Thinking about starting my own newsletter.

First little balcony harvest. 🌱 It wasn’t easy or sure with all the scaffolding from the roof reno that lasts the whole summer. But grateful for the results nonetheless. 🍅 ☺️

Today I discovered Manuel Moreale’s Blog thanks to this great endorsement by @uncertainquark (which I in turn found thanks to micro.blog’s discovery tab):

I just donated to a personal blog writer I really like. Check out his very human blog, which actually cares about the state of the Internet: manuelmoreale.com 📝

One of the posts there (On discovery and consumption) made me pause when I was thinking about how to react to this beautifully little post by @pimoore:

Who we are is the most eloquent and unique story that we all write every single day.

There is a difference between commenting and quoting a post like this. Since that post was inspiration to a point (this) I wanted to make, I don’t think that a comment would have been appropriate. Looking at the comments other people actually made, they are engaging with the post more directly, by uttering e.g. approval (for example, @patrickrhone’s “Truth”)

There is also a difference in the way I engage with the post when quoting it: The engagement here is very indirect, the other person does not even necessarily notice that I took what they wrote and re-contextualized it for my own needs.

Similarly to Manuel Morale’s point about discovery and consumption, this might be an obvious difference. But I think commenting and quoting also is related to what Manuel has to say about the centralization of discovery and consumption (meaning the engagement with the discovered content):

One major change the web has experienced was the consolidation of discovery and consumption. Digg was—and still is—a place to discover new content but the consumption of that content takes place away outside of Digg. And the same was true for discussions around the content. Those used to happen in comment sections spread across the internet. But now, places like Twitter or Instagram are acting as places for both the discovery and the consumption of new content.

A platform that only allows comments about content linked from elsewhere on the web will not lead to this kind of centralization. A comment-only platform like this is also much less convenient to use to actually build upon other people’s content, which most often happens in the quoting (or linking) style instead the commenting-style of engagement.

Making it easier to quote other people’s content might on the other hand have consequences as regards to how we engage with the creators behind the content. Which brings me to another post of Manuel (The internet is not broken. People are.), which is that social media exposes a lot of people’s interest not in doing the thing for the love of the thing, but for the fame, which might be achieved through it (Something I have always appreciated about @merlinmann: He does the things because he loves doing them).

A commenter is not very likely to become famous through commenting. A quoter on the other hand produces first order content: This post here stands on its own, even though it is inspired by other content. Combined with the strong network effects of the big social media platforms, odds are that the wish for fame becomes more likely to surface - because fame itself is more probable in these conditions.

Therefore offering tools for quoting, for building upon other people’s content, is a double edged sword. If the social media platform is too big and quoting is too easy, there is an increased likelihood of a bloodless hunt for fame, in which first order creators become increasingly invisible to each other.

I had a feeling something was up after this week’s RecDiffs - which was excellent btw. As if you’d notice something off in a good friend’s otherwise normal behavior. I hope everyone is fine. (I’m just a listener and concern of this sort feels intrusive.)

That there hasn’t been a new Back To Work in two weeks has me gravely concerned for @merlinmann and Dan Benjamin alike. I noticed that there was also no new Road Work. So I assume it has something to do with the Fireside Dispute.

Finished reading: Blue Nights by Joan Didion 📚My thoughts: The Melancholic Richness Of Frailty

This book is as much about aging than it is about her adopted daughter Quintana. It is a sad book. It is a book of acceptance, I think.

I read this in one siting on the porch of my Girlfriends mom, living in Finnland, it was already a little too cold to sit there for the four hours or so it took me. But the book didn’t let me go.

In my last review of two of Didion’s books I wrote that the author’s smarts won’t save her from the inevitability of life. In the end her body, her mind, will fail. In the end, what could she even have done to save her child? So she mourns, or tries to mourn, like a person not acquainted with these traditions. This outsider’s view to a very human problem was very relatable: I find myself often fascinated but not affected personally by the emotional weather of day to day life. It’s more the second order emotions - emotions about other people’s reactions to things I believe to have already understood, filed away, moved on from - that get me. This is probably more common than I know I presume at times.

