Another long absence, and again a lovely excuse. I invite you to peruse The Distributist Review.

I'd like to start taking some notes on books I read for this blog (I mean den), on the off chance that someone will find them useful. And what better book to begin with than How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler?

Unfortunately, this entry also happens to be an experiment in combatting insomnia, and the experiment is rapidly succeeding. I'll get what I can for now.

There are piles of books on how to read books. I think I read this one because when I flipped it open, he was talking about Aristotle or Aquinas, or probably both. Also, you can open to any page and immediately get a crisp, didactic fellow; it doesn't take long to see why he likes Aristotle.

It's been a few days since I finished it, and I have yet to return and review (I'm attempting this major new habit, for reasons which will eventually be explained), but there are at least two tremendous insights in this book.

1. Dive into the index.
2. A book doesn't stretch your understanding unless you don't understand it the first time through.

Since even one such major insight is coming to seem above par for the average book, I'm quite pleased.

Dive into the index.

Adler presents a somewhat typical "preview" method, which includes the table of contents and the first and last chapter. If you don't have the habit of reading (not skimming) the table of contents, that itself can change your whole outlook of a book. Instead of dripping it word by word into your system, as from an IV, you soar at once over the whole sea, getting the lay of the coasts, the coves, the treacherous reefs.

But Adler takes it a step further; the index. If the table of contents is a birds-eye view, the index is an enchanted ball pit. I don't think Chuck E. Cheese had come on the scene yet when this book was written (though this was the revised edition); if it had, I'm sure Adler would have seized the metaphor. Even after making an index, I had never stopped to think what a brilliant pile of jewels is carefully stashed in a book's back room; you can dive right in and swim about through a jumble of all the book's main ideas. You can touch any enchanted word, and be carried right into the thick of the book.

In the past, I'd seen indexes as purely utilitarian, only consulting them when I already (thought) I knew what I wanted, grumpily sifting through the rainbow to find my particular dented yellow ball. Now, Adler suggests reading the thing, perusing it, noting which words have oodles of references; in short, swimming about.

Or again, perhaps the index is a sort of "Wood between the Worlds," as in the Magician's Nephew, or even a world of magic doorways like in Monsters, Inc.

Freed from the constraints of conventional prose, the index is almost solid idea; few prepositions, no articles or adverbs, no mitigating phrases. Try to read and visualize even one page of an index. You'll find yourself flying all over your mental landscape.

No substitute for reading the book, of course. But the relationships that leap into view may not even have been sensed by the author. You really can feel that you're diving, that real things crowd and squirm and wiggle about you like fish in the sea.

Read books you don't understand.

Adler reserved his enthusiasm for great books; in fact, he helped edit the Brittannica edition of "Great Books of the Western World," which still graces many a library shelf. Up to now, the series has seemed sufficiently cumbersome and intimidating to ward me away, although I do think that even as a child I liked the variation in the binding color scheme (so unlike an encyclopedia). I've read some of the authors, but avoided that edition. Now perhaps I'll check it out.

Adler thinks that if you understand a book too well on your first read, it doesn't have much new understanding to give you. You can always find new information, but the book that will really knock you over is the one that stretches your very understanding of the world. And, obvious as this ought to have been to me, your understanding can only be stretched if at first it doesn't reach.

This opens whole new vistas of actually reading some of the more intimidating names. Not only might I not mind those initial sensations of inertia and despair as the air thickens and grows dense; I might begin to welcome them. The usual signs of panic might become signs of promise. In this direction likes an uncharted cavern; I can tell by the closeness of the air.

The Syntopicon

Sleep is coming for me, and I'll have more to say on this soon, I hope. I'd like to summarize his techniques (so I can use them myself), and I'd also like to peruse his Syntopicon, volumes 2 and 3 of the Great Book state which were a nearly epic attempt to categorize and index over a hundred main ideas throughout the Great Books set. Adler wanted you to be able to compare quickly what was said by, say, Aquinas and Freud, on, say, the subject of love.

At first glance, this seems like a job for The Internet, but I'm not so sure. The Wikipedia article on the Syntopicon currently includes the main ideas, each of which is linked (in a slightly self-congratulatory fashion) to that idea's page on Wikipedia. You can judge for yourself whether the current Wikipedia page on any of these topics is comparable to a hundred passages or so from the "great writers", even if you do feel compelled to keep them at bay in quotation marks.

On the flip side, the idea of cross-referencing all these ideas in English translation is somewhat depressing. I say that as a college-educated monolinguist, still trudging my native slopes while the children of illegal immigrants gleefully navigate multiple worlds. Call me a wannabe philologist, but if they were going to spend all that money, Homer should have been in Greek. Maybe I'd learn it.

