More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links
Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? I’m currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Ango’s File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far — Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allen’s (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and society’s adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag ‘em. I’m going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email
We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →
More in literature
Becky Chambers’ gentle sci-fi on the right amount of carbon, AC, airplanes, and yachts.
Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average about three pounds and contains 86 billion neurons. That’s our birthright, and we did nothing to earn it. We tend to operate our brains passively, ignoring most available perceptions. We “tune them out” – the electronics metaphor is nowadays almost inevitable. It’s easy to be lazy, coast through the ocean of data we dwell in and go on living. Paying too much attention to the world can be madness, as is paying too little. I become aware of this only when I’m looking for something lost or misplaced, whether it be a word or the car keys. It’s like adjusting a camera lens – looking at what’s there, not what we have already assumed is there. The Indiana poet Jared Carter describes in the title poem to his 1993 collection After the Rain the hunt for arrowheads in a farmer’s field once the rain has stopped: “They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky, Yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth. Still, even these are hard to see – at first they look like any other stone.” I’ve often gone hunting for arrowheads, pottery shards and other Indian debris, but Carter’s poem reminds me of a visit to a dairy farm near Belfast, N.Y., run by one of my mother’s cousins and her husband. This was sixty years ago. The pastures were dotted with limestone rich in trilobites and other fossils. My brother and I filled a milk crate with chunks of stone and brought them back to Ohio. There we fantasized about the future paleontologists baffled by their appearance so far from their native range. Carter continues: “The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what’s known; Conviction’s liable to say straight off this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way Across the field, but what is hidden here Lrequires a different view – the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun Simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change.” Impatience sabotages perception. Carter concludes his poem with these lines: “After the rain, perhaps, something will show, / glittering and strange.” I’ve learned to stop looking, especially for a word I know is out there – or in there somewhere – in order to find it. “Finding” is an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It may be the finest thing Davenport ever wrote, and it recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility. The essayist says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding but he can’t help speculating: “Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.” We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes: “I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.” As A.E. Stallings says in her poem “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006): “The land is full of what was lost.”
The post Snake in the Grass appeared first on The American Scholar.
Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of a Mind: A Life in History is over 700 pages but remains fascinating upto and including the final page, and while Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio is over 500 pages shorter, reading it again only multiplies the pleasure. All three writers display a commitment to their research not limited to a 9-to-5 academic career. It is embedded in their lives;2 the two surviving authors are still working in their 80s. But why did they dominate my reading? I wondered if it was a vicarious living of an alternative life, the one in which I was able to dedicate my time to reading and writing, perhaps to enable a more satisfying production. I daydream of the garden offices I see advertised in my Instagram feed in which I might escape distraction and finally concentrate after decades of superficiality. The archive of this blog reveals a movement from naive enthusiasms and bitter agitations to more ambitious content that doesn't quite escape the original form and may in fact diminish its strengths. At its best, blog writing glances at subjects, whether that is a new book or literary current affair, acting as the corner of an eye catching sight of something regular coverage blanks out, while, at its worst, it merely imitates.3 Ultimately, however, it remains a dilettantism. It doesn't nourish. At least, that is what I have felt. Then I reread the passage in Self-Portrait in the Studio in which Agamben writes of a postcard on his studio desk of a 17th century painting depicting a woman feeding from her own breast.4 After acknowledging its 'cloying lineage', he argues for it as an allegory of the soul nourishing itself. He asks what it means to nourish oneself: "What is a light that feeds itself? A flame that no longer needs fuel?" In the process of nourishing—in any kind of nourishing, spiritual or bodily—there is a threshold at which the process reverses direction and turns back towards itself. Food can nourish only if at a certain point it is no longer something other than us, only if we have—as they say—assimilated it; but this means—to the exactly the same degree—that we are assimilated to it. The same thing happens with the light of knowledge: it always arises from outside, but there arrives a moment when inside and outside meet and we can no longer tell them apart. At this point, the fire ceases to consume us, 'it now consumes itself'.5 This, I realised, was why these books had dominated. Each in its way marks multiple crossings of thresholds, the meetings of inside and outside, and I was drawn to these books because I was aware that I had been impatient for such a threshold to make itself known and want to know how others had climbed above the shameful lowlands of secondary writing. Like so many others, I had sought assimilation in the consumption of ideas, washing down the keywords and catchphrases of philosophy, literary criticism and critical theory like so many pills, downloaded using the convenient shortcuts technology offers, but which map only