Recent content on thinking out loud
Michael Cunningham: 
 
 You could say that writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognize everything and everyone by naming their qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle — by naming them in ways that are both recognizable and unfamiliar, by combining words unconventionally so that, coming into contact, they emit new sparks of meaning. You attempt to invigorate the…
Deborah Levy: 
 
 All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer. Towards our parents or something like them. Towards our siblings and lovers and friends or something like them. Towards the unknown. Towards the edge of a cliff. 
 
 My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein , p. 215 

Daniel Kehlmann: 
 
 Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered. 
 
 Georg Wilhem Pabst, a German film director, but here a character in the historical fiction work The Director 

Hey, there, blog. It’s been a while. I’ve been busy, but that’s not the main reason for my silence. The bigger problem I’m finding it hard to finds words that capture my sense of what’s going on in the world. But I’m still here, and still sometimes finding the energy to read. While I select some of that reading in hopes that it will help me understand and respond to deteriorating conditions, I’m…
Some notes about books I finished reading this month 
 
 ( Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book. ) 
 
 Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse 
 
 by Luke Kemp. 
 
 This is a massive book, and I’m not going to attempt to describe the whole of his project. However, I think the basic story is relatively straightforward and can…
Susan Sontag: 
 
 I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realized that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness. The only kind of sensuousness I have…
Alfred North Whitehead: 
 
 Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that “purpose” is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities…
Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning. Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, he announced that he would like to have a pickle on his cereal. “That’s not a great idea,” I said. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to face me, planting his feet solidly on the kitchen floor. “You do not have my…
Virginia Woolf: 
 
 Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment…
Rebecca Solnit: 
 
 Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food. But the single biggest one is: get over our reliance on fossil fuels. Climate change is itself violence as fires, floods, extreme…
Lionel Trilling: 
 
 We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late…
This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology . According to the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers , tribology is “the study of surfaces moving relative to one another.” They go on to explain that such study focuses on three related factors in the world: friction, lubrication, and wear. Though I offer this information from the STLE website, that’s not where I…
Some notes about books I finished reading this month 
 
 ( Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book. ) 
 
 Into the Weeds: Why I Write 
 
 by Lydia Davis. 
 
 I came across this book only a week before the day that I’m writing this note, and I finished reading it several days ago. Yes, it’s a short book (only 139 pages), but I finished reading it so…
I’m wrapping up this four-week project with today’s report. It’s a little — but only a little — frustrating to see that my phone use crept up a bit in this final week. I have what I think is a good excuse: my wife and I were both traveling to different places. I was out and about on my own in the city a good bit, and needed to stay in touch. I say that I’m only a little frustrated by this because,…
As I was reading this morning I quite suddenly remembered that time will jump ahead early tomorrow morning, borrowing an hour of my life that will be returned sometime next fall. Knowing that the lost hour will materialize as if out of nothing next fall is little comfort as I contemplate the lost hour of sleep tonight. I remind myself, though, that it’s only an hour of sleep . There was a spring…
Lydia Davis: 
 
 …reading a book is a considerable commitment of not only time but also thought and even emotion, especially when you have so many books you have brought into the house, when you seem to buy books even compulsively, out of a hunger for yet another book, and haven’t yet read most of them, when you have acquired so many that although you have many bookcases, in many rooms,…
Another week of watching my screen time, and I’m happy to say that it dropped a bit more this past week — to an average of just over 2 hours a day. About an hour of that time is my exercise and meditation time, when I use the phone to track time spent. I’m even happier to say that I believe that I’m breaking the deeply ingrained habit of reaching for my phone whenever there’s what might be called…
This is my submission for the February 2026 Emacs Carnival ; Sacha has proposed the theme of completion in emacs . 
 I manage our household finances using a Plain Text Accounting app called Beancount . I really like having all of our records in plain text rather than in a proprietary accounting system. And, by “all of our records,” I mean a pretty long history of earning and spending. The…
Another week in my attempt to lower my attachment to my phone. I’ve been at this for three weeks now, but at the end of the first week I joined Manuel , Thomas , Kevin and others. They’ve just now finished week 2, so I’m numbering this entry 2a so that I can get in sync with them. 
 I’m a little late posting this because last week was a bit different from the previous weeks. There are a couple…
Here’s my entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival . The topic proposed by Zachary Kai is intersecting interests . When I saw the topic, I immediately thought of my reading interests. Since my retirement, I suspect that I spend more time reading than I spend doing anything else, though I suppose if one bundles washing the clothes, washing the dishes, and paying the bills together under the heading…
Another week down, and time to think about the time I spend on my phone. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I was going to lessen my attachment to my phone. Serendipitously, I stumbled on Manuel’s post indicating that he and a friend were doing the same. Following their lead, I committed to posting a screen shot of my phone screen time each Sunday for four weeks. This is my second…
I wrote earlier this week about the cleaving in Emily Dickenson’s mind and followed that up with a rant about my frustration with end notes . For some reason, as I was thinking about both of those posts this morning I quite suddenly remembered a brief conversation I had with my favorite philosophy teacher . Joe (the philosophy professor) was one of the most intelligent people I ever spent…
Peter Handke: 
 
