Not really a year-end post

I didn’t feel like doing a regular end-of-year post, so instead, a few scattershot comments, punctuated by photos.

Thought a lot about communities this year. How to make spaces for people to connect, how to both contribute and listen, how to balance time between the people I mostly interact with via screen with the ones I see face-to-face. How to make the most out of the occasions when I get to see People From Inside the Computer in real life.

Also thought a lot about attention and to what and whom I was giving it. A slogan I heard on one of the many podcasts to which I have been listening keeps repeating in my head: “pay attention to your attention;” e.g.: the things you spend time pondering, obsessing, & ideally being delighted and enthusiastic about. Note that this is very different from “spend more time being anxious about your recurring anxieties”!

Speaking of enthusiasms, I don’t think I’ve mentioned here yet that I wrote an appreciation of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone for Hilobrow.

One of the books I really enjoyed this year was Boel Westin’s biography of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. Always, it’s books that illuminate the difficulties as well as the satisfactions of doing creative work that I most appreciate.