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. 🙂
“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