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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
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
When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. to watch Laurel and Hardy movies. I’d seen a notice in the paper. A film collector brought his own projector and a box of 16mm reels and set up in one of the meeting rooms. About a dozen people showed up, most very old or very young. For four hours we watched “County Hospital,” “Big Business,” “Double Whoopee,” “Our Wife,” “The Music Box,” “Way Out West” and other films with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I’m certain I have never sustained laughter for that long. Of course, laughter has a social component, and I was merely joining my son and the rest of the all-male audience. This is one of my most cherished memories. Josh and I still love Laurel and Hardy. It seems fitting that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was born on Bloomsday, fourteen years before that joyous event first took place on June 16, 1904. He entered the world in his grandparents’ house in Ulverston, Lancashire. Describing an early photo of the pair, Hugh Kenner refers to their “stares of idiot hopefulness or fathomless exasperation that constituted their public critique of the universe.” Kenner was reviewing The Films of Laurel and Hardy by William K. Everson in the November 14, 1967, issue of The National Review. Kenner, the scholar Modernism, adept of Joyce, Pound and Beckett, continues with the photograph: “Bathed in the nearly horizontal light of early morning, the boys look fresh: the day is all before them. Creation has sprung forth anew, pianos once more unwrecked, cars undemolished, hats unbattered, suits unrumpled. Ollie lounges against a Ford that looks spry as a grasshopper, his bulk so poised as to seem weightless, feet nonchalantly crossed. Stan’s hands are clasped in ecstasy. They bend toward each other in communion. Soundless laughter convulses them; their closed eyes savor some invisible bit of business . . .” Kenner carefully evaluates the films, acknowledging that some were dross but others “classic,” flawless” and even “perfect.” “Big Business” (1929) he calls their masterpiece. In it, the boys are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. Kenner closes his review: “Their comedy, more than any other in cinema, theologized, so to speak, the common experience that if you hammer nails you are apt to strike your thumb. The theology, being false, is comic only in being belied: each film upheld it dogmatically; it was all their films that belied it.” In a November 7, 1967, letter to Kenner, Guy Davenport praises the review and writes: “A joy; your essay on Stan and Ollie. Arthur Stanley Jefferson. And Oliver Norvell Hardy, of Milledgeville, Ga. (where Flannery O’Connor wrote her novels), descendent of Nelson’s Hardy. One would love to sic a genealogist onto the matter, and come up with a kinship between Tom and Stan Jefferson.” [The quoted letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]
Preserving family history The post Stephanie Santana appeared first on The American Scholar.
Improving the climate is a better goal than trying to fight change.
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.”
A Guest Lecture with Margo Loor, co-founder of the Estonian participatory democracy platform Citizen OS.
