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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
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The American Scholar.
Improving the climate is a better goal than trying to fight change.
I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them. My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience. In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum: I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes: “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.” Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector. Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova: “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss? “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.” Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]
Preserving family history The post Stephanie Santana appeared first on The American Scholar.
Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing such suspicions at least since Freud’s arrival on the scene. Busybodies flatter themselves by uncovering previously unsuspected motives in others. Think of it as amateur psychology practiced as a self-congratulating hobby. One of my favorites among Clive James’ books is Late Readings, published in 2015, four years before his death from cancer. “Late” is redolent of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” James writes about the books he knows will be among the last he ever reads, including those by Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning – all superb choices. A line in his introduction comes to mind: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” That almost sounds like a pep talk. If something has worked for more than six decades, reliably supplying pleasure and learning, why stop now? James continues: “Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”
