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recent thought / activity
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inhalation, exhalation
I've been thinking a lot, this morning, about this quote from Harvard rare books librarian Matthew Battles: "The people who shelve the books in Widener [Harvard's library] talk about the library's breathing—at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of the term, the library inhales, and the books fly back."
I've been thinking about this model—inhalation and exhalation as metaphor—and it occurred to me that this model also describes the way I think of the brain. Given that the brain is an information-processing organ, one can think of it as breathing in information. Given that the brain is also the seat of human creativity one can think of it as breathing information back out as well.
I take in a lot of information as part of my daily experience. Like most humans, I crave novelty, and I make good uses of the tools and resources that allow me to maximize the amount of novelty that I come across. I follow a couple of hundred people, organizations, and things on Twitter. I follow a couple of hundred blogs using Google Reader. I have my Pinboard network set up to dump directly into Evernote. As of this weekend I'm now also using a Chrome extension that allows me to shoot longform Web articles directly to my (new!) Kindle.
I say this partially to brag about being how fast and dense I am, but there are times when the whole process is disquieting. I worry, a little bit, about "data hoarding." (It is, after all, not healthy to inhale too deeply and too often.) I like to think that I'm not just mindlessly consuming stuff to add it to the pile of mindlessly consumed stuff. I tend to work processes on the stuff that I take in: I tag it, I index it, I aggregate it, I curate it, I rank it into lists. I hope that some of these activities begin to count as a type of exhaling. Not hoarding but sharing. (This gets complicated when we begin to think of what it means to "share" something in the digital realm—sharing a link is importantly not the same as sharing something finite, like, say, food—but that's maybe a topic for another time.)
Or maybe not hoarding but investing. A lot of the creative work I do involves writing—it's my major form of imaginative exhalation, to go back to the metaphor that I'm straining here. I like to think that all this data that rushes into me feeds the work that I do, provides the "Silent Partner" with important nourishment, turns it into something that someone may consider valuable. I hope it helps, rather than hinders. (If you want to see what a book looks like when the author is drenched in Too Much Data, you might enjoy this.)
This is also a piece about having (mostly) stopped blogging. If nothing else, this blog used to serve as a good place for synthesis and reflection, a place to pause and make sense of the information I'd taken in, to try to figure out where it was all pointing. I wish I were doing more writing here; I kinda miss it.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep going. Labels: information, me, meta
Monday, August 06, 2012
weekly offering (june 4-june 10)
No weekly offering this week, as I was away at Hippie Camp. More soon.
Friday, June 10, 2011
the raccoon e-mail digest
Hey! Want to get this blog in e-mail form? Try this: The deal: when I remember to update this blog, subscribers will get an e-mail which will have the full text of my mutterings within it, so they won't need to remember to visit this URL to get their recommended dosage of my personality. Labels: meta
Friday, February 11, 2011
creaking back to life
So, uh, hi, it's been a while. I decided that I was going to quit blogging when Blogger discontinued FTP support, because I knew that migrating would change the URL, and otherwise annoy me. Plus I'd felt like a lot of my impulse to post things to the Internet had been adequately met by my (massively increased) activity on Facebook and Twitter (I'm jbushnell over there, FYI). But every once in a while I still get the impulse to write something that's longer than 120 characters (420 in the case of Facebook). And this week was one of those times. I wrote a long piece on information management, and then suddenly realized that I no longer had a good place on the Internet to put a piece of long-form text. I ended up using Facebook's "Notes" application—a kind of half-assed blog substitute—and the whole thing made me feel kind of sad. I probably would have just gotten over it and moved on except the information management project that I was writing about was also forcing me to go back through my old blog writings, in order to better integrate them with other digital notes. And going back and scanning through all those old posts was a really interesting experience. I realized that blogging made me think more critically about information that I was consuming. I realized that blogging helped me to focus more fruitfully on my own creative process. I realized that blogging made me—I really believe this—more intelligent. And having a pretty detailed record of the ups and downs of the last ten years is valuable. I like being able to look back and trace the development of ideas. I like seeing what I was reading then and comparing it to what I'm reading now. I like being able to go back and see the moment when I decided I needed a cell phone. In short, blogging makes me happy. I don't know if I'll be able to get back in the habit of it, whether it fits with what my life is now. But I think it's worth saying that I miss it.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
the year in books (so far)
Just a quick heads-up for any of you interested in what I've been reading lately: the 2008 books-log page, which had been languishing for the last few months, is now up-to-date. I'm mostly not writing capsule reviews this year—just too much other stuff going on —but if you just want a raw list of the 47 books I've read so far this year, well, it's there for you. (My LibraryThing page has also been brought up to date, for those of you who prefer that system.) Anyone have any recommendations for worthwhile books I should try to tackle before the year is out? Labels: book_commentary, meta
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
using tables to control layout since 2002
Spent much of yesterday making some tweaks to the look of this site. In general I'm trying to strip away excess visual clutter, deploying white space as a way to make the site clearer and more pleasant to read. The version that's up now is sort of ultra-minimalist; I'm not sure if I'll leave it like this or tweak it a little bit more in the coming week. Any comments you might have are welcome. Labels: meta
