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My track record on New Year's resolutions is no better than yours, but this calendar hinge more than ever feels like a moment for new beginnings. I decided to launch this blog with the selfish motivation of giving myself a regular personal writing project, but also because over the holidays I had a few great long-form conversations with family and friends, and I realized how much I miss the exchange and playful trial of ideas that happens in those conversations I just don't have time or opportunity for in this season. So, here we are.
In the spirit of New Year's resolutions, I'm committing to a regular posting schedule -- so you're invited to drop in regularly if you find my content provoking the right kinds of thoughts and questions! I crave the interaction of your comments. Think of the comment section as an inviting stretch of wet concrete just begging for you to leave some clever mark of your passing by.
On Mondays I'll be publishing relatively short pieces (500-1000 words) that sit in the intersection between my own stories, the arts of words and music, and contemporary culture. That's a deliberately broad circumference: it's pretentious enough to be starting a blog, I don't need to pretend to have a mission. My model is an old favourite early modern text of mine, Thomas Browne's reflectively curious Religio Medici (1642). I would die happy should anyone say of my work what Browne's modern editor Geoffrey Keynes wrote of his:
It may justifiably be held that Browne lacked profundity as a philosopher, but his sympathies were wide, and even an ordinary opinion becomes interesting when clothed in the whimsical language which he knew how to use so well.
I'll be starting next Monday with the first entry in "Things Worth Remembering," a short series reflecting on The Year That Must Not Be Named. We'll be feeling its effects for a long time, but there are a number of experiences both good and bad that I want to keep in focus in my memories. This series will be a set of beginnings for my immediate writing here, as well, since those memories prompt more than a few topics I'd like to think my way around by writing them.
On Fridays I'll be publishing "Tuning In," a series featuring brief recommendations of enjoyable/thoughtful pieces of writing or media I've come across or returned to recently -- articles or reviews, podcast episodes, YouTube videos, music albums -- a pleasant finisher to the week. It's been a tumultuous week in the news and cultural conversation, so by way of something light-hearted and totally different let me kick things off by recommending the Museum of English Rural Life's Twitter feed, guilty of such delights as #InternationalUnsolicitedDuckPicDay (mark your calendars for 2022!):
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