Genius Loci Newsletter on Jeremy Bassetti

[Genius Loci] A Self-Study Syllabus, Gilgamesh, Audience Capture, AI Threats

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0500

I write to you from an airport terminal, which explains why this month’s dispatch is delayed. Not that you noticed. Most of July, before I left, belonged to a set of four-thousand-year-old texts. One was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I read for the first time in 25 years, since I read it at the community college that now employs me. This time I’m reading it more soberly… soberly enough to notice that much of what gets called “the text” is really someone’s interpretation of it. In fact, everything is a kind of interpretation, including what we perceive, think, and create.

A Method to Start New Projects: The Self-Study Syllabus

The history of ideas as an academic discipline is young. It’s usually traced to Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s and laid out his method in his book The Great Chain of Being. This book gave the field its founding assumption. An idea (say, “the great chain of being,” or for my purposes, “the sacred mountain”) can be traced across centuries and civilizations.

Not everyone agreed with that assumption. Michel Foucault spent the greater part of The Archaeology of Knowledge — I think — arguing more or less the opposite. What looks like one continuous idea is often several distinct ideas that use the same word. Around the same time, Quentin Skinner made a related point in his essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” If you read an idea outside its historical context, he argued, and you’ll mistake your own assumptions for the past’s. Ideas evolve and context matters.

I mention this all because it is related to my own project. When I look at how mountains have been imagined across thousands of years, I often wonder if I am I following one continuous idea (“sacred mountain"), or cataloguing a series of unrelated ideas that happen to share a similar concept or a landform. Lovejoy may have been concerned with “continuity” or tracing an idea throughout time, but I find myself more interested in noticing them pop up in time. In other words, I’m less interested in connecting the dots than dotting some possible connections.

These writers — Lovejoy, Foucault, Skinner — were writing for other academics mainly. Their debates assume a graduate seminar’s worth of context. But a project like mine (global in scope, aimed at a general reader) needs a method too. I have been building what I’ve started calling a “self-study syllabus,” essentially a reading list broad enough to cover the period I’m thinking about, assembled before I know which threads are worth pulling on.

What I am talking about isn’t similar to a chapter outline. An outline might be about shaping a narrative or an argument, about weaving research into a story, which is the harder and later work. A self-study syllabus is about surveying the field, getting a general sense of the lay of the land before deciding where and what to build.

Because my project is global and aims to be rooted in the history of ideas, I started with the earliest textual records we have, those from Mesopotamia. This part of my syllabus contained primary sources like Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, the old Sumerian Bilgames stories, some myths and so-called “dialog” literature, some cultural artifacts like the Babylonian Map of the World, and so on. During the first part of the upcoming fall semester, my goal is to finish primary research into Mesopotamia.

From here I have a few directions I could go next: the Judeo-Christian world, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece. While my instinct is to move chronologically, it is hard to do in this case. What is most important here, though, is committing to an area not too far afield and exhausting it. Do no read around willy-nilly, no not skip straight to synthesis. Survey a period on its own terms before deciding what you actually want to say about it.

Reading Gilgamesh

The first place my syllabus took me this month was back to the Epic of Gilgamesh — a text I hadn’t read in decades. I had forgotten how good it is (had I known to begin with?). Gilgamesh is a great, if strange work. The hero is a tyrant. He is violent, rash, and hard to root for. As a human, he mostly sucks. But he grieves for his dead friend, and that grief earns the reader’s sympathy. His friend’s death changed him. The story is fascinating, complicated, and full or literary and cultural tropes we would recognize in any Hollywood movie or modern book: literary cliffhangers, antiheroes and complicated characters, men sowing their wild oats and women “domesticating” them, human pride and the destruction of the environment, and so on.

My first reading many years ago was a narrative retelling. This time, I wanted as close to a literal translation as possible. I settled on Sophus Helle’s newish translation. Though I wish I had known before buying Helle’s book that, while his translation seems faithful, the translator is nonetheless a poet and he took poetic liberties — he even says as much in the introduction.

Helles’s translation is good. But the gold standard — even Helle acknowledges this — is Andrew George’s two-volume Oxford edition. Heavily annotated, George’s academic edition is the one every serious scholar works from. It is not to be confused with George’s earlier, more affordable Penguin edition of Gilgamesh aimed at general readers. I went looking for the scholarly edition after finishing Helle’s translation. I found a copy in a library. It’s magnificent, and it costs about $600 for both volumes — accessible to institutions, to research libraries, to perhaps a handful of scholars, and to almost no one else. George’s Penguin edition is, taking everything else into account, might be the best for everyday readers.

Since finishing Gilgamesh I’ve been reading further into Mesopotamian letters. I read again the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, and the old Sumerian Bilgames stories. A lot of the Mesopotamian texts can be found on the electronic Babylonian Library, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and other online repositories.

I wrote about each on my On Mountains blog:

Fortunately, most of the Mesopotamian primary texts are short. However, the secondary scholarship is not, and it’s a real hazard for a project like mine — endlessly interesting and available and capable of eating the time I should be spending moving forward. My plan is to read the primary sources first, see which threads are worth pulling, compile my thoughts, and then dive into the secondary sources.

Rebuilding my YouTube Channel Around the Work

For a few years I’d been posting photography-adjacent content on YouTube. I used photography as the entry point into what was interesting me. I’d talk about my Bolivia work, for instance, through a photography lens. In these vidoes, my main interest (mountains) was secondary to the tool (the camera). In hindsight, that was backwards. Photography should have lived at the margins of that discourse, not be the frame around it. But the photography angle was the easier sell, and I built a small audience on YouTube because of it.

Eighteen months ago, I made a video on the photographer Josef Koudelka that was meant mostly to encourage other photographers to do more with less. This video alone pulled in over 550 new subscribers (over 25% of my total number) and helped get my channel monetized. I don’t care much about subscriber counts as an end in themselves, but they matter when the algorithm determines whether to keep showing your work to others. For me, this meant that video was quietly training YouTube to find me more people who wanted similar photography videos, not more people who were interested in my projects and research.

This is the much-feared “audience capture.” It is the way a platform’s feedback loop can push creators into creating more of whatever already struck a nerve. This is why some bands never evolve. “Audience capture” trains you to ignore your interests in favor of that which “performs” better.

I keep thinking of Kierkegaard’s claim here, that “the crowd is untruth.” Shaping your work to what will be legible and popular to the masses is at odds with pursuing “truth” or what’s actually worth making. Pandering to the algorithm is about conformity and consensus (like the outputs LLMs produce), and doing so betrays the self, the spirit, the individual.

My Bolivia video — the video of mine I’d argue is the most historically and culturally substantial one I’ve made — has picked up only around 200 views since March, making it the lowest-performing video I’ve ever posted. The photo community (the community to which most of my subscribers belong) doesn’t care about the subject at all. Fine. But this means that, if I want to continue on my current channel, I need to start over. It means letting the old, photography-interested subscribers slough off and building a new catalog of videos.

This isn’t really a YouTube problem, or even really a me problem. It’s the problem anyone doing slow, specific work runs into the moment they try to work in public view: the thing that gets you noticed is rarely the thing you actually want to be known for. More people are searching for the latest camera from a well-known manufacturer than for your weird, specific, nerdy project. That gap is the difficulty.

I unlisted most of the old photography-focused videos. And I am rebooting my YouTube channel with my mountain work as the organizing principle — subscribers be damned. Photography stays, but only as a tool in service of the larger work, not a topic of its own. I’ve posted a ”Welcome to My Channel” trailer, along with a piece on mountains in the Bible and their bearing on the crucifixion story that probably nobody will watch. There’s also an angle of my new study, still a little cluttered, in the new videos if you’re interested in seeing how it turned out.

LLMs and Life.

Is AI Killing “Informational” Writing?

Tim Ferriss recently wrote about the collapse of his own prescriptive nonfiction book sales — down roughly 80% since 2022, on current trend. He writes: “The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh.” His more interesting claim is that: “The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind at length on a subject it has bled for—might get smaller, but stranger and more interesting.”

On a subject that someone has bled for.

Nonfiction is broader than the prescriptive, how-to end of the shelf, but the decline isn’t isolated to the genre Ferriss operates in. Travel writers and bloggers have watched their informational posts get swallowed whole by AI tools that answer the question directly, without sending anyone to the source. It’s a rerun of an earlier disruption lead by the bloggers themselves: guidebook sales evaporated once bloggers and social media influencers started giving the same information away for free and in different formats.

If Ferriss is right that the market for information is collapsing, the real question becomes: which kinds of nonfiction books are doing something a chatbot can’t?

I’d like to think that history, narrative nonfiction, current affairs, journalism, and the like are kinds of nonfiction genres the chatbot can’t do well. People who don’t read history often assume, understandably, that it’s a chronicle of settled facts. It isn’t. It’s an interpretation of the past, a story built out of events, sometimes advancing genuinely new research or evidence, but just as often simply telling the same past in a new, more illuminating way. That act of interpretation is the historian’s actual job. It is not a job an LLM trained to predict the next likely word can do, because there’s no “likely” version of a genuinely new interpretation of the past — only a synthesis of readings that already exist. Ted Chiang made this point about AI-generated text in general: a large language model is, in his phrase, a blurry JPEG of the web — compressed, lossy, a reconstruction of what’s already there, warts and all. It can remix, but it can’t have bled for anything. The kind of nonficiton writing that might survive will be the kind built on lived experience, interpretation, and the new/now.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

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[Genius Loci] Offices, Rooms, Backrooms

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I write you from the comfort of my new home office, a room I’ve renovated with my own two hands, a room that I’ve unintentionally been calling a “study” and a “studio.” I don’t know why I reach for these words instead of “office,” but I like to tell myself it is because I see it as a place where a certain kind of intellectual and creative work occurs, a place of dreaming as much as doing.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that the intimate spaces we inhabit like bedrooms and offices are charged, imaginative spaces that shape our thinking. Any space we live in “bears the essence of the notion of home,” and the chief function of the home is that it “shelters daydreaming,” “protects the dreamer,” and “allows one to dream in peace.” How a space earns that power is an essay I’m thinking about writing. But as I renovated this space, a few questions kept turning around in my head. When does an “office” become a “study” or a “studio”? Are there real distinctions we should be careful about when we use these words? Or is it just a pretense?

My study (ahem) still has all the hallmarks of a newly-moved-into space: unadorned walls, books and random items strewn about, the lingering scent of fresh paint and drywall dust. With enough time, most of these hallmarks will give way to more mature signs of life, to evidence of an inhabited place. As for now, I’m just happy to finally sit in a space I built myself to do The Work.

The early days of demolition.

Renovation Reflections

Before some random room can become a place, it has to be project. And this one nearly broke me. I did very little reading (see below) and writing. The renovation took longer than I had planned (what doesn’t take longer than planned?). I had hoped to be done by the end of May and working in the room come June 1, but the demo/renovation was harder than I expected. Holding a panel of 5/8” drywall up against the ceiling with one hand while screwing it in with another was something I hadn’t imagined doing at the outset. How does one person do this? Using a makeshift frame that I built from scrap lumber (I named it “Nate” after my neighbor who failed to show up and help me one day), I was able to muscle a few panels of drywall into place and screw them in. Even with “Nate” helping me, it was hard work. The real Nate eventually showed up, thankfully, but the work was no easier… just faster.

The room is not done, technically. I had dreamed of hanging wallpaper and wainscoting, of laying a faux-wood flooring, but that would have delayed my move-in date even further (to say nothing of adding to an already ballooning expense). Instead, I painted the walls using leftover paint (a shade of white called “Jasmine Flower”), slapped down a cheap rug I found at an outlet store, and called it a wrap.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

It’s been at least a couple decades since I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I came back to it, this time in audiobook form, as I renovated my own room. Originally a series of lectures given in 1928, the little book is worth a read no less because it’s a classic in feminist thought. It examines how women have been systemically (socially? culturally?) limited from participating in creative fields. Woolf makes the case that a woman needs financial independence and space, both physical and metaphorical, to do any kind of serious intellectual or creative work.

I understand the importance for women to have a room of their own, so-to-speak, especially considering their historical deprivation of it. But I also found Woolf’s premise generally holds for… everyone? Financial independence, whether that be from a man, an alienating day job, a master, an oppressive society, etc. ensures that one has the time and resources one needs to think and create. Having a dedicated, quiet space ensures that one can be comfortable to think freely and create without interruptions or external demands. When we quote Woolf’s famous line “a room of one’s own,” we often omit the second half of the sentence: “with a lock on the door.” One needs to be protected — physically, financially, metaphorically — from distractions that take one away from The Work.

I put a deadbolt on the door I hung, with the help of my father. This puzzled my wife. With a smile, I told her it is to protect my books from thieves. I don’t ever expect to lock myself in the room while I work, but doing so might be a helpful ritual or symbol.

There are many well-known examples where beautiful work has been created without spatial and financial luxuries. And, conversely, there are many well-known examples of luxuries and comforts killing creativity. But I believe Woolf’s general premise to be a good one in creating the general conditions for creative output.

Remnants of insulation.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

At the end of the semester, a friend let me borrow Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi. She mentioned it was an easy read and that I’d be interested in it given my interests in journaling and note-taking. The story uses short journal entries written by the protagonist as the narrative device, whose brevity I’ve found helpful while reading at night and before bed.

The book — at least the first half — might be the book one looks to when studying “atmospheric” writing. The titular character, Piranesi, lives in a labyrinthine structure called “the House.” The House is endless. It has statues. Tides regularly flood rooms in the House. Only one other person lives in the House. There are birds too, and a few skeletons. That’s about it. It is incredible how much sense of place and atmosphere the author is able to conjure with so little. It is positively weird.

The book reveals itself to be a psychological thriller, maybe, or a work of pseudo-science fiction. I enjoyed the book, and especially Piranesi’s optimism, his journalistic spirit, and his ability to find beauty in an otherwise bleak, isolated space.

Backrooms (film)

I went to the cinema for the first time in three years and saw Backrooms, a psychological thriller/horror film. What drew me to the film was its showtime and its competition. I had a narrow window to watch a movie and it was either Backrooms or The Devil Wears Prada 2. It was an easy pick. I didn’t know much about the film, or its context, prior to watching it. But I’m glad I did.

The movie is a psychological thriller set in a liminal space, or a “non-place” as Marc Augé might call it. I won’t spoil the film for you, but the plot involves a furniture store owner finding a portal into an endless labyrinth, an eerie abandoned office building with early 1990s wallpaper, ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lighting. The early-’90s vibes are spot on, which is all the more impressive when we remember its creator Kane Parsons is so young he cannot even buy alcohol in the USA (per Wikipedia, he was born in 2005 and turns 21 on June 18).

Parsons’s work was “discovered” through his YouTube channel. I love stories like this one, which illustrate the power and importance of sharing your work online or with others in your field. His work is exceptional, it should be noted. Even his YouTube work exhibits a quality above and beyond those in his peer group. And there is a little luck involved. For every one Kane Parsons there is an entire swarm of other creative minds who get lost in the multitude. But you can’t make the basket if you don’t take a shot at it.

I’d be remiss not to mention that Backrooms has some interesting overlap with Piranesi: the labyrinth, the portal into the space, the relationship the space has with memory, the psychological and sci-fi elements, the sense-of-place being constructed with so little. They pair nicely together.

Drywall taped and mudded.

I sign off from a backroom of my own, this one small and safe and bolted from the inside, where I now turn my attention to The Work. I’m naming this space The Beehive as a metaphor for work and a kind of teeming energy.

Today — right now — is the first time I’ve been able to sit and work in this place. I don’t have all my items moved in and organized yet. But things will fall into place.

I leave you with some points I need to remember before embarking on any future renovation project. Maybe they’ll help you too:

Consider hiring someone else to do the work.
Demolition is just as difficult and transformative as building.
However long you think it will take to complete your project, multiply that figure by 2.
However much you think it will cost to complete your project, multiply that figure by 2.
You can learn how to do most things yourself.
But you’re not a pro, so don’t expect professional results (drywall mud, I’m looking at you).
Also but, you’re competent and able-bodied, and you can deliver results that are good enough.
If your father offers to help you (if anyone offers to help you really, but especially if your father does), don’t hesitate. Always say “yes.”
See point 1.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Drywall sanded (yes, I wore a mask).

