Bikes, Books, and Bullshit.

Stray Thoughts on AWP Baltimore

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The advantage I had going into the conference this year was coming in already exhausted and a day and a half late. I’d spent the first 4/5 of the work-week, starting Sunday afternoon, traveling for work. It was a good trip, I met, in-person, my new teammates and many other new coworkers besides, but suffice to say most days I was up at 6:30a and the days were not over until, at earliest, 9p. So I was already exhausted.

(Naturally, my flight Thursday night was delayed, and there was a minor issue with the hotel reservation, and I did not get to sleep until maybe four in the morning, Friday.)

I slept in as long as I could. I walked along the main roads and took a leisurely breakfast at an iHOP between my hotel and the conference center. I got my registration, the ubiquitous tote bag, and entered the bookfair around 1p.

Prior AWPs were prepared for differently. When I went as an undergrad, I was working a booth, I was going to collect submission fliers and literary journals and to try to learn something from the panels and sessions, to try to suss out something of the MFA programs I would much later, maybe, apply to. Later, when I was in an MFA program (not one of those I had learned about earlier), I was going to hang out with friends in my cohort, see old friends, professors, from past lives, collect submissions fliers, attend panels and sessions and readings. The last time I went, post-grad, I was there to try and figure out how to sell a novel manuscript, meet small presses, attend readings.

This time, by the time I actually made it on the ground, I had absolutely no plans, intentions, at all.

I wandered around the bookfair row by row and would say hello on the off chance I saw someone I knew but was mostly gathering data; this trip — the work trip included — was, we said, mostly about gathering data. I talked to folks at tables, got fliers if they were thrust upon me, but said, over and again, that I was doing my shopping later. (This was true; I went back to the few folks I said I would and bought something on Saturday. This did mean that I missed a few volumes I was excited about.)

I tried attending a panel.

Because I did not do any preparation I picked the session I would go to based off the title alone; I made a bad guess about what it was about. The panel was fine, they were doing the thing, but it was not a topic I was interested in save at a higher-level, a sort of genre-of-work-level, and because it was instead about doing, or rather starting the thing, a thing that I’m kind of, philosophically, in opposition to, it wasn’t for me. I stayed longer than I really needed to, but: you try to be polite.

What I will say though was that it boiled down to what I had more or less taken away from the sessions I attended the last time I went: it’s a practice, it’s about relationships, it’s about simply starting.

If nothing else, to borrow the title of a book, I felt that I do know some things. It felt nice, or, at least: reaffirming.

The events ("off-sites") I went to Friday night were all haphazard and hand-sold to me by people I talked to or texted with. The first was really two readings. I had tried to get dinner at a vegan restaurant that had apparently permanently closed the week before and so went straight to the venue and ordered a drink. There was already a reading going on so I sat and listened. Missing my intended dinner would be a theme of the weekend. That first reading was good — I caught the last two readers, the last of whom has a new book I would like to buy (though they were well out of it by the time I went shopping Saturday), and then I spotted Bob, and Chris, by the bar, and went to introduce myself in person. It was very good to meet them! They’re both so lovely, so nice. I really like their podcast. It’s nice to transition from Internet to "IRL" friends.

And then I had to run off to another reading in another part of town.

This second one I learned about because I saw an Allston (MA) flag at a booth and so stopped. Was not aware that Nixes Mate existed or was local, and now I have another wonderful local thing for my radar. Michael and Anne and the woman from Lily Poetry whose name has escaped me were all super nice and welcoming at their booth, and so I wanted to their reading (I would have gone for local folks regardless, but it was a bonus that they were so nice and warm). Unfortunately I missed Anne’s reading because I arrived late, but heard a bunch of other good stuff and made another new local (Boston) poet friend whom I think I’ll be able to rope into reading at Two Page soon. I’ll speak of that whole thing in a moment.

Saturday I worked my work-exchange shift and did a little shopping and went back to the hotel to use their gym. This was a very wonderful thing; I felt very good afterward.

Then: three more readings, back-to-back-to-back. The first was put on by Post-Pop, but mostly I was there because the host, August Smith, is a fellow UMass-Boston alum, and I really liked him when I met him at a backyard reading a year or two ago for his book, which I also really liked. It was a good reading.

Then across town to see David read from a forthcoming book, and this was also an excellent, and super well run, reading. Plus I heard a new-to-me writer whom I really like and am excited about! She read a really interesting, one-off, in-progress piece (you know: my jam so far as what I like to hear at a reading), and the book of her’s I picked up has a really good title, too. I’m excited to read it when I’m done with Perfection.

Then down the road to the Game Over Books x Garden Party Collective reading, which was also very good — and I finally got to hear Bob read a poem from his book! — but I was a bit cooked by the end, if I am honest. I’d been in readings from about 3:30 to 9:00, and that’s a lot, even for a relatively extroverted, likes-to-go-to-readings person like myself.

I really enjoyed the readings. I’m still trying to figure out what, if anything, I’m taking away from them as an aggregate, as a lens on my work work, but that takes time anyway, and my brain is so fried. But they were the kinds of wonderful, moving, aesthetic experience I was looking for, so: wonderful.

In the end I met back up with David and some friends of his and had dinner at a bar and went to another bar and eventually I made it back to my hotel. It was lovely.

I did a lot of walking. I didn’t do — make, have, take time for — much exploring of Baltimore. I was interested in what I saw walking around. I didn’t spend too much money, I don’t think, although paying for Lyfts and so on always pains me a little (but I was not willing to try and figure out the buses, the trains, which app I needed to download to use one of the electric scooters littered around the city).

I did not do very much writing. I made some notes. I read, was read-to. I saw a few friends and acquaintances but didn’t really make a point of it. There were some people whom I had been excited to see but missed. I regret that I didn’t have the capacity to do more to make the meetings happen it but I didn’t have the capacity and feel at peace with that. There will be other trips.

I ate reasonably well, if late every night. I got to overhear a lot of chatter and felt old, listening to two younger poets have extraordinarily similar conversations to conversations I’d had with my writer friends years ago. I am not, of course, old. Still.

It was a fun game to guess who were the writers walking around the city; this was not in fact hard at all (even if they were not wearing their conference badges, if they did not have the conference tote bag hanging from a shoulder).

I’m glad I went. If nothing else, it was a kind of vacation. And now I’m looking forward to home, to getting back to the work.