It is very powerful to read about a person so gifted that she can’t help it to struggle with the voice in which she writes. Was how she wrote before her memoirist turn ever anything more than something she used instead of her own voice? In short: a voice instead of her voice? That is probably not fair. Authenticity is not a boolean. It is a construct. A repeated question from the book: How can one be direct in one’s writing? Although I listened to “The Year Of Magical Thinking” I think Blue Nights might be her most reflective book I have consumed, yet.

Didion is not shy to discuss the many mental health issues, that her Daughter had to face. How the names for the diagnosis changed over time, but the problems essentially stayed the same. One such name: borderline personality disorder. Mental health is not what took her life, not directly at least, but a lost battle against infection. That Quintana was adopted plays a big part in the book and is one of the most powerful themes: Didion’s reflection about the ‘recommended choice narrative’ and Quintanas question “What if you didn’t choose me?” is as relatable as it is gut-wrenching.

It’s hard to imagine what my impression of “Blue Nights” would have been without knowing “The Year Of Magical Thinking”. It is often the case with memoirist writing that its power stems from the layers - in volume as in sophistication and arrangement. And I feel like Didion’s two memoirs, as sad as they might be, are amazingly rich and deep.

In my last review I mentioned the problem of privilege in Didion’s writing and this makes it harder at times to relate to her. In Blue Nights she makes an attempt to address this topic, when she asks whether Quintana had a privileged childhood or not. The answer comes down to “I mean, we weren’t that rich…”. Maybe this would have needed a more elaborate treatment.

I really liked this book and I am surprised how much I managed to write about it, or rather my thoughts about it, here. I like Didion as a memoirist, too. I am not so sure that I will ever check out her more literary works. I actually rarely do that after having consumed memoirs of writers or artists. No, it’s the mundane and not so mundane everyday stuff - or rather its heightened, polished reflective version - that interests me.

One last time back to the book: “Blue Nights” is a great book about mourning, about aging, about being a parent and a writer. Didion is steeped in a way of life that I would guess only exists in its fossilized forms, in memories. The relatable topics and the now lost to us extravagance of old Hollywood produce a rich, deep and at times paradoxical memoir that I would especially recommend if you can spare the time to consume “The Year Of Magical Thinking” beforehand.

A very good person to follow on here, if you are interested in web development, is @baldur. He links consistently interesting articles and offers in his commentary on them very often refreshing takes on the current status of the field. Insightful!

When will I learn that early flights are to blame for everything? Their seductive quality of „having a few more hours“ (that short night extra) is never worth it.

Test was negative. What a relief.

First Corona test ever. Hopefully it’s nothing.

Switched over today from Youtube Music to Apple Music. Something I wanted to try for a while, but since I share an account (family account) with my GF, it was not as simple. I like it so far, she doesn’t. So let’s see where we land after a month with this.

Finished reading: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion AND Let Me Tell You What I Mean also by Joan Didion 📚 Thoughts about these two books: Acceptance As A Worthwhile Struggle

As I said in my last review: I love autobiographical writing. To continue the theme, I recently listened to Joan Didion’s Books: The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir of an especially tumultuous year in her life. After the sudden death of her husband and the hospitalization of her daughter, Didion finds herself detached from reality and has to claw herself back to reason. There is a certain sharpness in the way she puts things, a certain breathlessness in the intelligence with which she follows the paths of her own thoughts while mourning the loss of a writing partner and spouse (a parallel to Hampl’s book).

