strategies

So far so good: According to the bottom of my Kindle screen, I’ve made it 40% of the way through the age of federalism—slow progress, but progress nonetheless!

I’m trying to avoid this book going the way of Simon Schama’s citizens, which I abandoned after so much time banging my head against it. Like citizens, aof is a chunk of a book; like citizens, it discusses a topic I’m deeply interested in; like citizens, it’s constantly insightful. And yet, like citizens, however desperately I want to read it, want to like it, sometimes I just can’t keep my attention on it.

A few strategies have helped me to keep reading and enjoying the age of federalism:

1. Don’t look at how far you have left to go. I know I’m 40% through because I checked for this post, but I turn the progress view off when I’m reading. This takes some of the pressure off from the book’s immensity.

2. Use an e-reader. This helps both physically and psychologically. Or in how physicality affects psychology. Physiopsychologically. These gigantic books are unwieldy, heavy, and tiring to hold in physical form. And why for Godsake are books like citizens and aof always set in the tiniest type ever cut by man? In their best forms, books are delightful objects. But these tomes are onerous; they make you want to put them down. In an e-book, I can set the view to meet my nearsighted needs and read on, blissfully unintimidated by the number of pages that lie before me.

3. Skim, skim, skim. No one can tell you otherwise—It’s perfectly fine to skip through parts that are boring to get to the parts that really interest you. Most books (especially histories like these, with their endless tangential digressions) have both. Careful scrutiny of every word is worthwhile sometimes, but there’s a lot to be said for grazing.

4. Don’t push if you’re not in the mood. Sometimes a thousand–page political, economical, and intellectual history of the American revolution is not the vibe. The moment it becomes an obligation and a chore, all hope is lost.

I tend to have several different kinds of books going at once, making it easy to switch to whatever feels right in a given moment. Of course, finishing any one of them takes longer this way, but… who cares?!

5. Take a break. It’s a marathon, etc. Maybe it’s a break to explore related works or primary sources. I’ve been doing a lot of this with aof: pausing to look up the texts of letters between the founders that are mentioned, to revisit Paine & common sense after the section discussing his influence, to read Hannah Arendt’s on revolution after the chapter on the French revolution.

Maybe, as in Number 4 above, it’s a break from this kind of book for another. Or maybe it’s just a break from reading anything, or to take a nap.

6. Accept that you will abandon some books. Accept that this is ok. Sometimes there’s no getting around it. Life is too short and miserable to add more misery voluntarily. There is no moral imperative to read any particular book, and it’s no moral failing to stop partway through one, either. There are always plenty of others on the shelf.

unexpected delights

When I started this little blog more than a year ago, I didn’t expect to care at all about its underlying code. I didn’t know any html or css and didn’t really want to. I chose to use Blot because it seemed like the simplest of many services available for hosting a site like this—write a .txt file, drop it in a Dropbox folder, done. Thanks to Blot’s clean themes, the barest bit of Markdown in the files would serve for formatting. I wouldn’t have to build the site to look good, and I could focus on Writing The Words, which is what a blog’s all about, right?

Turns out it’s much more than that, and I care more than I thought about how this site looks, how it works, and what’s under the hood.* I started with the easy-to-change options in the Settings tab of Blot’s theme editor: the color of text and links, the font, fontsize, line height, margins. But the site still didn’t truly feel like mine.

I longed for tweaks that couldn’t be made with the sliders and buttons on offer. I wanted a real hand in the construction of this place. The Source Code tab called.

Blot’s simplicity, which I had counted on to make deeper exploration unnecessary, actually made it inviting. I forked the theme I was using so that I didn’t have to start from scratch. That original theme now serves as a full practical reference to use in unravelling the deep mysteries of css—here is what this thing looks like, and here are the classes and values that make it look like that. And it’s also a backup to revert to in case I break something too fundamental to fix. (It’s only happened once so far!)

I still don’t know much html or css, but I’m learning by doing. Gradually, I’m making not just the site’s content but its behavior and appearance more my own. Tinkering with the code, even at the edges, has become an unexpected delight.

It was building a new landing page, not writing a new post, that brought me back from a year–long hiatus. Which I think might say something about what this site is all about, what it could be. What I can make it to be.

discoveries & inspirations

A related delight is seeing cool stuff elsewhere online and checking out how it was made; hitting Dev Tools → Inspect Element, cracking my knuckles over the keyboard, hackervoicing I’m in; embracing a noob’s excitement at the capabilities of these languages. Basics that must barely make grizzled veterans shrug in their sleep are revelatory. They carry the unparalleled joy of being new to me.

