Weekly Assemblage for 2025 Week 35
I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week Week 35 is the week of 2025-08-25/2025-08-31.
Tiny Experiment of the Week
As much as I’m a huge proponent of digital notes, this week I’ve been keeping a 3.5” x 5” notebook open as I read books by Chu, Benjamin, and Foucault. I type so much more quickly than I write that having a keyboard at hand invites me to quote extensively, while the relative friction of a paper notebook helps me instead make bullet points of my condensations, summaries, and reactions.
This strategy might be what Sönke Ahrens would call “fleeting notes”—although perhaps not exactly, since I do plan to keep these little notebooks. In any case, the experiment certainly seems to be helping me read faster, and focusing less on each individual detail and more on the overall structure or argument.
We’ll see how well this works going forward.
Listening of the Week
The new-to-me music I’m digging this week is definitely Tin Man. In particular, I’ve got DrippingAcid on replay. (I sort of stumbled onto him via Acid Test Records, which I almost certainly encountered because it’s the label that releasd Om Unit + TM404’s collaboration In The Afterworld.)
Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza
Ellane on One-Page Notebooks
Speaking of paper notes, I enjoyed Ellane W’s The Surprisingly Powerful One-Page Notebook That’s Always With Me. She sings the praises of folding up a sheet of paper into a one-page notebook (1PN) to tote along as an intentionally constrained alternative to any more substantial notebook you might use.
I often do the same thing, only I tear out the middle seams to make a one-page mini zine-style booklet. (I initially started doing this to reuse discarded misprints at my former library job. Knowing only one side of the paper was usable might be why I got in the habit of adding the zine-style tears?) I particularly like Ellane’s suggestion of digitizing whatever you find useful in one of these one page notebooks (or 1PNs). The brevity definitely helps you remember to move from paper to digital sooner than with longer pocket notebooks!
Tracy D’s Big Questions
Tracy Durnell’s What to read? Big questions as filter and frame helped me re-think how I’m approaching my own reading. It also makes me want to start writing down my own big questions. Maybe I’ll end up making public pages of these here, much as she does?
Franklin S’s Staying With the Trouble
Franklin S’s weekly note—which thinks with both Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin—is not that far off from this type of “big questions”.
It’s exciting—moreover, it’s heartening and encouraging—to read Franklin’s musings on what he’s thinking through during his sabbatical and to see him share with thoughts-in-process, the things he’s working through and with as he’s trying to address his questions.
Maybe this kind of “big picture” framing happens at the beginning of the academic year, for those of us who live on that kind of cycle?
TWI(R)L
This week I (re)learned…
- the word “etymon”, via Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology
- the word “heteroclite”, via Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things
- how much I enjoy using Llama Life—although I still do wish it more reliably put prominent notifications on my watch and phone. Maybe I’m just still learning how to work with it?
Site Refinements of the Week
I noticed that the screen reader text for each of the heading links was visible on this site. A few minutes of digging in the Minimal Mistakes theme repository’s “Issues” area let me know what had changed and how to fix it for my own site.
Although I use the remote theme method for my site, I’ve edited the CSS files enough that I had to add the changes into my own local version of that file. (With the remote theme method, any local versions of a file override the remote theme’s version.) I might eventually take the time to move all my customizations into a different file so that my site will better pull in this kind of fix—but even with the time spent realizing the issue and manually fixing it, I’m a big fan of this approach to maintaining a site and of the maintainers whose labor makes it happen.
Kudos
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