We see here a woman who is smart, quick and in control of her faculties wanting to fight and having to accept, that there is no real shortcut, no swift way to skip the all too human need to just feel shitty for a while, to be scared, to be upset, to not know, to maybe not even understand why your own seemingly better argument, the pointed question or educated guess doesn’t cut it. To be clear, what Didion focusses on is not this desire to skip the lowly emotions and loss of control that are part of the human condition. But, to me, she exemplifies how hard it is to accept the necessity of being a passenger, not the driver, for a while after an event like this.

One strength of Didion’s writing is that she can put a finger on the power of slightly changed emphases. Like in her text “Everywoman.com” about Martha Stewart and her empire from the second book of her’s I have listened to: Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays from 1968 to 2000.

In Everywoman.com she turns the critique on Martha Stewart, a home maker turned CEO of a billion dollar company, inside out. The critique goes something like this: Martha Stewart is a fraud, because she pretends to be a simple homemaker, like her fans, even though in reality she is a driven business woman who created merely an artifice of being a homemaker. Didion is directing her more empathetic read of Stewart mainly against Jerry Oppenheimer’s unauthorized investigative Book on her: Just Desserts. Opposed to Oppenheimer, Didion concludes that Stewart’s success, Artifice and all, are inspirational to US-American women because Stewart managed to create her own rags to riches story: from homemaker to CEO.

One thing I picked up and that is eerily related to her empathy for Stewart is her own success. I stumbled upon the following review of The Year of Magical Thinking on Amazon that is an example of what I mean:

She certainly went through losses that would make anyone stagger. I just found that I couldn’t identify with her experiences. She describes months of folks making sure she was taken care of. Can’t relate. She recounts good times in a long marriage that involves luxurious travels and freedom gained through wealth. Can’t relate. Am I jealous? Probably.

Didion is well off, that much is clear. She has been a successful writer for a long time and coming up in a much more socially mobile era, she ended up being wealthy. The question is: Does this take away from her writing? And the answer is: Yes, a little bit. I wouldn’t go so far to suggest that I can’t relate or that what she has to say is not interesting, quiet the opposite, but because Didion’s voice is one of careful reexamination (it reminds of the idiom “show me, I’m from Missouri”) and her reputation is one of popularizing counter culture, of problematizing the American Dream I can’t deny that the success, although earned, subverts a little bit her persona, her self-conception or the frame from which I read her (so maybe, probably, this is on me). It complicates the relationship between me, the reader (or listener in my case), and her, the counter culture writer. Now, I am not owed an uncomplicated relationship. But I do have to admit that the contrast of a now wealthy writer that came from a place of socially conscious reporting - and still has those instincts but lives a totally different life - lead to some cognitive dissonance. It totally makes sense that lives like this exist. She is not the first, nor the last that will have had also monetary success from writing empathetically about various social issues. I still enjoyed the books, I just wish there was a way to ask the question: How do you integrate your being well off with writing so empathetically? How do you try to juggle not being perceived as patronizing?

• You can find her Essay on Martha Stewart on the New Yorker’s website: Everywoman.com.

Birdnet made the rounds on hacker news yesterday. Can’t wait to test it out when we’re hiking again. Same goes for Plantnet for that matter.

Finished reading: The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl 📚For my thoughts see: The Art Of Writing About Yourself.

Also learned that you can archive your posts to github and to the internet archive. Great stuff @manton

Now I need to figure out how to migrate all the old blog posts from all the other blogs here. Many incarnations over the years…

Just set up my custom domain so that it would point to my micro blog instead of an old blog I don’t update anymore. Posts gonna be available under blog.martin-haehnel.de

A favorite book of mine is one that looks back. One that is thickly layered in the complications of the author’s view. I don’t think I knew this or could state this as plainly before this book. For a while I assumed it was weakness to be interested in this somewhat incomplete form - is that even the right word? - that is, autobiographical writing. But I love writing that leaves room for one’s own thoughts. And I therefore loved this book which is a prime example of doing the form justice: The Art Of The Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl.