Interview with David Leo Rice in minor literature[s]

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve honestly lost count of how many times David and I have sat down to talk about some new book of his, but it’s hard to have too much of a good thing! And we finally did meet in person not too long ago for the first time since that first time we met in 2020, in the hazy days just before the world shut down for COVID. He did a reading at Riffraff Books down in Providence, RI, and I took the train down to see him. Also got to meet his brother and his father. It was a great reading and a great time hanging out there and after all around. I think I’m getting to see him next week at AWP, too, but, you know, TBD.

But anyway, we’ve published a new interview in minor literature[s] about his most recent book, The Squimbop Condition which, in addition to having some super interesting, very classic David Leo Rice writing in there, also has killer illustrations throughout (which, naturally, I forgot to ask about during the interview; or maybe let’s pretend that I did, but that it sadly had to get cut out of the final version? In any case —).

A preview:

This too feels very much a part of the era we’re living through, where discourse has swallowed reality so thoroughly that we don’t notice the disjunct anymore. People who say the right or wrong things are seen as equivalent to people who actually do things—and perhaps not incorrectly, if our world is now as susceptible to what is said about it as it is (or ever was) to what is done to and in it. I tend to think that a culture that has foregrounded fights over language and opinion is either in great shape—all the major, tangible problems have been solved—or in truly awful shape, if it’s tacitly given up on even trying to solve those problems as such. It’s like language becomes a kind of magic with the innate ability to conjure and destroy beings and objects, which, in some conceptions of reality, has always been true.

— David Leo Rice

With any luck we’ll be back to our more regularly scheduled content next week, although I think based on the routine(s) of the new job, posts should be expected on Fridays going forward, not Wednesdays. I’m sure you won’t mind.

A Missed Week

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While I announced this only to myself, my intention was to post weekly on Wednesdays, hearkening back in some small way to the "Wednesday Weekly Recommended Reading" series that I originally conceived of as a kind of backbone support to whatever else I might write here. I’d kept up the new weekly posting consistently for (let’s count…) six weeks (not bad), and this week I missed the mark, posting this paltry thing on a Saturday. Some observations and comments:

I feel OK about missing the target publication date, but less so about having fallen out of the practice of working on posts/essays throughout the week such that I would more or less always have something more or less ready to go.
This may be a lesson in saving content: I did post the Duras thing on a Friday, thinking that book review/comment content could be "bonus," but maybe the lesson here is that I actually am probably only good for one post a week, for now.
This is also a lesson in content design; I think I got too excited about the ventilated prose essay; I don’t mean for all posts to be that long, in-depth, researched, whatever. I think I set that as a bar for myself when in fact that was always meant to be somewhat exceptional, or at least posts like that were meant to be exceptional (for: I do have more planned, half-written, forthcoming). But if I’m to keep up the regular publishing practice, setting the bar very high in terms of time and effort is going to make that much harder than it needs to be, given this blog’s position in the overall hierarchy of my creative and other priorities.
I managed OK the rather insane week during which I interviewed, but the actual first week of the new job (I started a new job this week) kicked my butt rather more in terms of mental energy and general time-management.
That being said, though I have not really written toward/on projects meant for this little blog, I have continued doing my regularly scheduled reading (Wide Sargasso Sea was so, so good) and fiction writing, which, in terms of personal priorities, makes sense: this is one of the things that’s going to be nudged off the plate when it gets too full. And I feel perfectly at peace with that.

This is all to say I’m still thinking a lot about practice but, also, routine. Prior to this change I’d been working at the same place, albeit in a few different roles, for nearly six years (six years minus two days exactly), and after the pandemic eased enough for us to get back into some kind of office, my routines were set. I am very much a creature of habit. I am not (yet) used to working all week from home (though I do intend to find some other places from which to work). I am not (yet) used to the irregular, customer-driven meeting schedules at the new place (as for the last few years I’d mostly only ever had a few meetings a week, nearly all internal and release-driven). I am not (yet) up to speed at work (to be fair: it’s been all of four days), and there is a lot of content and application I need to get my arms around quickly. But. I have figured out how to keep reading and writing, at least in some small way(s). I have not yet built routines around my practice(s), but this will come. I mean for fuck’s sake: I haven’t even had a full five-day workweek yet.

So I’m late, so what. Tonight we’ll go dancing. Next week will be an opportunity to practice, to get back on the horse. I hope to finish the draft about platform ownership, or maybe semantic markup for poetry, but I probably won’t have time. Which is fine. There’ll be something else. It’s practice.

Unsophisticated Notes on Jane Eyre

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every few years my wife will — I think jokingly — threaten divorce if I still haven’t read some classic or other that she she loves and deems important that I read. The last one was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter which was, of course, excellent. This year it was Jane Eyre. I have some vague memory of my cousin having read it in high school and thinking it a slog but very much enjoying it, and then when Alia read it some years ago I remember her being absolutely floored by it. She’s amazing at summarizing and retelling things, and I think told me about a quarter of the plot before she decided that I would need to read it myself (and, though it was published in all of 1847, she was kind enough not to give spoilers). This was also connected to her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea; I can’t remember if she’d read that before or after we read Good Morning Midnight, but either way, as we are both big Jean Rhys fans, and I want to read more of her (I’ve only read that and Quartet), I needed to read Jane Eyre first.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying I’ve finally read Jane Eyre, and greatly enjoyed it.

My temptation is to try and say something intelligent about the book, but the bar for that is both very high objectively and very high for myself, having done enough schooling to know what good is and what’s just not good enough (or anything), and conveniently I also am very crunched for time this week, so I will only make a few brief remarks about things in the book that caught my attention. Hopefully somebody much smarter than I can explain it. The following contains spoilers, because, you know, the book came out in 1847.

I Am a No-Fun Reader (Plotting): I wish I were smarter on the genre conventions in mid-19th century English novels, which is to say, I wish I had a little more context in which to situate some of the "plotty" elements of the book. Like, was the reader supposed to know that they were her cousins almost immediately? I feel like it was very obvious very immediately. And it’s a little bit over-determined by the whole "coincidence" of all of it, sure, but still. As soon as there was the mention of an uncle, an inheritance…

The same could certainly be said with regard to Helen Burns (which: what a name) and her fixation on paradise in the next life; as soon as there’s the typhus outbreak, you kind of know…

I’ll have more to say about the religiosity, the divine interventions, below, but — honestly perhaps because they came outside of that — I thought the handling of Grace Poole as a subterfuge was brilliant; it was just unclear enough to actually arouse suspicion while not actually spoiling anything (even though, you know, it was spoiled for me already based on being a 21st century kind of person).

