A collection of divagations I’ve self-published on my blog over the years.

Some of these are blog posts that eventually became short essays; some are essays that never became blog posts; some are projects that began as sequences of posts at my blog but now have dedicated pages all to themselves. Some were scraps that took forever to emerge from my notebooks. Mostly, they appear here to pull them out of the chronological slog of my archives.

Is this something of a digital garden? I suppose, because while most of them are stable in their content, some of them may be revised, redacted, excised, amended, and otherwise edited as time goes on. “Add another guess to each solution. Nothing’s final.”

❦ Blog Posts that Became Essays

• On Motivation and Writing Prompts [2020]
• Chance Operations: On chance operations and bias [2020]
• The Magical Powers of a New Shirt: On The West Wing, 9/11, language, and violence [2020]
• Is Not Chicago: Something about free will and polarities; also, glancingly, Tolstoy and pencils [2019]
• On Freedom [2011; revised 2021]
• New Copies: On artistic creation [2004; revised 2005, 2019]
• Disbelief: On the idea of “the suspension of disbelief” [2003; revised 2019]
• Blogs: A Brief Reader’s Guide [2003; revised 2019]

❦ Blog Posts that Didn’t Quite Manage to Become Essays

• Six Zoom Meetings Before Lunch: The enchanting prelude to The Magical Powers of a New Shirt [2020]
• Until the End of the World: On a long-vanished and recently reissued film [2019]
• On Poetry and Bullshit [2019]
• On Morning Pages: If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly [2018]
• Nameless Decades [2018]
• Drake’s Equation and the Church [2018]

❦ Poems Originally Published Elsewhere

• Cadenza and a Found Fragment in your Firetorn Books: Plain text versions of poems that first appeared in issue #5 of Wine Cellar Press
• Otata: Six poems that first appeared in the now-defunct Otata, with their proper lineations restored
• Time & Times: a poem originally published at Selcouth Station, which is no longer online

❦ Projects and Other Distractions

• Finished: Books I finish reading each month [January 2019–present]
• Book Spine poems: poems assembled from the titles of books [2018, 2022]
• The Pencil Tour: A browse through my pencil cups [April 2020]
• The Random Walk: A month of randomly selected books from my library [May 2020]
• Bookmarks from bookstores I’ve visited over the years, or which I’ve discovered in used books [July–September 2020]

❦ Meta

• Tools: A brief overview of the analog hardware I’m using at any given time