Speaking of money, that Wikipedia article has a fascinating (and hopefully true) account of just how expensive it was to cross-reference all these Great Books. Today, the two volumes of the Syntopicon aren't even on the shelf at the Purdue library; the rest of the Great Books series is there, but you have to go to the repository for the Syntopicon.

I have to actually read the thing a bit before praising it too much. But the idea is exciting. And the name sounds awfully cool. And the thought of multiple people getting paid for multiple years to read these books makes me wish they were releasing a revised edition.

On the other hand, it only really works if it piques you into reading at least some of the books in full. Otherwise you're depending on Adler & Co. not to have missed anything.

Reading techniques

Getting back to the actual book I did read, I also liked the various techniques Adler presented for reading. But through the wiki-like magic of the den, I will leave this tantalizing information for a future revision. (Though you can start here if you're impatient.) Good night.

Confused by the site? Stop in here.   more »

Sorry I've been away, but I've been updating Penny Justice. Take a look.

If you're going to use Firefox, I've found the following essential.   more »

I suggest something called e-mail. It's nifty.   more »

Source: Eddy Van 3000. License: CC share-alike, attribute

Just look for a bit. I'll be quiet.

I came across the morpho butterfly in a book awhile back, but forgot the name. To my delight, I saw this picture today on Flickr while hunting for something else, and finally got to see a much bigger picture than the one in the book.

That blue is not merely "intense". Tiny scales on the wing actually bounce the lightwaves around to heighten the color. As the current Wikipedia article explains:

These colors are not a result of pigmentation but are an example of iridescence: the extremely fine lamellated scales covering the Morpho's wings reflect incident light repeatedly at successive layers, leading to interference effects that depend on both wavelength and angle of incidence/observance.

There's a diagram that might make that a bit clearer. Basically, when light hits you or me, what doesn't get absorbed simply bounces off our skin and goes its merry way. But when lights hits these scales, it cascades into multiple layers of reflections. Some waves bounce off the highest scales, some off the lowest, and some off those in between. Almost all of these reflected waves cancel each other out. But the scales are perfectly spaced so that these particular shades of blue bounce back in phase--and we see a brilliance that, unless I'm mistaken, isn't possible with normal pigments.

To top all this off, the underside of the wings is brown. So one moment you think you're looking at a moth, and the next moment, an open butterfly flashes a blue that would vanish if its scales were a few more nanometers apart. (In fact, the scales are even based in melanin, to absorb the other colors.)

The description was fascinating, the picture is gorgeous, and now I can't wait to see one in flight.

Do you ever think of places on the Internet as places? I never thought about it much before, but if this is my "home" site, where's the den?

Like everyone else on the Internet, I'm still trying to figure out at least a little of what we're all doing here. I enjoy having my own little site, but I'd be hard pressed to summarize the thing for you. Every so often, I get frustrated with my current structure, rip it apart, gather up the broken pages, clean them up, bind them to their own lost links out in hyperspace, and try something new.

Blog: Feed the Monster

Until recently, I thought of this place as a blog. For many years, I attempted to keep a blog, but a blog is all about quick posts that must be deep frozen in their particular bracket of the space-time continuum, preferably sized to the minute. You aren't even supposed to edit them, really, without using delete tags. Nor are you encouraged to add second or third thoughts--why would you? On the off chance that someone will wander through your archives, rereading old blogs for old times' sake?

Sure, decent software bubbles updated blogs to the top, but readers still have to scroll through your old stuff, and by the time you're scrolling through a blog, you're violating the medium.

In short, a blog really is a 'blog--a web log. A log. You do not playfully tweak a ship's log. You do not go back and revise the CHANGELOG if you think Version 0.05 got insufficient attention. You work on the current version.

Logs make perfect sense for certain projects, like sailing a ship. But I'm not sure they work for me here.

• Time is the focus. You haven't updated your blog!
• Which, looked at backwards, means: If there's nothing new, the old stuff is boring/outdated/consumed.

I'm not the first person to notice that this dynamic easily leads to frequent posts that consist of nothing but keyword-laden links to similar keyword-laden links. C. S. Lewis could easily base a rewrite of The Great Divorce in such a hell.

Not that I mean to trash a good blog. If it works for you, great.

Wiki: Group thought

In stark contrast to the blog stands the wiki. The wiki is concept-centered. You don't link to /2003/03/8/35/59/52/elephants, you link to /elephants. If you have a second thought, you edit the wiki. No one cares.

After years of blogging, discovering the wiki was a draught of champagne. I wandered around the original wiki, and kept thinking, They can start a page about whatever they want. It doesn't have to go into a category. And you can link to it without remembering the exact day you started it. And you're encouraged to edit it whenever you want.

