Reading

Three P’s

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For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:

  • Plain text
  • PDFs
  • Printouts

While in college in the mid 1990’s, and prior to purchasing my first computer, I utilized a word processor. Think manual typewriter but with a 3.5″ floppy disk for storage. I wish I had known enough to preserve all of my writings. The floppy disks were formatted for the word processor but not the computer. It wiped everything off the disk to make room for the Windows formatting. The lesson here is to preserve your work and prepare by future-proofing formats. It was a hard learned lesson. All of my personal writing, studies and papers gone.

I was reminded of all of this when I read about how Hemingway’s early notes and the beginning of a novel disappeared. His wife had gathered his works and left Paris by train to Switzerland to meet him and a publisher and somehow, the suitcase went missing from the train platform and they were devastated.

My loss was due to ignorance and in no way as significant as Hemingway’s loss. But the pain was there.

My revamped workflow process is:

  • Write and edit drafts in Ulysses (saved to cloud, backed up onto my file server)
  • Publish from Ulysses to my website (saved to cloud)
  • Copy/Paste to my own database in plain text format (cloud, file server)
  • Migrate all of my work into the database in plain text, organize.
  • Print to .pdf by year (saved to cloud and file server)
  • Print to paper by year (saved to a dedicated yearly file folder or binder)

Interesting enough, while walking through the library’s “read and return” section, the word “Hemingway” ended up in my peripheral vision.

Rabbits and Frequency Illusion!

I usually don’t give them a glance but the paper spine was attractive. The fiction novel title is “The Hemingway Thief” and how the aforementioned luggage was lost. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to be a good yarn with a few secrets and twists. Looking forward to reading it as soon as possible.

Blackout

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I’ve been experimenting with digital crossword puzzles and newsprint lately. With crosswords, I’ll solve the puzzle (entertaining in its own right) and then bonus(!) I will take a screenshot of it when complete. Then, in Apple Photos, use my Apple Pencil to markup the image to find words that stand out. After those are mapped out I will then cross out the rest to come up with some poetry. Although, that is limited to the words on the puzzle so they are more statement than poetry.

After reading an interesting article with Apple News, I will take a screenshot and do the same for the article- try to connect words and to form a new phrase or sentence.

The whole premise is ridiculous but it is mentally challenging and time consuming. I’ll see how long the fun lasts but for now, I am enjoying it.

After
Before

Theseus’ Paradox

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While researching an unrelated article, I came across that phrase, “Theseus’ Paradox” and went down a rabbit hole of nerd-scrolling after that. The Wikipedia page here details the story and the philosophy about it so I won’t get into details for now.

However, it does refer to the “Ship of Theseus”, from the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Then something sparked in me where I recalled I have a book in my library titled “S.” by J.J. Abrams, the famous movie director. Long time readers will remember a post back in March where I was tempted to read it but was overwhelmed at the time and wanted to read it properly. Well, after this new round of frequency illusion it is time for me to dive even deeper to see how far down the rabbit hole goes. Unrelated except by name only, there is a documentary film out of India with the same title, “Ship of Theseus” that has to do with photography. I need to find and watch this soon as well.

12 Down, 12 To Go

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Halfway through the 2024 reading list and I feel as if I am on a spree. The first quarter of the year was slow reading with work travel, relocating and heavy, difficult books to sort out. The libraries felt generous and dumped four books on me all at once to hurry and consume, but it just won’t be possible to do this and give them justice.

99% of the books on my list are fiction and yet, halfway through it, I am looking for some non-fiction. No biographies, self-help, politics or history. Something thought-provoking. The search is on.

Read & Write

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The Los Angeles Library system recently purchased a local book publisher and plans on publishing even more from local authors. Brilliant!

Local libraries could and should support people to self-publish books, e-books, websites, etc. Instead of just computers for the homeless to play games on, set up printers, scanners, zine machines, etc. Beef up the local writers and potential authors by hosting writing parties. Maybe even add a community feed to host all of those websites and their owners with a shared feed of everything published in blog format and RSS?

Read-O-Matic

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I want to design and place a machine to fill up with books that people can purchase on the go as opposed to them buying a soda or a snack. I know we will all be a lot healthier.

They remind me of the Little Free Library stands all across the country, of which I used to be a curator of one back home.

They also remind me of the Art-O-Mat art vending I’ve seen in Las Vegas.

Scroll Your Own Way*

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*with apologies to Fleetwood Mac

Scrolling is a tool of our current digital existence, no matter how much we dislike our dependence on it. This is because most people are scrolling on an app platform where they have little control on the content they see. 

Social media algorithms mean you don’t see the posts of everyone you follow. You see only what is currently popular from some of them. Plus you see other stuff you don’t follow that their algorithm “think you might like”. Popular means engagement, so the original post is swarming with comments from strangers. You also see ads everywhere that often takes over the original material you are trying to consume. The interface itself is urging you to scroll! Like! Subscribe! Buy!

No thank you.

Digital life shouldn’t be this way. The best way to consume media is not with social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions of new, and better quality articles created every week.

But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it.

This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. It exists in the background of almost all websites. It’s a way for RSS apps to subscribe to that websites content and receive new articles when they are available.

In the RSS context, “SUBSCRIBE” doesn’t mean you pay, nor do you give your email. In fact the website owner won’t even know you’ve subscribed at all!

It’s like podcasts — but for reading.

