Status, 29mar2021 - updated with upcoming release dates for (almost) everything - including the third book.

Think I’ve finally got this posting workflow / embassies thing figured out for the 55,034th time.

Sunday visit.

Running partner turkey update: standing tall and lording again over his driveway of the broken-down Honda, he emerged unscathed from the other night’s high winds having not moved with the winds, but with the winds having moved with him.

The latest MacroParentheticals dispatch, the first of the monthly NL iterations, is on its way to inboxes. Full-on daily posts might return tomorrow, but, having existed on a daily basis, partially, over the last week:

On Deletion Practices (24mar2021).

SitRep, 23mar2021.

On Evolving Inspirations (22mar2021).

See you tomorrow, maybe, as daily pieces make their return. Simply because I think I like doing them.

NOTE: though it’s too late to change it now, I made an error in this morning’s newsletter: in reference to Abbott Kahler’s “How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life,” I said “as she moved heaven and earth to secure the release…” when I meant to write, “as she moved heaven and earth in efforts to secure the release…”

Essential new long-form piece from Abbott Kahler: How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life, via Vulture.

Nick Cave And Warren Ellis Plot Live Film, via The Quietus.

Wong Kar Wai Explains the Controversial New Restorations of His Films, via IndieWire.

The original Ninja Gaiden Black and II code has apparently been lost, so you’re getting Sigma, via The Verge.

COVID-19 is Different Now, via The Atlantic.

Kinetic Flowers Grow from a Deteriorated Landscape in an Otherworldly Installation by Casey Curran, via Colossal.

Today’s main accomplishment: the dry erase board is now bolted to the wall. (Trust me, the excitement never ends.)

EarBliss, 27mar2021: LA OLA INTERIOR, Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990.

Very well, left-handed single paradiddle-diddle, I see you’re going to be as much the bane of my existence in this second phase of my drumming practice as you were in the first, all those years ago.

High wind warning update: the warning has expired, the trees weren’t deserving of my suspicion, and only an outdoor chair has been relocated.

Finally added a projects page to Parenthetical Recluse. The nip/tuck continues, ad infinitum. (Good morning, BTW.)

An overnight high wind warning so I’ll probably spend the afternoon staring at trees with suspicion.

The pegboard is installed; my mother’s Christmas wreaths have a home. The balance of the universe is restored.

The season of siren testing and dog-children sing-alongs is upon us.

For most of what passes for my pretend writing career, I’ve printed out everything that I wrote on that particular day: a physical, secondary back-up (to Time Machine on a decade-old Macbook Air, hence my tendency towards redunancy) to scribble upon and work by hand in the first bits of the next morning, before turning myself and it over to the montony of typing and cut and paste and deletion etc etc.

But, as I fiddle about with this new iteration of The Third Book, I’ve ceased this printing practice: whereas I once kept each section in its own document, I’m now concocting the whole thing in one document, jumping back and forth between bits of deeper focus (small assignments decided upon that morning and worked into their final form before moving on) and something akin to an outline (I tend not to outline, but the overall structure of this Work is all-too apparent); if a bit comes to me, I throw the inchoate version of it in the section where it will live in wait of its potential tenure as a small assingment for crafting and refinement.

(Note/beg/plead: iA Writer, please add “jump to section heading” in a not-too-distant update; it would make life even simpler.)

Arriving at the point: as I’m now working in the absence of that secondary, physical backup, I’ve stopped deleting anything, favoring instead the use of a second document, “(TITLE) - CUT”: everything I would otherwise delete goes there instead – cut/paste. Never know when I’ll need it or use it: a case of the right phrase, the right turn, arriving at the wrong time, waiting for its moment in the sun – or final obliteration upon the work’s completion and archiving.

And lo, my office smartbulb has turned off for the day, a symbolism not at all lost on me.

Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase’s Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s-1950s, via Brain Pickings.

Matt Kindt jumps into the controversial world of NFTs with a new ‘Mind MGMT’ story, via Smash Pages.

How Long After Getting a COVID-19 Vaccine Is It Effective?, via The Atlantic.

Smooth Curves and Negative Space Complete Elegant Wooden Sculptures by Ariel Alasko, via Colossal.

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map, via Open Culture.

The Morkie Queen atop her throne. (None are worthy.)

It’s kind of amazing to see how much the floors really need vacuumed when I wear my glasses in the house (for once). My general state of blurry obliviousness doesn’t translate well to a vacuuming regimen.

Running partner turkey update: standing tall alongside a broken-down Honda, he gazed through me and across his kingdom of dead cornstalks, as if to signal that his lack of motion was nothing less than his having become motion itself. Turkey Speed Force.

Good morning – it’s currently 44ºF under sunny skies and I’m drawing something of a blank here this morning. But words must appear: such is this daily discipline.

Another scheduling shift, one that, for today anyhow, I’m liking quite a bit – though its true test will be in my capacity to navigate the afternoon (my condition having been compared to being a sheepdog without sheep). For now, though, I’m feeling a little less shake/rattle/roll, so that’s nice.

(Can’t discount the potential that this shake/rattle/roll reduction is nothing but a byproduct of the shiny new but whatever, I’ll roll with it.)

Addition of more/different structured time leading me back to idea of weekly essays at Parenthetical Recluse (well, three of them , whatwith every fourth Sunday – this Sunday, actually – belonging to MacroParentheticals), and re-re-christening these morning pieces SitReps, instead of titling them. Treat them like daily newspaper strips, the Sunday edition being the biggest, the essays being more thought-out representations of what I’ve been thinking about that week.

The one thing holding me back: will anyone read them? The one thing pushing me forward: (why) do I really care?

But all this is just something I’m considering. Haven’t quite brought myself there. Still, this will be the first week back with the newsletter, so I might as well give the notion a trial run. And so, SitReps reborn.

The day awaits.

Listening: DYNAMIC STILLNESS, by Steve Roach.

How Edward Hopper’s Paintings Inspired the Creepy Suspense of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, via Open Culture.

The Canoo Electric Pickup Truck Is Everything the Tesla Cybertruck Is Not, via Design Milk.

Inside the high-stakes world of designing for 911 operators, via Fast Company.

Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture, via The Guardian.

Vaccine mystery: Why J&J’s shots aren’t reaching more arms, via Politico.

LEGO NASA Space Shuttle Discovery (10283) Officially Announced, via The Brick Fan.

Three Leonard Cohen Animations, via Open Culture.

The daily completion of small tasks on large projects - books, podcasts, door repairs, pond maintenance, room maintenance/preparations, etc etc - never fails to help me refill that self-respect-o-meter, bit by bit. Back to The Work.

While “inspiration” would, at first glance, connote a positive spin, reality dictates that it can also be negative: I am inspired to NOT be like this person, to NOT create like this person.

Growth and evolution – creative or personal – being centered around the question of when to let those erstwhile inspirations go: is it when the gauge trends more towards the negative than the positive or when it indicates neither a negative or postive reaction, when ambivalence strikes?

Leaning towards the latter: a negative reaction – a reaction AGAINST something – can, after all, be just as potent – if not more so in some cases – as a positive. But, another wrinkle: the lack of a reaction (or for that matter, a positive or negative one) to a once-inspirational/influential work/person at a certain point in time doesn’t preclude a reaction – either postive or negative, same or different – from a different iteration of yourself, days or months or weeks or years down the line, via the magic of rediscovery and that holy grail of experiencing something again for the first time – but only with the benefit of a not-insignificant temporal interregnum.