This week's blog posts

zibaldone.net

It seems I’m beginning to keep my notes in a variety of “notebooks” simultaneously. In my PKM system at home, this means I have a box of 3x5 note cards and a couple of Leuchtturm1917 and Paperage notebooks. And a big Obsidian vault along with a bunch of sub-vaults and a growing batch of Heptabase whiteboards. For the stuff I’m putting online, I’m letting YouTube host my videos while I’m splitting my “blogging” between Substack and my new personal pages at zibaldone.net. I think my plan is going to be to repost some of the daily posts I make there onto Substack and then at the end of each week make note of them all, in a linked summary.

This week I’ve been hard at work on a new project, designing a web-book for my book Peppermint Kings and a lot of the material that surrounds it. I did a talk via Zoom for the museum in Three Oaks Michigan, and that got me thinking about some of the things that I had not really been able to say in either my dissertation or in the Yale book (which, let’s face it, was an academic monograph). I pondered on that a bit, in that linked blog post where I talked about preparing for the Zoom talk. I posted a “rehearsal” video of the talk here and when the museum posts their recording of the actual event, I’ll link it.

That talk got me thinking about all the things I had left unsaid in Peppermint Kings, so I started pondering a bit more and decided to produce something that in the project stage I’m calling Peppermint Kings Annotated. I had already notified the Yale University Press a couple of years ago that I was reclaiming my copyright on the book, so I’m free to do what I want with it. This will include a slight rewrite of the original text, which as I’m reading it is not as good as I’d like it to be, despite the assistance of Yale’s editor, Otto Buhlmann. But it will also include a bunch more information and narrative. It will live at an Obsidian Publish website for now. Possibly permanently, since it’s becoming increasingly clear to me I like non-linear exposition. And then this morning I posted an announcement of my new web-book project and what I hope to do with it.

So that’s what I’ve been up to this week! Stay tuned for more major news and info here, or bookmark zibaldone.net for daily updates.