This is not a paid sponsorship, but an RSS reader such as the no cost app called NetNewsWire. It shows you articles from your favorite blogs and news sites and keeps track of what you’ve read.

This means you can stop going from page to page in your browser looking for new articles to read. Do it the easy way instead: let a feed reader bring the news to you instead.

If you’ve been getting your news via Facebook and Twitter — with their ads, algorithms, user tracking, outrage, and misinformation — you can switch to your news feed reader to get news directly and more reliably from the sites you trust.

Take back control of your scroll. Scroll your own way.

Start with two or three sources. Maybe a news site and a couple of blogs you like such as, oh, I don’t know, chrisdenbow.website. His RSS feed is simply: https://chrisdenbow.website/feed

Give it a go, and after a few days, you’ll feel something magical happen. You have an app with a feed you can scroll through that you completely control. You decide what is in there. There is no algorithm. Just the latest posts from every site interleaved in reverse date order.

You don’t even need to leave the app to read. I subscribe only to full text feeds, so the entire article is readable within the app. No cookie pop ups or confusing menus to navigate.

There’s no comments or likes. If you no longer wish to see posts from a particular author, you remove their feed from your app and you never see them again.

Everyone should have the ability to scroll your own way.

While typing this up, I obviously sung this in my head the whole time.

The Future

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I’ve mentioned previously that something about writing online has to change soon. I’ve looked into the options to host my decades of digital journals with various low/no cost alternatives and they suck. 

Speaking of The Future, I just finished this book of the same name as well as a quick re-read of Alice In Wonderland. That makes ten titles down out of my 2024 reading goal of twenty four.

The Book Finds You

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The Book Finds You

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami

Picture yourself walking through the halls and shelves of a vast library. Among the endless rows of books, one catches your eye. You reach out, and as your fingers graze its spine, there’s a moment of connection, a spark of recognition. It’s as though fate has guided your hand to this particular book, at this precise moment.

Once you start reading, it feels like you’re embarking on a journey with this book. Its words lead you down paths of discovery, challenging your perspectives and opening new horizons. You find yourself nodding in agreement, pausing to think, and sometimes even disagreeing with it.

As you read, you realize that this book isn’t just something you’re consuming; it’s becoming a part of you. Its characters, its ideas, it’s prose.

Sometimes books seem to find us by chance. You might stumble upon a forgotten book on a dusty shelf, find a book left behind on public transportation, or receive one as a gift unexpectedly. In the novel, Rabbits, one of the recurring themes of playing the game is…the game chooses you to play, not the other way around.

The older I get, the more cynical I become. Nationwide chain bookstores are all the same by design, so if you can make it past the coffeeshop, past the rows of tiny trinkets designed for you to grab while waiting to purchase, past the Bestsellers(!) that everyone else is pushing, past the toy section that is there for no explicable reason besides another money grab and past the music/collectible culture sections, then and only then you may come to the bookshelves and hope to discover a unique book, one that resonates with you.

I prefer the used bookstore. Each store is unique and forces you to hunt on every shelf. Because every shelf has treasure on it waiting to be discovered. The books there seem almost tangentially organized, like they were arranged according to conversation rather than by category. There’s a loose structure, a rough outline, the topics, and genres move seamlessly from one to another, and sometimes off shoot to unintended places, places where one has lost their train of thought, when one must pause to reflect and wonder how they even got there. This isn’t the kind of book store you go to looking for something specific. If you do, you’ll, more than likely, leave disappointed and unimpressed. If you’re searching for specificity, you probably won’t find it here. This is not the kind of book store you go to seek out “a book”. This is the kind of book store in which the books start to seek you.

“Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit your mind like a glove fits your hand.” — Neil Gaiman

One of my favorite books is titled A Gentle Madness by Nicolas Basbanes, wherein the author describes perfectly how a bibliophile gets caught up in their passion for books, libraries, and knowledge. I used to be a bibliophile, but thankfully not drawn completely into madness. Having said all that, to say:

The right book chooses you as much as you choose it. It’s a meeting of minds and souls, a serendipitous encounter that can enrich your life and leave you grateful for the magic of literature.

S.

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My tsundoku keeps multiplying and I won’t apologize for this self-infliction. I saw this beautiful novel titled S. in a bookstore recently and decided I had to have it knowing very little about this other than it was sealed in plastic, but well designed. 

I was not disappointed. Once I removed the plastic, I then had to break the seal to slide the hardback from its cardboard-protected shell. The hardback itself is designed to mimic a novel from the 1940’s from a fictional author who tells his fascinating life story. Inside, the pages are designed to appear weathered, worn and faded yellow. The story within the story within this story is not only the biography itself, but of two people who communicate through each other’s marginalia (I LOVE marginalia) on these pages. But wait, there is more. Inside the pages are inserted, physical letters, postcards, notes on a cafe napkin, photographs and even a paper compass wheel. 

I enjoy a good story, but even more so the approach that publishers are crafting multi-dimensional books to tell a good story and keep the reader engaged. Much like the Rabbits series and my current reading of XX.

The only other book I want but not in my physical possession is The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I need to rectify that soon and increase my tsundoku.

I look forward to devouring S. as soon as possible.

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This book, like the Rabbits novel is not an easy read and requires patience and concentration. There are so many layers and even a soundtrack to listen to complete the novel (much like the Rabbits podcast). This will take some time