It sounds like a straight up self-help book than it is. It is much more a beautiful mix of memoir and essay that circles around the topic of leisure and how it relates to writing, describing and living in general. What is great about these kinds of books is their way of heightening and compressing reality in its descriptions without loosing the connection to it. And so nothing is ever just the cause of anything or arranges itself neatly into a narrative ark. We might construe easy cause-and-effect relationships between the defining moments of our lives but at the same time we know - if we take the time to notice - that it is much more complex than that. Nowadays there is nothing more boring than a too neatly arranged story.

While Hampl wrote this book, her husband died from a heart disease. Her longing to see him again, her struggles of not being able to believe - as a person being raised in the Catholic Faith no less - that there could actually be another side, where he would wait for her… I could feel that - as somebody raised devoid of any religion (Post-GDR east Berlin). I can imagine how this - having to realize that the partner you miss is gone for good, this person you spent most of your time with, the one which also happens to be your first reader - must have felt. This entanglement builds a lot of the emotional scaffolding in the book. I think it was pretty effective and lends the book a nice counterweight to Hampls beautifully written investigations of a leisurely life.

I liked how history and especially her engagement with history writing made it possible to look over the author’s shoulder while she discovers new wrinkles in the story of the Ladies of Llangollen - two Irish Women - who sought to live a “life of retirement” in the Welsh countryside in the 18th century - only to become famous for it. Montaigne is an important part of this book, too. He is her patron saint of description, observation and as the inventor of the essay an important corner stone of reflection. He is the poster child of the art of the wasted day. In another part of the book, she visits the almost forgotten but now famous proto-geneticist Gregor Mendel as well. He never managed to pass the exam to become a teacher. So he instead lived the life of a monk.

Monks and Nuns are a big topic of the book. If not literally then figuratively, most of the people that are practicing the art of the wasted day are living a fairly structured life - an interesting paradox. But monastery life is not only structured but also slow. A structure followed slowly lends itself to being contemplative, to taking the time to observe and also describe. This kind of life, behind real or metaphorical walls might be a life lived in solitude (or: alone, but not lonely), is a life in which you are not needed all the time, not interrupted constantly, a life where your input, your action is not demanded all the time, where you can come to rest on the passing within and around you, as Montaigne might have put it.

The descriptions of her historical case studies are interwoven with her own life accounts. It’s all the stuff I love about this form of writing: vignettes, reflections, beautiful descriptions. Like in the end, where she and her husband travel down the Mississippi river in an old wooden cabin boat, seeing her home state from a different angle and therefore very differently than ever before.

The book also includes some well-reasoned advice. I loved her description of an anecdote in which a student of hers - she teaches writing at the University of Minnesota - didn’t know what to write about himself, because he only came from Fridley (one of many the suburbs of Minneapolis):

I stared at him. I didn’t, for a moment, comprehend that this was the dark disclosure, this the occasion of his misery: being from Fridley meant, surely, that he had nothing to say. In effect, had no life.

There it was again—nothin’ had ever happened to him and I was asking him to write about it.

“I have good news for you, Tommy,” I said. “The field’s wide open—nobody has told what it’s like to grow up in Fridley yet. It’s all yours.” (p. 185)

This passage was really eye-opening for me and put a finger on an important insight: Autobiographical writing doesn’t need to be anchored by an exceptional life. Or rather: Any life can be made to be interesting.

While writing this review I was googling around trying to find information about the book and its contents - I had listened to it through my local library - and I am a forgetful person. The book seemed to have gotten middling reviews in the aggregate. So I guess it’s not a book for everyone and who knows if I would’ve liked it as much, if I would’ve read instead of listening to it. Parts of the magic of a book like this lie in the sound - and since Hampl reads this herself we really get an impression of the sound she was aiming for.

For me it was an inspiring listen that made me write a lot more over the last three weeks and rediscover my love for memoirists writing like this.

If you are interested to see if this is for you: There is an excerpt about the Ladies of Llangollen on Longreads. And here is a short clip of Hampl’s performance of the beginning of the book’s chapter entitled “To Go”.