This is all to say that I’m really interested in how Jane Eyre engages with genre plot(s), but that I don’t really have anything smart to say about it.
Wondering About Race: Even outside of poor Bertha, there is the characterization of the cousins on her mother’s side that caught me:

“Well, and what of John Reed?”

“Oh, he is not doing so well as his mama could wish. He went to college, and he got—plucked, I think they call it: and then his uncles wanted him to be a barrister, and study the law: but he is such a dissipated young man, they will never make much of him, I think.”

“What does he look like?”

“He is very tall: some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he has such thick lips.”

— Jane Eyre Chapter 10

Mrs. Reed, villainized of course, also is referred to at times with racialized language as very "dark" and so on, and there’s a reading here where she’s so protective of her children in favor over Jane because of that; like I say, I know that there are much smarter people than me on this, and even books — exhibits! — about race in the work of the Brontës (I mean: the whole controversy about the new "Wuthering Heights" movie casting and so on), but even to this somewhat naive reader, it was quite present, and apparent, throughout.
Wondering About Religion / Novel as Wish Fulfillment: Again, I’m missing context. Could I have read the introduction after I finished the book? Yes, I should have. But I had so many other books overdue at the library and (see further excuses). But I was a little surprised that the book ends with St John, and how much Rochester’s disfigurement is cast as a kind of moral just dessert. Pairing that then with the Helen Burns thing — well. It’s quite a religious novel, isn’t it? (And here I’ll pass over the various slur(s) at non-Christians she includes at points later on in the novel.)

I think, as a non-Christian who’s always been frankly perplexed by the "suffering in this world is OK because there’s paradise in the next" argument or mode of thinking, that aspect of the book was probably inevitably going to fall a bit flat for me. There’s a quote that I probably should have actually written down on the back of the edition I read — one of the Modern Library ones — about how the novel is in part "wish fulfillment," and I sort of get that, but it returns to the plotting question I had above: how much of it is meeting convention, and how much of it is some kind of argument about the goodness/justness of God? Is the argument of the novel really so simple?

And yes, see "not being any fun" above: there’s no fucking reason that the novel has to have an argument. I agree! I really enjoyed it as a pleasurable work of fiction to read!

But, you know, given that it’s also "literature" (another problematic label, I know, I know, this is why I am not a literature scholar), I suppose I found myself reading it very much with all of these things in mind. It’s a little problematic for me! Of course, this is why you get so excited for the Jean Rhys…

In any case. I’m looking forward to chewing on the above for a while and then going back and doing some actual reading on and about the book by people much smarter than I. But I’ll do this after Wide Sargasso Sea, which I plan to start on the train home tonight. And in the meantime, please accept my apologies for any and all bad takes in the above.

Two Pages, New Work (First Cut)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was not the post I had meant to write today, nor is it particularly realized or complete, but as I am practicing finishing things, I think this will do. I plan to write more about this topic — near and dear to my heart — so please consider this a first cut, a working-through, a Barthes-like introduction.^[1]

I’d had planned — months ago — to write something up along the lines of "A Year and a Half of Two Page Tuesday," which probably would have been more like "Eighteen Months of Two Page Tuesday" as my friend’s kid was just then about eighteen months, and the language of time and measure tends to stick to my brain in ways I don’t fully understand. But that came and went, and now, if you were to count the months prior to doing the readings where we were just doing social bar nights, this little thing has been going for over two years. Which really isn’t bad.

But as I was doing the reflecting and — frankly — thinking a little bit about what is next for the series,^[2] I thought about the positioning of the whole thing, about what it was for. I mean: myself, obviously. (I have cool friends who do great work, and I want to hear it read.) But beyond that, it was conceived of, and still is, a community-oriented kind of thing. The goal being, to quote Cynthia Ozick quoting Lionel Trilling on "little magazines":

[To] keep the new talents warm.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about keeping new talents warm, not only because it’s been cold as fucking balls in Boston the last few weeks, but because I think this is important work to do. I mean, I’ve published jack, I like to think I have some small amount of talent as a writer, so I may be new myself, but. I certainly can do what I can to help others, new as I am in writing, old-hand that I am in putting things like this together.

So what is warm? Warm is — I think, I hope — reading in public for the first time ever at the same reading as someone who’s published multiple, very well-received books; reading a couple times from the same project, getting feedback and appreciation for the changes you’ve made; getting referred to read by your friends who’ve read before, knowing full well they’ll be there to support you; seeing familiar faces over the course of months — now years — including the bartenders, the staff at the bars; feeling comfortable enough with the group to read challenging, or vulnerable, or not-quite-yet-right work; feeling comfortable enough to read at all; a belly full of Narragansett and french fries.

This is perhaps why I’m so committed to the bit — i.e., two pages of new work — because that, I think, allows, enables, encourages all the above. The bar is high insofar as people really do bring some kick-ass, ground-breaking, deeply-exciting work, but also low, insofar as it’s two pages: why not take a risk. And because it is new, the readings themselves tend to cohere: everyone is responding to the current world around them. There is a lot of overlap there, in our little community, and so we get so many slices across that world, so many responses to it.

We keep our new talents warm by making it easy to get on the reading list; by making sure they have enough space to try but not too much space so as to become overwhelmed; by making sure everybody is nice,^[3] gets talked to, has their piece appreciated or, if they’re just coming to listen, gets pointed to someone with similar interests (poets and poets, ex-theater kids and ex-theater kids, etc.); by maintaining good relationships with the bars that host us such that they’re excited to have us (and not only because we bring them in a good chunk of beer money); by existing at all.

It is this last piece, I think, that has helped me sleep however soundly I can sleep given the current state of the world. It’s a community. We see each other in person. We interact in person. We build trust together over time. There are people in the community whom we know we can call upon.^[4]

So: two pages, new work. Easy.

1. One of my favorite books of all time is his Pleasure of the Text, and we’ve just started Camera Lucida in a book club, and I just really love the numbered, meandering paragraphs.

2. Stickers. I really want to make some cool fucking stickers.

3. We haven’t yet had to turn someone away but I’ll fucking do it. I mean I hope we never have to. But.

4. Which, if you are reading this at all close to the time of publication, please consider helping out our dearfriends over at Charlie’s Kitchen, who are dealing with a flooding disaster: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-charlies-restaurant-recover.

Comments on an n^th Redesign and a Modern Static Web Stack

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the changes I suggested might be forthcoming was, of course, a redesign. I realize that this is essentially impossible to see if you haven’t visited the site before (and although there is the Wayback Machine, it does not appear to have pulled the old css file, which makes sense given that I used to append a ?<date-time-slug> to it because of the way the old server cached that file).