Wonky iPhone photo, but nearly done!

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[Genius Loci] Summer Break, Renovations, A. G. Sertillanges, The Work Begins

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

Greetings from the far side of the academic year. It is officially summer break, which checks out. The past few days in Florida have seen near-record heat. Thankfully the humidity has been relatively low, and rain is coming in the next few days to cool things down. I feel free, but also a little lost, like a man standing in the middle of a forest unsure about where to go. But it is more an anxious-excitement lost than a scared lost. There are too many options and possibilities.

I know I complain a lot about how little time I have during the academic year to devote to The Work. But scheduling my out-of-office auto-responder to end on 18 August 2026 has made me forget about the toxins that leach into academia, the so-called “service to the college” and “other duties as assigned." These noxious elements are properly alienating for the professoriat. They take us away from our primary roles: serving students, doing research, writing. And it makes increasingly less sense if and when an school’s administration and local government do what they want anyway. Anyway, enough of this for the next three and a half months.

Three and a half months!

This time will be a kind of detox. I’m ready to get to work, to focus on The Work. You know what I mean. This summer is about making space. Clearing the academic residue out of my system. Pulling sheetrock from the walls of a garage room. Rereading my book proposal with honest eyes and reworking it with careful hands. All of it, making literal and figurative space to do one’s work, is the same project.

New Essay: A Higher Calling

I published a new essay called “A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From” last month about the ways in which creative people have described their “vocation” or “calling” — that feeling some of us have of being driven or compelled to pursue our work. Some describe this impulse as coming from a higher power. Others, it is a kind of internal impulse.

The essay is an essay in the proper sense of the term: a test, an attempt to examine ideas and figure out what I think about a topic. I’m happy with it, not least because I learned something while writing it. Specifically, that what I had always felt as my “calling” has a long history entangled in religious and spiritual thinking. And this is a powerful motivational force for work.

“The Intellectual Life”

My essay “A Higher Calling?” was inspired by a book I read: A. G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life (amazon|bookshop).

In his book, Sertillanges calls intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He also offers a vision of what intellectual practice looks like. His vision is a Catholic one, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Considering its foundation is set in medieval Christian thinking, the book can feel dated. For one, Sertillanges speaks of the intellectual as a man’s occupation, whose wife must acknowledge her husband’s sacred call.

Leibniz reportedly said, “there is no book so bad that you could not get something out of it.” Sertillanges himself suggests something similar: intellectuals must look for what is true and useful in all works, even flawed ones. He asks us not to “linger endlessly over differences” when we read, but to focus instead on what serves our projects and mission. It is as if Sertillanges has given us permission to salvage his text for its useful parts — or, as Thomas Jefferson once described the moral teachings of Jesus, to find the “diamonds on a dunghill.”

I don’t mean to imply Sertillanges’s book is a dunghill. But some parts shine more brightly than others. Among them: a framework for living the so-called “life of the mind,” and a discussion of the necessary sacrifices one must make to live this kind of life to its fullest. If rigor and dedication are central to this lifestyle, readers of The Intellectual Life might be surprised to find Sertillanges also advocating for balance, moderation, and play.

His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles walk into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world. His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world, that one consciously adopts.

The study with a pile of drywall.

Study / Studio Remodel

Since Luciano came into our lives, our house feels smaller. What was an office became Luciano’s bedroom. What was a dedicated guest room became a multipurpose room: office, guest room, storage. Books are everywhere. Battery chargers. Old cameras and rolls of developed film ready to be cut and archived. Stacks of mail I thought I’d get to. My desk has become its own episode of Hoarders. It isn’t comfortable for our friends or family when they visit, though they’re too gracious to complain. And it isn’t a comfortable place to get work done, to retreat in quiet comfort.

There is a small room in the back of our garage. At 12 x 6 feet (roughly 4 x 2 meters), it is half the size of a small bedroom. When we were viewing this home, the realtor joked that it would make a good “man cave.” It is that kind of space, detached and private. The room is unfinished. It has poorly hung drywall barely painted white, no insulation in the walls or ceiling, no door, no electricity within the room itself. Its window is a single-pane antique. The room is usually a sauna.

I am going to renovate the space into a proper study and studio. To do this, I’ll need to pull down all the sheetrock from the walls and ceiling, rip off the furring strips and drywall screws, run electricity, insulate, hang new drywall, install a door, install a new window, add flooring, and so on.

I’ve never done anything like this before.

There is no going back. I’ve already started renovating it. In the past week, I have completely gutted the room, stripping it down to the bare block wall. I punched out the old window and hung a new one. I installed new outlet boxes — as it turned out, the room was already wired on an unmarked 20-amp circuit. And oer the next few weeks, I’ll finish the job… hopefully.

The goal isn’t to make an Instagrammable workspace in line with my “dark academia” predilections. The goal is to get a functional, comfortable space into operational condition as soon as possible.

Book Proposal

The workspace matters for my summer work plans and my work On Mountains. My larger goal is to get the book proposal into good enough shape to solicit feedback from friends and mentors, so I can begin querying agents later this year. I’ve already written a solid draft, so I’m not starting with a blank canvas. But I need to get clear and honest about the book’s angle and boundaries given my current work and life conditions. I have two possible paths: one more appealing, the other more realistic and less costly in time and resources. One version of the book is the book I want to write. The other is the book I might actually be able to finish given my current constraints. I’m trying to figure out if those are the same book.

This process will also necessitate creating an outline, which sets a clear path on where to go and what paths to ignore. Having this constraint will be helpful for creative clarity.

The proposal, like my new study, isn’t finished. But the summer has started, and that’s enough to get excited about… On that note, I’m off to enjoy a birthday snack.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Happy(?) birthday selfie after installing a window.

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[Genius Loci] Between the Lamp and the Sun

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I skipped last month’s newsletter. And even as I type these words, I’m tempted to skip this month’s too. I find myself pursued by the writer’s oldest adversary, that self-destructive feeling that one has nothing to write about. I use the word “feeling” here deliberately because that’s what it is. It is an emotional response not grounded in any reality, at least not for me.

Sometimes this feeling is wrapped in shame and avoidance. It is better to remain silent than to confront the fact that I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to accomplish. This becomes especially destructive when we rationalize the shame away. Besides, nobody wants to hear about minor progress anyway. Other times, this feeling is wrapped in self-doubt. I have nothing worthy to say. I have no new insight to provide. I have nothing to contribute. Nobody cares about what I have to say. Nobody wants to hear from me, of all people.

Yet, as is often the case, our feelings are contradicted by reality.

In fact, when I think about it, the past few months were especially full and busy. They were full and busy in the positive sense. I read several books related to my research, and a few for pleasure. I wrote thousands of words, some of which appeared on an On Mountains post about mountains in the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I edited and published a documentary about a Bolivian pilgrimage to a sacred mountain on YouTube, which consumed no small portion of my time. And I spent a great deal of time thinking.

And life was also positively full and busy domestically. My mother came to visit from abroad, I painted the house during my spring “break,” my son had his second birthday, and our family has been riding bicycles in the evenings after dinner.

In short, the past few months have opened many doors, they have provided many opportunities to reflect upon and to write about.

And yet, if what I felt was just an illusory feeling, that’s not to say that the feeling wasn’t justified. The fullness crowded out the time and space to dedicate to reflecting, synthesizing, and creating.

Maybe we can have days that are too full and busy in a positive sense. Which is to say, to be full and busy in a positive sense is still to be full and busy. It is like you’ve eaten too much kale and broccoli: while nutritious, the fact remains that you’ve eaten too much. You’ve become immobilized. You haven’t left space for anything else. Your portions are not balanced.

What would balancing our daily portions of life and creativity look like? How many hours should one dedicate each day to playing, resting, living, experiencing, consuming, reflecting, synthesizing, and actually creating? Should we even expect ourselves to dedicate a part of our day to reflection and creation much like we expect to drink water or to eat a certain amount of protein or fiber? What would we place at the foundation of our creative pyramid? What would we place at its apex?

The foundation of a Pyramid of Creative Work might be sleep, rest, play, and movement. Above that, consuming, reading, researching sits below reflecting, journaling, and making connections. At the apex of the pyramid might be the product, the creative output.

The Creative Pyramid, generated using artificial intelligence.

The creator needs to have a balanced life and existence.

In his book The Intellectual Life, the French Catholic thinker Anton-Gilbert Sertillanges recommended what we might today call a healthy “work-life balance” to those interested in living a life of the mind. “Give up nothing of what belongs to man,” he wrote implying that even the thinker, the intellectual, the philosopher must not lose touch with what it means to be human. We must live in the world. We must seek rest and joy. Work should not come at the expense of one’s life.

The man who thinks exclusively of his work, works badly: he cramps himself; he acquires a specialized bent which becomes a defect. The mind must stay open, must keep contact with humanity and with the world, so that every time it comes back to its work, it brings capacity for a new flight.

Conversely, for Sertillanges, life should not come at the expense of one’s work. Those who are called to do intellectual or creative work must ensure there is space for the work.

But the takeaway here is appreciating the beautiful duet between work and rest. It is understanding that rest, play, or life is an important, generative part of creative work. Rest doesn’t serve one’s work any more work serves one’s rest. They are mutual dependencies.

Before you call me a “twat” for treating family time as something less than a life well-lived, please know that I am also stalked by another adversary. The work I’ve been called to do has a shadow that grows longer and longer. It is a feeling of never having enough time. The sun is falling towards the horizon.

Unless I am doing The Work, unless I can dedicate time and space to The Work, unless I can embody The Work, I feel as if I am wasting what little life I have left. I know this sounds ridiculous, pretentious, and unhealthy, but it is a feeling I haven’t been able to shake.

That which pulls us away from ourselves can be beautiful and rich and full. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset had a word for this: alteración — the state of being pulled outside of oneself, absorbed by the world. What can pull us away are distractions like painting the house and algorithmic media, but they can beautiful things like birthday cakes and bicycle rides. What makes a human, says Ortega y Gasset, is our power of “withdrawing himself from the world and taking his stand inside himself.” The word he used for this superpower is ensimismarse — the state of being inside oneself. Ortega y Gasset suggests that if we never withdraw into ourselves, we’re nothing but sub-human primates always and forever reacting to environmental stimuli.¹

Luciano in the park next to his father's shadow.

I should say here that, between the birthday cakes and bike rides, I have been writing. But my writing hasn’t been public-facing, which is a specific kind of writing. Note-taking and journaling are different than, say, writing a public-facing piece meant to be read by others. Public-facing writing needs to provide some value, whether it is information, inspiration, or entertainment. Put another way, public-facing writing serves others, while note-taking and journaling are self-serving.

Self-serving work supports a person’s humanity as much as it supports the work one does, as we see in the Pyramid of Creative Work. This type of writing is writing to think, as opposed to public-facing writing which is writing to communicate.

When we don’t produce public-facing work, which we have defined as work that provides value, many of us today feel as if we are not producing anything of value. This is a life-threatening disease we need to treat. The self-serving work, the note-taking and journaling and thinking and reflecting and resting and playing, is valuable. It is an important part of The Work.

The French poet Paul Valéry spent many decades writing in his notebooks between 5 am and 8 am, the time “between the lamp and the sun.” He thought his notebooks to be his most important intellectual output. While his notebooks have now been published and even translated into English, Valéry treated them a kind of private laboratory — a private space in which to think, to experiment, to test, to tinker.

I’ve been tinkering in my own laboratory these past few months. Between the birthday cakes and bicycle rides, between the video editing and this blinking cursor, I have also been thinking and jotting and researching. These form the foundation of the Creative Pyramid — the unglamorous, unreadable, unshared work that makes everything above it possible.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Ortega y Gasset, José. Man and People. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Norton, 1963. Pp 16-18. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] The Work, Creative K-Holes, Dead Forever

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

It’s me, Jeremy Bassetti, giving you another opportunity to gaze upon the strange species of animal called Scriptor dayjobicus strangulatus, more commonly known as the domestic writer-strangled-by-his-day-job.

In this month’s email, you’ll find a personal update, followed by notes on the joys of falling into creative K-holes, author platforms, some podcasts on books and writing, and the music of the Grateful Dead.

The year is 8.7% complete! This fact alone doesn’t unsettle me as much as accounting for how little of this time I’ve been able to spend forging ahead with The Work — the good work, the real work, the writing and thinking work, the research work, the creative work, the difficult but satisfying work, the work that you’d do even if it doesn’t pay the bills. And yet, time is what you make of it. Despite feeling pressure from the classes, the grading, the emails, and the meetings — ¡Jesúcristo! the emails and meetings! —, I’m realizing now that I’ve written over 6,500 words and done quite a bit of research. A good month can thus only be measured by how much of it is spent above ground,¹ surrounded by friends and family, and adding some bricks to that pyramid we call The Work.

While 6,500 sloppy words does not seem like an impressive amount over the course of a month, I’ll put it in my wins column given my constraints. I need to remind myself that I’ve managed to write 6,500 words despite a full-time job and a toddler at home. A toddler who has been having night terrors. A toddler who had an ear infection and the stomach flu for the better part of a week. A toddler who passed along his stomach flu to his parents. A toddler who took great pleasure in imitating the sound of his father retching. A toddler who plastered his father’s sweaty, cold, trembling body with glittery stickers of cute dinosaurs and pink hearts.

Like their quantity, the quality of those words is nothing to gush over. Them words are sloppy — loose. They’re half-formed and incomplete. They’re half drunk and in need a literary intervention. But they are the raw material of The Work. The bricks of the pyramid will eventually get adorned with a veneer of polished limestone. One hopes so, at least, but that’s for another day.

Creative K-Holes

I spent a large part of my free time in January researching the Virgin Mary for a chapter I’m working on. I’m particularly interested in her appearances on and around mountains. Mary might be a mountain climber, given her propensity for alpine appearances. The two best-known Marian apparitions happen to be ones on or around mountains: in Mexico (Guadalupe) and France (Lourdes). In Mexico and France (as in Bolivia and elsewhere), the Virgin Mary was loitering in mountainous areas.

I read two books about Mary. I started with Leith’s accessible The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction, which provides an overview of Mary’s role in the church and charts the history of Marian devotion in the past two thousand years. After reading Leith’s book, I dove into Carl Anderson’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. Anderson’s book is too apologetic — too evangelical — for me, but it is the best kind of book in that it opened new research directions and threw me into what I can only describe as a K-hole.² In this case, the state is caused not by ketamine but by research.

When lost in creative K-hole, one feels time, the environment, and the body almost dissolve. They slip away and we enter a trance-like state. Unlike an actual K-hole, it is a desired state, an overdose of curiosity and absorption. While in a creative K-hole, it is common for the fiend to look up at the clock perplexed that they had spent the last three hours, say, browsing through an online database of Nahuatl hieroglyphs.

This is why it is important to confront, entertain, and consider books you would otherwise dismiss, like I could have done with Carl Anderson’s book. You never know what insight, lead, idea, or turn of phrase you might find in them. In addition to the Nahuatl glyph database, Anderson’s book somehow led me to a small trove of primary sources like the marvelous Florentine Codex and secondary sources like the fantastic book El Altépetl, Origen y Desarrollo.

Academic studies like El Altépetl are among the books that matter most. They’re products of deep research, experience, and expertise. They’re often the distillation of years or even a lifetime of thinking and work. They are real contributions to history. But they rarely sell more than a few hundred copies, probably only to historians and academic institutions. Society gives less attention to what is more important.

Email Lists & Author Platforms

At the end of my winter break, I was thinking about my newsletter and my “author platform.” Authors often feel compelled to “build an audience” or “build a platform” because, as you know, publishers and agents like their authors to reach readers. Having an established platform does help with promotion, marketing, and sales. Forget about building social media profiles. One of the best tools of an author platform is an email list. Email lists are the gold standard, and there are strategies to build and maintain them. My own email list — the one that delivered to you the email you’re reading now, unless you’re reading this via RSS or on my site — actually shrank last year. This might not be a bad thing, after all. But size and growth is often a metric of reach and resonance. I discussed my mistakes with my email list last year so you can learn from them. Avoid my mistakes, grow your email list, and build your platform.

