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Reading List 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
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
If I had been in the house all day reading during a long Ohio winter, invariably my mother would say, “Go outside and blow the stink off.” My parents took a kid reading as a reproach, something unnatural and probably unhealthy – one more reason for me to be secretive. When I was twelve, getting a room of my own with a door that locked was a godsend. Three years ago I wrote about a poem by Walter de la Mare titled “Books” published in the July 1906 issue of The Bookman. It includes the lines: “Books—to wax solid on, to wane less fat; / To grasp what long-gone Wisdom wondered at.” Now I find he published another poem with the same title and collected it in one of his books for children, This Year: Next Year (1937). The 289-line poem is composed in rhyming couplets and begins: “A boy called Jack, as I’ve been told, Would sit for hours — good as gold — Not with a pie, like Master Horner, And plums, for dainties, in his corner. But silent in some chosen nook. And spell-bound — by a story-book!” In my case it wasn’t always stories. I also favored biographies and nature guides. I read about people like Mark Twain and Marie Curie, and learned to identify butterflies, trees and wildflowers. I saw no disconnect between what I read and what I experienced in the real world. Today, that’s basically an article of faith, one of the reasons I so dislike the way most academics treat literature, as though books were cadavers and they were pathologists. Jack’s mother in the poem echoed mine: “How often his mother would sigh, and cry — / ‘Up, Jack, and put that trumpery by! / See, Spring is in the sky! / The swallow is here, the thorn’s in blow — / Crimson, pink, and driven snow; / Lambs caper in the fields . . .” We didn’t have a lot of lambs in Cleveland but the message was identical. Jack, you see, “In books found marvellous company, / Wonder, romance, and mystery.” De la Mare cites fairy tales (Andersen, Grimm) and nursery rhymes, the earliest texts most kids encounter, followed by Gulliver’s Travels (bowdlerized, of course), the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe. Nice to see the poet reproducing my boyhood reading list fifteen years before I was born. De la Mare lends Jack a sort of poet’s apprenticeship: “Never believe it! What Jack read Refreshed his senses, heart, and head. Words were to him not merely words — Their sounds rang sweet as bells, or birds; Nor could he tell, by any test, Whether he loved — he once confessed — Their music, or their meaning, best.” Dela Mare reminds us that books are more than escape, for children and adults -- an understanding that trivializes the power of reading. Sure, they fill idle moments, and that’s perfectly respectable. Consider de la Mare’s closing lines: “This seems to me at least to hint. That if we give what wits we have To Books, as Jack himself them gave — To all we read a willing slave — The while we dream, delight, and think. The words a precious meat and drink. And keep as lively as a spink. There’s not much harm in printer’s ink.” A spink, by the way, is a finch, often the chaffinch. A lovely phrase in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Like a summer flye or Spinxes winges, or a raigne bow of all colours.”
On jellyfish babies, my father’s pain, and the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific The post After the Fallout appeared first on The American Scholar.
Sometimes two people will stand next to each other for fifteen years, both feeling out of place and alone, like no one gets them, and then one day, they look up at each other and say, “Oh, there you are.”
