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

Robert Chandler has rescued, through translation, much of Russian literature for the Anglophone world – Pushkin, Andrey Plantonov, Teffi, Lev Ozerov and Vasily Grossman, among others. Most of Chandler’s own prose I've read has been in the form of brief introductions and notes. Several years ago he alerted me to a piece about Rudyard Kipling’s poetry he had published in Granta, and I wrote about it. Now I find two other essays published in the same journal – one on Grossman, the other one devoted to an English poet previously unknown to me: “Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger,” by Randall Swingler. Chandler assures us the book contains Swingler’s “best work,” much of it devoted to his experiences as a British soldier during World War II.  One of the most gratifying pleasures I know as a reader is learning of a writer new to me and finding him worthy of attention. The passages quoted by Robert look more than promising. My university library has only one book by Swingler in its collection: The God in the Cave. It’s a twenty-three-page poetry collection published in 1950 by Alan Swallow of Denver (publisher of Yvor Winters), and I’ve put a hold on it. Through interlibrary loan I will request a copy of The Years of Anger. My only hesitancy is that Swingler was a communist, an affiliation not associated with the writing of first-rate poetry. Robert quotes the central stanza of “The Day the War Ended”:   “There is a moment when contradictions cross, A split of a moment when history twirls on one toe Like a ballerina, and all men are really equal And happiness could be impartial for once.”

The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own. The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to… read article

Some books, including several of the best, defy conventional literary formulas and genres. Consider Moby-Dick. Is it a novel in the same inarguable sense as Middlemarch, another very big book? What about Tristram Shandy, with its endlessly deferred plot, digressions within digressions and passages “borrowed” from other writers and interpolated into Sterne’s text? Its oddness has stymied many readers, even Dr. Johnson. Montaigne’s Essays are wayward works having little in common with contemporary essayists claiming decent from the Frenchman. (Joan Didion, anyone?) What these works share, apart from eccentricity and vast learning, is elasticity. Anything, any subject or narrative whim, might have been stuffed into their already bursting forms.  The grandfather of such oddities is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, with five subsequent editions, each longer than its predecessor, brought out during Burton’s lifetime. I remember discovering Burton as a freshman in the university library, and thinking I could read it for the rest of my life, which has proven true. It’s a wisdom book chock full of knowledge, much of it outdated but still fascinating. Gary Saul Morson calls it “a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.” Burton stitches together other men’s words into a quilt of quotations, and defends his method, saying he was   “. . . enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccum venit (whatever came uppermost) in an extemporean style, as I do comply all others, effudi quicquid dictavit genius meus (I poured out whatever came into my mind) out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak. . . . idem calamo quod in mente (what my mind thinks my pen writes).”   Burton’s method shouldn’t be confused with such literary cul de sacs as “automatic writing” or Jack Kerouac’s nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody.” While following a trail of associations spawned in a remarkable memory, Burton resembles a jazz musician who simultaneously improvises and follows a theme. In The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture (Yale University Press, 2011), Morson writes: “The Anatomy is like life, unrehearsed, and life is like the Anatomy, a first draft.”     Burton died on this day, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two. Less than twenty percent of the population of Elizabethan England lived past the age of sixty. One qualified as “old” at fifty. Shakespeare, Burton’s close contemporary, died at fifty-two.

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