Podcasts

I’ve been limiting my podcast consumption lately, but when a friend sent me a podcast episode on Dante’s Divine Comedy I couldn’t resist. The podcast is called Old School and, from what I understand, its host Shilo Brooks interviews interesting people about the books that changed their lives. The episode was a wonderful conversation about the power of the poem, not least because of the guest’s harrowing story about losing his wife in a car accident when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The guest, a literature professor named Joseph Luzzi, found solace in Dante’s story. Reading Dante was part of his grieving process.

Near the end of the episode, Luzzi discussed academic writing and popular writing. He noted that while popular writing is often characterized as being simpler than academic writing, and academic writing is characterized as being more complicated than popular writing, the opposite is really true. He argues that popular writing is more difficult because distilling complex ideas into simple terms takes a great deal of time, energy, and skill. As I wrote before, academic writing is easier because style, clarity, and the ability to communicate the idea is subordinate to the idea, “original argument,” or disciplinary contribution itself. If communicating complicated ideas in ways that resonate with non-experts is a superpower, it is so because it is super hard.

I also stumbled onto an interview with author Tom Junod sharing his thoughts on writing. I especially enjoyed his ideas on use of AI in writing. Junod notes that writing is hard work as much as it is heart work. It is full of life, energy, and — for lack of a better term — soul. Those who use AI for their writing must think poorly of writing itself — as a soulless, heartless activity. And yet, using AI for soulless, heartless writing like social media posts, TPS reports, and data analyses is okay. But if you’re writing for a reason that matters, if you’re concerned with taste, beauty, ideas, and connection — is this not the stuff of writing? —, then AI can’t help.

Dead Forever

I dropped off a few rolls of film to get developed at a new film lab in town. The rolls were the last three to develop from 2025, shot in the months of May, September, and December. The May roll contained images I took during a Dead & Company concert my father invited me to at The Sphere in Las Vegas. On the day I developed the photos, news broke that the band’s singer and guitarist — Bob Weir — had died. The news caught us off guard. The music of the Grateful Dead has been in my father’s life since he was a teenager. It has been with me all my life, my father playing their albums in our home and car through a variety of media: vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. But the live music was always the best. One mild April evening, my father took me to see my first concert: the Grateful Dead with opening act The Black Crowes. I was too young to fully appreciate what I was experiencing, but I knew it was weird. And weird was good. Between April 1995 and May 2025, my father and I have seen the band and its various incarnations play around 15 shows. The music had grown on me, but my main interest in going to the shows was to go with my dad and to see him fall into a sort of K-hole of his own, absorbed by music he loved and knew so well.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

That is, not six feet underground. ↩︎
A dissociative state where one feels detached from their body and environment as the result of overdosing on ketamine. So I’m told. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] Resolutions, Changes Coming, Friendship

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

A very happy New Year to you and yours!

I’m feeling optimistic and charged for what this year might bring. The New Year grants permission to hit reset. It is a natural transition point, an ideal time to reflect on who we were and who we might become. I know there’s pessimism surrounding New Year’s resolutions, but I’m a proponent of them. Sure, the new year is as a good time as any to make changes. But how can the collective energy around change and improvement possibly be a bad thing? The new year is a psychological break. Sure, most resolutions get abandoned within weeks, but the intention is important as it involves identifying that which needs to be changed. The collective momentum and energy at this time of year to renew, to reboot, to reset is palpable. Ride the wave.

In what’s below, you’ll find the theme of change oozing out of the holes of these very letters. First, you’ll find a personal update. It is followed by a note on some changes to this newsletter and a note on friendship in the digital age.

Personal Update

With the holidays and family in town, December was light on writing. I managed around 1,000 words on my book’s Introduction. Many of those words may end up in the boneyard (a section at the end my document where I bury all the darlings I kill), but that’s part of the writing and editing process. You write to figure out what you think, and then you refine your thoughts or remove what’s not relevant.

On my website, I published two On Mountains posts. One simply announced the arrival of a new mountain-related podcast hosted by Jason König, Jonathan Westaway, and Jonathan Pitches. The second post was prompted by the aforementioned podcast’s first guest, and relates to the idea of mountains a safe spaces or protectors.

I also posted my end-of-year review for 2025. It’s mostly behind-the-scenes thinking about my creative practice and platform. You might find it useful, or you might not. Either way, it’s there. One takeaway from my end-of-year review: I’m doubling down on my creative work and how I share it. This newsletter is part of that recalibration, and some changes are coming to it.

This newsletter will undergo a slight shift. It will continue offering a round-up of what I’ve been up to and chronicling my creative progress and thinking, but in a mosaic-like way — so you’re not stunned by a 1k-2k word narrative in your inbox. The earliest iteration of this newsletter was a series of links from around the web related to travel, writing, and photography. It won’t return to that, exactly, but it will have a similar vibe — linking out and unpacking more as it relates to my own cultural consumption. Not documenting what I’ve been eating, but journaling what I’ve been metabolizing, creatively and culturally speaking. It’s not about performing expertise, making proclamations, or being polished.

The long-form essays and reflections won’t go away. They’ll just migrate from the body of the newsletter to my site’s Fieldnotes section, where I’ll link to them in these round-ups. I’m doing this to clearly delineate my writing and thinking, but also — honestly — to give space for the more important work (my proposal) instead of this self-imposed deadline and pressure to churn out something substantial every month. Sometimes the best way to write the thing that matters is to stop pretending everything else matters equally.

Marie Høeg, Ingeborg Berg, and Dog in a Rowing Boat, ca. 1895–1903.

Friendship

An online friend and I started an accountability group for creative work. We designed it to bounce ideas, offer support, share encouragement, and give feedback when requested. It feels good to have this space for camaraderie and idea generation. But having it also forced me to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have many friends. Very few real, flesh-and-blood, spit-in-handshake friends, at least. Certainly few in my area I can talk to about creative work. Few writer friends. Few eager to form new friendships, to shoot the proverbial shit.

I suppose modern adulthood is like this. We’re too busy with our own lives to make space for genuine friendship. I have a handful of work “friends” (if you can call them that), and some real friends (one of whom graduated from the work-friend category to the friend-friend one). But none that are undergoing the same creative struggles I am. Friend’s don’t need to be facsimiles of ourselves, but the more aligned you are with a friend the better you two are able to relate to one another, to understand one another. The standard advice to make friends revolves around interests: if you’re into, say, crocheting, attend a crocheting meetup. But what if there’s no local meetup for “people trying to finish their non-fiction book proposals while holding down a day job and trying to build an online platform”?

Sometimes my wife asks me who I am texting with. And she seems perplexed when I tell her I am chatting with “So-and-so, an online friend.” And yet I feel saying the word “online” diminishes the friendship. Online friends are real friends. At least they can be. We have real conversations. We share pain and sorrows and small victories. We might not have suffered or endured physical rites of passage together like the kids in The Goonies. But if you form an online friendship, they are your people, even if geography separates you. This is one of the great gifts of the internet.

But if proximity doesn’t matter, why then has the communication with my highschool and college friends, who all now live far away, been reduced to sharing memes and videos on social media? That you have a shared past with someone is important in the definition of friendship, but that you have a shared present with someone is important in the formation and of new ones and in the maintenance of the ones you’ve already made.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

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[Genius Loci] The Notebook as Life Interface

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

A few days late in posting this, I write to you with a sense of joy. Sure, the holidays have something to do with it. But a bulk of the joy I feel comes from the realization that five days stand between me and the winter break. Granted, these five days will be five long ones with grading, emails, and meetings. But I can almost taste the glass of eggnog I will drink after reporting final grades to the college.

After a personal update, in which I discuss a month off social and algorithmic media, I’ll make the case for a notebook being the only interface one needs in life.

Personal Update: A Month Off the Algorithm

In response to last month’s Genius Loci, in which I complained about having too many inputs, an acquaintance recommended that I stay off algorithmic media (social media apps and sites, YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, etc.) for the month of November. I followed his suggestion and realized that the overwhelm I reported feeling had as much to do with the quantity of inputs as it did with the quality of my consumption. In other words, while the input overdose was real, the nature and subject of the media I had been consuming contributed to the frazzle. Media in the “creator economy” niche saturates the brain with all the things it could or should be doing, or it subconsciously reminds you that you need to catch up with these gurus who are “killing it.” Giving that up has proven helpful. This is not to say the clouds parted and the heavenly beams of productivity shone upon me. I still had work obligations — teaching, emails, meetings. But at least I felt a bit more at ease.

Somewhere in that ease, with my mind a bit calmer, I wrote an article called Servitude as a Service: Reading Kant in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I also read and wrote an analysis of Kalidasa’s epic Sanskrit poem The Birth of Kumara. Instead of podcasts, I listened to audiobooks. Two, in fact, both of which I recommend:

Keith Houston’s The Book is a wonderful history of the book. It touches on its constituent parts: paper, ink, writing, printing, design, and form. Book nerds will appreciate Houston’s sprawling, global history of the object we all can’t live without. It paired nicely with Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was such a gripping, insightful listen that I purchased a physical copy. Allen’s book traces the huge impact using notebooks had in history (more on this below). Allen shows how foundational notebooks were to the cultivation of arts, sciences, and commerce. Notebooks underpinned the commercial revolution during the Renaissance with double-entry bookkeeping. They advanced the arts, allowing artists to sharpen their skills. They enabled poets, thinkers, and writers to collect a mass of ideas that would otherwise vanish into the ether. Notebooks are foundational to human flourishing and progress.

Notebooks: The Only Interface You Need

If Roland Allen’s The Notebook helped me understand the extent to which notebooks have helped humans think, it also helped me reflect on my own notebook writing and thinking (and the impact digital devices have had on them both).

I started using a notebook in the early 2000s. For Christmas one year, my stepmother gave me a wonderful, little notebook with rough, fibrous paper. It was very clearly handmade, the ripped cover material folded over on the inside covers to form makeshift pockets. Deceptively light in weight, it was a beautiful object. But it was also an impractical one. It had pages of varying thickness, which only sometimes caused the ink to bleed through. The paper, prone to tearing under a fine nib, was scratchy to write on. I put the book down sometime in early 2005 with more than half its pages unwritten. In the half I used, I wrote travel narratives and other cringeworthy cultural observations. But I also noted exchange rates, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, card game scores, hostel and flight information, quotations, book titles, and fleeting thoughts. There are several strings of numbers, jottings of places and names, the meaning and contexts of which I have long forgotten. I sketched and drew in it, including a map of possible routes through Europe in winter 2005. I never went on that trip, but it dawns on me now that I am reviewing the map that I traveled along a few of the legs of the imagined itinerary many years later.

For that brief period in the early 2000s, before the days of smartphones, this notebook helped me remember, reflect, and ruminate.

I picked back up the note-taking habit in the early 2010s after returning from a stint in Spain. I regret not keeping one while I lived in Europe. What memories would that journal have preserved? I ask that question because my post-Spain journals idealize my time there. A notebook from that time would have captured memories and feelings now long forgotten. It too would have captured account numbers and passwords; random addresses, phone numbers, and names; sketches and drawings; bitching and complaining; notes on my research; scattered thoughts and half-baked insights; crappy poems; and it just might have pushed my life in a different direction. In short, it would have accumulated the evidence of a life lived.

My notebook wasn’t a tool. It was unmistakenly an interface for my life, an extension of my mind.

The map I drew.

What is an interface? The word was first used to refer to a boundary between two separate objects or bodies. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan used it to describe the place where two discrete systems interact. Soon after McLuhan, the term was used to describe the object or apparatus connecting those systems (as in “a USB interface”). Now we might think of an interface as something that someone uses to help them control something else. What comes to mind is a computer terminal or a physical dashboard with buttons and knobs. In this imagining, the user is the central “system” in an interface, the agent that controls the action of the other non-human system. An email inbox and its software are thus communication interfaces. Social media and text messaging might be friendship interfaces, lamentably.

In our smartphones, we have interfaces for friends (social media, text messaging), for work (inboxes, Slack, dashboards), for entertainment (streaming platforms, algorithmic media), for commerce (marketplaces, payment and banking apps), for health (fitness trackers, telehealth portals), for learning (educational platforms, tutorial sites), for mobility (ride-sharing apps, navigation systems), for governance or access (digital IDs, authenticators, password managers), for productivity (habit trackers), etc. Smartphones have become the primary interfaces that stands between us and our lives.¹

Despite the smartphone acting as interfaces for much of our external lives, we seldom acknowledge that we’re missing an interface for our inner lives. We use interfaces to communicate with others, but seldom do we use them to communicate with ourselves. Even the idea of communicating with oneself carries negative connotations. Despite nearly all of us sustaining an inner monologue at all times, the idea persists that only lunatics talk to themselves. To “get in touch with oneself” seems woo-woo or suggests a deficiency: you need to get in touch with yourself because you’re out of touch. Keeping a notebook or journaling is often characterized as childish, immature, romantic, or (for a man) effeminate.² Journaling now treads too close to self-help, “life hacking,” and productivity circles that to keep one is now to suggest you’re trying to “optimize” your life because you, or your life, is suboptimal.

The Case for Notebooks

Despite (or beacuase of) this, I keep coming back to the one interface that doesn’t make me feel like quitting: the old-fashioned notebook.

When compared to a digital device, a notebook has distinct advantages. Firstly, its value is non-transferrable. Nobody is eager to steal a notebook off a table or snatch one out of your hand. Using one doesn’t promise any renumeration. In it, we follow our own minds, thoughts, and interests instead of being distracted or strung along by some algorithm. It therefore feels clean and satisfying to use one, free of any implicit or explicit transaction.

But what about digital note-taking? For me, physical notebooks are better than digital ones. The main reason is because I struggle to stick with one digital note-taking system: I have notes in Apple Notes, some in Obsidian, some in iA Writer, some I sent to myself in emails, and some I keep in Zotero. None has ever felt quite right. No wonder I feel scattered. What’s more, note-taking software puts guardrails around your interactions with it. It forces you to interact with it in a certain way. It constrains you to text-based input and reminds you when your writing isn’t grammatical. The physical notebook doesn’t remind you if the word you invented isn’t in a dictionary. It doesn’t alert you if your passionate burst is fragmentary. It doesn’t prevent you from drawing, sketching, gluing, pasting, or blotting. It doesn’t conceal your penmanship, your shaky sentences reminding you that you were on a plane or bus, or your quick hand a reminder of your anger. It is a direct interface with oneself, as unmediated as you can get.³ No data collected, no privacy policies to confirm, no batteries to charge.

The notebook as interface works well because it is not meant for anyone else. It prefigures an intellectual solitude that results in intellectual authenticity and honesty. It allows us to confront our own thoughts, unadulterated, anywhere.

What makes a notebook such an important life interface is its physicality. The physical act of using a notebook — our muscles, our motor skills — helps us process information. And when we write a note in a notebook, it exists in physical space, not in a digital one that can scroll away, that isn’t fixed in space. The physical aspect of note-taking is what has been so helpful for thinkers throughout history.

Typing notes on a device doesn’t offer the same tactile feedback. It doesn’t carry the same emotional resonance. Perhaps this is sentimental, rooted in a growing aversion to the digital encroachment into our lives. But digital note-taking has never felt satisfying. What’s satisfying is the physical, tactile nature of the analog notebook — making a mark on the material world, smudging graphite, smearing ink. Most of us would agree that writing (and receiving) a handwritten letter hits differently.

In his chapter on Charles Darwin, Roland Allen discusses Darwin’s note-taking habits. Of course Darwin took field notes, capturing observations while traveling on the HMS Beagle. But Darwin also had a dedicated notebook to think out loud — to ask questions, interrogate himself, challenge and test ideas. It was his inner monologue made material. In this way, notebooks are prime examples of interfaces. They don’t just record the evidence, artifacts, and residue of life. Rather, they help us negotiate life, make sense of it, and develop ideas.

