Category: field notes

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:

▰ This week I started posting brief field recordings, each roughly 30 seconds in length, and writing about them. The series is now titled #30s. It’s funny, and informative in its own way, how this began. I went for a walk, which became an unexpected errand, which led to me hearing something (#30 Retail Phase, the sound of a retailer’s shoplifting alarm system), and recording it, and writing about it, and then doing the same three more times: (#30 Play Misty, the city waking to rain; #30 Block Chain, construction noise; and #30 Internal Monologue, the sound inside the household fridge). One chance alteration of a plan blossomed into an ongoing mini-series of interrelated reflective investigations.

▰ I’ve apparently been on freesound.org for over 20 years.

▰ Pondering trying again at Weekly Beats / “Jamuary,” which kick off in a few weeks

▰ On the Lines BBS (llllllll.co) there’s an annual discussion of the upcoming year’s goals, and I made some gestures in that direction.

▰ I just noticed the little waveforms that appear on my iPhone when I’m on a phone call with someone. There is a waveform at the top of the screen (iPhone 17 Pro), a tiny thing to the right of the “dynamic island,” and it shows different colors, on opposing sides of the waveform, depending on who is speaking.

▰ I spend a lot of time on video conference calls. Recently it’s seemed that people have had less difficulty with audio. I don’t know if the interfaces or the underlying technology are getting better, or we’ve just all been better trained at this point.

▰ A backpack remains a central organizing principal of my life. Getting a new one is a milestone of sorts, and requires some reorientation.

▰ Will there ever be another Don DeLillo novel? When will the next William Gibson book be published?

▰ I finished reading two novels this week: Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me, respectively the 25th and 26th of the year (not counting a novel’s worth of books I started and didn’t finish). The strongest aspect of Morning and Evening, to me, is the fluidity with which Fosse paints these liminal existential/theological spaces. It was interesting to have completed it right after What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Atonement), because both novels have distinct parts one and two. In What We Can Know, there is a lot of part one before the jump; in Morning and Evening, there is precious little. Meanwhile, the “literary” What We Can Do and the “pulpy” Spread Me both take the future impact of climate change as their starting points, and both are lust-heavy. I’m almost done with Jinwoo Park’s Oxford Soju Club, and deep into several others, Middlemarch, House of Leaves, and Midnight’s Children among them. Yeah, too many at once, again. That’s one new year’s resolution deflated before the new year has even begun.

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:

▰ Back early on when I was teaching a course on sound at a local art college, maybe 2013 or 2014, a student asked me, during discussion toward the end of a semester, what I though the normalized state of everyday being would become, given how fast things seemed, at the time, to be changing — and this is a decade-plus ago — and my response, in the moment, was “flux.”

I though “flux” might become an everyday sensibility. We might be concerned about flux but we would also adjust to and even take pleasure in flux. Flux was sort of the opposite of the supposed “end of history,” or an aslant corollary. Flux was change as a manic constant.

What I didn’t foresee was “lore,” which has clearly prevailed. Lore is the glue — whether fictional, or as a matter of heightened narrative-providing, dot-connecting facets of everyday life — that keeps things together. Lore’s prevalence in particular in the consumption (and collective contribution to) popular fiction feels like an expression of a desire for such continuity outside of fiction: lore as an antidote to flux. Lore is the anti-flux.

I still take pleasure in flux. To me, flux is riding the everyday, a bit like standing while on a public bus, or dodging fellow pedestrians while keeping up a good pace on a city sidewalk. I’ve never had great balance physically, but I can handle the cultural and technological flux okay. Keeping track of lore is not as much of a strength for me, come to think of it.

▰ I’m always keeping an eye on the Obsidian roadmap, Obsidian being my note-taking and writing cross-platform app of choice. Excited for a lot of what’s ahead, especially multiplayer, mobile widgets, and Bases support for Publish.

▰ It’s kind of funny to attend a concert in a church with a massive pipe organ, and the pipe organ just serves as a visual backdrop. No one plays it.

▰ I had an iPod but the vibration of the pre-SSD ones weirded me out. I think I used mostly rando Sandisk-type ones until the Touch came out.

▰ I have, based on recent evidence, found myself deeply in a phase of my life where I find concerts of songs that are all verse chorus verse, and during which there’s no musical improvisation, to be fully claustrophobia-inducing.

▰ When I got out of college, in 1988, I lived, for a spell, walking distance from the old Knitting Factory, the one on Houston Street. This year, 2025, here in San Francisco, I managed to walk from my home to concerts featuring Marc Ribot (in Golden Gate Park) and Fred Frith (at the 4 Star), both of whom I saw at the Knitting Factory way back when. More of this in 2026, please.

▰ I didn’t finish reading anything this week, but considering what I finished reading last week, I think that’s OK. I’m very close on Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me.