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
hiatus
I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June. Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
business / busy-ness
I've got shit coming at me from all directions this week, most centrally a pile of grading that's about the size of an unabridged dictionary, so the quietude that's afflicted this blog since I finished the big canon-making project will likely persist for another week or so. After that things will start wrapping up and I'll have a little more room to breathe. If you're desperate for content, you could take a look over at my photos on Flickr: the nice weather of late has pushed me out of the house and into the city, and I've been making a lot of use of my camera to take pictures of, well, mostly trash and assorted disrepair. But if you like those kinds of things, there's lots of new pictures to look at. Try the Notebook on Cities for a taste. Also, any readers of this blog who are in Chicago, or who can get here before 9 pm tonight, might want to come by to see me perform at the Lakeshore Theatre tonight with my band, Number None: we'll be debuting a new, as-yet-untitled piece. We're in the middle slot: Ben Vida will be opening, and Mike Tamburo will be wrapping the night up. Labels: meta, number_none, personal
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
raccoon audio
I've decided to spin off the MP3 posts into their own blog, over at Blog*Spot: Raccoon Audio. The reason for this is mainly because I want to start getting indexed in the Hype Machine's database, and I thought they were more likely to index an all-MP3 blog than this one, which I think could comfortably be descrbied as "eclectic" in its focus. MP3 posts will still be cross-posted here, so you don't need to do anything or even think about the new site unless you're only reading this blog for the music-oriented posts, in which case you might want to switch to reading that one, which has a nice syndication feed and all that jazz. That's also the place to look if you want the whole top ten all in a single post, specifically here. I took some liberties with the dates, don't look too close. Labels: audio, meta, mp3s, music_commentary, personal
Thursday, February 08, 2007
So now, after a week of whirlwind activity (in which, among other things, I wrote a chapbook of 36 poems in 24 hours) I'm off to England, to join up with the other half of the Number None Mobile Unit for our micro-tour of the UK. UK readers of this blog, if there are any, consider checking out the tour dates on the Rebis page if you think you want to come out and see some ecstatic drone. So anyway, although I might attempt some blog posts from the road, I think it's likely that updates here will be minimal until after August 11th, which is when I'll be returning home. Hope you're all well~ Labels: meta, number_none, personal
Friday, July 29, 2005
For the next three weeks or so I'm going to be up and down the east coast, trying to, you know, build utopia and stuff, which means that there won't be too many updates here during that time. I'm working on a review of the most recent Hwyl Nofio release (6/3 Update: this review is now up, at Thaumaturgy) but after that I've got no real big blog-plans until I get back, around June 21st. See you then. Labels: meta
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Expect updates to this blog to be scant for a while, as I will be spending the next two weeks at the Spring Conference in rural New Hampshire and the Young Adults Conference / Liberal Religious Adults Conference on the beautiful Star Island in the Isles of Shoals. I should be back on or around June 16th, and although I'll probably update the site between now and then, you should expect those updates to be little tweaks rather than big chunky blocks of new content. Labels: meta
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
This weblog will be static until around June 8th. Labels: meta
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
I'm currently in the midst of a "grab the summer by its horns" kind of week.
I turned in grades on Monday, and ever since then I have been sifting through odd heaps of accumulated stuff and sorting files, in an attempt to get my living space (and my headspace) organized.
This is a precursor to my summertime work, which (this summer) will mainly consist of revising and sending out fiction for publication. I've got lots of stored-up material that just needs to be submitted in a dedicated and consistent fashion.
Today I began major revisions on an old short story of mine, "Clip Art," which I plan to have out in the mail shortly.
But just in case you were wondering, yes, I'm still here, and, yes, I plan to keep updating this weblog regularly throughout the summer (not counting a short hiatus that will be coming up at the end of May).
Thursday, May 09, 2002
So I've been trying to install Aaron Chan's CGIcomments on this weblog. This should be feasible: the hosting service that I use for this site seems able to run CGI scripts.
I don't know much UNIX, and I didn't have a secure shell client until today. But I used this tutorial to walk pretty closely through the various steps. Unfortunately, I'm still getting "Internal Server Errors" when I try those comment links, and I even get them when I try to run the simple test script I uploaded.
Which leads me to believe that there's something very simple that I'm doing wrong. Raymond's tutorial suggests that I might need to configure the Apache server to run CGI scripts. But can that possibly be an issue, given that my host offers full CGI ability even to people with basic dial-up accounts like myself?
I'd love insight from any of you folks out there who have more computer knowledge than I. Labels: meta
Sunday, April 21, 2002
Recent search terms by which people have found my online serial, Imaginary Year, include:
While this is a reasonably accurate cross-section, I can't help but feel that most of these people were probably disappointed.
Oh God I'm tired.
Monday, April 15, 2002
My friend Hannah is coming to town today. She will be here through Thursday, and I want to be a good host, so updates may be few and far between during that time. Until then, I leave you with this neat, minimal Flash animation by Yugo Nakamura (and collaborators).
Sunday, March 10, 2002
opening incantation
A new year, new projects in the works, a new weblog.
Monday, January 07, 2002
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