When used, a physical notebook ceases to be a tool and becomes an extension of the mind.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

The big twist at the end of this horror story is that we are becoming nodes in the system. We’re no longer the end-users. We are becoming the medium through which technology operates, not the other way around. ↩︎
Those who think this way have forgotten that Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, was an avid journaler. ↩︎
Apart from thought itself, perhaps. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] Inputs and the Information Firing Squad

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

For reasons you’ll read about below, October felt full. Not in the satisfied, wholesome sense. In the uncomfortable, bloated, sick-to-your-stomach sense. After a personal update, I’ll share some thoughts on the modern condition of having too many input channels.

Personal Update

Despite feeling overwhelmed, I’ve managed to get some work done. I published three articles on my website, all on the On Mountains sub-site. Two articles involved my Bolivia work. I posted an overview of the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña, and an article detailing how the Festival blends indigenous cosmology, Catholic devotion, and political authority. I also wrote a piece tracing the evolution of sacred space in the Torah.

I also published an interview with Lance Richardson about True Nature, his new biography of Peter Matthiessen, on my Creative Journeys podcast. The book is worth a read. Also check out Ryan Murdock’s interview with Richardson on his Personal Landscapes podcast.

What will November bring? With any luck, I’ll carve out time for more work amidst the overwhelm described below.

Last month I said I would write about mountains in Kālidāsa’s Sanskrit epic The Birth of Kumára, but the book hasn’t budged from the top of my to-be-read pile. I doubt I’ll be able to resist its beautiful seaglass green color for much longer. Unless another shiny object catches my attention, the Kālidāsa work will start when I’m done making sense of my notes on mountains in Dante’s Commedia.

The Information Firing Squad

It is difficult, if not impossible, for someone to live and work optimally when they have too many inputs. By “input” I mean: information that enters into a system and demands processing.

In many cases, the problem is not the quantity of information but the quantity of channels of information.

Think of those challenge games where a ball runs through a metal track — like a miniature roller coaster — and a participant must grab the ball as it exits a chute and reintroduce it into the track. The participant, who has one hand tied behind his back, loses the game if he drops a ball. A new ball is introduced into the track every few minutes, making the challenge increasingly difficult. One ball is easy to manage. A second complicates the game a bit. A third requires concentration. A fourth… there’s always a breaking point. One ball too many ensures that all the balls fall to the ground. Now imagine the balls don’t get introduced on a predictable schedule. And instead of falling out of one chute, they can fall out of one of several and often at the same time. This is the world we find ourselves in, a challenge game that is impossible to manage, much less win.

We have too many inputs in our lives, too many balls to juggle. We have too many touch points.

Reflect, for a second, on your input channels. Mine might look similar to yours. At work, faculty have two different email inboxes, one for admin and one for students. We have meetings that occur on Teams, Zoom, and irl for a variety of committees and initiatives. We have department meetings, faculty assembly meetings, committee meetings, policy meetings, student meetings. We have meetings to plan for meetings. We have a few information dump (“communication”) channels like instructional spaces and a proprietary message board, both with relentless pings and notifications. Sometimes we use Google Docs to share and “collaborate,” other times we use OneDrive and Microsoft 365. On top of that, we have classes to teach and homework to grade. This is just at my day job. Add this all to our personal channels for communicating with family and friends: WhatsApp, text messaging, Facebook, Instagram. Add our domestic, life-related channels: snail mail, email. Add our entertainment channels: social media, podcasts, Netflix, traditional media. Add to this our creative interests and their respective input channels. This is not the proverbial “firehose” of information. It is a firing squad.

It is hard to think clearly in this environment. It is near impossible to excel, to live and work optimally and meaningfully, in such a hell. This environment is the human equivalent of a distributed denial-of-service attack — too many requests and the system shuts down.

In a recent post, Craig Mod wrote

It’s impossible to be “authentic” (to maintain some kind of “core integrity”) or to access anything resembling “true creativity” when plugged into social media. Social media destroys whatever it is I feel out, alone, in the middle of a big walk, connecting with people, writing, looking closer and closer still at the world.

Social media is of course part of the problem. Smartphones are part of the problem too. They, to use Craig’s phrase, “teleport” us away from the immediacy, the nowness of life. But the problem is much larger than the social media and smartphones. It is a problem born of the so-called “information age.” Too much of anything is bad. The same goes for information, inputs, and everything the contemporary human has to keep in mind and to keep track of. Our brain can’t keep its “mental charge,” as my wife calls the ability to consider the infinitude of modern obligations. It is a distinctly modern condition that seems to be getting worse.

This digital overload is a bad LSD trip, one that shows no signs of letting up. How many more hours of this do I have in store, you ask yourself? How many more days, months, years? When your sanity gets restored, you cannot shake the synthetic aftertaste it leaves in your mouth and that hollow, empty feeling deep in your soul.

Henry David Thoreau, who lived and wrote as the world had begun its sprint towards modernity, had already felt modernity’s deleterious effects. In his book Walden, he wrote:

Still we live meanly, like ants… Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau uses the word “detail” here in a negative sense, as unimportant minutiae and the multitude of unessential things that prevent us from enjoying life. In order to succeed in this environment, one must be a “great calculator” of all these details. We must possess sufficient computing power to be able to process all that is coming at us, lest we drown (Thoreau’s metaphor) under its crush.

Later in Walden, Thoreau lampoons those who are addicted to the news in a way that resembles the contemporary affliction of checking a smartphone compulsively: “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’”

If Thoreau teaches us anything about living in the modern world, it is that we can resist the modern world, or at least control for its deleterious effects. We don’t have to play along. We can live in the world and not be of it, if you’ll permit me to borrow the early Christian idea that makes a similar, if spiritual point. We can resist these forces just as we can succumb to them. The injury from the firing squad, it turns out, is a self-inflicted wound. It is punishment for a crime we didn’t have to commit in the first place.

But how does one pull this off?

My impulse is to withdraw as much as possible. To disengage, to pull back, to become a ghost, to turn on “monk mode,” to cut ties, to tune out the noise. But “monk mode” is impossible to do at work. That is, if I want to keep my job.

I suspect that one need not retreat into the woods like a Thoreau-like hermit. One need not renounce civilization, to find some real or spiritual mountain in the middle of the desert like Anthony the Great and the other Desert Fathers. Though, I must admit, the idea does have a nice ring to it.

The general plan of what to do becomes clear when we ask ourselves a simple question: what do we want to do with our lives? Juggle balls or create something interesting? We can’t do both. Taken in this light, it is clear what to do. Sever all but the most important inputs. In short, we need to be thoughtful about our ignorance.

That’s all for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

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[Genius Loci] Documenting Documentary Work, Life in the Margins

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

Like August, September was jammed packed. I continue to be slammed with obligations and details I needn’t bore you with. But these past two months got me thinking about the composition of our lives, especially what makes them meaningful. After a short personal update, I’ll share some half-baked thoughts on what it means to live life in the margins.

Personal Update

I don’t have much time this month, so I’ll be brief:

My new YouTube video is live. It is a POV-style film where you follow me as I document Cerro Calvario in Bolivia using a few cameras.

With the video finished, I’ve returned to writing. I finished writing some notes on mountains in the book of Deuteronomy, rounding out the Pentateuch. I also wrote about the Arc’teryx firework controversy on the Tibetan plateau and what our online discourse reveals about our cultural ignorance.

October brings a few podcast interviews, after which I’ll turn my attention to mountains in one of the greatest poems in classical Sanskrit: The Birth of Kumára by Kālidāsa.

Life in the Margins

I am a middle-aged male human, sitting on my couch in the precious morsel of free time I have, reading the biography of an accomplished writer who led an interesting, if tragic, life.

Lance Richardson’s new biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, has accompanied me this busy month — which has itself forced me to reflect on time, how we spend it, and what our lives are made of. But it was less Matthiessen’s story itself than the book as an object — as a metaphor — that provoked an idea.

In books as in life, its magic happens in the margins.

If a biographer were to write my biography, what stories would one include?

A biography of my life wouldn’t be worth reading. My first three decades were lost years — lost to youth and lost to universities. The time in my fourth and, now, fifth decades has been mostly consumed by a career that I’ve complained about before: in a Venn diagram, the nature of my employment and what I find to be interesting and worth doing in this life overlap only a smidge.

Yet despite our day jobs consuming a disproportionate amount of our time on this earth, some of us strive to live interesting lives and do interesting things.

My biographer wouldn’t write about how many students or classes I’ve taught, how many committees I’ve served on, or how many meetings I’ve attended. My biographer won’t write about how many days I’ve showed up to work despite feeling under the weather, despite facing personal hardship. A biographer wouldn’t address any of it. But a biographer might write about (the failures of) the creative life I’m trying to live on the margins of this job.

Isn’t the working man the happiest in the margins of his life?

For the conventional worker today, our lives are like the pages of a book, most of which are consumed by another person’s narrative and ideas. The story is written by other people or other forces (our bosses, our context, our culture, our society), and we follow along. Yet, we have an opportunity to take notes in the margins.

The margin is the most interesting part of a book. This is where the thinking and connections happens. This is where a book gets owned, where it makes and impact, where it relates to a reader. There is not a lot of space in the margin relative to the other text, and what we’re able to contribute there is concise, fleeting, fragmentary, yet dense.

The margins of our lives are the weekends, the evenings, the holidays, the lunch breaks, the quiet moments where we are left to our own devices.

It is a pity that life has been relegated to the margins in the first place. Yet these are the moments that we remember most. Perhaps we remember them most because these moments are the rarest in today’s world of all-consuming work. We only have a few holidays a year, after all. And those days are markedly different than the weeks we spend under fluorescent tubes. But I would like to believe that we remember these moments most not because they’re rare, but because they’re the moments in which we feel most alive. We spend our time doing the things we want and living through moments we all seek: creating, being around family, enjoying our solitude, thinking, falling in love, reading. As Byung-Chul Han notes in his book Vita Contemplativa, culture is created in spite of the modern condition of all-consuming work, not because of it.

What we “write in the margins” - the “inactive” and “unproductive” time we spend living outside of our day jobs — helps us make sense of the story. It gives our lives meaning.

For many of us, we are too fatigued in the evenings to think. On the weekends, too busy catching up with chores and errands to enjoy what little time is available. It is all too easy to surrender to Netflix or TikTok. Yet it is precisely because this time is so vulnerable that it is so precious.

Let’s not surrender. Let’s aim to increase the white space — to increase our margins so that they’re no longer marginal. To make more room for our story. To have more space dedicated to ourselves. To contribute more of our own selves and creative energy to this life. To not feel guilty or unproductive doing so. This is the goal at least, to have a page where the space dedicated to the text block and the margins have inverted.

That’s all for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

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[Genius Loci] Fieldwork in the Cochabamba Valley

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I’m back from South America and I have a lot to share. Though finding the time to sift through the material I collected on my trip — the videos, audio recordings, photographs, notes, and interview transcripts — has been a challenge because of the sheer amount of data I collected on the trip. And because the back-to-school chaos, the family visits, and a sniffling toddler have consumed all my time and energy. This is a way of apologizing that the September 2025 installment of Genius Loci is a few days late. But here it is! In today’s issue, I reflect on my fieldwork in Bolivia, offer you a note of encouragement if you’re like me and slammed at your day job, and leave behind some bits and bobs for you to pick at from around the web.

Personal Update

It felt good to be back in the Cochabamba Valley last month. It was late winter in the southern hemisphere, and the Cochabamba Valley felt like spring — the valley’s namesake is after all Bolivia’s “City of Eternal Spring.” And unlike my first visit to Bolivia, the altitude didn’t make my head feel as if a dagger had pierced it.

As I mentioned last month, the goal of this trip was to do more documentation and research on and around the holy mountain, Cerro Calvario, during the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña and its pilgrimage. No high or mighty photo projects, no “pop-up newsletters,” and no grand goals this time. My only objective was to do fieldwork: researching, experiencing, engaging, documenting, and thinking.

I conducted more interviews this time. I spoke with shamans working at the foot of the hill on and on the hill itself. I spoke with “miners” — those who take care of the mines and ceremonial spaces on top of the hill. I spoke with vendors, pilgrims, and dancers. Heck, I even spoke with the former mayor of city that hosts the festival — Quillacollo.

One highlight of the trip was meeting a few healers and shamans I met and photographed three years ago. I was hoping to see some of them again, in fact. So I printed their photographs and brought them with me. Of the three healers whose photographs I printed, I only found one. He was happy to receive the image. I met another shaman I previously photographed, but I didn’t have his image printed.

When I returned from my 2022 trip to Bolivia, I remember feeling upset that I didn’t record any video. I had a few reels or stories that I posted to my Instagram, but nothing deliberate or considered. So, I made it a point to record a lot video this time. I think I have enough material for a few films, which I’ve already begun working on and will post on my YouTube channel soon.

One of the videos is a POV-style walk-along that I recorded on the two busiest days of the festival, when the activity around the mountain makes the conditions less conducive to carrying out formal interviews. I strapped an action camera to my shoulder and photographed the activity on and around the hill.

I also recorded most of my interviews and plan to release a longer, more considered documentary about the festival and the events on and around the hill.

I have a lot to unpack, a lot to unravel and untangle.

Priority #1 is finishing the videos I mentioned above. Deadline: September 2025.

I somehow got monetized on YouTube late last year, which means I’m generating revenue on the platform (currently a whopping 39 cents per day based on my meager views). But YouTube threatened to take away my monetization if I don’t post again. Any writer, artist, or creator will tell you that getting paid for one’s creative work is rare. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, 39 cents per day is around $145 a year. This amount will help pay for some of my tech stack (website hosting, email service, creative subscriptions, etc.). I don’t want to give this up, so I need to feed the beast and publish another video within the next two weeks.

Priority #2 is folding in my fieldwork into the chapter I’ve been working on, which is more difficult than it sounds. Incorporating new research and material into a solid draft cannot usually happen without a substantial overhaul of the draft. But I’m here for this. Deadline: December 2025.

Also on my agenda the last quarter of 2025:

An analysis of mountains in Deuteronomy
An analysis of mountains in the classic Sanskrit work The Birth of Kumára by Kālidāsa
A review of The Scent of Time by Byung-Chul Han
A review of Resonance by Hartmut Rosa
A few more podcast interviews

All that to say, a lot of good work will be coming your way in these last four months of the year—YouTube videos, analyses, articles, podcast interviews, and possibly more.¹

My trip to Bolivia coincided with the country’s bicentenary, which was cool to experience — lots of parades, patriotism, and public debate about the future of the nation.² But the presidential elections in Bolivia disrupted the dates of the festival and forced me to return earlier than I would have liked.

Also forcing me to return: the fall semester.

Stay Energized

Teachers and professors will know what I’m talking about. Every new academic year starts with a flurry of institutional energy: meetings, committees, red tape, emails — oh, so many emails! Add to that some course prep and, once the tap opens, a steady stream of grading that won’t stop for another 16 weeks. As anyone who has hunkered down during a hurricane will tell you, not all energy is a positive energy.

Yet amid all the busywork of a day job, you need to find time to continue the real work — the fulfilling creative work, the book idea you’ve been chewing on for years, the research you’ve been conducting for just as long. You don’t need to just “find” the time. You need to carve it out. Fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there. Oh? You’re already tired? Take what you can get — a hundred words here, fifty there. It’s all too easy to veg-out in front of Netflix at night, but doesn’t a hundred words better the next day?

This slow march forward is progress. And though your work does not compete against the work of others, your dedication is as rare as it is difficult. Most people on this planet will not yield as much creative output as you.

Stay energized on your work, that nucleus around which you find yourself orbiting like a charged particle.

Bits and Bobs

If you’re interested in the philosophical side of space and place, you might want to listen to this heady interview with philosopher Jeff Malpas. The interview is actually on a photography podcast, The Land Behind, but fortunately they speak very little about photography.

Read Thomas Swick’s article about Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, published half a century ago this year, and its place in the history of travel literature.

Speaking of trains, look out for Monisha Rajesh’s new book, Moonlight Express, out now in the UK and soon in the US (Bloomsbury). I got word that Tharik Hussain’s new book Muslim Europe is scheduled to come out at the end of November (Penguin/Viking). I also got a press release about an interesting book about Peru to come out early November (Icon): Another Bone-Swapping Event by Brad Fox.

