thinking out loud

Michael Cunningham: You could say that writing is a continuation of that effort to render and recognize everything and everyone by naming their qualities, ideally from an illuminating angle — by naming them in ways that are both recognizable and unfamilia…

Deborah Levy: All writing is about walking ghosts.

Daniel Kehlmann: Times are always strange.

Hey, there, blog.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Susan Sontag: I have never understood asceticism.

Alfred North Whitehead: Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes.

Our son was three years old, and he was in the kitchen with me and my wife as we were preparing to eat breakfast one morning.

Virginia Woolf: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

Rebecca Solnit: Climate change is caused by many human actions, and the solutions are likewise manifold: change how we design our residences, towns and cities, transit systems, agriculture, land management, and overall consumption habits, including food.

Lionel Trilling: We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.”

This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

I’m wrapping up this four-week project with today’s report.

As I was reading this morning I quite suddenly remembered that time will jump ahead early tomorrow morning, borrowing an hour of my life that will be returned sometime next fall.

Lydia Davis: …reading a book is a considerable commitment of not only time but also thought and even emotion, especially when you have so many books you have brought into the house, when you seem to buy books even compulsively, out of a hunger for yet ano…

Another week of watching my screen time, and I’m happy to say that it dropped a bit more this past week — to an average of just over 2 hours a day.

This is my submission for the February 2026 Emacs Carnival; Sacha has proposed the theme of completion in emacs.

Another week in my attempt to lower my attachment to my phone.

Here’s my entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival.

Another week down, and time to think about the time I spend on my phone.

I wrote earlier this week about the cleaving in Emily Dickenson’s mind and followed that up with a rant about my frustration with end notes.

Peter Handke: Who has ever experienced a successful day?

Sven Birkerts: Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake [serious reading].

Claude Anshin Thomas: We cannot think ourselves into a new way of living, we have to live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

In her book An Absorbing Errand, Janna Malamud Smith writes poignantly about the long and rich relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

Reading more than one book at a time means that it takes me longer to finish a particular book, but I find that that disadvantage, such as it is, is usually outweighed by the insights gained by the sometimes serendipitous and sometimes planned connections…

Luke Kemp: Authoritarianism — obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers — increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security.

I’ve claimed for years to be absolutely tone-deaf regarding poetry.

Time to pay the piper.

Last week I finally decided to push myself really, really hard to cure myself of phone attachment.

Anyone looking carefully at my blog (as if!)

George Scialabba: The attrition of civic memory and craft knowledge, a reduced attention span and loss of discrimination, the attenuation of nuance and the homogenization of vocabulary — in all these ways the decay of literacy currently serves both the ma…

Time is on my mind these days.

George Scialabba: Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books.

Some notes about books I finished reading this month (Click on an author’s name to read my notes about the book.)

Janna Malamud Smith: We look with awe upon groups of great thinkers or artists who came together in the past — the transcendentalists in mid-nineteenth-century Concord, the cubist painters in early twentieth-century Paris, the friendship between Coleridge…

Perhaps I shouldn’t put these two items together in one blog post.

I listened yesterday to Nate Hagens’s conversation with Xiye Bastida.

The theme for this month’s emacs carnival, hosted by Christian Tietze, is this year, I’ll….

The water cup sitting on the desk before me is now one of a set of four such cups.

George Scialabba: Utopia is impossible unless, among an overwhelming majority, solidarity and trust are nearly instinctive; responsibility, self-reliance, initiative, honesty, and other civic virtues are practiced much more widely than now; and democratic…

Anyone who has been reading my meanderings for any length of time might have noticed that I’ve been rather active here over the last two weeks.

A sports writer for the Boston Globe has an occasional column with the introduction “turning the bag upside down to see what falls out” or something like that.

Yesterday, David’s post detailing the oldest items he owns came through the RSS doorway.

In a recent post I admitted the challenge I face coming up with things to write about here in the blog.

(If you have something to say about search engines, please click on “read more” and read to the end of the post.)

In yesterday’s post I offered a brief account of why and how I do virtually all of my computer work in plain text.

Ellane, writing at PTPL 192, explains how and why she lives the plain text life and invites others to do the same.

Early on in my PhD studies, I stumbled on the work of a particular philosopher.