May it not be the last!
It’s going to be a reading!
Except it’s mostly a social thing,
by which I mean that it’s going to be a very
short reading. And then, if my very nefarious plan works out, people will
stick around, talk to each other, maybe meet some new people, maybe have a nice
time. I don’t even really give a fuck if anybody talks about writing or books or
anything (I mean: I give a fuck that they appreciate the readers, of course.
You’ve always got to give props to the readers).
I’ve been sort of haphazardly "piloting" a writer/lit folks meet up or social
thing since January, and this is a step towards creating some kind of
formalization around it. I like the idea of
keeping the non-reading weeks/months (timeline, schedule, cadence, etc.,
horrifically TBD) casual, smaller, whatever, but I also want to throw a good,
big-tent kind of party. I struggle with this generally, the opposing impulses of
bringing people together intentionally (viz who it is that I’m bringing
together) and the bringing together of everyone I can find, harangue, meet by
accident. This is going to be an attempt at a kind of balance.
We’re doing it at the Banshee because
a long time ago I used to work for/run an organization called Write on the
DOT and they’d let us do open mics there for
free. The
Banshee also used to be our "program bar" in grad school, where we would go
after workshop. It’s a good
place! Not cheap, exactly, but if you know what to drink (Narragansett) you’ll
be OK, and the food is pretty good. It’s also partly a thank-you to all the DOT
folks who’ve been generous enough to come to my side of the river to hang out
these last few months.
We’ve got some great readers — six of them. The deal, also, is that they have
to (I mean "get to") read up to two pages (double spaced) of new work. So
it’ll be fresh shit. It’ll also be a pretty short reading, because long readings
are long and I want it to primarily be about community — you share a little
bit, but mostly you ask about how work is going and what TV you’ve been
watching.
Anyway, I hope people show up. I’ve emailed some of the local grad programs and
the local literary event aggregator and I’m posting this here, and on what
little social media I have left, so. But hell: even if it’s just me and the six
readers, we’ll have a good time.
(But also: please come. It’ll be fun, I can basically promise.)
I am hard on things. I am clumsy. I expect things to last much longer than they
are really designed to. I know this. Alia likes to remind me of this. And yet
—
In a perfect world, nothing of my personal anything would ever be done or appear — however momentarily, however hidden inside a folder I know that the company
does not automatically back up — on my work computer. Beyond that, there are
non-zero times when I am out and about and would like to scribble a
little. And because the
"phone" in my pocket has a much better processor than my first n computers, it
has a git client, however rudimentary, it has a shell, also rudimentary, that
runs vim with enough of plugins and things, it makes sense that I’d want a small
keyboard that could travel with me, so I am not mistyping constantly on my
phone.
But I have been through three in the last year and a half or so, three
different models, and they’re all just fucking shit, e-waste, and I am sad and
mad about it.
First it was the hinges. Then it was a pinched wire inside of those hinges. Then
a battery inexplicitly died, or — perhaps — the hinges failed again, but in a
different way, as this last keyboard was of an entirely different design. And
sure, my backpack is not necessarily a friendly place for things with fragile
hinges and wires: I ride a bike in Boston, I over pack, the fuck do you expect?
But at least some pretense of durability, you would think —
And I had been happy enough with them, each of them. Sure, I had to remap the
Caps Lock key to Control every time. Sure, some of them didn’t have an Esc key
(requisite for "basic" vim use) and I had to get used to Ctrl-[ instead (which
is arguably as ergonomic, anyway). Sure, my phone screen is very small and not
the best for scanning and editing large chunks of text, but writing forward? But
wide enough, in landscape mode, to accommodate 80 characters at a reasonable
font size? I had made it work, and work well, I think.
But then all the keyboards broke. And now I’m reduced to typing with my thumbs
again, to using iA Writer again,
to lugging around a laptop if I actually want to get any writing done while out
in the world.
And yes, these are first world problems, of course they are. And yes, I’m sure
that somewhere there is a better option. But I’ve been burned three times, three
fairly different models, and so I’m loathe, really, to try again. I don’t like
consuming things. I want to buy only things that last.