That’s all for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

I am considering the idea of publishing a photo zine or a pamphlet towards the end of the year. ↩︎
From what I understand, Bolivia seems to be veering towards a more free-market approach as the elections dealt a blow to Evo Morales’s hitherto dominant MAS party. ↩︎

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

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[Genius Loci] Back to the Andes, Deep in Admiration, and the Substack Problem

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

As you read this month’s note, I’m on a plane going back to the Andes where I will continue my research on a syncretic mountain pilgrimage. I’ll have more to share about my work in the Andes in September’s newsletter. For now, I’ll leave you with links to my work I published in July, a note about Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Deep in Admiration”, and a half-baked rant about growth narratives on social media platforms and how they harm the culture of the platforms they celebrate.

Back to the Andes

I’m heading back to the Cochabamba Valley to do more research on and around the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. I plan to write more about the events in future On Mountains posts.

Unlike my previous 30 days in the Andes, I will not send out a pop-up newsletter. Having a pop-up newsletter — a newsletter that is bound within a short period of time — is a good way to generate a lot of material because of the expectation and pressure to produce it. But I’m packing light, leaving my computer at home, and don’t need the pressure to produce given my objectives.

As I wrote in last month’s newsletter, my main objective is to interview more people about the pilgrimage and the mountain. I also have a side quest to record a lot of video, with the intention of publishing a few YouTube videos. This means my still photography will take a back seat in this year’s trip.

My Work

Despite the summer semester ending, which comes with grading and administrative overhead, I had a productive July. Notably, I published four On Mountains posts discussing mountains in the Books of Exodus (part 1 and part 2, Leviticus, and Numbers. I’ll finish out the Pentateuch when I get back from the Andes. Then I’ll take a short break from Judeo-Christian ideas to explore mountains in an epic poem written by ancient India’s greatest poet: Kalidasa.

I also published two podcasts episodes: one with Ed Bernbaum on his book Sacred Mountains of the World for the On Mountains podcast, and the other with Aatish Taseer on his book A Return to Self for the Creative Journeys podcast.

Lastly, I blogged about Byung-Chul Han’s book Vita Contemplativa.

Deep in Admiration

I’ve recently come upon Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Deep in Admiration,” which is the Foreword of her 2016 collection of poems Late in the Day. It is a beauty. In the short essay, Le Guin says that the our culture is a throwaway culture, in part propelled by (or portrayed by) what she calls our modern “technofix.” To be better stewards of our planet, and our relationship with it, “we need to relearn our being in it.” This involves relearning our biological kinship with life on the planet, and our symbiotic relationship with the Earth. In describing our relationship with other beings and the plant, Le Guin uses a metaphor we are familiar with: we are “nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections.” That to subjectify (rather than objectify) the world is “a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.” It is to recognize the subjective agency, to acknowledge our kinship, of and with the natural world. Our use of language and poetry is a particularly strong way we can subjectify the world.

The Substack Problem

Thesis statement: Growth narratives on social networks like Substack harm the platforms they celebrate by encouraging others to replicate their success. By “harm,” I don’t mean to suggest harming the platform’s growth or profits. Rather, I mean this in the sense of culture, creativity, and form. Growth narratives help turn platforms into memes of themselves.

I’ve been thinking about the culture of social networks lately. There’s a pattern I keep noticing, and it’s becoming hard to ignore.

Sign up to any social network and you’re likely to get bombarded with what I call growth narratives: content about success and succeeding on the platform. Your feed gets flooded with posts that lionize the platform itself. I suspect the platforms push these types of narratives because they show users the value of using the platform.

The problem is that using the platform becomes equated with growing on these platforms, building audiences on these platforms, and making money on these platforms. Income takes precedence over ideas, metrics and money over meaning, subscriptions over self-expression. It becomes about the game, not about “the good.”

Substack is essentially a glorified blogging platform that syndicates content via RSS, email, and its walled garden. I suspect many of its users weren’t writing or blogging before joining the platform, which means that many of its users are writing in order to make money and capture audiences. Even writers who were writing and blogging on their own sites have switched over to Substack explicitly for its audience/growth implications.

We all want to be heard. We all want to be validated. But Schopenhauer warned us about writers who write to live instead of living to write. The whole writer-reader relationship on Substack is predicated on the idea of the writer generating cash or cachet from the reader.

Many users now arriving on Substack aren’t riding the wave. They’re getting sucked into its undertow, where they are sure to get beaten and battered. They’re essentially propelling the momentum of others. Why? Because they’re copying the playbook, thereby validating the genius of the original play. I tend to disagree with Walter Benjamin here, who believed reproduction destroys the “aura” of works of art. I reckon it does the opposite.

Growth narratives being irresistible, they compel new users to copy and mimic these success narratives. This creates a mimetic culture, a platform-specific form and tone, on the social network itself. The platform “has a voice,” one might say charitably. Maybe it is better to say “it has an accent.” Which is just another way to say people are copying content of others in order to game the algorithm and in pursuit of a similar success. From language (“smash like”) to form (reaction videos, jump cuts, Mr. Beast Face), a platform eventually becomes a meme of itself. Without a doubt, AI is making this worse.

At around 1,000 words, that’s it for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] A Few More Days in the Andes, Summer Books, Creative Journeys Podcast

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

Fear not! I offer you a shorty after last month’s loooong missive. In this month’s post, I’m off to spend a few more days in the Andes this August, some links to my work I published in June, and more!

The first half of the year is in the books. Despite a few setbacks, the month was a productive one. Among the setbacks was my son getting slammed with a case of hand, foot, and mouth disease — a viral infection producing pox-like sores, some of which can manifest in the mouth and throat thereby making eating/drinking a living hell. All this as his molars were erupting. All this with guests in town. All this with some last-minute, day-job-related hot potatoes to juggle. It has been a rough month to say the least. But now we’re on the other side of it, thankfully. And we’re back to work!

As I wrote in last month’s newsletter, I’m ramping up my On Mountains work. Much of this work is about accumulating a repository of notes and data. It is about processing information and thinking in real time. It is about opening dialog and signalling to the world, This is what is important.

It is early yet, but having a singular focus feels good. Invigorating and clarifying, even. With a singular focus, it is easy to see what is (and what is not) worth doing. I also strangely helps open up a world of possibility. It is, therefore, not constricting but liberating. Liberating, because the focus also frees you from the tyranny of choice, the dictatorship of having too much, and the oppression of an open field.

A Few More Days in the Andes

In one month, I’ll be on a plane heading back to Bolivia for the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña.

As I recounted in my book The Hill of the Skull, I visited the festival on my last trip to Bolivia. That was three years ago. But now I’m going back. Why? To learn more about the mountain. To spend more time with it.

And I have some new objectives:

Interview more people than before, especially pilgrims, shamans, and religious leaders.
Document more, including more video.
Listen more and plunge more deeply into the feeling of the holy mountain.

The mountain that pilgrims visit during the festival is the subject of one chatper in my book proposal. So, the main goal is to get the material I need to finish the chapter!

The presidential election in Bolivia has been scheduled for August 17, and Bolivian law prohibits public gatherings around the elections, presumably to curb protests, coups, and other political unrest.

Originally scheduled for occur around the elections, the pilgrimage and festival was moved by organizers a week earlier. The calendar change might impact the amount of visitors, but I do still expect many thousands of pilgrims to descend upon Quillacollo.

I will (probably) not do a pop-up newsletter this year like I did last time. But keep an eye out for August’s Genius Loci newsletter for confirmation and a special announcement.

My Work Published Last Month

Is AI Making Us Dumber? — I forgot to link to this last month. In this post, I reflect on the impact AI has had on teaching… and some alarming trends.
The Burnout Society review - I wrote a brief review on Byung-Chul Han’s most-popular book. I will be reading his body of work in the coming months.
Mountains in the Book of Genesis - For On Mountains, I wrote about the symbolic nature of mountains in the book of Genesis.
Some Writing Advice from Robert Macfarlane - After listening to an intervew Macfarlane gave, I wrote-up some points that resonated with me.
2025 Mid-Year Review - To keep myself accountable, focused, and on track, I’ve written a brief overview of the first half of 2025.

Bits and Bobs

Lots of new books this summer. Robert Macfarlane’s book Is a River Alive? (buy) is a slam dunk. Macfarlane has been on the podcast circuit, with new episodes dropping here and here.

Aatish Taseer’s newest book A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (buy) comes out July 15. It is an excellent little book, the kind that one can return to.

I also received copies of Monisha Rajesh’s new book Moonlight Express (buy) and Lance Richardson’s biography True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen (buy). I haven’t had a chance to read these two books yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

In a related note, I’m dusting off the microphone and recording a few new episodes with Taseer, Rajesh, and Richardson for my Creative Journeys podcast. My conversation with Aatish was recorded yesterday, and it will drop soon.

Okay! At around 800 words, that’s it for this month!

Thanks for your support and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] A Strategy to Build an Author Platform, On Mountains, Substack Slop, RSS Readers

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

In this month’s post, some practical steps to build an “author platform” that leverage both traditional and new media, my new project called On Mountains, a rant on the enshittification of culture via Substack and AI, in praise of RSS readers, and more!

Ahhhh. Summer is officially here, which means Central Florida is plagued with high humidity, mosquitos, and afternoon thunderstorms. The thunderstorms are quite nice. They’re loud, dense, torrential, and quick to disperse. As for the mosquitos and humidity: there will be no relief until October, at the earliest.

But, thankfully, I’m indoors a lot. I’m teaching four(!) summer classes. This, unfortunately, means little time for “Jeremy time.” But, as you will read, I’m making the most out of what little time I have left.

How to Build an “Author Platform” in 2025

In May’s Genius Loci, I wrote about my struggles building an “author platform.” Thanks to everyone who reached out after the last newsletter offering words of encouragement and sharing your own struggles with writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor so it is good to know that I’m not alone in my struggles.

Since then I’ve been thinking more about building an author platform, and I’ve settled on a “workflow” that attempts to leverage both traditional and new media methods. This workflow is designed for someone like me who has goals for writing and publishing non-fiction books. I gleaned it from reading a slew of non-fiction book proposals and query letters.

The workflow is simple, but the entire process of building an audience and writing a book will take years. With enough time and dedication, though, the workflow might yield results.

Focus. Ignore what everyone else is doing and focus on your own work.
Find your beat. Choose a topic, theme, or “beat” that you love to write and think about. It will be your subject-area expertise. It should be narrow and specific, yet broad enough to encompass many non-fiction book ideas. For example, “Early America” is a specific geo-historical time period. But, obviously, this intellectual space is huge in terms of potential book ideas.
Create a website. Start a website/blog, Substack, or podcast on your topic. You will write (“create content”) in your subject area. But not before you…
Seek bylines first. Consider writing articles that might work well in traditional publications (in what few remain). Pitch these ideas to online/print publications as a freelance writer. Aim to get paid for your work and to build a résumé of bylines related to your topic.
Repost and expand. If you succeed in publishing an article in a mainstream publication, congratulate yourself. As you enjoy a glass of wine, write a follow-up post/article on your website discussing the piece and link to it. Repurpose the idea however you can. Were sections edited out of the final piece? Has new research emerged since the time of writing/publication? Also, explore “meta” angles: what is it like writing about your topic? Milk it for every drop. If your agreement allows for it, re-publish the piece on your own site.
Website backup plan. If you didn’t succeed in getting your pitch commissioned by a mainstream publication, don’t despair. Write the piece anyway and publish it on your website.
Ideate and repeat. Think of new essay/article ideas and repeat steps 4-6.
Continue creating. For ideas too small or otherwise unsuitable for online/print publications, don’t waste your time pitching them. Instead, go straight to publishing them on your website.
Post and ghost. Share your articles, stories, and news on social media. Engage with those who directly engage with you. Otherwise, stay off social media. This workflow is not about building a social media following per se, but a readership, audience, and platform.
Never get discouraged. A vast majority of all freelance pitches get rejected. Freelancing is a numbers game. Keep pitching. Rejection will happen often; never get discouraged. Write the damn thing anyway, post it on your website, and then start thinking of new ideas to pitch and write. This system is about delivering work.
Bonus: Don’t use AI. Leverage your experience and humanity. In a world where seemingly everyone nowadays is using AI to create slop, your humanity and distinct “voice” will set you apart.

This workflow may sound similar to what online marketers call “content marketing.” Yet, the novel approach here is that you will make a concerted attempt to get your work published in traditional media outlets.

Getting published in traditional media outlets is becoming more important, especially in the Age of AI. I wonder if “AI slop” might just be what saves the traditional publishing world, or at least what’s left of it.

Traditional publishing bylines and credentials were once seen as unnecessary in the new media landscape. The argument went: why suck at the teats of editors, publishers, and gatekeepers when you can self-publish, build an audience, and make a living without them? But now that AI slop is proliferating online so quickly, I suspect bylines in traditional media outlets will take on a new significance (of professionalism? of quality? of authenticity?) in the coming years.

I’ve decided to implement this workflow in my own work.

As you may know, I’ve been working on a book idea for quite some time. Yet I need to get more tactical about achieving my goals. This means, for me, having a clear strategy that optimizes for building a body of work in my area of interest.

Announcing ‘On Mountains’

I’ve started a new microsite/podcast called On Mountains. It explores the intellectual and cultural history of mountains, which is related to my non-fiction book idea. Obviously, this topic is quite narrow, but not so narrow that it will severely restrict the number of non-fiction books I can write in this space (I already have a few in mind!).

I’ve been doing research, reading, studying in the area for a number of years, so I have a lot to say. The new microsite/podcast will be the forcing function to start engaging with the topic in a public way.

This is a long-term project designed to build a repository of articles, research, and notes on the topic as I “work with the garage door open.”

I’ve ported over some of the old mountain-related posts I wrote, and I have been publishing new material like:

An article investigating the relationship between mountains and the site of Jesus’s crucifixion.
A textual interview with archeologist Richard Zettler on Nippur and Ziggurats.
A podcast interview with Dawn Hollis.

Substack Slop and AI?

In thinking about “author platforms,” Substack naturally came to mind.

I’ve been creeping around Substack lately via its social media app. It is a curious space. Its algorithm is serving me a lot of writing about writing and a lot of cheerleading for the platform itself via growth “hacks” and success stories. Worst of all, its algorithm is serving me a lot of flat writing pummeled to death by AI.

The problem seems to be especially prevalent in the photography community. Photographers, whom I know personally and won’t name, have disclosed to me in private that they use AI to “clean up” their writing. They think it is great. They think it makes their writing better. But what they don’t realize is that AI makes their writing worse in that it sterilizes their unique voices. When I chat with them on the phone, or hear them speak on podcasts or YouTube videos, I am astonished by how differently they sound IRL when compared to their Substack articles. They sound nothing like they write.

To fall in love with a piece of writing is to fall in love with its style, tone, and approach. It is the author’s particular way of thinking and seeing, communicated in words, that draws us in. This is the author’s distinct “voice.” AI is a literary plague, killing en masse authors’ voices and their personalities.

I’m not alone in thinking this.

After playing around with LLMs and AI, Robin Sloan reported that they “made the story duller rather than sharper; they clobbered precisely the bits of language (often weird-angled) that were the most fun; they pushed the story’s shape and tone powerfully towards conventionality.”

Sloan’s comment made me consider an analogy. AI produces the literary equivalent of plywood: flat, dry, pedestrian, and composed of bits and pieces from other sources. To be sure, plywood is good enough for most people to build basic things. But, for those of us who seek the good, the last thing we want to enter our brains is the basic: flat, uninspiring, average writing.

Flatness has been a metaphor of the digital age. The world-wide-web is about lateral networks, not vertical ones. The Internet seeks breadth, not depth. Algorithms have intensified the flattening. Just look at how creators chase virality and attention by reproducing and mimicking viral content. AI does the same by offering users predictive text via common, average responses. Algorithms, like AI, thus produce “the hell of the same” and we must resist them both.

Plus, why would anyone give their time and attention to read a piece “written” by someone who didn’t give their time and attention to actually write it with care in the first place? In other words, if someone doesn’t care about the work they’re creating, why should anyone care to read it?

This isn’t inherently a Substack issue. This is an online writing issue. And while there are certainly many real humans who are concerned with the craft of writing on Substack, and some incredible ideas/writers/writing/Substacks, I fear they’re far outnumbered by the humans who aren’t. There is no way for me to know this is true, but if certainly feels like it could be true.

