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. 🙂
“Here’s a bagel. Let’s sit down and talk about this.”
My history professor, Dr. Robert Bernheim (who is also reading Eichler’s Times Echo 😀) was recently interviewed by Beit Polska/Jewish Renewal in Poland about his recent trip(s) to Poland, his family history, and his use of “bagel diplomacy.”
And also “bagel memory.”
From a Portland Press Herold interview last September:
Bagels are a connection. It’s a form, for me, of active memorialization, active remembrance. It connects me to a family that I never knew. I only know about. I don’t have a recipe. I don’t have a kneading trough or a bread bowl. I don’t have any of these things from any of these relatives because the Holocaust erased that.
Can’t sit still, can’t sit in silence. Don’t know how to read because we also have convinced them that it’s a meaningless activity, and they only want to be productive citizens. So even the patience to read a beautiful sentence — they don’t know how to love a beautiful sentence because they can’t check a box.
…Imagine sitting down with a book. You’re wanting to read, and the whole time you’re like “what’s the point, what’s the point, what’s the point, what’s the use?”
…In [Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451], one of the characters says, ‘We stopped reading books a long time before we started burning them.’… Totalitarian regimes can control you more easily if you don’t read.
…So we uplift freedom and yet the whole time we don’t realize how enslaved we are because we’re not readers, we’re not critical thinkers, we’re not imaginative thinkers anymore.
Just a dog riding shotgun — the pride, the hope, the infinite possibility!
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at age thirty will not know how to produce a potato.
—Wendell Berry
Robert Frost and the composition of our lives
Also thinking of these reflective epigraphs from Eichler’s first chapter:
I would resist describing us as more masculine, as some of the characterizations in recent media stories implies. Such characterizations often overlook the fact that during the persecutions of the Soviet era, it was women—and primarily grandmothers—who were active in the Orthodox Church and who kept the faith alive (if often on life support). It was Baba who came to Liturgy, lit candles, prayed for her children, and saw to it her grandchildren were baptized.
While men and women are no doubt different physiologically, there is no such thing in Orthodoxy as “men’s” spirituality as distinct (or what is worse, opposed!) to “women’s” spirituality. Men and women, young and old, are all asked to pray and read Scripture daily, fast, give to the poor, work with their hands, confess their sins, join with the church in the worship of God, and receive Holy Communion. A godly Orthodox man and a godly Orthodox woman will live similar spiritual lives.
To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive. It was not a conclusion that I came to in time. It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me. God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling.
—Frederick Buechner