The possibility to edit one’s own posts after the fact on micro.blog, is something I really missed from other social media platforms. Finally I can correct misspellings, weird sentence structures, …

Doesn’t mean I will notice them all. But those I do notice I can finally correct!

After not working for about two weeks, the people putting up the scaffolding around the house continued today (Saturday) in the morning. Again, without any warning whatsoever. This whole thing is really a case study in how not to communicate renos to renters…

Calling family will never not be a trial to me. I’m just bad at keeping people in the loop. Probably because I don’t really want to be kept in the loop myself. Does this make others assume I have more emotional bandwidth to offer than I have?

When I was looking through my DayOne posts - the recent acquisition of the journaling app by automattic made me curious; I had not been using the app in a couple of years - I stumbled upon a journal entry that included a few screenshots of tweets that a quite popular German political Twitterer (maybe 30k followers back then, now around 50k followers) had posted, that berated me fiercely. How stupid I was and how dare I speak up against this person. They called me a baboon that needed to be put into place amongst other things. I think they called me sexist, too. I didn’t have the heart to plunge deeper into the post. As I was simply too shocked. I had completely forgotten about this life altering experience half a decade ago. But here it was. And the remembering began.

What had happened? When I was studying history of science and technology I was not shy to speak up. I was a young man that deemed himself smart and with a talent for research. I also had way too much time on my hands, which made me “dangerous” in class. I read and studied furiously. And what I learned I wanted to apply. That is, nothing went past me in class. Any little uncertainty that came up, I problematized - to the frustration of my professors, I’m sure, as well as my classmates. I wanted to be a researcher, or no, I wanted to be a prodigy. A person with great potential to become an exceptional researcher. I dreamt big. And I wanted my professors to see how smart I was. I had this dream that somebody would take me under their wing, make me behave, by offering a path to a career in research. I wanted to be tamed, I think, so that I could become the beautiful, creative researcher that I thought I ought to be.

In any case, this phase of my life was a messy one and so were the discussions in the seminars. Lots of arguments, lots and lots of monologuing on my part. Oh, my poor classmates, forgive me! But that’s who I was back then and although I look back with shame, I would be lying if I would not point out that this time of my life was one of the most instructive phases of it as well.

I remember neither subject of the course nor the specific book introduction, chapter or article that we were assigned to read for this weeks class. What I do remember is that I disagreed vehemently with the author’s premise that nobody had as of yet really looked into the topic at hand, except herself. That the author was female was incidental to my disagreement. But I never liked this take. To me, history was all about uncovering more and more aspects of the past. And a new take was adding a new shade, a new layer to the beautiful complexities of historiography as it related to the topic at hand. There is no singular fundamental take on history that subsumes all other takes - or at least not for long. History is best, I thought, if it was a humbling exercise, one in which your own strong opinions and values get somewhat relativized. History, to me, was a quest for authenticity, for serious inquiry, that ought not to bend to the political fashions of the day - even if I happen to agree with them. History ought to be historicist, in the German sense, where the understanding of a happening stems from a process of trying to find plausibility in the actions through sympathy for the actors - no matter how vile their behavior would be deemed, probably rightfully so, in our time. In short I was a young man looking for authenticity in a world full of ironic takes. I craved sincerity. “Be real with me”, I thought often, “I want to like you”. “I want to be sure that you like me”, if you say so, too. I was lonely and longed for reliability.

It was well known amongst history of science students back then, that we had a minor celebrity in our midst. This person was a young politician of some clout. An up-and-comer that had gotten a taste of political authority, of respect towards their own person, after being elected to the city’s parliament. They were invited to talk shows and interviewed a few times for TV and radio back then. They carried the aura of demanding respect into our classroom as well. Wearing nice long woolen coats, good fitting suits and expensive looking scarfs, not at all what the rest of us normals wore and especially not me, the wild man in the shabby cloths. They were standing out. They had understood that clothes make the person. At the same time their public persona was one of irony, of trolling for the greater good, or what they perceived as the greater good. They were a postmodern politician. One that always seemed to play both sides of the un/certainty coin: Claiming “Facts first!” but being crowned troll of the year some years earlier.