It seems like Substack is the Blogger/Tumblr/Medium du jour. It is the Instagram for those who read and write. It is where the readers and writers are hanging out nowadays. And, for these reasons, it has an appeal.

One writer I follow decided to go all-in on Substack, seemingly charmed by Substack’s built-in audience-building capabilities. In his post on the subject, the writer — clearly uneasy about his decision — stated that Substack is where the “audience growth” is. Another writer/podcaster friend also decided to go all-in on Substack, leveraging the platform’s turn-key, creator-focused features to publish podcasts and essays while notifying his audience and enabling monetization in one fell swoop.

Substack has had a gravitational pull on readers and writers like no other blogging platform. Each month, thousands of writers and creators sign up to Substack because it makes creating, distributing, and monetizing one’s work easy. Famous writers and journalists have flocked to Substack for the platform’s creator-focused features, whose reach and influence is hard to escape.

But I wonder what will happen to the platform if it becomes overrun by AI slop. And I wonder to what extent the algorithm will dictate the type of work published on the platform.

Those who consume and create on Substack will have a different experience than those who simply create on Substack. Those who consume might be vulnerable to the flattering effect of the algorithm, a kind of stylistic group think. Those who simply create might be immune to it.

RSS Readers

One way to avoid the algorithm is to use an RSS reader. Thank god for RSS readers! All hail RSS! RSS - one of the greatest technologies underlying the modern web.

RSS readers help me read/consume online content while avoiding all the bad stuff. I can read articles on websites without ads and notifications. I can read social media feeds without the social media apps and algorithms. I can get all of my reading/consumption in one place that isn’t my inbox, thus saving time bouncing from website to feed to website.

There are many fine RSS reader apps available. But the RSS reader I’m currently using is News Explorer (Mac, iOS). It is a powerful little reader. It can pull in the RSS feeds of most things you like to read/consume online like:

Substacks
YouTube channels
Bluesky / Mastodon users
Reddit subreddits
Podcasts
And ye good ole websites and blogs

And News Explorer, unlike many of the other RSS readers I’ve tested, fetches the entire articles even if the RSS syndicates only summaries. And it is not behind a frickin subscription.

If you’ve never used an RSS reader, download a free one and add the websites you frequent. Give it a go.

Bits and Bobs

I preordered Robert Macfarlane’s newest book Is a River Alive? It came with a wonderful, embossed Fieldnotes brand notebook (they can be bought separately here). I am a fan of Fieldnotes. So too is Robert Macfarlane, having used them for many years in his writing process.

I’ll start reading Macfarlane’s book when I finish The Burnout Society, a short book of philosophy by Byung-Chul Han. In the meantime, Sophy Roberts’s interview with Robert Macfarlane on her podcast Gone to Timbuktu leaves me with much to look forward to.

I also enjoyed listening to Johann Hari talk about writing on the How I Write podcast. The entire episode was great, but the idea that stayed with me was the idea that story and scene need to reveal insights, truth, and meaning. It is the nonfiction equivalent of showing, not telling. Hari says in the episode:

Every insight needs to be earned by a story, right? If I just tell you, the war on drugs was created for racist reasons, okay, you might intellectually be persuaded that. If I tell you the story of Billie Holiday and how she was stalked and killed by Harry Anslinger, the man who launched the war on drugs, which is how I opened Chasing the Scream, that story will land with you in a much more powerful way than if I just tell you this abstract insight, right? Every insight has to be earned by a story.

Okay! At around 2,300 words, that’s it for this month!

Thanks for your support and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] Writing Coaches and Author Platforms

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

In this month’s post, some notes on writing coaches and author platforms, some notable podcasts to binge, and a low-residency MA program in nature and travel writing.

Over the past few months, I’ve been stuck on the freelance hamster wheel of doom - pitching articles to publications, hearing crickets, following up, and hearing radio silence in return. Then I do it all over again with another publication. You know the drill. Zero feedback. So, I’ve decided to seek help. I’m hiring a freelance writing coach to help me improve my pitches and land some articles.

My goal is not to necessarily build a career as a freelance writer or journalist. I already have a full-time job. My goal is to write articles related to my book proposal’s topic in mainstream publications.

This is a tactic in my larger book-proposal strategy, which I reconfigured after reading successful nonfiction agent queries and book proposals (like the ones on Jane Friedman’s website). In many of the queries and proposals I read, authors included information about their “platforms.” They mentioned their blogs (citing traffic metrics) and the articles they’ve published in mainstream publications, both being directly related to the topic of the book proposal. These documents serve as blueprints on how to format a query letter and - more importantly - what to do before someone is ready to query agents.

Having a solid, clear book idea is the obvious foundation for any successful query letter or proposal. Having an “author platform" is also helpful. If the point of these documents is to argue for the “business case” of a book idea (i.e.: that the book will sell and make the publisher money), and that you’re the right person to write the book, then having a platform is important.

Jane Friedman defines platform as “an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.” I agree with Jane, only adding that a platform for non-celebrities includes “a meaningful body of creative work.” But what does this look like in practice? An author platform could be a well-trafficked blog on a specific topic. It could be a track record of covering a “beat,” a specific topic that someone covers in publications.

When reviewing the query letters and book proposals for non-fiction books on Friedman’s site, I noticed that many included blog/podcast details and a short list of professional bylines.

Creating a blog/podcast on a subject-matter is technically an easy thing to do. Getting published in outlets is much more difficult.

From what I’ve been able to discern, it is not 100% necessary to have bylines in major publications to land an agent or a book deal. But it helps because it signals authority, credibility, and expertise. Having a blog on the topic of your book proposal can also signal authority, credibility, and expertise, but getting an article published in mainstream publications can validate the work in ways a blog cannot. Having bylines signals that you, as a writer, are able to work with editors. It signals you can write at a high level. It signals peer validation. It signals the potential for a wide readership. Bylines are not the end-all-be-all of a query letter or book proposal, but they’re helpful.

Authors querying agents and sending book proposals have one chance to grab an agent’s attention. That first impression needs to be as good as it can be. According to Jane Friedman, “The query letter has one purpose, and one purpose only: to seduce the agent or editor into reading or requesting your work.” An agent who decides not to represent an author will likely pass on an updated query letter or proposal.

This is why I’m looking to hire a freelance writing coach. I want my query and book proposal to be irresistible. And I need help pitching articles to publications.

I’ve never had a “writing coach,” but ideally it will be a well-published writer who can help me refine my pitches on the topic of my book idea and land them in publications. I figure that a writing coach might pay for itself if one charges less than what a publisher pays for an article. This could be a sound investment, especially for someone whose income isn’t dependent upon freelance work.

I’ve been in touch with a few writers who help struggling writers with pitches. I’ll let you know what comes of it.

In short, I’ve realized that I am a bit over my skis with my book proposal. I have a solid book idea (I think), but I need to get serious about building a “platform” on the topic. This means my book will take a lot longer than I had anticipated. But the book is the goal, and after feeling a bit lost, I’m happy to find a semblance of a path forward. More on this very soon.

Some author platform takeaways for aspiring nonfiction writers:

If you want to write a nonfiction book, you will need an “author platform.”
An author platform is not an unrealized interest in a subject. By “unrealized interest,” I mean an area of interest/study to which you’ve contributed nothing.
Building a platform takes time.
One common way to start building a platform is to write about your topic on a private website/blog. Share your ideas, research, and work with the world.
Another common way to build a platform is to start a podcast on your topic, interviewing and speaking with others who are already doing work related to the topic.
Writing about your topic in other outlets/publications helps build your platform, as it offers a bit of professional/external validation. Pitch your ideas relentlessly.
Take your writing and your platform-building seriously.
If you need help, don’t feel ashamed to ask for it.

Podcasts

I’ve enjoyed listening to Ryan Murdock speak with Sophy Roberts about her wonderful new book, A Training School for Elephants. He also spoke with Melissa Harris, the author of Next, a biography of photographer Josef Koudelka. It is worth noting here that Sophy Roberts has published a few good interviews last month on her own podcast, Gone to Timbuktu.

I also enjoyed listening to author Dani Shapiro on the Always Take Notes podcast. When asked about the traits of young writers who go on to have successful careers, Shapiro said:

I think that there is luck, there is timing, there is talent. But there is also this other trait, which is a word that the great editor and critic Ted Solotaroff once wrote in an essay called “Writing in the Cold.” In the essay, he muses about the promising writers that he knew and who disappeared ten years on, and then about the successful writers who he hadn’t necessarily thought would go the distance. The word is durability, the ability to endure. ¶ Another way that I’ve heard it described is: you fill a bathtub with water one drop of water at a time. Eventually, you will be able to take a bath. Eventually, there will be a tub full of water. ¶ It really is about the ethic of doing the work regardless. Of doing the work whether or not it’s being accepted and received. Of not being flattened by comparison. ¶ I think the writers who hewed to their own vision stayed true to it. Not believing the praise, not believing the naysayers. Simply writing every day without hope and without despair. Just doing the work.¹

I needed to hear this. Frankly, many creatives need to hear it. We will experience highs and lows. Mostly lows. Don’t let the highs or the lows throw you off course. Continue working towards the goal. Continue working.

If an article idea doesn’t land after a few rounds of pitching and iterating, put it down and move onto the next idea. Then try the next idea. And then try the next one.

Get a MA in Travel and Nature Writing

Applications are now open for the Bath Spa University’s two-year Nature and Travel Writing postgraduate degree program. This low residency, part-time program is taught by Jonathan Lorie and Gail Simmons. Apart from its opening weekend in Bath, England, most classes will be held remotely in the evenings UK time, which may work well for American students. The program seems to emphasize praxis and fieldwork, which is to say instructing the student on the fundamentals of being a working writer. At £9,000 a year, the program isn’t cheap, but surely this is more affordable than its American counterparts. It is worth noting that this is an MA (not an MFA) program.

That’s it for this month.

Thanks for your support and farewell,

The host’s question begins at the 19:59 mark and Shapiro’s reply begins at the 20:15 mark. I’ve edited Shapiro’s reply for clarity and precision; in the interview, she misquotes Solotaroff as saying “endurability” instead of “durability.” ↩︎

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] The Springtime Blues, Vibe Coding, Social-Media Shields

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

In today’s AI-packed missive, some notes on AI’s great, big book heist, vibe coding, a note on my website redesign, the 2025 travel writing book awards, books as social media shields, and a free Field Note journal when you pre-order Robert Macfarlane’s new book.

Heyyy from Orlando, where we’re experiencing the type of weather you’d expect in Paradise. The pollen and itchy eyes and sneezing and nasal sprays are minor complaints. The weather compels you to drive with the windows rolled down and the music turned up. Even music sounds differently in the spring — it enters you more deeply and heightens our love for the world. The general urge is to be out in the world in the perfect spot: half in the shade and half in the sun.

And while I should be outside enjoying the world, I find myself feeling a bit down. It happens to me every spring. The feeling is one of anxiety. It is the feeling of being not where I should (or want to) be, physically or creatively. I feel as if I’ve been wasting time, which is a feeling that has followed me for much of my adult life. From my desk I look through the windows and I daydream about what I could/should be doing instead of slouching over my laptop, grading assignments that were probably written by AI. I wish I were elsewhere, anywhere out in the world…

You might be thinking: just go outside, you schmuck! I do go outside quite a bit, but to be outside is not necessarily to be out in the world. Modern knowledge work treats being outside as a reward for the work you’ve been doing inside. Being outside then, like sabbaticals, is meant to refresh and “renew” you for the grueling hours of inside work you have ahead. This vision separates life from living. By being “out in the world” I mean a state of being receptive, open, and willing to be shaped by experience. To be “out in the world” means not to just move through the world, but letting the world move through you. And every spring, for whatever reason, I’m reminded of what is missing in my life.

Does anyone else feel the Springtime Blues?

Libgen and LLMs

The other day, The Atlantic in an article reported that Meta and OpenAI used the ebook piracy site Libgen to train its AI models. Per the article, Meta got the go-ahead from “MZ” - Mark Zuckerberg himself. It is unclear which pirated books the AI companies used to train their LLMs, but I’m willing to bet that the companies scraped as much data as they could. If you’ve published books, you can use this tool published by The Atlantic to see if your books have been pirated and potentially included in the LLM data sets scraped by Meta and OpenAI.

There seems to be some moral and legal confusion about the issue. To be sure, piracy is theft and a violation of copyright law. Piracy and pirates should be prosecuted. Yet, while stealing books to read them — as it appears these large language models (LLMs) have done — is theft and should be prosecuted, the act of learning from books is not illegal. Meta and OpenAI’s lawyers argue their use of this material doesn’t violate any copyright laws because it doesn’t reproduce the work but uses it in a “transformative” way (a key term used in the defense of copyright claims). But some of our collective unease with the situation revolves around the fact that these LLMs are profiting materially from this data, which itself was acquired illegally if The Atlantic’s reporting is true. Though, with questions of scale aside, it is unclear how this is different than, say, an author reading books, learning from books, and then writing new books. In any case, let’s hope OpenAI’s 2024 deal with News Corp. will set a precedent with the licensing of information so authors can at least get paid for the work these corporations stole and exploit.

Some authors are now questioning the standard inclusion of ebook rights in publishing contracts, arguing that ebooks don’t turn large profits for the authors and lead to “instant piracy” (and thus easily gobbled up by LLMs). I think this is a good move, especially to help authors preserve more of their rights. Others, like the Authors Guild, are advising authors to include a “NO AI TRAINING” statement on a book’s copyright page. Cute, but probably ineffective considering how several AI web crawlers don’t even respect robots.txt files preventing AI bots from scraping websites. It is not like those FBI piracy warnings on VHS tapes and DVDs actually stopped anyone from making and distributing copies.

Vibe Coding

On the other hand, there seems to be some optimism about the coding potential of LLMs.

“Vibe coding” is a new term that refers to prompting LLMs to code using natural language. In theory, you can write or speak instructions to a LLM and it will output what code or software you’re describing. LLMs retain a “chat history” and remember your conversation, thus allowing you to refine the codebase. Other, more sophisticated LLM integrations “live” in your terminal and can evaluate your entire codebase without the standard chat prompt functionality we’ve become accustomed to with AI agents.

The cyberpunk future is here, and it isn’t ruled by the socially-awkward hacker soldering transistors and capacitors to some device or typing into a command-line shell on a CRT screen. It is ruled by people like you an me who need custom tools. At the end of the March 7, 2025 episode of the Hard Fork podcast, listeners called into the show to discuss their bespoke, “vibecoded” software. Even Craig Mod, who knows a thing or two about software development, vibe coded a custom “social media network” for his community, with rate limiting user posts and a disappearing timeline.

You need to have a basic understanding of how software works, and the ability to articulate what you want, in order to implement and exploit the possibilities. In the case of APIs like Claude Code, you’ll need to know your way around the operating system’s terminal (and a lot more). But if you don’t, you can probably ask a LLM to walk you through the process.

I tried it out. While redesigning my website, I encountered some responsive-design issues. I pasted my CSS into a LLM and asked it to evaluate my code. After some back and forth, it solved my problem. I also asked it to organize my CSS file, which it did wonderfully. The process helped me learn a bit more about CSS, debugging, and the backend systems I use. While I cannot pretend to be fluent in any coding language, I’m not a complete beginner. But I still think there is a barrier to entry; those with little-to-no coding knowledge will have some difficulty getting a project off the ground.

Is there an ethical, intellectual property issue with using AI to code? It is unclear. AI models have been trained using code documentation and a large database of public source material. In the case of web development using CSS and html, source code is visible to anyone using their browser’s code inspector and dev tools. Whether learning from this information constitutes “stealing” is a matter of debate, as anyone had the ability to “learn” from it in the pre-AI age.

Website Redesign

If you’re reading this in an inbox, you won’t be able to see my website’s new design. My old site used a design borrowed from astrophysicist Brian Koberlein (he kindly sent me his source code and okayed my use of it). While I love his design, the site was built with his design logic (which is to say, a design logic that didn’t come naturally to me). And there was a bit of cruft in the code - there were references to features that had been discarded/disabled/abandoned.

