💬 “I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.” – Rebecca Solnit
Via Bradley Andrews
💬 “Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.” — Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 89.3. Cited by Michel de Montagne in ‘On Experience’ in The Essays: A Selection. Trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin Books, 2004. 3.13, 366.
This is true, potentially, of writing notes. It’s too easy to produce fragmentary knowledge.
The solution? Link your notes and create hub or structure notes (there is a difference — see Bob Doto’s post for details) that cluster separate ideas together and lead in useful directions.
📷 In Brittany, France, there’s an area they call ‘La Côte du Granit Rose’ – the Pink Granite Coast. I was happy to find a corner of the New South Wales coast that’s really quite like it.
Birubi Point at Anna Bay, NSW.
📷 I’ve taken a few days out to walk the coast. It was… well, you can see for yourself what it was. This might explain why my writing here has been even slower than usual. But now I’m back, and normal service will resume shortly.
In Matt Bell’s excellent book on writing, Refuse to be Done, there’s a quote by Karen Russell, author of the excellent novels Swamplandia. and The Antidote. She says,
💬 “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.”
Respect is due, but I can’t help feeling it might not be quite that hard.
#writing #climbing #writinglife
💬 “We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ’truth’ of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations… I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.” – Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House. (1969). p. 80.
Still true 😞
I’ve been enjoying these Meisho-zue (名所図会) prints from late 1700s Japan. They depict temples and other ‘famous places’, for pilgrims and armchair travelers. Notably they’re from the Shinbutsu-shūgō era (神仏習合), prior to 1868, when Buddhist and Shinto places of worship were still integrated.
Built-in support for the ‘Web of Markdown’?
A Feature Request: Support for Static .md Outputs & Discovery
Motivation: A Simpler, Less Exploitative Web
I’ve been interested in a simpler, less exploitative web for a long time. It feels like the modern web is increasingly dominated by ads, intrusive surveillance, tracking scripts, and bloated layouts that mock our control over our own reading decisions.
I’ve explored simpler alternative networks like Gopher and the Gemini protocol to find a quieter reading experience. But separate protocols don’t fit smoothly into my existing publishing workflow. They require running parallel infrastructure, managing new server software, and creating extra publishing overhead.
At the same time, recent developments in AI have rapidly turned Markdown into the default lingua franca of the web. Micro.blog users already author their posts in native Markdown, as does everyone using a static site, so converting that source into HTML only to have tools and readers parse it back into text feels a bit redundant. Why not cut out the middleman and directly serve the original Markdown to anyone, human or software agent, who chooses to read it?
The Web of Markdown ‘movement’ (maybe that’s a bit premature) feels like a practical way forward.
A song from Canada you might enjoy: 🎵Goûtons du plaisir, from the album Au Coeur de l’Aube by Genticorum.
🎙️Why is everyone going to Japan?
That’s the question addressed by an episode of the Search Engine podcast.
By ’everyone’, they implicitly mean Americans, which is odd since most visitors to Japan come from China. Still, it’s a very interesting discussion.