But as my Zaydie said often, "It is what it is," and I am at least blessed with
opposable thumbs.
I recently changed more things on this old web log and one of those changes was
a silencing (via its losing place on the header) and trimming (via accepting
that I will never be able to remember to keep the "currently reading" up to
date) of the reading page. The
thing is that I am always reading a lot of books concurrently, I am not necessarily good at accepting when
I’m just not going to get around to finishing a book (here’s looking at you,
Hypermedia Systems), and since I have no analytics on this site anymore, I
have no idea if it’s interesting to anyone besides myself anyway.
Anyway, one of the books I’m reading is Umberto Eco, How to Travels with a
Salmon and Other Essays, and it’s a fucking delight. He’s so funny! I mean,
I’m very much enjoying The Name of the Rose as a bedtime book, but this shit
—
But as I went down to the 16th floor of the WeWork carrying both the Eco and
Conversation of the Three Wayfarers (Peter Weiss) to eat my lunch (because
Thursdays are the busiest days here and I could not get a comfortable seat on my
own floor’s common area), I realized that not only had I brought the Weiss from
home and that I keep the Eco (the essays, anyway) on my desk at work, but I have
yet another book by my night stand (the other Eco), two in-flight books next to the
chair in my home office (A Shock by Keith Ridgeway, The Berlin Wall by David
Rice that I’m reading ahead of another interview with him; three if you count
the very on-pause Electronic Literature, which I am still determined to finish
one of these days), not to mention the audiobooks I’ve got on the Libby app and
the O’Reilly app. It’s a lot of books at once! Yet, I might
observe:
-
I still typically have only one book per "column" going at a time, i.e., one
for-my-"work" fiction book (the Weiss, technically the same column as A
Shock but it was due to the library yesterday), one "fun" fiction book (The
Name of the Rose), one programming book, one nonfiction audiobook…
-
They live in fairly separate physical zones, which (maybe) helps me keep them
straight? Let’s say this is true.
-
Typically all but the for-my-"work" fiction books tend to be books that are
easy enough to pick up and put down without too much worry of remembering.
-
…and in any case, I am never without something to read.
This is all to say that I have still not found any comp titles for my novel
manuscript, and yet despite this, my reading is still so much more for
pleasure. Now: to
Command-Line Rust!
After (checks billing history) nine years ("Joined on: 2015-02-03") I am
finally giving up on Dreamhost hosting. I’m going to keep my domains there
because I have a bunch of free credits from things and they make it easy enough
to do them "DNS Only" and manage the CNAME and ALIAS records and so on, but
as soon as this DNS move over finishes (which will be before this post has gone
up, I expect), I will have cancelled my shared hosting. Previously I was on the
"Unlimited" tier, and now I’m on the "Shared Stater" plan, but soon I will be on
no plan, and it will be beautiful. As this is a static site, there are
so
many
free
places
to
host
it,
that I really shouldn’t be paying to do so. It made more sense when I was also
hosting a "professional" personal site, my wife’s bakery site, school projects,
etc., but now? Not really.
The other motivator to move things over is that Dreamhost recently (quietly)
removed
Passenger,
which is what I previously had used to facilitate hosting the Flask-baked bakery
site, and as I consider adding some "additional functionality" to this site via
our dear friend HTMX, it’s too much trouble to manage the
environment, deployment, etc., myself. So I’m giving Render
a try. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe it’ll end up costing me money. Maybe they’re secretly super unethical (I did google this first).
Still: deployment is easy and I can (finally) ditch CircleCi, which also will be
good.
It’s a little annoying to configure all the DNS stuff but once that’s done it’ll
be done, you know?
And though I do intend to make a newsletter thing and use this as a launching
pad for the spiritual successor to
Response, in
the meantime, while I build out all the other infrastructure, I won’t be paying
for hosting I don’t really have to pay for, and this is a very wonderful
thing.