The previous design was all monospace font, all the same size, with a color for links and a color for <code> and underlines for emphasis. Not really pretty, but it was… a decision that I had made.

Now, though still — frankly — austere, it at least is hopefully more legible due to the more readable font and multiply-sized headings, actual italics for emphasis, and so on. How did we get here.

No Theme for Me

As noted in the colophon, this is a Jekyll-based static site. Typically, Jekyll sites use themes that you install via a Ruby Gem. You do, it turns out, need a theme, for when I tried to remove the default theme Gem, Jekyll would no longer build. But because I am grumpy I override the default theme more or less entirely, and as such, I more or less design the actual semantic layout (i.e., the bones of the thing) and the styles (the window-dressing) "from scratch." This is not to say that this is impressive by any means, but only to say that, as someone who is not really a designer in any sense of the word, I am opening myself up to a mountain of small and large decisions when I design, or redesign, this little blog of mine.

The semantic layout I feel very good about; I work in publishing, spend (too much) time thinking about Semantic HTML, and generally feel rather on top of modern HTML(5).^[1]

The design, less so. That is probably why it is minimal, in addition to my preferences for designs that highlight the text(s) themselves (at least when, as here, the text is more or less the entire point). If it is minimal I have to make fewer decisions. This is good. Because although, as below, I did, and still do, have a reasonable handle on formerly-modern and currently-modern CSS,^[2] what exactly to do with all that knowledge (or at least with the many tabs open to the Mozilla Developer Docs) is a separate matter entirely.

Modern CSS, Kind Of

I recently completed an "engineering mentorship" at work on React, which is a fancy-pants web framework that, according to a friend, "gives you a lot of rope with which to hang yourself," and is, alas, an industry standard. But that’s somewhat neither here nor there; what is relevant here is that my old friend Sass, a CSS preprocessor,^[3] may no longer be needed! Basically with react you can inject CSS right into the JavaScript, and some of the things that you used to need something like Sass to do (variables, nesting, combining multiple smaller files into one file that gets sent over the wire). You still can’t do the file combination natively (at least not without some other system like React to do that for you), but we now have things like variables, nesting, and light-dark themes out of the box, and so I was pretty existed to use them! But.

Jekyll comes with Sass baked into it, so, like, you may as well use it.

To get into the weeds, beyond being able to combine files via @import directives, I personally find the variable syntax much nicer. To wit:

// sass
$light-color: #282c34;
$light-bg: #fafafa;

// modern css
:root {
  --light-color: #282c34;
  --light-bg: #fafafa;
}

Of course really it’s in the calling code where it’s nicer:

// sass
body {
  background-color: $bg-color;
  color: $text-color;
}

// modern css
body {
  background-color: var(--bg-color);
  color: var(--text-color);
}

Is the difference slight? Yes. It is less characters to type? Also yes. And it makes it somewhat easier to do convoluted things like the following:

// light mode
$primary-light: #0d45bf;
$secondary-light: #a626a4;

// dark mode
$primary-dark: #90b3ff;
$secondary-dark: #fc9cfa;

// just call the one variable instead of light-dark-ing all the time
$primary: light-dark($primary-light, $primary-dark);
$secondary: light-dark($secondary-light, $secondary-dark);

So I used some modern CSS in the redesign, but still fell back largely on Sass, which I feel perfectly fine about.

Jekyll Metadata, Or: I Do Not Keep My Frameworks Sufficiently Up-To-Date

There was a fun bug I ran into when trying to get the sidebar over there to display categories, as well as the new filters on the posts archive page:

Liquid Exception: undefined method `each' for "bullshit, code":String p.data[post_attr]&.each { |t| hash[t] << p } ^^^^^^ in posts/index.html

    Error: undefined method `each' for "bullshit, code":String p.data[post_attr]&.each { |t| hash[t] << p } ^^^^^^
    Error: Run jekyll build --trace for more information.

After much frustrated googling, I turned to Gemini (the free version, for I am both cheap and not interested in spending money on LLMs), which informed me that although the Jekyll documentation seems to indicate that categories: bullshit, code should work, a change to the template processor (called "Liquid") means that it instead needs to be formatted as an actual array, i.e., categories: [bullshit, code], or in asciidoc, as in this post, :page-categories: [bullshit, code].

Minor thing, but the point is that as a part of this "redesign" I upgraded the version of Jekyll I was running on to the current version, which at the time of writing is 4.2.2. Cool, fine. The earliest commit I can find has me starting at 3.8.6. But I’m pretty sure I moved the repo at some point. Based on when I actually started the blog in May 2017, it would have been version 3.4.3. So at least one major version upgrade. No wonder things that used to work simply stopped working.

Anyway. Now the liquid to make the little categories stuff work, works:

{% for category in post.categories %}
 <li>
  <a href="{{site.baseurl}}/posts/?filter={{ category }}">{{category}}</a>
 </li>
{% endfor %}

Beautiful.

Lights, Vanilla JS

Now as mentioned, too many times, this is a static site, which means that it is just text files (HTML files) and a couple images on a "dumb" server that just serves them up; there is no back-end logic doing anything at all. So any interactivity I may want I need to implement in the client side, i.e., in your browser with JavaScript.^[4] There are essentially two things that I thought were worth adding: a way to choose a light or dark mode, and a better way to filter the posts archive, now that I may or may not be using "categories" more appropriately.^[5]

And while, yes, it would be nice to use some fancy JS framework like React, the great thing about the modern web is that, not unlike CSS, "vanilla" or plain JavaScript does so much more than it used to, and is, generally, nearly even pleasant to work with (although I’m still probably partial to TypeScript for larger and more complex projects, even though that itself can be a pain in the ass).

So what did we do.

Lights

This ended up being simple enough, sort of. The actual code that does the switching is very straightforward:

const lightsToggle = document.querySelector("#lights-toggle"); // (1)

lightsToggle.addEventListener('click', () => { // (2)
  const isDark = getComputedStyle(document.documentElement).colorScheme === 'dark';
  const nextTheme = isDark ? 'light' : 'dark'; // (3)
  document.documentElement.setAttribute('data-theme', nextTheme);
  localStorage.setItem('theme', nextTheme); (4)
})

We get the id of the link up yonder in the header there.
We add an event listener for when that link is clicked.
We use a fancy ternary operator to switch the "next theme.
Here’s where the trouble starts.

So, I think it’s cool that we can use local storage now. It’s simple, easy, and a good way to remember what "mode" you want when you visit a site again (because you’ll come back to read more, right? Right?).