 Who has ever experienced a successful day? Most people will say without thinking that they have. But then it will be necessary to ask: Do you mean “successful” or only “happy”? Are you thinking of a successful day or only of a “carefree” one, which admittedly is just as unusual. If a day goes by without confronting you with problems, does that, in your opinion, suffice to…
Sven Birkerts: 
 
 Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake [serious reading]. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitements of film. But if we do read perseveringly we make available to ourselves, in…
Claude Anshin Thomas: 
 
 We cannot think ourselves into a new way of living, we have to live ourselves into a new way of thinking. Pay attention to everything, to the smallest particle. It is in attending to the smallest particle that we discover the largest space, the fullness of a life thoroughly lived. 
 
 Bringing Meditation to Life: 108 Teachings on the Path of Zen Practice ,…
In her book An Absorbing Errand , Janna Malamud Smith writes poignantly about the long and rich relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I’ve already admitted that I’m tone deaf regarding poetry; what really struck me while reading Smith’s account of the poets’ relationship is how they cultivated and nurtured this relationship almost totally in letters. They visited…
Reading more than one book at a time means that it takes me longer to finish a particular book, but I find that that disadvantage, such as it is, is usually outweighed by the insights gained by the sometimes serendipitous and sometimes planned connections between the books that I’m reading. I developed this practice while teaching at a small liberal arts college, when it was common for me to be…
Luke Kemp: 
 
 Authoritarianism — obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers — increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security. Some percentage of a population appears always to harbor stronger authoritarianism, and studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across eight modern high-income countries found that…
I’ve claimed for years to be absolutely tone-deaf regarding poetry. I suspect I’ve even said something about this in a blog post. It’s not at all unusual for my wife (who loves poetry) to come to me, excited to read a poem that she’s just discovered, hoping that it will finally inspire the poetry-appreciating brain cells lying dormant in my brain. So far, not so much. 
 But I recently heard…
Time to pay the piper. When I wrote yesterday about my commitment to reduce the time spent on my phone, I didn’t realize that I’d have to come clean so soon. (One thing I’ve noticed in retirement is that weekends tend to disappear. One weekday is pretty much the same as the next, so it’s hard to keep track. I’m aware of the privilege reflected there.) But here it is: my report of phone screen time…
Last week I finally decided to push myself really, really hard to cure myself of phone attachment. For months I’d noticed the seemingly automatic behavior of reaching for my pocket whenever I had the slightest amount of time in which I was not explicitly focused on doing something else. Sometimes the urge came when I was doing something else – I’d be in the middle of a paragraph of a very…
Anyone looking carefully at my blog (as if!) might have noticed that I’ve used very few tags. I decided very early to tag the commonplace entries , simply because those are clearly in a category by themselves. And I realized yesterday that I used two other tags (software and economics) in the first month, but used them only one time each. This is a brief post to say that I’m going to try adding…
George Scialabba: 
 
 The attrition of civic memory and craft knowledge, a reduced attention span and loss of discrimination, the attenuation of nuance and the homogenization of vocabulary — in all these ways the decay of literacy currently serves both the manufacture of consent and the accumulation of capital. A populace that cannot recognize rhetorical devices, make moderately subtle…
Time is on my mind these days. It occurred to me recently that I’ve now lived over a third of my life since my mother died; in less than two years I’ll be as old as she was when she died. She was such a significant figure in my life for so many years that it’s a bit unsettling to realize I’ve lived this much of my life without her. I’m not sure why, but realizing this makes the sense of my…
George Scialabba: 
 
 Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books. Under these peculiar circumstances, intellectuals would technically be free, but their freedom wouldn’t be worth much. Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members — their…
Some notes about books I finished reading this month 
 
 ( Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book. ) 
 
 The Birth of Love 
 
 by Joanna Kavenna. 
 
