He asked us what our favorite work of art was, and never could I tell him it was him
There’s something about going to a museum by yourself that feels unreal, or maybe between reality and something else.
I know that not everyone has had this experience. Hell, a lot of people haven’t done a lot of things alone.
When I go to art museums alone, I listen to music (you’ll see below), and I bring a notebook and pen. I wander through the galleries like a ghost, impermanent and invisible to most others who are there with other people. Every once in a while, I’ll stop in front of a painting or sit on a provided bench, and I’ll write. Usually, it’s journal entries. I remember the first time I went to the MFA; I sat on a bench, and I got to write about my new job, how I wouldn’t have to live in a hotel anymore, all that. How things were looking up and would maybe be stable. That journal’s name was Horatio, and I always signed off He that thou knowest thine.
Going to the MFA always seems to happen when something in my life shifts. I won’t tell you what I wrote in front of the various paintings this visit. They are too personal, too raw, and too revealing. Renoir’s La danse à Bougival and Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit know more about me and my feelings than some of my friends, I think. There are paintings in Christchurch and London and New York City and St. Louis and Boston that all have bits and pieces of me lingering in the paint.
✒️ What I’m writing
Citation Needed: How to Use Logseq’s Zotero Integration
I did a cool thing! I wrote about using Logseq’s native Zotero integration for the official Logseq blog. Most of the post is just on getting Logseq and Zotero set up, but then I spent some time going over my workflow and, more interestingly, why certain workflows are convoluted and not well-suited for what Logseq is.
I don’t mean this to be judgmental, but I get confused when I see people trying to do longform writing in Logseq with BibTeX cite keys and all that. Sure, that’s a workflow you can do (and I show how in my post), but it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t think Logseq is meant to do that kind of writing.
This brings up what I’ve been writing about regarding tools, their ideologies, and how we shape each other. You can certainly use Logseq in ways it’s not suited for, but I think the friction of using multiple tools together is worth it. Some people think all friction in knowledge management is bad. Hell, I have ADHD, and friction is usually my mortal enemy.
But when writing and thinking and learning, friction is what makes us slow down and pay attention. Friction makes us think.
What is left behind when you remove photos from a scrapbook?
Libraries lend the previous experiences of materials
🎨 What I’m creating
episode 059 - Open Library and Controlled Digital Lending of librarypunk
We had Kyle Courtney on to talk about the Internet Archive lawsuit, among other things. I always learn so much any time I talk with Kyle.
I think this episode is a good way to clear up some misconceptions:
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The lawsuit is not actually suing the IA because of the National Emergency Library. I think that’s what brought it on, but the suit is because of 127 specific books in the Open Library during normal CDL operations, not the NEL.
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A lot of libraries already do Controlled Digital Lending in some form or fashion. This isn’t the high-risk stuff the NEL did. CDL is simply making a digital copy of a book your library already owns and lending that copy to one person at a time; during a digital loan, the physical copy can’t be checked out.
Now, we can have another discussion about creating digital scarcity and digital rights management (why replicate the limits of physical lending?), but the point is that CDL is a low-risk practice. Not zero risk, but low. It’s especially good for collections that are unique or hard to access physically. Kyle mentions how Alaska loves CDL because of how difficult it can be to travel.
📖 What I’m reading
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
I crossed page 200! I’m 20% through Infinite Jest. That feels really cool to say.
I can’t remember the last time I felt myself falling in love with a book. Like, sure, I can tell when I love a book. But this is that distinct feeling you get when you feel the love developing. It’s like falling in love with a person.
While reading, I’ve smiled, laughed, cried, looked fondly at the page like when a lover does something so them you can’t help but fall more in love, highlighted passages in reverence because I can’t believe how beautiful they are.
What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it’s not arousal that’s so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were ever only like two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.
🎥 What I’m watching
Sometimes I just binge videos of people like, trying those ridiculous life hacks and whatnot. That’s what happened this week.
🎶 What I’m listening to
The Art Teacher - Rufus Wainwright
I went to the MFA on Saturday to catch the Turner’s Modern World exhibit before it ended. Turner and Sargent have been my favorite artists for a few years now. I remember going to the Tate in 2019 with my friend Brigit, and I was softly crying most of the time we were in the Turner wing.
Turner and Sargent are my two favorite artists because of this song. I listen to it every time I go to the MFA, especially when I’m in the gallery with the Sargents. I first heard it in a The Secret History playlist on Spotify. Dorky, I know.
You know when you listen to a song for the first time and it becomes a part of you? Yeah. That happened. I had just started my transition and was reckoning with my shifting sexuality, so hearing Rufus Wainwright sing “I was just a girl then, and never have I loved since then” felt like, I don’t know, permission?
Anyway, in the song, Rufus Wainwright is singing from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, reminiscing about a trip to the Met in high school, and how the love she had for her art teacher has never gone away. She says “I liked the John Singer Sargents. He told me he liked Turner, and never have I turned since then. No, never have I turned to any other man.” At the end of the song, she’s married, all that. But then: “All this having been said, I married an executive company head.
“All this having been done, a Turner, I own one.”
I’m one of those people where, if something mentions something else, I will go look up that something else. I looked up Sargent and Turner, and I fell in love instantly. I softly wept in the Turner exhibit, and I softly wept in the Sargent gallery, with Wainwright’s Philip Glass-like piano repeating under everything.
🍝 What I’m cooking
There’s a staff potluck tomorrow at work, and I’m making these two recipes: