Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Summer off Per correr miglior acque alza le vele omai la navicella del mio ingegno (Purgatorio, I) I'm planning on taking a hiatus for the summer. I have some other things to do that will likely absorb the time I would normally have set aside for writing and posting these pages; I thought I might coast in neatly if arbitrarily to shore at the one hundredth page, but it seems I will fall a bit short. No matter. This also seemed like a good place to take a breather for other reasons as well. The least important of them is that I am gradually approaching the allotted space on my server. That's hardly a major issue, since additional server space for a relatively infinitessimal site such as mine is readily available at nominal cost, but I have also been frustrated by dealing with a perpetually balky FTP connection and may want to explore different arrangements that will allow me to focus more on content and less on maintenance. As rewarding as it is to build this very modest site from scratch, I am not a web designer and don't want the nuts and bolts side of things to become a distraction from my real purposes (whatever those may be). Most importantly, I need a “consolidation,” as the jargon has it, a chance to stand back, break bad habits, do other things, and think about what direction I want to go in the future. As I read through random bits of what I've posted in the last two years or so I'm pleasantly surprised by some things and, as I would have expected, fairly appalled by others. I could simply clean up and chuck the bad, but in some way I feel that doing so, except in the case of obvious howlers, would be to betray the essential nature of this project, which has always been intended to be mutable, open, and tentative even when deeply felt principles or passions were at stake. So barring emergencies or sudden inspirations, I'll let my oars down, drift for a bit, and resume when the time seems ripe. And if I decide in the future to sail in entirely different waters, I'll leave word here. Enjoy the summer. June 23, 2006 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me