 In this novel, Kavenna weaves together four tales on motherhood. The weaving of the four is both explicit and implicit. The first tale is a semi-fictional account of the last days of Ignaz Semmelweis…
Janna Malamud Smith: 
 
 We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name only a few of these many pairings and groups. We realize that people seek out each other to find sympathetic…
Perhaps I shouldn’t put these two items together in one blog post. It’s possible (if not probable) that the Venn diagram showing the overlap between the parties interested in one and those interested in the other is rather small. But they come together in one day for me, and I’m both excited and inspired by both of them. Who knows? Perhaps someday someone will find themselves landing on this page…
I listened yesterday to Nate Hagens’s conversation with Xiye Bastida . Bastida is a climate activist who, though only in her early 20s, has already spent years seeking to motivate others to do what we can to avert a climate disaster. She organized an environmental group at her NYC high school and later worked with others to organize a NYC climate protest involving 300,000 people. She also…
The theme for this month’s emacs carnival , hosted by Christian Tietze, is this year, I’ll… . I’ve not written for any of the indieweb carnivals. But since I’m all in on developing elaborate plans for what I’m going to do, this seems like a good time to jump in. This year, I’m thinking, I’m going to move beyond making plans to doing more with those plans. Moreover, I think that emacs…
The water cup sitting on the desk before me is now one of a set of four such cups. At one time it was one of a set of six. The cups were made for me over 30 years ago — a birthday gift that my wife commissioned to be made by a dear friend of ours. I love the way it looks and the way it feels. I love the thought that it was thrown and glazed by a woman who is still a dear friend, even though we’ve…
George Scialabba: 
 
 Utopia is impossible unless, among an overwhelming majority, solidarity and trust are nearly instinctive; responsibility, self-reliance, initiative, honesty, and other civic virtues are practiced much more widely than now; and democratic habits of self-confidence, candor, and tact are far better developed. Channels of communication and public information are as yet…
Anyone who has been reading my meanderings for any length of time might have noticed that I’ve been rather active here over the last two weeks. Surely today marks the first time that I’ve posted my writing on this blog 14 days in a row, and it happened because I made a pact with myself. My inspiration for this pact came from a book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff called Tiny Experiments and a blog post by…
A sports writer for the Boston Globe has an occasional column with the introduction “turning the bag upside down to see what falls out” or something like that. He then presents a potpourri of brief observations and sports reports. This post is something like that, a collection of quotations from books I’ve read over the past year or so. I suppose I could have posted each of them separately with…
Yesterday, David’s post detailing the oldest items he owns came through the RSS doorway. David was inspired to do this by a similar post from Thomas . The thought crossed my mind that I might do the same. But that thought was followed rather quickly by the thought that I’m more than a little uncomfortable by how much I own and my how much my sense of myself is informed by the items that I own. And…
In a recent post I admitted the challenge I face coming up with things to write about here in the blog. I don’t see myself as being particularly creative. That’s why this passage in Karl Ove Knaussgaard caught my attention: 
 
 What does it mean to create? What does it take? How does an artist open up a creative field for a work, how do they keep it open, and how do they enlarge it? What…
(If you have something to say about search engines, please click on “read more” and read to the end of the post.) 
 David, a GenXer blogging at Forking Mad+ , joins many others in his dissatisfaction with google search. He used DuckDuckGo for a while, but found the results to be rather unfocused. A year ago, he tested Kagi.com, which differs from most (all?) other search engines by charging…
In yesterday’s post I offered a brief account of why and how I do virtually all of my computer work in plain text. In that post I responded to a set of questions, and I’ve continued to think about those questions and my responses. In fact, if I were addressing those questions today my answers would be slightly different simply because the wheels just kept turning in my mind. I don’t know that the…
Ellane, writing at PTPL 192 , explains how and why she lives the plain text life and invites others to do the same. She even provided the questions. Thanks, Ellane. 
 
 When did you start using plain text?
 
 I don’t remember just when I began moving to plain text, but it was sometime in the late 1990s. That’s when I first dipped my toe into running linux; a friend helped me set it…
Early on in my PhD studies, I stumbled on the work of a particular philosopher. I can’t remember now just how and where I learned of him, but that moment of learning marked a significant point in my graduate studies, because I later wrote my dissertation on his work. I said then, and I would say now, that it’s fortunate that this worked out as a dissertation topic, simply because I was sure I…