I suppose I could call this den a "personal wiki", but I'd rather not. An essential aspect of the wiki seems to be the group effort. Anyone can edit anything. The more you think about that, the more amazing it gets--until you start reading about, say, the medieval intellectual world, not to mention most tribal cultures. Then we're the ones that start to look odd. Anyhow, odd or not, since I'm the one writing all this, wiki doesn't seem quite right.

The Den: No Pressure

I'm also happy to call this a den because it reminds me that I've finally moved all this away from my front door, and I can relax a bit. Although I've had a separate professional site for years, this is still my main email address, and I still expect editors and other formal visits from time to time. From the beginning, I've had a not-so-creative tension about this place: can I relax and just talk, or need everything need be polished and publishable? The result can be a bit tense and cheery and didactic, like a permanent phone call with a new client.

Yes, life is too short for any of us to be slovenly. But it's also too short to agonize and polish and repolish a piece that's meant more as a conversation. One could argue that we'd both be better off if I shut up and we went to our separate copies of Shakespeare, but if there is a value in this ephemeral sort of conversation, and I think there is, one has to feel free to chat and be done with it, even if one is also labouring mightily to craft more permanent work. We writers don't fret over our face-to-face conversations that aren't worth publishing.

Since I'm not trying to sell anything (except my own books, I suppose), nor hijack the blogosphere, I would like you and me to understand that this is my den, it's where I hang out and shuffle papers and thumb through books and talk to a friend. It's not a chat room or forum, of course, since it's usually just me, but on the other hand, the online journal or diary metaphor doesn't make much sense either. I'm not alone, I'm talking to you, and hoping you'll talk back.

Besides, I do have a journal, and I don't have any intention of tossing it into the Internet. Online journals actually rather frighten me. This is the Internet--everything is in public. I've moved this den away from the front door, but it's not hidden, merely discreet.

Anyhow, there's a long explanation of a short word. Welcome.

An overview of Markdown syntax, refactored from http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html.

Markdown is a minimal syntax set, designed to make it easy to write and edit your prose. You can use HTML tags whenever you need to.

Markdown syntax cannot be used within block-level HTML.

Span-level HTML tags -- e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> -- can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.

Overview

More examples

> This is a blockquote with one paragraph. Each line begins
> with an arrow.

> Another blockquote, but only one arrow at the beginning.
Don't actually need more.

> This is the first level of quoting.
>
> > This is a nested blockquote.
> 
> Back to the first level.

* An unordered list
+ With mismatching bullets
- Still works

1. An ordered list
23. Just needs to begin with 1.

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.
[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.
See my [About](/about/) page for a relative path.

[An example][id] reference-style link.
[An example] [id] reference-style link with a space.
[An example][] reference-style link, with an implied id of "An example".

Reference links require link definitions, which can take several forms:

[id]: http://example.com/  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/  'Optional Title Here'
[id]: http://example.com/  (Optional Title Here)
[id]: <http://example.com/>  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/longish/path/to/resource/here
    "Optional Title Here"

Reference links are case-insensitive.

Image links:

![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg)
![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")

![Alt text, reference-style][id]
[id]: url/to/image  "Optional title attribute"

Additional notes

Lists

Separate list items with blank lines if you want each item to be enclosed in a <p> tag.

List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spaces or one tab.

To avoid an accidental list by a number at the start of a line, you can backslash-escape the period:

1986\. What a great season.

Blockquotes

A Markdown "indent" is 4 spaces or one tab.

To put a blockquote within a list item, the blockquote's > delimiters need to be indented.

Code blocks

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab.

To put a code block within a list item, the code block needs to be indented twice -- 8 spaces or two tabs.

Special characters

Use a backslash to escape:

    \   backslash
    `   backtick
    *   asterisk
    _   underscore
    {}  curly braces
    []  square brackets
    ()  parentheses
    #   hash mark
    +   plus sign
    -   minus sign (hyphen)
    .   dot
    !   exclamation mark

You'll also want to read the original, full Markdown syntax here.

On this site, I'm actually using pymarkdown, a pyblosxom plugin.

Here's another python implementation of Markdown. This is exciting because you can use extensions.

You can convert Markdown to formats besides HTML with other programs. Like Pandoc.

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML, groff man, and S5 HTML slide shows.

I haven't tried Pandoc yet, but since I went to the trouble to install Haskell to get it working, I thought I'd mention it. :)

Resumé

You know what you want to say. Let's say it. I will write, edit, proofread, lay out, typeset, illustrate, design a web site. Whatever it takes.

My full resumé is available at my company web site, Wineskin Media.

• What's a den? What is this place?
• Where do I post my comment?
• Where's the site map?
• Hey! That old post isn't under the same date/tag anymore!
• Full FAQ