The problem is that, sticking the code that checks the localStorage for any prior preferences where you’d normally stick a script, i.e., at the end of a page (or maybe this is too "old web," and we don’t do that anymore? I didn’t bother to check), you get a weird flash, because your browser tries to render things as it reads them, i.e., it’ll show the page as it gets it, not once it’s gotten all the content, so if the script is at the end, the page is shown before it knows whether to keep the lights on or not.

The very dumb, I-didn’t-bother-thinking-of-a-"right"-way-to-do-this solution was to just stick that code in the <head> tag. I won’t show you that because it’s ugly and all in one string to make the page load just that much faster, but you can "view source" if you must. So anyway, there is a light and dark mode now that you can switch at will.^[6]

Filters

This is equally simple as the lights, thing, so I’ll just show and annotate the code:

const queryString = window.location.search; // (1)
const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(queryString);
const queryFilter = urlParams.get("filter"); // (2)
const posts = document.querySelectorAll('li[data-categories]'); // (3)

if (queryFilter) { // (4)
  filterPosts(queryFilter)
}

function filterPosts(category) {
    posts.forEach(post => { // (5)
        const categories = post.dataset.categories.split(" ");
        if (categories.includes(category) || category === "all") { // (6)
            post.style.display = "block"
        } else { // (7)
            post.style.display = "none"
        }
    })
}

We get the URL to see if there were any query strings. We send you to the same posts/ page when you click on, for example, code over there in this page’s "categories", but with a ?filter=code query string. Otherwise that won’t be present.
But, you know, if it is present, we want to know what we’re filtering for, in the case mentioned above, that would be "code".
Here we’re gathering all the posts that have a data-categories attribute. All posts have a data-categories attribute.
If there is a filter, we run the filterPosts function to filter for that filter.
Onto the function itself, we basically just iterate through the list of posts we collected up in (3) above.
If they have the category we’re filtering for, we set the display style to block (the default for an <li> element).
If they do not have the relevant category in their data-categories attribute, we set the display style to none, thus making it "disappear" off the page as seen from your browser.

Simple enough.

Does It Look Any Better?

Beauty is, they say, in the eye of the beholder. I think, at least, it does not look worse.

Partially it was a good exercise for myself to think about things like what makes a blog something one wants to read, what kinds of functions do I like, how does one these days marry a small amount of interactivity with static sites in a way that is both nice while nevertheless keeping to the minimalist ethos of a static site?

As with all side projects, the work was a little hurried and harried, but I’m pretty happy with the result in the end, and feel fine about it, just fine.

I mean: the point is the writing anyway, right? Right?

1. It occurs to me that I am not sure of my audience in writing this; is this for a technical audience? For my writer friends whom I occasionally bully into helping me review these posts? For merely myself? In any case, HTML is the markup language that things like web browsers and e-readers speak.

2. CSS being the language that affects or styles the way that things like web browsers and e-readers show HTML

3. That more or less let you do things you used to not be alb to do in CSS, like variables

4. I am again struck by total confusion as to whom I’m imagining the audience of this post to be.

5. And yes, while I’ve gone back and included some additional categories/metadata on old posts, this is mostly a "looking forward" thing.

6. For, if you are like me, you may prefer a dark mode for your system, but want to read things in light mode, because black text on a white(ish) background is, scientifically, easier to parse.

Ventilated Prose as a Tool for Writing

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

While I would refer you to the blog that introduced this term to me originally for a better history, the short version is that in the 30’s Buckminster Fuller, a known neologism-coiner, coined the term "ventilated prose" to describe what is essentially prose with enjambment. It is also sometimes called, according to other various places on the internet, "coding prose," or (I think somewhat restrictively) "semantic line breaks." Fuller himself also referred to it as "mental mouthfulls[sic]," which, well —

I like "ventilated prose."

The joke, of course, is that when published as such, it may or may not be indistinguishable from poetry:

When the re-written report was submitted, the Director said, "This is lucid, but it is poetry, and I cannot possibly hand it to the President of the Corporation for submission to the Board of Directors." I insisted that it was obviously not poetry, since both he and I knew how I had chopped up a conventional prose report. The Director said, "I am having two poets for dinner tonight and I will take this to them and see what they say." He returned the next day and said, "It’s too bad — it’s poetry."

— Buckminster Fuller
from the preface of No More Second-Hand God

That being said, my interest — following my threat to discuss what writing on a computer affords — is in ventilated prose as a compositional technique, a means or tool to aid in writing composition and revision. The posts linked above allude to this, but I would like to discuss what this means in practice — with examples — if one considers one’s working medium to be text (which, to give credit for beating me to this distinction, Ramshankar is quite clear on: "When writing text (prose, not code) you need to decide where to break lines so they remain within manageable limits"; although I personally am happy to let my text editor wrap lines for me on (rare) occasion).

Were one to say compose this way in an appropriately lovely lightweight markup language, and then feed that text through your favorite conversion tool, the prose would come out not "ventilated," which is to say in the more familiar blocks of prose paragraphs and so on, but, I think, much improved.

Aside

To continue giving credit freely where credit is due, the method of working that I’m going to propose in what follows was shown to me by the writer Jane Unrue when she was the visiting professor at my MFA program. Incidentally, she is also the person who encouraged me to think about my writing as a "practice." So although what I’m about to describe is a practice and method I’ve modified and built up for my own purposes over a number of years (and taken it out of the Word document in which it was first shown to me) and to which I have appropriated the term "ventilated prose," it has its origins in my work with Jane.

Ventilated Prose as a Means of Understanding a Sentence

Let’s borrow a sentence from some open-source text, for example, why not a sentence pulled at random from Sense and Sensibility:

No one could dispute her right to come; the house was her husband’s from the moment of his father’s decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood’s situation, with only common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing.

It’s a nice, spindly, sentence. At first glance it might seem to be merely a fairly standard, early-19th century sort of sentence. Lots of clauses and interjections and so on, and to some sensibilities (no pun intended) it might feel a little long. But how is it working, one might ask. How does it do what it is supposed to be doing?

We might "ventilate" it thus to try and get some insight:

1 | No one could dispute her right to come;
2 | the house was her husband's from the
3 | moment of his father's decease;
4 | but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater,
5 | and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood's situation,
6 | with only common feelings,
7 | must have been highly unpleasing.

