irf.

oh dove.

From Men I Trust¹:

“To be ours
Like the trees on our shores
All tweezed
The cliffs eat away at our knees”

It is fascinating how good poetry can somehow arrange common words to evoke a kind of instantaneous phenomenological experience that one can’t easily articulate with words but feel (understand?) intuitively; like a beam of warm sunlight rushing through a small gap between clouds in an overcast day.

writing about having nothing to write about.

From Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation (p.82):

“When I began my first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, I knew I had no choice but to write about having nothing to write about.”

First things first: I have no delusion ambition to write a novel.

I want to write more because it’s becoming more and more clear to me that the only way I can get in dialogue with my own thoughts is to put them somewhere tangible ¹. If I let them brew exist outside my mind, I can return some days later to see what they have to tell me. If I try to wrestle them in my mind, they run circles around me.

Unfortunately, doing so has been harder than I anticipated. For the longest time, I wanted to write this blog ², but I felt constipated stumped about what even to write about. I still feel that way, even more so now because I am going through some dog days. My brain feels like a badly made soup. I throw a bunch of things at the imaginary wall in my mind, but nothing sticks.

Thankfully, I came across this quote from Murakami. It allowed me to at least write this nothingburger post about having nothing to write about. I am hopeful I have plenty in the tank to write about, but if I cannot scramble anything, I will come back here again and again to write about just nothing.

memories of my domestic landscapes.

One of the better photography books I read (saw?) this year was Domestic Landscapes by Bert Teunissen. It is such an amazing photography project because each photo puts a person in the center and tells their story through the space they lived in for many, many years. As I was seeing the photos, I kept remembering faded images of the house I grew up in, the houses of the relatives I visited, and the house my grandparents lived in when I visited there the summer after the first grade.

I am not nearly as skilled as Teunissen in photography, but I tried to emulate¹ his idea a few times when I visited my parents’ hometown this past summer. I wanted to have at least a few photographic souvenirs to help me reconstruct those fading childhood memories in the future. I also thought this would be a nice practice using my 24mm equivalent lens because I have been struggling to get good images with it since I bought it three years ago.

foggy.

in Evanston, tonight.

hello world.

irf stands for “innumerable random formations.”

I came across this phrase in Stephen Greenblatt’s book Swerve, and it immediately felt like a good metaphor for the way my mind races from one unfinished thought to another.

I decided to start this blog because I realized that if I never pause and write down my thoughts, I never actually process them. I never engage with them. I don’t even remember most of them. So, I am not writing this blog for others to read it. I am writing it to aid my thinking.

There are a couple of stylistic influences that guide the structure of this blog¹. The first influence is Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. I want to write short and reflective posts without worrying about what others would think if they read these articles. The second influence is John Gruber’s blog daringfireball.net. I really like the simple, minimalist nature of Gruber’s blog, as well as his quickfire style of publishing, so I want to emulate it here.

In any case, I’m so curious if this will be another random project that I start and forget or if I’ll manage to return here to enter an asynchronous dialogue with my inner self.

If you are not me and happened to stumble upon this page, feel free to contact me at [email protected].