These days have been jammed with writing and side gigs, and getting Rufus ready for daycare—which he starts tomorrow. He’ll be going three days a week, and Julia and I will split the other two weekdays. We have conflicted feelings about the milestone, naturally, but I also think the structure will help us all. The phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “dedicated time.” I noticed yesterday, while outside planting a new tree in our front yard, that for the first time in a long while the weekend actually felt like a weekend.
Since my previous few letters all had a bunch of links and recommendations, I’m going to pave that cowpath (or at least lay down some gravel) and make it a regular feature, called:
Speaking of …
Past letters: The Toledo Museum of Art posted the recording of the Ocean Vuong event I mentioned last time. Vuong was there for the first public exhibition of his photography work. What an eloquent human being.
Speaking of side gigs: I’m tutoring again this year for Building Beauty, it’s that time in the term when the Studio students are mulling over the question, Which aspects of beauty are idiosyncratic (or personal, cultural, extrinsic) and which are innate, intrinsic? If you peel away, one by one, the layers of personal memory, collective history, and culture, is there anything left? Christopher Alexander certainly thought so. And much of the first volume of The Nature of Order tries to pinpoint that feeling.
This issue of Blackbird Spyplane, though, hits perfectly on one of the other layers.
Speaking of Chris Alexander: here’s a newly released hour-and-a-half long talk by Alexander, in 1995, describing the process of building a community of homes in Austin, Texas.
I loved hearing Wim Wenders on the Mubi podcast talking about Perfect Days (which I gushed about in issue 417). I’m relatively new to Wenders, but listening to him here makes me want to go through his entire filmography.
I’m looking forward to Here, aka the Forrest Gump reunion movie. In large part because of the source material: Richard McGuire’s graphic novel. Here’s Chris Ware’s review of the book when it first published in 2014.
Speaking of Chris Ware: Here’s Ware on Richard Scarry – including a brief history of Little Golden Books. I can’t wait to pore over the Scarrys with Rufus.
Speaking of picture books: I have never backed a Kickstarter project as quickly as I backed Kelli Anderson’s Alphabet in Motion. And I loved this bit from Kelli’s first project update:
Over the past few years, I have been uncertain whether this book would ever see the light of day. It is the type of project that 'isn't supposed to exist', for several reasons:
1.) Capitalism: Because the production cost is so high on each copy, it is truly a leap of faith to print the number of copies required not lose money. 2.) The rigidity of traditional publishing categories: Because it fits in both "kids" and "adults" book categories, this book is a challenge to traditional publishing norms 3.) The limitations of mass-production for print books: It is tricky for even the most skilled printers to make a book with this many moving parts.
Those [very reasonable] reasons occasionally make me feel like an unreasonable person. Your belief in this project reinforces the vision I've had from the beginning: that people need and want books that connect them to their world.
“Occasionally unreasonable” is a worthy aspiration, I think!
I don’t know how this piece from 2012 landed in my Read Later queue, but I think it has some things to say about this moment in AI: Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate.
Longtime Sunday readers might remember my own pet theory, from issue #312, about what makes the original trilogy so damn charming.
To end this week, I’ve been testing out the web browser Horse, which automatically organizes pages into collapsible, nested sidebar lists called “Trails.” Horse really opens my mind to how in the evolutionary line of web browsers, tabbed browsing – or our current way of how tabs work – are just one mutation out a possible many, a sensible choice that got copied and became a dominant standard. But not inevitable. It could have gone totally differently.
Horse is so close to replacing Arc for me; aside from third-party password manager support, which is coming soon, most of the challenge is retraining my muscle memory to type “Horse” instead of “Arc” into my launcher bar.
Horse is a paid app ($20/year or $60 lifetime), but goes to support an indie two-person team. It’s also a fair price, I think, for a reminder that software doesn’t have to work the way it does.