This is what’s going on with me now.
Living
My father died in the Spring, and my attention has been scattershot since then. I had been making decent progress in my reading projects–Moby Dick and The Man Without Qualities–and was slowly working my way back into some kind of running shape. But dealing with my father’s decline and death has been a shock to my life rather like getting slapped, hard, on the side of the head: painful for a little bit, but disorienting for long after.
Working
It hasn’t helped that work has been disruptive. A couple of key people left for other jobs, and our VP of Engineering got fired, and the relief I felt at his being fired told me I’d been avoiding the fact that on his watch our team’s culture had been seriously damaged, and that my own engagement with the work was suffering. Since then I’ve rebounded, but it was an upsetting realization.
Writing
I recently started using Logseq as a journaling tool, and it’s transformed the way I think about journaling and about how I write in general. For a very long time I would beat myself up, emotionally, for not having the discipline to sit at a desk and write (by hand) in a journal, or to even maintain an electronic journal. What Logseq does is allow me to record my thoughts more or less however I like, and organize them as I like later on: it’s been freeing. I’m writing, and thinking about my writing, more than ever these days.
Reading
I’ve returned to The Odyssey, in Daniel Mendelsohn’s fluid translation, as a prelude to watching Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film adaptation. I’m reading it in the shadow of Erich Auerbach’s masterful essay “Odysseus’s Scar” from Mimesis, and of Kate Briggs’s reflections on literary translation, This Little Art. I’m also (slowly) reading Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, which is helping me get a better understanding of why The Odyssey is written as it is–the constant repetition, the parataxis, the lack of literary (as in written) artifice.
This is a now page. It will be updated occasionally.