I wanted to design my own site from the ground up, based on my own design and logic. I want to know where everything is and what every line of code does. My site isn’t fancy, and I’m still ironing out some kinks (I will ask a LLM to help me, surely), but I’m happy with what I’ve been able to create in such a short time. I know my site now more intimately, like an old book I’ve read many, many times.

I’ve also added a commenting feature to my website using Bluesky. For those who don’t know, Bluesky is a Twitter/X clone that has been gaining momentum recently. It is not owned by Meta, unlike Threads, which is a plus. It has a different vibe from X and Threads, much like Twitter did in its early years.

Here’s how commenting on my website now works:

I’ll share posts on my website (like this newsletter) to my Bluesky timeline.
To comment on my website, simply reply to my Bluesky post.
Your comments will appear both on Bluesky and on my website.

Comments don’t “live” on your site. They are just visible on your site via a Bluesky API. Comments are easy to moderate. Just delete the comment and the post disappears. Have a troll? Just block him on Bluesky. Or, to disable comments on a page entirely, just don’t share the webpage on Bluesky.

Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

The Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards announced its 2025 winners last month. Noo Saro-Wiwa’s book Black Ghosts: A Journey Into The Lives Of Africans In China won the non-fiction category, Travel Book of the Year. Elif Shafak’s book There are Rivers in the Sky won the fiction category, Fiction with a Sense of Place.

I haven’t read much travel writing since stepping away from the Travel Writing World podcast. I needed a break from the genre. I couldn’t continue reading books whose genre interested me more than its subject matter. I’ve been making a deliberate point to avoid travel books, to instead find books 1) related to my current research topic, 2) books that I find interesting for whatever reason but are unrelated to my research interests, and 3) books that serve the particular function of being social-media shields.

The social-media-shield book must be:

cheap
easy to carry around (i.e.: mass-market paperbacks)
brainless / entertaining
easy to dip into/out of
devoid of emotional attachment and therefore easy to abandon in a community bookshelf when done

Carrying a pocketable book helps stave off the impulse to reach for a device. If you find yourself with some time to kill, you will reach for your book instead of your device. Keep the book on your nightstand and you will read it instead of your phone. It helps us cultivate focus and attention, which is the opposite of what our phones are doing to our brains. I understand social-media addiction is more of a problem for the younger generation who haven’t experienced the pre-digital world, but it is easy for the rest of us to fall into the trap.

I had two social-media shields last month. The first was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. The second one was Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, which I found in a community bookshelf in my neighborhood. I have no comment on these books, with the exception that they fulfilled the criteria and served their purpose.

I also finished reading Tod Papageorge’s Core Curriculum, which I reviewed here. If you’re interested in photography criticism, the book may interest you. It covers the following photographers: Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Josef Koudelka, and Robert Adams.

Pre-order Robert Macfarlane’s New Book

Pre-orders for Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? are now open. Macfarlane and the artist who created his book cover, Stanley Donwood, have partnered with Field Notes again. If you pre-order the new book from a participating indie bookstore, you will get a signed copy of the book and a Field Notes notebook. For more information, check Macfarlane’s social media post. I believe this deal is for US-based customers only.

Okay. This email is around 2,000 words. Time to shut it down and to go for a walk outside…

Thanks for your support and farewell,

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] E.M. Forster, Byung-Chul Han, & Paul Theroux

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

Hello hello. After a few cold snaps, one of which brought snow to parts of Florida, it is safe to say that spring has sprung. The flowers are popping and a fine layer of yellow pollen has dusted everything. A dip into the pool is surely on the horizon. While the air conditioning will soon start its constant drone to mediate the humid inferno that will become of the Central Florida spring, let’s appreciate this moment for what it is.

If I sound uncharacteristically optimistic, it is because… I feel good. I’ve deleted social media apps off my phone, turned off the news, and given attention to my own work. When discussing Thoreau’s skepticism towards news and media consumption in Walden with my students, they were appalled. Some argued that it was important to consume the news as a way to stay informed about socio-economic and political issues. Yet, to acknowledge, oppose, and protest what one finds objectionable doesn’t require submitting oneself to an unrelenting deluge of doom and despair. In other words, to stay informed is not to stay inundated. When we divert our attention away from news cycles and media consumption, we create the space to engage with the immediacy of our own lives and experiences. I think that was Thoreau’s larger point.

Books

I haven’t read as many books as I had wanted in February due to stupid, last-minute work obligations. Though, I picked up E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Ritual (2019), and Mountain Dialogues: from Antiquity to Modernity edited by Dawn Hollis and Jason König.

Picking up A Passage to India was a whim. It has been standing on my bookshelf neglected and unread for over two decades. This book was, I think, the very first second-hand book I bought online. It cost a cent, plus $2.99 for shipping. I remember how thrilled I was when it first arrived. But, for some reason, the joy didn’t last long. I stopped reading the book halfway into the fifth chapter. The index card I used as a bookmark so many years ago was still wedged between pages 44 and 45. I didn’t remember why I put the book down. That is, until I picked it back up.

After the first chapter, which draws a compelling parallel between the lives of British colonists and their imperial subjects through descriptions of place—showing how the realities of empire were obscured from the British just as the town was hidden from their elevated view by trees—, I found the book to be incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. Still, I gave it a chance. But after the first ten chapters, I gave up again.

Life is too short to trudge through books you don’t find interesting.

Far more interesting for me was a work of philosophy by the contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han. As its name suggests, the Disappearance of Rituals is a book about the loss of ritualistic practice in contemporary society. Han argues the loss is brought on by the “neoliberal regime,” a catchall term for capitalism, globalization, algorithmically mediated feeds, digital communication, and so on. His argument is a little-c conservative one. I wrote a review of the short book here.

I also started to read Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, an academic anthology edited by historians Dawn Hollis and Jason König. I don’t recommend the book to non-historians, Hollis’s more-recent Mountains Before Mountaineering (my review here) being the better choice for the general reading public. Broadly speaking, the book rejects the idea popularized by writers and historians like Marjorie Hope Nicholson and Robert Macfarlane (and countless others) that modern man was first to appreciate mountains… that, as one travel writer recently wrote, “For much of human history, mountains were avoided. They were a supernatural domain of monsters and gods, and only visited by prophets seeking commandments.” Statements like these are simply not true and, given the historical scholarship that has been done in the past decade or so, intellectually lazy.

Podcasts

Paul Theroux chats with Ryan Murdock

Not much to report from podcast land except to say I enjoyed listening to Paul Theroux make the rounds in support of his new collection of short stories, The Vanishing Point. He spoke with Ryan Murdock on Personal Landscapes, which you can also watch on YouTube, and with Sophy Roberts on Gone to Timbuktu. If I am remembering correctly, Ryan’s interview explored topics related to reading and writing, while Sophy’s focused more on Orwell and Chatwin.

Some of Theroux’s reading/writing advice summarized from the two podcasts:

What looks like “the end” is often just a false summit - there may be more ahead, beyond if you keep going.
Write from lived, firsthand experience. Don’t write about topics of which you have no knowledge.
Don’t chase literary fashion or trends.
Make sense of your life through writing about it.
Reading deeply and completely in an author’s work is more valuable than reading widely but shallowly - get to know the writer, not just individual books.
Seek out great writers that are relatively unknown.

What else?

Over on YouTube, I posted a video of my trip to France last December to visit family. I use the trip as a way to chat about a camera, the Pentax 17 half-frame film camera (which I review here).

On my blog, I wrote about something called “post-documentary” photography. This is a newish approach to photography that has been growing in popularity of late, especially amongst photobook publishers.

I’m also working on a couple of new, mini projects about mountains. One is an essay, already at some 4,500 words, which I’ll likely publish here on my site. The other is a new podcast series on mountains, for which I’ve interviewed Dawn Hollis. More about this in the coming weeks and months.

That’s all for this month!

Farewell.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] Creative Synergy, Pico Iyer's 'Aflame'

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:01 -0500

In today’s missive, musings on creative synergy, Pico Iyer’s new book Aflame, and some personal updates.

Creative Synergy

Last December, my son went to France for the holidays, and we returned on New Year’s Eve. The whole family fell ill during our trip, which partly explains why I didn’t publish a newsletter in January. I also intentionally left my computer at home. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have published or updated anything. And that was fine. I needed a break. In fact, I didn’t even bring a digital camera. I took only a small half-frame film camera.

Stepping away from the digital side of things, and not feeling guilty about not publishing the newsletter, gave me some space to reflect on the nature of my digital, online work. I’ve been juggling a lot, and it’s something people often comment on — “How do you do all of this? You have a day job, you run a podcast, a newsletter… How do you manage it all?”

Taking the break made me realize that I don’t have to do any of the work I do. And I probably shouldn’t be doing half of it.

One term that I kept returning to during this time of reflection was synergy. I envy those who have a singular focus, whose work clearly revolves around one central point. I feel that this is one of my fatal flaws, juggling too many things and not having a laser-sharp focus on one.

I’ve been seriously wondering if I have a mild form of ADHD. How do I even test this?

There’s little connection between the various projects I am working on. It is as if they’re siloed off, isolated, and detached from one another. As a professor at a community college, I have a range of obligations, from teaching introductory courses to administrative “service” work. The subjects I teach don’t often align with my research interests, and my service work is wholly unrelated to both. My personal projects are just as siloed. There is little overlap between my podcast, YouTube channel, and my online writing like this newsletter. The different projects don’t always overlap, making it difficult to focus on one when I’m constantly switching between them.

During the period of reflection, I made some decisions to help align my creative chakras:

Officially end the Travel Writing World podcast.
Align my podcasting efforts.
Stop writing my Creator’s Log, which was just another thing keeping me from doing real work.
Delete social media from my phone. Access only on a computer, at most once a day.
Focus on my research projects across all my creative channels.
Read more, write more. Read read read. Write write write.

Ending the Travel Writing World podcast is a psychological win. By keeping it on the back burner, I felt as if I had this unfinished project hovering over me, one that I had to keep an eye on somehow. Shutting the podcast down will help me move on and focus on my current projects. Of course, the interviews and articles will remain archived on the website. If anyone wants to “acquire” the domain/podcast property, let me know.

That said, I’m not done with podcasting. I think the form is interesting. And I’ve decided that having a podcast aligned with my current research would be more meaningful. It’s a natural fit, especially since I need to interview people for my research anyway. So I’m starting a new podcast, which I’ll announce later. I’m not going release episodes on any schedule, which should help allay any pressure to produce “content.” This new podcast is essentially for me and my research, and for those who want to follow along with my research in real time.

You might be thinking: Didn’t you start a new podcast last year? Yes, you’re right. It is called Creative Journeys and focuses on creative process. I don’t feel as beholden to this podcast as I did with Travel Writing World, so I’m keeping it alive and will publish new episodes as they come. I’m not seeking out guests, but I will embrace opportunities as they arise.

Pico Iyer’s Aflame

I spoke with Pico Iyer about his new book Aflame for the Creative Journeys podcast. It is an interesting book detailing Pico’s history visiting the Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur over the last 30 odd years. It begins with Pico’s house burning down in California, the incident that led him to discover the monastery. Incidentally, the book was published here in the US when the Los Angeles wildfires captured the nations attention. The book pairs well with Pico’s earlier, short book the Art of Stillness.

More Personal Updates

I published my 2024 End of Year Review.

I reviewed Dawn Hollis’s new book Mountains Before Mountaineering. Dawn has built her career on dispelling the enduring myth that mountains were avoided and hated before modernity.

I published a video on YouTube discussing/interpreting Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay “On Reading and Books.”

That’s all for this month.

Farewell.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] Media Diets, Gypsies, Print Sale

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:30:00 -0400

In today’s missive, musings on media consumption metaphors, praising Josef Koudelka’s photobook Gypsies, and a some personal updates.

Media Diets

The holiday season is a time when we think about self-improvement. We make resolutions to save money, tackle long-ignored projects, and get organized. At the top of many lists, though, are resolutions aimed at improving physical health—dieting, exercising, and losing weight. We think about starting gym memberships, eating better, and staying active.

This focus on physical health is valuable, but what if we extended the metaphor to our intellectual lives? Just as we work to nourish and care for our bodies, we might also consider how we nourish and care for our minds.

Lately, I’ve noticed more people using the language of food, diets, and consumption when discussing media, information, and ideas. Cal Newport explores this in his recent book, Slow Productivity, and Yuval Noah Harari touched on it in an interview promoting his latest book, Nexus.

But this is not new. In fact, Arthur Schopenhauer remarks on the topic in his essay “On Reading” found in Parerga and Paralipomena. Schopenhauer says:

Just as we upset the stomach by too much food and thereby do harm to the whole body, so can we cram and strangle the mind by too much mental pabulum.

The quantity, quality, and types of information and media we consume matter.

Think of information as food: as too much food and overeating can lead to health issues and disease, too much information can be damaging to our mental lives. How many of us have been paralyzed by “information overload,” or that frazzled stupor after hours of brainless scrolling?

If quantity matters, so does quality.

I used to think all reading was inherently good—that the act of reading itself was what counted. But now, I’m reconsidering.

Sure, we’re reading more than ever before. But much of what we consume comes from screens, served to us by algorithms, influencers, and media corporations. These quick, easily digestible snippets of information are the “fast food” of the intellectual landscape.

When we think of fast food, we picture calorie-rich, nutrient-poor meals—overprocessed and engineered to be addictive. The media equivalent includes social media posts, clickbait articles, and “content” designed to entertain us and trigger emotional responses rather than provide substance.

Harari calls for an information diet, suggesting we approach our media consumption as we do our food choices.

Just as food diets focus on limiting unhealthy calories, information diets emphasize reducing poor-quality “content” that offers little intellectual nourishment.

If fast food represents low-quality media, what constitutes the intellectual equivalent of a nutritious meal? While defining “wholesome” information can feel subjective—and risks sounding elitist—there’s value in challenging ourselves.

To extend the metaphor, let’s consider exercise.

Physical fitness relies on intentional stress, like resistance training, stretching, and cardio, to strengthen the body. Intellectual health functions the same way in that it benefits from challenging material.

It might be a good time to pick up that philosophy book you have always been curious about.

Perhaps we should resolve to implement a media diet in the new year. We could limit the amount of low-quality “content” we consume.

As the saying goes, “You are what you eat.” Occasional indulgence in junk content is probably fine, but a steady diet of it is surely damaging.

Schopenhauer goes a step further, however, and suggests that reading high quality stuff won’t matter if we don’t make space for contemplation. He writes:

For the more we read, the fewer the traces that are left behind in the mind by what has been read. It becomes like a blackboard whereon many things have been written over one another. Hence we never come to ruminate; but only through this do we assimilate what we have read, just as food nourishes us not by being eaten but by being digested.

For those of us who are writers, photographers, or other creatives, this is especially important. The constant noise of digital media can drown out the signal we’re searching for in our work. The New Year is the perfect time to recalibrate, and the media diet metaphor offers an interesting framework for doing so.

Let’s nourish our minds as intentionally as we nourish our bodies.

Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies

Josef Koudelka's Gypsies Cover

I recently got a copy of Joseph Koudelka’s book, Gypsies, a photobook documenting Romani communities across Europe in the 1960s. The book is a beautiful artifact, capturing a world that feels distant yet human.

Holding a photobook like Gypsies is bittersweet. On the one hand, it reminds us of the photography projects that truly matter. On the other, it highlights just how much superficial work dominates the photography landscape today.

Continuing with the fast food metaphor, much of the photography we encounter on social media could be called “fast photography.” It’s quick to consume and often leaves little to no lasting impression. In many cases, the photographer positions himself (and it is usually a man who does this) as the main character—whether through showing off expensive gear or churning out cliché images. This type of work panders to algorithms and audiences. It aims for likes and shares rather than saying anything of substance.

“Fast photography” is the visual equivalent of junk food: repetitive, shallow, and ultimately forgettable. It challenges neither the viewer nor the creator. As a result, it risks reducing the mainstream association of photography as mere “content,” vapid and stripped of its ability to inspire, provoke, or move.