the landscape of the outside. No meeting ever arrives. Ten years ago when I read Nathaniel Davis' translation of 'Across the Border', Sebald's beautiful essay on Peter Handke's Repetition, a novel that had dazzled me in the late 1980s alongside Slow Homecoming, Across, and The Afternoon of a Writer, I was also dazzled. I had read the novel several times was frustrated each time that I couldn't find words to express why it and the three other novels had stood out above almost everything else I had read,6 and Sebald's essay only deepened the frustration as it focuses on the novel's metaphysical ideas, its mythological scheme, and its relation to the theme of 'Heimat' in Austrian literature and Filip Kobal's quest for redemption from the inheritance of fascist violence; that is, nothing much to do with me, but did help me to understand "the particular light which filters through" the novel, the words Sebald uses to describe Handke's prose in Repetition. The light made "the text itself a place of refuge among the arid zones" and "by the power of words alone" made visible "a world more beautiful than this one". Reading Jo Catling's translation of the essay in a book we have waited for two decades and on which I hope to write more, I realised the larger issues had over those years become embedded in me, so familiar that I could set them aside to concentrate on what really nourishes, perhaps refuge, beauty and redemption. This is another reason why the books dominated: they emphasised the value of finding what such nourishment rather than trying to assimilate the food that passes right through. Assimilation may take a lifetime to arrive, but, as Blanchot says: "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." Notes Terry Pitts' two-part review of the collection is especially good on this.↩ This becomes clear in the remarkable final section of Agamben's What I saw, heard, learned in which he remembers a note he wrote as a child that "seemed to be the secret core of my philosophy"↩ All these years later I still cringe at the memory of when the Litblog Co-Op, set up to promote formally adventurous fiction and challenge the conservative coverage of print newspapers, announced its first 'Read This!' promotion as Kate Atkinson's best-selling novel Case Histories with the co-op member referring to the author as "a juicy pro", as if novelists were gymnasts and the novel a pommel horse.↩ The painting by Giovanni Serodine is given the title as Allegory of Science by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but most other sources refer to it as Allegorical Female Figure.↩ Agamben is quoting Plato's Seventh Letter on which he bases the claim.↩ I wrote a blogpost on three of the four and another on Handke's book-length poem To Duration also written in the mid-1980s but didn't appear in English translation for another 25 years.↩
I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer. The poet Jane Greer is seventy-two and lives in North Dakota. For twelve years, she edited the Plains Poetry Journal. She is a poet of domesticity and technical rigor, Midwestern in her good-humored seriousness, a Roman Catholic who reveres the wonder of creation. I’m from Ohio, a semi-Midwestern state, but there’s nothing homogenous about the Midwest and its people. She’s rural, I’m urban/suburban. Most of the stereotypes don’t hold, though Midwesterners indulge them and laugh. I remember being surprised when a buddy and I got lost in Illinois trying to outrun a tornado that never happened. We found ourselves in Lewiston, where Edgar Lee Masters moved with his family at age twelve. It served as his model for Spoon River. And the surrounding fields of corn felt almost claustrophobic. I read Those Days: An American Album By Richard Critchfield (1931-94) when it was published in 1986. Like Greer, Critchfield was a North Dakota native, and the book recounts his family’s history in that state and Iowa. I remember associating it with Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Greer, I discovered, reviewed the book in the April 1987 issue of Chronicles, and it begins with a passage any writer would be delighted to hear: “This is a book I wish I’d written, a love story of the largest and best kind. Like most people, I remember my childhood, that eternal summer, in a glow of happy forgetfulness, simply out of pleasure. Richard Critchfield ‘remembers,’ as if he had been there, his parents' lives and society before he was born, and shows why it’s important to remember and to go back even further than our own birth: Because like it or not, we are attached. We are not historyless like Adam, breathed out of nothing; we’re drawn from the narrow end of a real and compelling vortex—history—vivid with blood and bone, passion and fear, as it touches down to make us in the here and now. Part of everything that was and will be, we move up the funnel of history to make room for those whose history we will be.” I envy Critchfield’s reconstruction of his family’s history, in part because most of mine is a blank. I know almost nothing about my father’s family and only unconnected shards about my mother’s. These people didn’t talk about the past, whether out of guilt or abject indifference, and bequeathed little living memory to their descendants. I’m left with all the questions I didn’t ask. “This is no vague nostalgic trek back to the nonexistent ‘good old days,’” Greer writes, “or mere homage to a loved mother, but a gifted writer’s careful examination of all available resources, to reconstruct the rhythm and immediacy of the past—its sounds and smells, human passions and disappointments. Critchfield has resuscitated those days, given them breath and pulse, and made their relevance to us, now, evident.” Here is “The Light As Thick As Clover Honey,” the first poem in Greer’s third collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022): ‘Here is the square pink house on the green street. Here is the long back yard sloped to the alley. Here is the rusty swing, and here is the pup-tent bleaching the grass. Here is the happy family like all the others. Here is the sunburnt child on her blue bike whose streamers are the reins of a great stallion; here they gallop the world from home to grandmother’s and home again on odd brick streets, around the painted bandstand, through the gap in in the church’s high trimmed hedge. Here is the small town hugging the river bend, cicadas rasping out their alien urge, the light as thick as clover honey. Here it is always summer, always the golden hour.” “Eternal summer” in the review, “it is always summer” in Greer’s poem.