My niece pointed out an Eastern Bluebird on the perch

Excellent conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Jonah Goldberg on the Remant podcast. Finally something — both substantively and tonally — that I can share with my political, uh… antagonists.

For comparison: I’m a longtime listener of the Dangerous Dogma podcast, and I tried listening earlier this week to Brain Kaylor’s interview with Paul Raushenbush. And, even though I mostly agree with them, I just found it — again, tonally and substantively — unbearable to listen to.

I think one of the primary lessons that we still collectively refuse to learn is that if we can’t cross party lines, can’t bring ourselves to even want to speak intelligibly or listen empathically across those lines, then things will only get worse. And, you can only do this yourself; you cannot make anyone else do it.

It’s one thing to post, share, or even scream into the void. I do a fair amount of that myself. It’s another thing — and I believe a much worse thing — to post, share, and scream continually if not exclusively into a crowd of clapping hands.

So I’m sure my extreme dehydration for shareable things is playing a big part here, but I do think this Remnant interview was just a good conversation on the merits. I’m not saying there’s anything groundbreaking here. It was just nice to feel like I was listening to a politics conversation that had the possibility to go beyond itself.

Related to this post about Oakeshott and the artist’s “emotional and intellectual integrity and insight” — both adding to it and complicating it — is this excerpt from Jeremy Eichler.

Nemo canum est qui mundum non reddat meliorem

I plan to keep all “politics” on the Wordpress blog going forward, but just in case you missed this New Yorker cover… It may be the best one they’ve ever had.

In my own mental space, the alphabet spans a banner at least 10 feet wide. But seeing the entire thing easily written out on one line as a title to a Billy Collins poem — not so much. Yet still “combines into all the [English] words we know.”

Juuust one, only one.

Damariscotta North and Damariscotta South

Goober

I’ve taken the Ulysses plunge. After the hundredth time forcing myself to sit down and learn to like or even use Scrivener at all (if for no other reason than that in the online world, where hell is endless subscription fees, it felt great to simply buy something), it was time to move on.

I still consider myself essentially computer-illiterate; I basically treat Computer Things — on or offline — as a glorified typewriter and piece of paper that people magically have access to. (And exactly for this reason, I’m grateful for the folks who know what they’re doing and make Computer Things easier for people like me.) All this web stuff is almost entirely virtual paper for me. Any step that complicates that image-relationship is disorienting. And Scrivener has been nauseating.

This is why both the Wordpress blog and the Micro blog look the way they do — the themes they use are as close to a plain (/magic) piece of paper as I can find. I don’t want elaborate designs or clicks or navigation menus (or tantalizing titles… wink, wink 🤓).

I just want to sit, type, publish.

So far (18 hours in), Ulysses seems great. Markdown is the easiest thing in the world to write with and I love it. Markdown XL in Ulysses seems okay so far, but some of the page features seem distracting, so if I can’t find a theme that makes it more plain-texty, I may switch it to regular Markdown. In fact, getting as close to the way Buttondown approaches newsletter writing, with a Markdown pane on the left and a preview pane on the right, is kind of what I’m after overall.

It’s like a Markdown mullet — business in the front, party in the back.

And now I’m going to try to publish this directly from the Ulysses. So if you’re reading this, yay for me and yay for Ulysses. 🙂