Note

I do not mean to suggest by this example that this is the only, or even a good "ventilation" of this sentence; rather, breaking it up this way helps me, at the time of writing, understand something about the passage. On some other day I might do it completely differently, and, perhaps, discover something(s) else entirely. In my own work, I often break things up in multiple different ways during the course of the writing and revision, depending on what it is I’m trying to understand or improve.

Let’s consider first the rhythm. To my ear, I count four beats in the first line (note here that I am not strictly speaking of metrical feet – yet; by "beat" I mean roughly a stressed syllable, like a "down beat" in music, but only roughly), two in the second, and three in the third. Were we to combine the second and third lines (which would be easy enough to do: a simple deletion, or, if you were using an application like vim, by pressing "J"), we can read the first two lines as a kind of uneven couplet, the implicit fifth "pause" beat after the semicolon serving then to strengthen the stressed ending of "decease".

Line 4 holds steady with four beats (and, I think, a significant pause after the comma, mating it up with the five-beat "couplet" across the first three lines), making the more sing-song three-beat lines 5, 6, and 7 carry the reader and their ear quickly (jauntily, even) to the end of the sentence, mirroring in rhythm the subtle narratorial shade thrown at Mrs. Dashwood and her feelings. It is not only the sense of the words that indicates this characterization, but also the rhythms of the sentence doing the characterization itself.

Looking now at the sound, we might more easily notice the consonance in line 2 between "house" and "husband", extending to "his" on line 3, which also has a fair bit of consonance between "father’s" and "decease." There is, in the next line, the "d" sound in "indelicacy" "conduct" and (depending on your accent) "greater". We might note, as well, the rhyme in the last two lines ("unpleasing" and "feeling[s]"), which further punctuate the sense of the sentence, joining forces with the rhythmic device previously mentioned.

Ventilating the sentence allows us to more easily take it apart and see exactly how it’s doing what it means to be doing. It is not unlike a New Critical "close reading," save that our interest is now not as readers (or high school students) but rather as people interested in the mechanics of the prose. This does, of course, extend very well across passages (i.e., one may not need to ventilate a sentence like "Everybody was drunk.", but were one to take a closer look at the first passage in "in our time", one might begin to notice the way the prose jaunts along more or less iambicly, while the dialog breaks the rhythm, doing what I might call the textual characterization work).

Ventilated Prose as a Tool for Composition, Briefly

How one actually gets the words down on the page I think is too personal to really provide recommendations for, and even my own first-drafting practice is largely inconsistent and mood-based, and so I don’t know that I have much to say about "ventilation" as a tool for drafting, save the more general point that if one begins to take ideas like this seriously, one is then freed up to break lines as needed to, for example, make comments (in the following, the line that start with // is an asciidoc comment):

1 | The dog dropped the bone,
2 | // Do we need to describe the bone more, or where he dropped it?
3 | and I picked it up again to throw it as hard as I could across the field.

Though, even without their removal the "converted" text would simply read:

The dog dropped the bone, and I picked it up again to throw it as hard as I could across the field.

I, personally, find this very helpful, especially if preceded by // TK, (although searching for // is almost always just as effective) to ensure that I keep moving forward (if that’s the goal for the day), making it simple, inline, to defer certain decisions or details or points for future research until later.

Ventilated Prose as a Tool for Revision

This is, as I imagine you may have been expecting, where ventilated prose as a tool for improving texts really comes into its own. The process is more or less the same as in the Sense and Sensibility example above, save that instead of merely admiring Jane Austen’s prose, we can then use what information the ventilation makes more clear to improve the sentences and passages that we’ve drafted ourselves.

I will dig up some decade-plus-old prose example of my own in need of revision, and will try to show how it might be thought about — and ideally improved — along these lines. To wit:

Henry was still in the habit of waking up on the right side of the bed, though he didn’t understand why. He stared at his alarm clock, blinking for a few seconds, before he reached over to the far side to pull the switch to stop the ring of the electronic church-bells.

Arguably this is fine, but there is, I think, much room for improvement given my current thinking about how I would like my sentences — and introductory sentences especially — to read (in terms of sound, rhythm, and sense).

So let’s perform a first pass, simply breaking it up to see what we might see:

1 | Henry was still in the habit of waking up
2 | on the right side of the bed,
3 | though he didn't understand why.
4 | He stared at his alarm clock,
5 | blinking for a few seconds,
6 | before he reached over to the far side to pull
7 | the switch
8 | to stop the ring
9 | of the electronic church-bells.

Note that in a few places (i.e., lines 7 and sort of 9) I decided to pull out a noun as much as a clause or phrase, which is to say: I already have a hunch, just reading it aloud to myself, that those fragments might be part of the problem.

Looking first at the sound (for, why not switch it up), there are a few things that are almost working, for example the consonance between "Henry" and "habit," the "stared", "seconds", "switch", "stop" sequence. I’m not really happy with any of it, though, because the absence of any repetition in the vowel sounds is, I think, breaking it up too much.

To intermingle a little rhythmic looking-at, "Henry" and "habit" is actually (I think) working OK because they both fall on downbeats ("HENry was STILL in the HAbit"), and move from the back of the mouth ("eh") through the middle ("ih" in "still") and then the front ("aah"), so maybe I’m happy enough with that.

Looking at the second pair, though, we’re thrashing from a spread-front ("aeh"), to a non-spread front ("eh") to a rounded front ("iih") to a roomy back vowel ("awh"), and it’s a lot of movement of the lips; too much, I think. And this is all before we even consider that the clauses themselves are not really doing much in terms of their sense!

So bringing the sense in (and let’s narrow our attention to just the first sentence, as I’m starting to realize that this could take too long if not, and this is meant to be more illustrative than an actual fix for the opening of a story I wrote in my teens), "though he didn’t understand why" doesn’t actually make much sense, given that we learn later in the story that Henry’s wife has recently died (what I thought I had to say about this topic as a teenager is a different issue). So presumably he would understand why, even if only implicitly.

But because we’ve ventilated the prose as such, we can also see that it fails rhythmically as well. Lines 1 and 2 could be re-broken as a tetramic couplet (four beats to a line):

1a | Henry was still in the habit of waking
2a | up on the right side of the bed,

(And yes, I know the rhythm in the above is terrible, mostly due to the central spondee, "right side," but we’ll leave that off for now.)

These are then followed by a pentameter line:

3 | though he didn't understand why.

Which un-balances the sentence (and yes, I’m well aware that the line itself is unbalanced, but), putting too much emphasis on the final clause, especially given the single-syllable "why" at the end. Sometimes you’d want a final clause to have the extra (metrical) foot, such a strong syllabic ending, but here it merely serves to underline the inappropriateness of the sense, for the prose itself overemphasizes the already questionable assertion that he would not understand why he was waking up on that side of the bed.