In contrast, Koudelka’s Gypsies exemplifies the kind of photography that matters. The images in this book were captured over the span of a decade, documenting Romani life in Slovakia, France, and Spain, a community marginalized then and still marginalized today. Through his work, we see intimate glimpses into their lives: families in their homes, moments of rest, and the heavy, emotional weight of death.

Photographers and books like this remind us of photography’s potential. All might not be lost.

Josef Koudelka's Gypsies Spread

Where are the Koudelkas of today?

They’re still out there, but they’re harder to find now. Their work is buried under an avalanche of the easily consumed and quickly forgotten. They are the proverbial needles in a haystack, hidden and obscured by all the chaff and dross.

I recently introduced Gypsies to my son, turning the pages as he sat between my legs. His reaction surprised me. Captivated by the black-and-white photographs, he dropped his brightly-colored plastic toy. He drooled on a few pages, and even giggled when he saw another child looking back at him from the book.

This is the same child who gets restless six pages into Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Yet, somehow, he sat through all 109 black-and-white images in Koudelka’s book.

There’s something timeless about this work. It transcends trends, algorithms, and short attention spans. It actually says something that isn’t performative or focused on the influencer. And viewed in today’s context of “fast photography,” it’s a reminder of what photography can be—and perhaps what we should strive for as creators and consumers of visual art.

Personal Updates

I have a new square print sale on my online shop for the holidays. The print bundles are in limited supply and are 1/3 off. Orders made today through December 15 will ship no later than December 16, after which I’m closing the shop until the new year.

I’ve completed Draft #1 of the introductory chapter for my book proposal. They say, “Always write your introduction last,” and while I expect to continue refining it, the introduction currently serves as the book’s spiritual guide—a foundation for the ideas I want to explore.

Next, I’m turning my attention to another sample chapter, this time a proper chapter meant to be placed somewhere in the middle of the book. I anticipate this round of writing and editing will be more demanding, as the chapter will need to dive deeper into the book’s core themes and ideas.

For now, though, it feels good to have an introduction draft in place.

Check out my creator’s log for those quick updates.

That’s all for this month. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

Farewell.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] The Railroad Rides Upon Us

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:30:00 -0400

October was a blurrrr. With only two pediatrician visits, baby Luciano (my son) had a slow month. And fortunately not too much destruction was left in the wake of a visit from Hurricane Milton and my mother. All is goodish here in Orlandoland. I wish at least the same upon you, wherever you are in the world.

In today’s missive, musings on a passage in Thoreau’s Walden, some personal updates, and a few new books to look out for.

The Railroad Rides Upon Us

It is a beautiful October afternoon here in Central Florida and I sit in my backyard reading a few lines from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden again. I don’t know why I pick up Walden. But I do know is one of several books I often dip into as a sort of palate cleanser after encountering so many unsavory ideas throughout the day. Today I come upon a passage about the railroad and the illusory nature of modernity.

Of “modern improvements,” Thoreau says “there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance… They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.”

One such “modern improvement” was the train. The railroad tracks ran within earshot of the cabin Thoreau lived in near Walden Pond. He regularly heard the train rattle and whistle from his cabin as it made its way to Fitchburg from Concord and back again.

The fare to Fitchburg was ninety cents, or about a day’s wages in Thoreau’s time. The 30-mile ride took about an hour. Thoreau questioned if this was a good deal:

“I start now on foot, and get there before night… Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day” to pay for the fare.

In other words, why would anyone spend an entire day working to pay for a train ride when they could make it on foot in that same amount of time for free?

Thoreau’s response shouldn’t be read as a simple affirmation of frugality and what we now might call “slow travel.” It is at its core a condemnation of the backwardness and paradox of modern life.

I’ve been thinking about this anecdote in the context of my own situation here in Central Florida, no less because Thoreau drew parallels between the fare to Fitchburg and those who postpone their lives until retirement.

Thoreau wrote, “No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.”

I am reminded of the parable of the American businessman who asks a Mexican fisherman why he hasn’t built a fleet of fishing vessels to capture the market. “To what end?” the fisherman asks the businessman. “So in retirement I can enjoy the lifestyle that I am currently living?”

To be sure, these questions have been asked long before Thoreau fielded them in Walden. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca once remarked that “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also: he is always getting ready to live.”

I’ve been thinking about Thoreau’s anecdote because I can see myself in it, unfortunately not as Thoreau but as the fool who works all day to pay for the train.

I have a decent job and live comfortably. But today Thoreau is asking me difficult questions:

Why do you work so much? To pay for a life in a place you are eager to escape any chance you get? To pay for a data connection on a mobile device that you know is harming your brain and society? To pay for all the things you don’t really need with “unlimited FREE two-day shipping”?

One problem with modern society might be that it is easy to get trapped into believing what we have is not good enough. For some, this is unintentional “lifestyle creep,” the term used to describe the phenomenon of someone’s spending increasing as their salary increases. You make more money, so you don’t think twice about spending more. For others, however, having more stuff and spending more money is the goal.

Now I generally don’t have a problem with people making and enjoying money. But I have a problem with the situation I find myself in. I find myself working to pay for a life I swore to never live. I find myself postponing most of the things in this world I care most deeply about.

I don’t think I’m succumbing to the hazards of nostalgia in stating that we, when we had less money and things and obligations, were happier. Perhaps this was because what we lost in money we gained in time and experiences. Yet I was already in my early 30s when I sold off most of my possessions to move to Spain, where I taught English for 15 hours a week. In other words, I wasn’t that young. I could have—should have—stayed in Spain, with my heart, but a job offer during the Great Recession in a town not far from where I grew up was, from my parent’s convincing perspective, an opportunity too good to pass up.

So it hits a bit close to home when I read in Walden, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

What I think he meant was that our possessions are not simply things we own—they are, in a way, things that possess us. And when a person becomes a possession, is this not called slavery?

Personal Updates

I am nearly half way done with one sample chapter for my book proposal. I was able to make some forward progress in the last week or so. Check out my creator’s log for those quick updates.

I posted a video on YouTube (and a blog post) about my method for organizing, backing up, and archiving my digital photos. This is a workflow video, which also discusses hardware and software, for digital asset management. Not for the faint of heart!

New Books

Pico Iyer’s new book Aflame will be published in January 2025. Pre-order here. It seems to be a great companion to his earlier book The Art of Stillness, which you must read or listen to Iyer narrate. I have my hands on an early copy, which I’ll report on in due course.

Aatish Tasser’s new book A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile will be published in July 2025. Pre-order here. The book looks promising, especially since his books usually dig far deeper than most travel narratives I’ve come across of late.

Daniel Light’s The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering will be published on 19 November. Pre-order here.

And Mountains Before Mountaineering by Dawn Hollis will be published in the USA on 19 November. Pre-order here.

That’s all for this month. If you’re in the USA, please get out and vote!

Farewell.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

My Website | Support My Work | Bluesky

[Genius Loci] The Future of Reading: A Warning from the Past

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:30:00 -0400

Hellooo from parent land, where plans are but aborted hopes and broken dreams. Instead of writing last month’s newsletter, I was nursing a sick family (thanks, daycare!) and ironing out the kinks for the new semester’s classes. September was the first time in a few years (ever?) that I missed a Genius Loci newsletter and it… wasn’t a big deal? A few of you wrote in asking if everything was okay (thank you!), but I’m sure most of you didn’t care as much as me.

In today’s missive, a note on the future of reading and some personal updates. I also wonder if food is the new angle in travel narratives and remind you that the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards is now accepting nominations.

The Future of Reading

The year was 1994. I was a pimple-faced teenager, already adept at the inner workings of Windows 3.1 and trying to wreak havoc by writing rudimentary .bat file viruses in DOS, no doubt under the influence of Doritos and Mountain Dew. It was around that time that I first started dialing into BBS’s, trying to download warez and (at my brother’s behest), spicy images. Of course, I’d get kicked off the computer so someone in my family could chat with strangers in chat rooms. In those days, the power and promise of the internet had begun to shine its light on the world, not unlike a sun having already broken the horizon.

At that point in time, I couldn’t have called myself a reader. I don’t think I had read a book cover to cover, choose-your-own-adventure books or comic books notwithstanding. So I couldn’t have begun to think about what impact the internet would have on the culture of books and reading. While the TV had long been attacked as destroying our minds (the boob-tube, the idiot box, etc.), computers symbolized promise (the information age) and intelligence (being called a “computer nerd” was always a backhanded compliment). The worst problem with the computer had to do with its physical impact with posture, carpal tunnel, or eyesight (the monitor is bad for your eyes, they saying went).

Yet, as early as 1994, a prescient thinker had thought about the impact of the digital world on the experience of reading. That year, Sven Birkerts published his book The Gutenberg Elegies, a wonderfully prescient warning of digital culture’s impact on reading — and its damaging side effects.

Birkerts argued that “electronic culture” had already ushered in a decline in reading. It helped chip away at the joy of reading, getting lost in books. It too reduced our attention and patience, “shattered (our) faith in institutions,” obliterated familiar points of cultural reference, and on and on in what might be read as a laundry list of the symptoms that plague us today.

When my students suck their teeth because I ask them to read a 2-page excerpt from some guy named Dante or Kant, this is the future Birkerts feared.

For Birkerts, “electronic culture” also creates a new mass culture — “a tide of the homogenous” or “the highly seductive glitter of mass-produced entertainment.” This echoes how some of the post-war Frankfurt School thinkers called cinemas “distraction factories,” and the point about homogeneity is the focus of Kyle Chayka’s recent book Filter World. In his book, Chayka charts how social media and the algorithm moves culture towards a mass, cookie-cutter culture — a homogenization of not just aesthetics but of ideas. Branded as a flattening of culture, and the delights of the weird, this dystopian version of a monoculture is too much.

Back to Sven Birkerts. He suggested that in the digital age, the network is a symbol of lateral connections - “vistas of information that stretch in effortlessly in every direction.” And with that, humans have been experiencing a disconnection with the other axis — depth, verticality, transcendence. What we gain in breadth, we lose in depth. This is a loss of meaning, a loss of digging deep, a loss of rigor. To be sure, the average human is reading far more today than they ever have — but the reading is superficial. Quantity is up, but quality is way down. Reading is not intensive, or deep. The quality of words matters, especially when the alternative to Faulkner is, say, Facebook status updates.

This horizontal movement, this perpetual act of surface-skimming, is not just a byproduct of the world we find ourselves in. It has been designed this way by our Big Tech overlords. This is the distraction factory. These are the weapons of mass distractions, the digital slot machines, we all carry in our pockets.

In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari discusses how our ability to focus and concentrate has been compromised by digital distractions and smartphones. Even staying up a bit later than normal, no-thanks to smartphone addiction, impacts our ability to focus, think, and retain information in a way that is similar to consuming alcohol.

One might say: Smart phone. Dumb human.

What is to be done?

It should be obvious. Unplug. Spend less time on devices. Recommit to the physical, the real. Turn away from the short form; turn towards the long form. Consume culture with intention. And — for the love of god — spend as little time as possible on social media.

Personal Updates

I posted a 9-month update on my 365-day photography journal project on YouTube.

The impulse to disconnect more is perhaps part of the motivation behind me taking more photos on film this year than on digital. Fewer screens, fewer distractions, fewer worries.

I was born in the era of film photography. The first photo I ever took was on a disposable camera, a picture of my mother posing next to a Corvette. I can thus say with pride that I’m a film-native shooter. I was buying and shooting film before it became trendy; because back then, it was the only option.

For me shooting film isn’t about the nostalgia or even “the look of film.” Rather, shooting film is about the materiality of it. It is about slowing down. It is about shooting more mindfully because the price (and mechanics) of film. It is about the inability to see your images immediately. It feels more natural, less rushed. Perhaps this is why film is surging in popularity, and why camera companies like Fuji and Leica have produced digital cameras with “film simulations” and designed to allow you to cover the screen (Fujifilm’s X-Pro3) or designed without any LCD screen or menus at all (Leica’s M11-D).

My book proposal is coming along, albeit slowly. Check out my creator’s log for those updates.

Food and Travel Narratives

Is The Best American Travel Writing series back? Maybe.

The beloved Best American Travel Writing series has merged with the Best America Food Writing. While this might seem like a tactical move to save the two titles amid shrinking profits (see the note above about the future of reading), to say nothing about scoring some goodwill points from the industry and readers, I think this tells you all you need to know about travel literature and journalism in the age of the smartphone. Food is as important to culture as it is to travel, but to look at travel solely through the lens of food is not unlike appreciating a symphony by listening to one instrument. Sure, it can be an interesting proposition. But there is so much missing.

Food has long been important in travel narratives, but there seems to be a newfound interest in food-based travel narratives.

As reported by Talking Travel Writing, the publisher DK Living has created a new imprint called DK Red that focuses on narrative nonfiction. It will publish travel and food narratives. As reported by Publishers Weekly, DK Living director Liz Gough said in a statement: “From cooking and travel to health and wellbeing and beyond, DK Red will enable us to continue to expand our portfolio, invest in more talent, and dive headlong into new areas to reach more readers around the world." One of DK’s recent forays into long-form travel narratives is a book called You Deserve Good Gelato, written by social media influencer Kacie Rose. It is an NYT Bestseller.

Travel Book of the Year 2025

The Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year is now open for submissions. If you published a travel book between 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, or are a reader and simply want to nominate one, please submit the title to Stanfords for consideration. The deadline for submission is 4 November 2024. See Stanfords social media for submission information.

Thank you for reading my work via RSS!

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Genius Loci Newsletter on Jeremy Bassetti

[Genius Loci] A Self-Study Syllabus, Gilgamesh, Audience Capture, AI Threats

A Method to Start New Projects: The Self-Study Syllabus

Reading Gilgamesh

Rebuilding my YouTube Channel Around the Work

Is AI Killing “Informational” Writing?

[Genius Loci] Offices, Rooms, Backrooms

Renovation Reflections

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

Backrooms (film)

[Genius Loci] Summer Break, Renovations, A. G. Sertillanges, The Work Begins

New Essay: A Higher Calling

“The Intellectual Life”

Study / Studio Remodel

Book Proposal

[Genius Loci] Between the Lamp and the Sun

[Genius Loci] The Work, Creative K-Holes, Dead Forever

Creative K-Holes

Email Lists & Author Platforms

Podcasts

Dead Forever

[Genius Loci] Resolutions, Changes Coming, Friendship

Personal Update

Newsletter Changes

Friendship

[Genius Loci] The Notebook as Life Interface

Personal Update: A Month Off the Algorithm

Notebooks: The Only Interface You Need

The Case for Notebooks

[Genius Loci] Inputs and the Information Firing Squad

Personal Update

The Information Firing Squad

[Genius Loci] Documenting Documentary Work, Life in the Margins

Personal Update

Life in the Margins

[Genius Loci] Fieldwork in the Cochabamba Valley

Personal Update

Stay Energized

Bits and Bobs

[Genius Loci] Back to the Andes, Deep in Admiration, and the Substack Problem

Back to the Andes

My Work

Deep in Admiration

The Substack Problem

[Genius Loci] A Few More Days in the Andes, Summer Books, Creative Journeys Podcast

A Few More Days in the Andes

My Work Published Last Month

Bits and Bobs

[Genius Loci] A Strategy to Build an Author Platform, On Mountains, Substack Slop, RSS Readers

How to Build an “Author Platform” in 2025

Announcing ‘On Mountains’

Substack Slop and AI?

RSS Readers

Bits and Bobs

[Genius Loci] Writing Coaches and Author Platforms

Podcasts

Get a MA in Travel and Nature Writing

[Genius Loci] The Springtime Blues, Vibe Coding, Social-Media Shields

Libgen and LLMs

Vibe Coding

Website Redesign

Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

Books as Social Media Shields

Pre-order Robert Macfarlane’s New Book

[Genius Loci] E.M. Forster, Byung-Chul Han, & Paul Theroux

Books

Podcasts

What else?

[Genius Loci] Creative Synergy, Pico Iyer's 'Aflame'

Creative Synergy

Pico Iyer’s Aflame

More Personal Updates

[Genius Loci] Media Diets, Gypsies, Print Sale

Media Diets

Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies

Personal Updates

[Genius Loci] The Railroad Rides Upon Us

The Railroad Rides Upon Us

Personal Updates