Take the <details> tag, which I discovered via Robin Sloan. In a recent newsletter of his, a paragraph had an arrow beside it: an invitation. On clicking it revealed yet more paragraph that had at first been hidden!

The Hint

The Reveal, from The slab and the permacomputer by Robin Sloan

What wizardry was this? Surely some sneaky bit of code, or a plugin of some sort; I’ve heard of plugins? But no! A single element, <details>, with its friend <summary> and of course trusty <p>, made this possible. Incredible! I’ve deployed <details> here, and frankly now have to resist using it for every parenthetical thought I have!

changelog

• Added a landing page
• Added a page to log my reading and watching and cetera
• Varied & minor style changes
  • Darker accent color
  • Horizontal rule now accent color & single line
  • Adjustments to table styling
  • Date & tags now on one line; line height of p.small
  • Changed ul bullet position to outside; back to inside; back to outside ad inf. Outside avoids column spacing issues, but I don’t like the unindented spillover to new lines that outside forces.

standard time

And all our intuitions mock
The formal logic of the clock
W.H. Auden

Just a note to say that I’m against our chosen collective delusion of daylight saving time.

Or rather, I’m against the time changes, adding or losing an hour by the clock; when it comes to reform I don’t care if we stay in daylight saving or standard time, only that we stay somewhere.

The thing is that, no matter how we set our clocks, it’s just going to be darker longer in the winter. Dark is dark whether in late morning or early evening. Forget the increased traffic deaths, the lower productivity, etc. that surround the time changes each year. These are human reasons. Cosmic reality—astronomy—is more compelling.

We cannot change the tilt of the earth. My greatest dream is that one day we’ll accept this, let it be dark, and maybe even sleep longer in the winter like other more sensible creatures.

I’d also accept world peace instead…

See also this common sense reform from Prof. Dan Cohen.

evening prayer

I.
Enfold in your embrace, O Lord, the suffering and meek;
Be moved at heart by these our subtle trials here, we pray,
Who skirt with covered countenance the awful snare of dread;
Make strong, protect, and comfort those you like and those you don’t;
And unto both the living and the dead return your peace.

II.
Defend this house from all encircling vengeance, God;
And banish hateful memories and spiteful thoughts;
In mercy, save us from the terrors of the night;
Relieve the burdens of our tossing restless souls;
Keep watch at doorways; light a lamp upon the porch;
Be warmth against the cold; be shelter from the rain;
And as we rest beneath the moon, send us good dreams.
6 June 2020

III.
God of patient, slow, unfurling mystery, who stilled
The shaking in a small wood craft, the eyes rolling over white-
Capped waves, who whispered through the rain do not be afraid:
Still too the anxious beating of my heart, and stay
The lashing winds of worry, doubt, and fear; calm my mind.

IV.
God, weaver of the black and starry sky of night:
Just as you tore the curtain of old belief so tear from me
All anger, fear, and jealousy; O mend my faults
O mend my wrongs O clothe my life in cloth of shining gold;
And of my scattered ravelled thoughts, Lord, stitch thou a whole.

a review

I imagine that it was while watching a train barrel west one summer evening that someone first noticed it: a blaze of red and gold as the setting sun caught on the rails, reflected, infused the steel with so much light it looked like it was melting. I imagine they checked the date: June 21. Every summer solstice in my hometown the sun sets over the railroad tracks north of town and sets them aflame.

The day is an annual celebration; folks come from all over to see the sight. Sometimes the brightness and chance of the sunset is, as John writes, breath-giving. Others it’s overcast and rainy; the sun sets, but not where we can see. The crowd leaves, disappointed, but only a little. “Oh well,” they say, “It’ll happen again next year.” Because by chance the tracks were laid just right—because the sun still rises and sets—there’s always something to look forward to, something to hope for, even beneath cloudy skies.

I give my hometown and all hopeful expectation five stars.

{Written as a contribution to the map at theanthropocenereviewed.com, a fan project inspired by John Green’s new book of essays The Anthropocene Reviewed, which rates different facets of the human–centered planet on a five–star scale. I limited myself to 175 words, the length of John’s first reviews at Booklist.}

On the seventh of May,
A bolt of lightning struck,
My birthday, a tree at
The edge of our property.
A harbinger: though like
Such signs are, usually,
Unclear just what it meant.
The scar it left too deep,
A summer passed, then two,
And then the lightning killed.
The tree now stands abrupt
And white against the sky,
Keeping secrets for the
Creatures that it keeps and
Remembering the day
The sudden lightning struck
Its heavy verdant limbs.
If prophesy, it’s yet
To be fulfilled, unless
It’s of that kind which day
By sly day comes to pass:
The lightning death—the tree
The living—the sky the
Charged happening between.