As such: an inconsistency, a mismatch in the sound has helped us understand more fully an error in the sense. So now I might, in revision, replace that last clause with something that better marries with the sound of the clause before, as well as something that makes — one hopes — much better sense.

This is not to say of course that a mismatch is always inappropriate, or that these need to match, that one’s clauses need always to bop along in some kind of prosodic meter (in fact: please, don’t do this), but that one can — and arguably should! — be aware of these elements in one’s prose as a means of understanding why something may or may not be working above and beyond merely "feeling" that something isn’t right.

This is also — certainly — not to say that I’m suggesting one performs these kinds of investigations on every single sentence. That way lies madness. But I do think that it can be a good way to un-knot knotty passages, understand when and why a passage or a sentence isn’t doing what it is supposed to be doing, and generally provide a practice that, over time, becomes second nature, improving one’s sentences always (or: so one hopes).

Clarity and Complication

Ventilated prose — termed as such — was developed to improve the clarity and readability of prose that was either too technical or too complicated on the surface level for the target reader (naturally: Fuller’s boss). Many of the posts I link to above espouse its ability to improve one’s clarity, to help one shorten and tame long, unruly sentences that, left unchecked, may become unwieldy and out of control and eat the reader for breakfast (or at least turn them away from the allegedly impenetrable prose).

I will leave an investigation as to why — in this day and age — complicated prose, prose that requires attention and intention, is of vital importance as an exercise for the reader.

And to be fair, I like a simple sentence. I like clear prose. I think these are, at some times and in some circumstances, wonderful things to aspire to.

But also: I greatly prefer daring, fantastic, virtuosic prose that can carry you along — if only for a while, if only at first reading — without your bothering too much about what it is "saying," for the prose itself is able to carry its sense, to embody its sense, such that it is able to, itself, help communicate its meaning.

The technique described above may help you more intentionally dazzle with your prose, may help you organize your sentences and passages in such a way that their twists and turns are no longer any supposed barrier to comprehension, but rather an intrinsic part of the reader’s delight.

Thanks Kate P. for giving me a sanity check read and a number of excellent suggestions for this post’s improvement.

Thanks Lisa A. for a typo catch.

Notes on Rereading The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had thought this was the third time I’ve read this book, but maybe only the second, unless I reread it before I started keeping my book lists, which is certainly possible. The first time I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras was in college, during a year-long class on writing the short novel with Jane Alison, whose books I’d only read years later but absolutely love, and is someone with whom I still keep in very distant contact (mostly when she publishes a new book; you should go read Villa E, as it was very, very good).

I don’t remember much of what I thought about it at the time — and I am not feeling brave enough to go back and try to find my notebooks and diaries from that period — but I have reliably recommended the book over and over since. I have read other Duras (though not much, not enough). But this book looms particularly large in my memory — perhaps because that class, the people I wrote and worked with, that particular period of my life, looms so large — and when I think about beautiful, delicate, controlled writing, I think of this book often. And I am working on a project now that hope will be beautiful, delicate, and controlled, and as such it was time to reread The Lover.

How wonderful, heartbreaking, a book to revisit, how many years later.

The thing that I remembered most about the book is its movement, its structure. It works via short sections, often only a paragraph (think stanzas, think crots — though lately it seems like I may have misunderstood the meaning of that term, or rather it may be itself somewhat loose and unfixed), which jump forward, backward, across in time and topic, in mode. There is an "I" and an externalized "she." There is repetition, theme and digression. It’s the kind of thing that makes its own sense and then makes further since once you hear — perhaps apocryphally, now that I can no longer quickly find a reliable source — that it was originally written as a commentary on a number of photographs that were excluded in the final version. It’s rich, visual, and is, I think, poetry.

What struck me this time — aside from the things that would strike someone in their mid-30s rereading something as opposed to what strikes a much younger someone in their early 20s — was the way that this works internally to the sections themselves, specifically in terms of the internal repetition, variation, return.

To wit, opening the book at random:

Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant.

— p. 54 in the Barbara Bray Pantheon Edition

The parallel structure is a lovely, familiar, powerful device, but then you get the secondary repetition, too, in "any talk" and "any need to talk", of course ending with the variation: "silent, distant."

And then the one that finally stuck out enough to make me realize what was going on, a little over 80 pages in:

The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light.

It’s astounding, to me, how much work "Blue." does. This is not in a particularly — plot-wise — significant section. It’s in a series of sections that build to significance, but itself? "Blue" punctuates, underscores, emphasizes. It’s a small thing but it’s the hundreds of small things that create the overall effect, the structure. The individual stones that make up the cathedral.

I’ve always been interested in these small devices, these building-blocks, although I think — with finally enough years out of school — that I’m beginning to understand the relationship, their use, a little better (a text I recently sent a friend: "I think I finally understand why you might ever want to rhyme something"). This works so well because of the way that it contributes to, embodies the overall structure of the text and its content (n.b. "Form is the shape of content," Shahn), namely memory, and a kind of obsessive return.

(Aside: I don’t have enough smart to say about this, but speaking of obsession, this book is so delightfully (stereotypically?) mid-century French in its orientation toward death.)

I read something somewhere, once, probably on LitHub, about how — I think it was — Rachel Kushner (whom I haven’t really read) puts together a bookshelf for each book she writes or is working on. I’ve dug up the syllabus for Jane’s class and am going back over the "Required Reading." I seem to remember that there was individual required reading tacked on as well, maybe in the second semester. What were my books, I wonder? I am fairly sure it included The Woman in the Dunes, which I’ve been tempted to but have yet to reread (and will not soon, for it’s doing a different thing than my current project). Maybe also The Reader, though it’s possible that Jane and I discussed that in some other context. In any case, I think it’s still a good idea. I think it’s useful. I found rereading Things recently extremely useful, and I am excited to read what is apparently a very intentional homage in Perfection.

This is all to say that there is so much going on in The Lover that it makes (at least this) one think of, consider, so much more. And I am a fan of anything that sparks further digressions, paths, pursuits. I look forward, very much, to reading it again.

When I Say I Want to Talk About "Writing with a Computer"

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I say I want to talk about "writing with a computer," I mean I want to talk about what writing with — on — a computer affords. Specifically what it can provide as a tool over and above, say, a pen (or a typewriter, if you’re into that kind of thing). I want to talk about it because the way that I use a computer as a tool in my writing process seems very different from the ways in which most of my writer friends do, and (naturally) I think the way that I do it is — perhaps not better — but makes a greater use of the unique things that this particular tool, this "technology," makes possible.

