person, my new teammates and many other new coworkers besides, but suffice to say most days I was up at 6:30a and the days were not over until, at earliest, 9p. So I…
I ve honestly lost count of how many times David and I have sat down to talk about some new book of his, but it s hard to have too much of a good thing! And we finally did meet in person not too long ago for the first time since that first time we met in 2020, in the hazy days just before the world shut down for COVID. He did a reading at Riffraff Books down in Providence, RI, and I took the train…
While I announced this only to myself, my intention was to post weekly on Wednesdays, hearkening back in some small way to the "Wednesday Weekly Recommended Reading" series that I originally conceived of as a kind of backbone support to whatever else I might write here. I d kept up the new weekly posting consistently for (let s count…) six weeks (not bad), and this week I missed the mark, posting…
Every few years my wife will I think jokingly threaten divorce if I still haven t read some classic or other that she she loves and deems important that I read. The last one was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter which was, of course, excellent. This year it was Jane Eyre . I have some vague memory of my cousin having read it in high school and thinking it a slog but very much enjoying it, and then when…
This was not the post I had meant to write today, nor is it particularly realized or complete, but as I am practicing finishing things, I think this will do. I plan to write more about this topic near and dear to my heart so please consider this a first cut, a working-through, a Barthes-like introduction. [ 1 ] I d had planned months ago to write something up along the lines of "A Year and a Half…