I blogged again: this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/5/toge.... This time, on the many uses and abuses of poor Walter Ong.

I have! I even bought it! I like it a lot—so smart to move away from the "inbox" paradigm.

5. In the meantime, fire up your RSS reader and point it here: this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/feed/rss. (Since I wrote the blogging software, you can also get a JSON feed, and you can replace ".html" at the end of any post with ".md" or ".json" to get those formats, because I'm a nerd.)

4. I'm not sure how to handle the fact that blogging's distribution method is so broken. Do I cross-post to Bluesky? To Substack? To an AI-powered avatar that reads my stories in vertical video on TikTok? (Probably not that one.)

3. My first big post covers this very subject—why blog?—while giving me an excuse to cite some excellent @anildash.com posts and @davidpierce.xyz's excellent reporting:
- www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/d...
- www.anildash.com/2024/02/05/w...
- www.theverge.com/23778253/goo...

2. I'm blogging again, knowing that the blogosphere I remember is dead, that Google Reader is dead, that the distribution problem (who checks blogs anymore?) led to a supply problem (why check blogs when there are so few to read?). Or maybe it was the other way around—an ouroboros of dead blogs.

A screenshot of my blog, THIS REPUBLIC OF LETTERS, displaying the first post: "We should check our emails; they shouldn't check us."

1. In the aughts and early teens, I'd fire up Google Reader and check my blogs—and maybe even write one. Pardon the earnest-posting (-maxing?), but it was often the highlight of my day. And, well, I'm blogging again: this-republic-of-letters.fly.dev/posts/3/we-s....

The birds are in motion today.

millennial: iykyk

plato: NOT SO FAST

A triptych of: (1) Mufasa scattering the hyenas—"what's a mob to a king?"; (2) Simba looking up at Mufasa in the sky—"what's a king to a god?"; (3) Timon and Pumbaa—"what's a god to a non-believer, who don't believe in anything?".

My six-year-old daughter is in her Lion King moment, and I'm meme-ing through it.

Oh, every one is always nostalgic for the geocites era web but when somebody actually makes a platform that crashes every 10 minutes, suddenly everybody wants future technology, I see how it is.

A little post from my social media neetwork/web-based performance piece, HOMER at internaut.club

a steal!

Look, I needed to brush up on my procedural rules for the executive committee meeting of my Tolkein fanclub.

BTW, the book I cite in my piece (and my book!), MAGIC AND LOSS, by @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social, remains one of the better things you can read on the internet, even though it was written about three internets ago.

The poem, "Blackberry-Picking," by Seamus Heaney.

Here's one of my favorite Heaney poems, "Blackberry-Picking" (which makes an appearance in my book!).

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50981/...

A screenshot of an article from Fast Company about Seamus Heaney.

It's Seamus Heaney's birthday! In 2019, I wrote on his last text, "Noli timere." Now, the page is so dark-patterned that I can't read it. My book, THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU—out in Sept—came from it.

Article: www.fastcompany.com/90311664/wha...

Book: herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

A bird sitting on a feeder, looking directly at the camera.

I set up a Raspberry Pi with a webcam and pointed it at my bird feeder, and I have a local ML model tell me if there's a bird every 10 minutes. I'm pretty sure this one is GLARING at my set up.

Considering making a version where you have to type a line accurately before you can move off the tab, but that might be too aggressive even for me.

A screenshot of EPITAB, showing "Bridge Poem," by John Ashbery: > And now I cannot remember how I would have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place. The place, of movement and an order. The place of old order. But the tail end of the movement is new. Driving us to say what we are thinking. It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand and think of going no further. And it is good when you get to no further. It is like a reason that picks you up and places you where you always wanted to be. This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed. Then there is no promise in the other. Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence, small panacea and lucky for us. And then it got very cool.

A screenshot of EPITAB, showing a flashcard of a selection from "Bridge Poem," by John Ashbery.

Whenever you open a new tab, wouldn't it be nice—before you make your way to some fresh patch of internet—to practice memorizing a poem?

Enter EPITAB! With it, you can add poems to your library, check off lines once you've got them down cold, and drill with "flashcards."

github.com/jswest/epitab

We’re raising our voices for a fair contract. 🎤

Join us in solidarity in our fight for layoff protections, AI guardrails and a clear disciplinary process: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Earthset from Artemis II. I am overcome.

Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local The Common Good Made Local

3. I missed Easter this year. But I’m glad I caught this book, which reminded me that imagination, like the flowers in my ill-tended garden, can bloom again. bookshop.org/p/books/beco...

2. Today, I read @amarpeterman.bsky.social's new book, BECOMING NEIGHBORS. He writes about the “resurrected imagination” at the center of Easter. “If we live our lives constantly up at the sky awaiting his return,” he writes, “we will miss the active work of the Holy Spirit in the world today.”

1. Easter is both completely bizarre and totally quotidian. A divine son dies gruesomely, only to emerge from the tomb to pass along a radical message. I look out my window at the green blades of grass rising, the pink buds announcing themselves: resurrection blooms everywhere your eyes land.

Thank you!!

An announcement in Publishers Marketplace that John West sold a book, THE PSALMIST.

As the pandemic dragged on, I (a little self-consciously) turned to the Psalms. Since I was raising a baby, each one seemed to say something about that completely quotidian miracle when we make families out of only feelings and time. I'm pumped to say that turned into THE PSALMIST, out in January.

Thanks, Anne! (Also, no joke, those RHET classes were pretty darn formative.)

(You can preorder it here: herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...)

When I attended conservatory, studying baroque performance practice, I would fumble my way through the music library's stacks almost every day, hoping to stumble across a book that could teach me something living about all those dead composers whose music I was learning. Sometimes, it would be a piece of music I'd discover. Other times, a treatise that referenced the recorder. Every once in a while, a connection between the deep reservoirs of meaning in the wider historical world and the music that was soaked in it. I worked out of the second floor of the conservatory library, the airy windows casting cheer on the study carrels, etched, as often as not, with little messages from studiers long ago. When my mind revolted against the demand that I keep reading, I'd stretch my legs and loosen my brain by walking through the rows upon rows of books and scores, looking for serendipity—ser-endipity being so often the parent of insight. Who knew that Bach wrote a vanishingly small number of tremendous sonatas for recorder and harpsichord? I didn't—at least not till I went looking for Buxtehude's sonatas and ended up with Bach's instead. My serendipitous discovery, alas, was made possible only by a reverent institutionalism not bestowed on everyone. "Innovations that cultivate serendipity—such as the Dewey Decimal System, by whose graces a trip into the stacks for one book often leads to a different, more salient discovery—must, almost by definition, be plagued by arbitrariness," Bill Wasik writes in an essay for the New York Times Magazine. But arbitrariness, and thus serendipity, does not drape itself across the topography of human experience evenly. That is, arbitrariness, in this power-mad world, isn't actually arbitrary. Indeed, where it mountains up—like most things—has much to do with the human institutions that shape our lives.

We've had a lot of fun here, but this is also a good reminder: There is no neutral way to organize information about the human world because humans always take a side.

From THE INTERNET WILL DIE...