By "technology" I mean "technology" in the sense that the wheel is a technology, the kind of thing that we understand at first — and sometimes forever thereafter — through metaphor. And the computer is riddled with metaphors to the analogue: directories, folders, windows, and so on, including, of course, the "page" inside your word processor application. While these applications obviously do a lot more than even the nicest electric typewriters, they still hold dearly to the metaphor of the page-as-sheet-of-paper, even though a very large proportion of writing ends up instead on the (still very much metaphoric) pages of the Internet. And there is nothing wrong of course, with metaphors, or this metaphor. But I believe there is possibility in what lies beyond this simple metaphor, and that is what I mean to talk about.

Regardless of where the writing ends up — a physical book or codex, a website, an app, an ebook, whatever — if it begins life on a computer, it begins as text, i.e., characters that are encoded into the 1s and 0s that the computer understands and processes. They do not live "on the page," but rather (and I am painting with a broad brush here; there are obviously exceptions) as text-based file-data that is presented to you on the screen via your editing or viewing application, and then converted, when the time comes, into some other presentation format to then be read. The text doesn’t exist "on a page" of a document (with the exception of in InDesign; but let’s leave that off for now, as one ought never compose directly into InDesign anyway); it exists alongside all the data around it.

So: why maintain the metaphor of the page?

There are good reasons not to give it up, of course. There are page-counts, either for yourself or some publisher, to keep in mind. There can be a feeling of accomplishment, or beauty, or at least progress in seeing the work typed out, indeed laid out nicely, on the page. The familiar metaphor removes a layer of translation or transformation that may or may not get in the way of the work.

Of course, I think that more can be gained by letting it go. By thinking of the text as such, as opposed to part of a pre-existing, pre-formatted document, we can free ourselves from the constraints that a page, a "document" implies; we gain easier access to the various transformations commonly performed on text; we gain access to tools designed specifically for text (as opposed to documents), and generally we create a new possibility for getting closer to the words, clauses, sentences, and other constructions themselves, such that the work, the art, the text as an object to be read.

There are fringe benefits to working on a computer as well — speed and accuracy (though these are arguable), easier portability (both physical and metaphorical), ease of duplication, dissemination, and version control, to name a few — but it is this mental shift, I think, that I am most interested in. Away from the boundaries enforced by any real or digital page, from a choice of a multiplicity of fonts and styles, and instead from a simple text editor, I think it is easier to get closer to the work, and to the words themselves.

As such, though I’ve previously outlined a prior version of the tools and processes I use today (and oh, the style of three years prior), I mean to revisit the tooling again, but with more of an eye to what that tooling — and that process — makes possible.

Changes Forthcoming

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As I was putting together my year in reading, it occurred to me just how long I’ve had this thing going, how much I’ve more or less written at it. It’s not necessary a valuable amount of work, but it is certainly non-zero. It’s certainly has volume and something like a history. There are certainly even a few things I’m even probably proud of. And I think I would like to do more things that I am maybe proud of.

My "intention" for this year is, I think, pretty much the same as last year: something to the effect of "process over performance," by which I mean practice over outcome, by which I mean focus on the doing of the thing instead of what it may or may not get me, or produce, or become. I think my written intentions were a bit different, but functionally that’s what I was focusing on doing last year, which, as mentioned, was a weird year for a lot of different reasons and in a lot of different ways. What good things came out of last year, however, came by virtue of a practice, of focusing on the process, because to be honest, many of the outcomes — the "performances" — I had last year were not what I was hoping for (with the obvious exception of Two Page, of course).

A big piece of process is, of course, practice, and as another means of practice I’d like to publish here more consistently, at least for a little while, at least while it’s still fun and productive. I mean to practice the writing itself, of course, but also practice finishing things, practice the performance of work itself, like a comic or a musician doing open mics; this blog is not entirely unlike a personal open mic, although — to belabor the metaphor — I do not currently have any means of knowing whether anyone is listening or not, as I’ve not had analytics on this site for years now. And so I may indeed re-introduce some analytics — though only ethical ones, I assure you. (Mostly I need to figure out if it’s cheaper to host my own or pay one of the "ethical" Google alternatives.) There is an "ROI" element to this, sure, but I also think it would just be good to know. Heartening, in a way. Even if, as I very much suspect, it will only serve to confirm that I am indeed shouting into a void. Which: no matter. It is, after all, a practice.

But because I want to do that I may eventually add some "features" to help the blog pay for itself a little better. There will not be ads, almost certainly ever. Or paid posts. Or any of that kind of annoying shit. (A benefit of having no reader data means that I would not be able to sell any ads anyway, were I ever tempted.) I will probably turn on the Bookshop.org affiliate stuff again if I ever figure out a way to do that somewhat more cleverly (i.e., programmatically). I like Bookshop.org and feel good about that kind of thing. I may also try some other things, but we’ll just have to see. I’m committed to keeping this a static site, though, and that does come with certain (I think positive) constraints. I may abandon Jekyll, though I did finally get a Docker container set up because I somehow broke the Ruby management in asdf, and I’m hesitantly excited about the rv project. Regardless, I am pretty sure that I have no interest in writing a newsletter, and I have a lot of strong opinions (that I should write up as blog posts…) about things like Medium and Substack anyway (though Ghost does look kind of good and ethical and whatever; I think Escape Collective uses it, and I love Escape Collective).

In any case —

What will this new "practice" consist of, aside from more regular posts? Mostly it will consist in work toward other goals, which for now I am going to keep to myself, thank-you-very-much. But it will at least consist of more books, more bullshit, and probably more bikes, too, once the weather improves (or I discover that I have something interesting to say about riding indoors, which: maybe). I know too that I want to try and work out some ideas I have about writing, and specifically about writing "on a computer" (though in a very weird turn of events, most of this post was actually drafted long-hand, which: a topic!). I’d also like to document more of the work I’m doing on my side projects, e.g., asciidocr and one or two other things I’m not quite ready to make public yet.

All of this means, too, that I will probably redesign the site again. If nothing else, I need to add a code highlighter, because the code examples in various programming posts are, at the time of writing, not nearly as legible as you’d want them to be.

This is all to say that changes — hopefully positive ones, if positive only fro myself — are forthcoming, and I hope to make this a place worth checking in on (or at least subscribing via RSS, may it live forever and always).

Cheers.