The actual quarrel around which I have been circulating for this handful of paragraphs is explained quickly: My adversary had read the text different than me - or not differently, but more affirmatively. The claim of a fundamental take did not repel them, quite the opposite. They bought the author’s points about what others had overlooked, maybe they bought the idea of a perfect all-encompassing historical take as well? I wasn’t sure back then, but I was sure that history doesn’t bend to a totalitarian approach. Writing history is a process of picking and choosing, of simplification. So I argued against their notion, vehemently. That the author had a feminist viewpoint - which was so incidental to my points - became the linchpin of the discussion. To this day I am sure of this: Even a struggle so central to modern societal progress as equality can only ever be an aspect of historiography. You may base a whole career on feminist history - and that would be an important pursuit - but nobody would claim everything is said and done when we have told all there is to tell about this struggle. No. No! And again: No!

I would like to claim that I stayed as calm as I am now, writing all this down however many years later, but that would be a lie. We shouted at each other. I didn’t permit this person, or my professor for that matter, to have the last word. I was incapable to give in, to allow this person to lug his intimidating aura around to steamroll me. After all, this was academia! Or its impoverished simulacrum at least. And arguments ought to count more than any accomplishments in other arenas of society here. Finally, the person just left in the middle of the class, infuriated, slamming the door. I was about to make another remark about their bad attitude, but was silenced by my professor: “Martin!” He only shouted this one word. My name. “Martin!” “There it was”, I thought. Finally an acknowledgement. I felt oddly good. I felt put into place. And wasn’t this what I wanted? To be put into place?

A few hours later, still pumped up from the altercation, I learned that my opponent had posted the tweets they did. I don’t think they assumed that I was a Twitter user or would seek ought their timeline - if they cared at all. I found myself in an exceptional situation: I could read what another person that didn’t like me thought about me. They just had put it out there for anyone to read. That included me and their kinda big audience. Some people liked those tweets, others retweeted them. And even though I knew, intellectually, that these tweets weren’t meant for me or were in the end about me, really (they were about this persons anger), I felt deeply hurt. I felt seen, in a bad way. I felt revealed, caught. I felt like I was laughable. The whole village, their village, had it out for me, pointing, be it in anger or amusement about this anti-feminist idiot, who came to town, unbidden, to insult the mayor with his retrograde ideas, the fool, not even able to see how antiprogressive he is. I felt my artifice was visible as such. The political ascriptions didn’t bother me, because they weren’t accurate. But the persona that was described between the lines did. This mess of piled up insecurities that held up the disguise of an eager student was laid bare. There I was, in my most unfavorable interpretation. However, I couldn’t deny the fact that it was a possible interpretation. It had a connection to reality. Yes, I was a self-serious jerk. And I knew it, I realized it, sometimes. And in this moment, I could see it clearly, I wasn’t the only one who was aware. I felt deeply ashamed.

As though a pill as it is swallow to remember all of this, to rethink all of this: I am grateful that I had the strength back then to screenshot those tweets and put them into my journal. I don’t know if I knew it back then, but I preserved a seminal moment in my life. There is no real moral here. And I couldn’t point to this vignette as the cause for things being different from there on out. I carried on a couple of years longer with this prodigy-jerk persona, before it finally clicked that this wasn’t the way. Erosion takes its time. But I will always think back to this moment in my life when thinking about where the beginning of the end of that persona is located. It’s right then and there. I am a better person for it today, prodigy or not.

Construction work throughout the whole pretty short summer sucks. But we make the best of it regardless. My GF rearranged the balcony, our oasis at home so that the plants would get more light and we can sit more comfortably there. 🌱