One week into EST and my circadian rhythm is still stuck in EDT. I’ve been waking up (and unable to fall back asleep) between three and four AM, then zombie-ing through much of my day.

I was hopping back and forth between my journal and notes this morning, assembling possible materials to share with you all, and tried to write that I was having lots of “mind wandering”. It came out “wind mandering”, which I’ve decided is some kind of psychic meteorological event that gusts through a village stealing memories.

Need fuel for your NaNoWriMo project? That one is all yours.

I’m still suffering from the effects of the Wind Mandering, so it’s going to be a grab-bag week here at the Marginalia Club.

📖 I took a pass through my notes on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet. Some highlights:

• Screen time and being physical present aren’t mutually exclusive — reading on the web can be as physical as reading a book, but the physicality takes the form of highlighting, clicking, copying and pasting, and dragging windows around for comparisons.
• Browser history is a kind of automatic memoir. Can it be a creative resource, for reconstructing your bunny trails of curiosity days after the fact?

🌎 Yancey Strickler proposes the Bentoism framework for decision making: What serves the needs of Now Me, Now Us, Future Me, Future Us?

Reminds me of Derek Parfit’s argument in Reasons and Persons about our ethical obligations to our future selves: if we think carefully about how much we change over the course of our lifetime, the person we will be in a few decades is practically a stranger. Therefore, we should not act in such a way that inflicts consequences on our future selves that we would not consider ethical to inflict on a stranger now.

📝 THE MARGINALIA CLUB, JR. EDITION. My six year-old son asked for a pencil so he could underline words he likes while he reads, “like Dad”.

In Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas he underlined: transformed, Flip-O-Rama, breakfast, nutritious, apparently, papa, confused, driving, because, boring.

📖 I’m about halfway through Steven Wolfram’s essay collection Adventures of a Computational Explorer. My first job was in product analytics at Wolfram Research, so this is a big nostalgia trip for me — two (indirect) references so far to code I worked on!

🎵 Meara O’Reilly’s Hockets for Two Voices (via Robin Sloan’s newsletter)

📝 On the blog, I shared notes on the Peter Stallybrass paper, “Against Thinking” (via the syllabus from “The Art of Longform”, a writing course I took in 2017).

That’s all for this week. Have you been reading/listening/watching anything good?