I’m hijacking this line from Mary Harrington: “Your strategy should be ordered not to making it pay, but to making it possible.” Perfectly pairs with Martin Bucer.
Finished reading: Ingrained by Callum Robinson 📚
Excellent.
Because to my great shame, the coasting was something I had drifted into not merely in my working life but in my consumer life as well. With more and more choice out there at the touch of a button—same-day delivery, landfill-black-Friday-buy-it-online, and a hundred other kinds of commercial awful—it has been all too easy to forget that independent local businesses, the kind of hardworking businesses that are right here on my doorstep, may be waiting in the silence for someone like me to swish through the door. That no matter how original or full of charm and quality they may be, many will not be able to survive without our support. And that they aren’t really businesses anyway; in towns and villages up and down the country, they are the lifeblood, the culture and the character of communities. They are somebody’s hopes and dreams.
If it’s okay to say, I really like the banner that I made for my Buttondown newsletter. The photo comes from a little-known, middle-of-nowhere bog in western Maine. It’s an otherwise inconspicuous, unremarkable, commonplace sunrise spot that I have passed a hundred times, usually on the way to a hike in the White Mountains or a weekend of mountain biking in Vermont. It is emblematic of just about everything I mean when I say “commonplace,” or “the small things are the best things.”
Last night, I created a page for my (neglected) Buttondown newsletter, mostly because I wanted a place for the banner to live and Buttondown does not include it in the archived newsletters… or so I thought. I went back, read some emails on an address I never check, and found that I had simply missed the memo about updates and just needed to copy, paste, and click a slidy button.
Still, I like the new page so for now I’m leaving the link in the navigation above. If I can stay the course this year, I hope to move most of any writing that I do back in that direction.
Callum Robinson, on the look of a shocked customer who, holding the price tag of a hand-crafted table, “fixed me with an expression of such disbelief, such towering contempt, that it takes my breath away”:
What I want to say is this: forget for a moment the weeks it took to handcraft this fine solid elm table, forget the years of experience brought to bear by the maker, the thousands of hours of training and practice, the costly mistakes, the electricity, insurance and overheads, the ream of arborists who brought down the tree, the sawyer who milled and dried the boards, the man in front of you, rooted to the spot, who painstakingly selected each one before handing over many hundreds of pounds for the privilege, and think on this—this table might last a hundred years, it might last four hundred. Your children’s children might still be sitting around it when you are but a memory. A vaguely amphibian headshot gathering dust on the mantel. All this and more I want to say, but of course I don’t. I probably couldn’t. My jaw is clenched so tightly that it might as well be wired shut.
“The Archtypes and the Splendors” — 11 months behind schedule, but another newsletter is in the archives.
This 2009 post from Dave Winer is good. “It’s so incredibly complicated. Mostly because there are so many observers all in one body.”
And it brings to mind two things:
- Czeslaw Milosz’s Ars Poetica:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
- A quote from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Ordinary Life. Under the subheading “Reality and Contrivance”(emphasis added):
It does take a deep skill, long training, and psychological capacity to become a good stage actor. But this fact should not blind us to another one: that almost anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness in what is being contrived before them. And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies. Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.
…people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissolve.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love.
—Kay Ryan
Connection favors ragged edges where you can connect on a bigger surface. If you’re all tight and straight and hiding and perfect and wrapped up in your little packaging, then there’s nothing to hold on to.