spring sonnet

O God grant me that greatest care—or is
It actually the lack of care—with which
My dog sees all your earth and doesn’t miss
A single leaf: a look that doesn’t list
But leaps from butterfly to stick to ball,
Or one more piece of trash, or some old sock;
Two bashful browning eyes that I could call
My sight, and I would joy around the clock.
I’ll pass on taste or smell like his O Lord,
And as for hearing: well, I think it best
He keep that too. Just this I would implore—
My sight improve; the dogs can have the rest.
To think how many wondrous sights I’d see,
Were dog-like love and wonder given me!

a note on reading notes

The notes on the age of federalism previously in this post have been moved! They and future additions will be gathered on this page instead. As I added more entries, and those entries grew longer, it made more sense to give them a home of their own outside the feed.

I’m sure the structure of this and future evergreen pages will change with time; I’m also pretty sure I’ll forget to change the link here when that happens…

the last contraption

I’ve been in an unmistakably good mood lately; I feel a kind of ambient contentment that I haven’t for a while now. Why? For one thing, in Des Moines we are finally, finally (I think, I hope) emerging into spring. The days are getting longer, the snow is melting, and it feels like the deepest part of winter is behind us.

For two, I got on my bike again.

I took my first proper ride of the season on Sunday, and it completely shook off my winter doldrums. It was warm, sunny, slightly breezy: perfect sweatshirt weather. The trails were muddy in places, but that just added to the fun. It was exhausting—and thrilling.

After a season off the bike I had to relearn how to move this way: to look farther ahead, anticipate, adjust to what comes. There’s a constant stream of changing context to handle. My rides start downtown on streets, sidewalks, bikelanes, maneuvering with cars. Then the local trail by the river, sharing with joggers, skaters, people fishing, kids being hooligans. Then the regional trail: a bicycle highway, straightaways, speed. Then more local trails, more streets, and all in reverse on the way back. Endless different views of the world and other people in the world.

My senses were utterly engaged the whole time. There’s a particular sharpness and clarity that snowmelt gives the air. I’d never noticed it before like I did dismounting at the end of the day, inhaling, my whole being full and giddy with it.

I taught myself how to ride without hands on the handlebars. I’d been jealous for ages of the nonchalant hands–free riders around town; now I’m cool like them. It’s not as hard as I expected, mostly a matter of gentle course corrections and momentum. The bike is designed to stay upright—I just had to keep it upright under me!

I love my bike as an object, a contraption. The tactility of braking and shifting, the click and whirr of chain, gears, wheels—the bike itself is as much a part of a ride’s sensory experience as the scenery. It’s unabashedly (elegatly, simply) a machine; even better, it’s a machine I power myself.

What else nourishes mind, body, and spirit so well?

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.