I Wish There Were Fewer Manifestos

Anyone else feel like there are too many manifestos out there? I'm not even talking about the horrid kind left behind by mass murderers, I'm also talking about manifestos of corporations, non-profit organizations, books in your book clubs, and political movements.

One of the greatest things there is is to not know. To live with wonder about an infinite universe is humbling and calming. There is so, so much that each one of us doesn't know anything about. Why prize what we claim to believe or find "true" when it's not even a sizable fraction of what's left unknown?

A manifesto demands adherence, some shared set of beliefs. The thing is, no one ever really fully buys into a statement of shared beliefs. Some statements we can tolerate being around even if we don't agree. Some we really don't agree with. Some things we accept in disagreement out of convenience or exhaustion. More often than not it's the idea of someone who's really bought in, and the rest follow along thinking they'll maybe get something out of it. If not everyone's bought in, why use language like "we" in your statements?

The next time you're reading a manifesto, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that?" Maybe you'll find out you don't. I encourage your independent discovery.

Shameless Recommendations 2021-08-17

1. Read Why Fish Don't Exist, and don't read anything about the book before starting it.
2. Play Baba Is You. It's available for major computing platforms, smart mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch. If you get stuck, don't cheat! That ruins the whole point of the game. Instead, check out guiding hint sites like Baba Is Hint which help you think about how the game works instead of giving away the solution.
3. Get a therapist or counselor even if you don't think you need one. Really. If there's nothing "bad" or "painful" to talk about, you might still learn about yourself and learn to think about your own thoughts differently with a therapist's help. If things are already bad, it totally sucks to jump through all the hoops and forms and insurance and such to get connected with a therapist. Get started with therapy before your energy state is super low from grief, trauma, depression, anxiety, whatever. Future you will thank you.
4. Eat Joe Chips. Serious but non-damaging crunch with just the right amount of give, excellent flavor dusting. Try out the assorted chips linked, and learn what your favorite flavor is. The BBQ flavor of Joe Chips (BBQ is generally my favorite chip flavor) has just the perfect balance of salt, smoke, spice, and sugar. I have not encountered anything else out there so balanced. BBQ chips are often too smoky (I usually pass up "mesquite" labeling) or not sweet enough. Not BBQ Joe Chips.
5. Go on a walk through a forest or park, and try to find one object of each color of the rainbow. Maybe you'll find a red leaf or an orange peel, or even a yellow dandelion. Make a note of your discoveries somewhere, or even take photos of each object of each color and arrange them to form your own lovely ROYGBIV. This exercise was adapted from Why Fish Don't Exist, but it doesn't spoil anything, I promise.
   

Old Internet Will Make a Comeback

You heard it here first! (Maybe not.) Old Internet activities like Blogger and LiveJournal are going to be hot again. Longform soliloquies like this one will become popular forms of expression again as we tire of our uncles having something to say about everything on social media platforms. Widely-supported, probably-already-installed, instant-loading fonts like Verdana will make a comeback, and expensive fonts like Circular which have to be downloaded and slow down page loads will fall out of favor. Maybe this time these newly-hot old platforms will benefit from wide support for emoji. 🔥 (Maybe not.) I betcha there will be some "new" site that replicates the experiences of these classic platforms.

How refreshing that Old Internet sites load pretty much instantly. The Servo or V8 or WebKit engine in your browser is overengineered to load and execute poorly-written JavaScript faster than it really should run. It's not just the web developers' faults though; basically all software is enormous and slow these days. If you keep your site simple and low-tech, it's like driving to the corner store to get some milk with a souped-up Ferrari, which is a funny image. (But did we really need the Ferrari in the first place?) Maybe just keep it simple and low-tech because all computers require energy to run and we ought to be responsible about energy consumption. "Call 4-H to find out how you can do your part."

(My favorite part of Old Internet? Hyperlinks! Maybe I just wish web pages thought of themselves as simple documents on the greater World Wide Web instead of be-all, end-all experiences. You might have already guessed that I don't think Facebook is the bee's knees.)

Go grab a stopwatch, click this link, and start the stopwatch. You can stop the stopwatch when the page finishes loading. How long did it take to load?

If You Want to Write

Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write has brought me back from spiraling nothingness before, and gosh darn it, it's gonna do it again.

"Award-Winning" Poem 2

Author’s note: it’s been a very long time since you’ve last heard from the author. The author (Arthur) is feeling the itch again, and is catching up on that by sharing some treasured poetry from the past little while. [Author's note in note: This blog entry has been ported from another blog, and minor content edits have been made for clarity.]

The poem below helped me win the "Grand Prize" in a 2020 poetry contest. 2020 is not even close to over, even though it feels like it's already been about four years. Regardless, the seasons have changed, and this poem tries to capture that. It is a Shakespearean sonnet as a dialog between a winter spirit and a spring spirit whose relationship is coming to an unfortunate end. This poem, more so than my previous "award-winning" poem, I believe was justified in achieving "Grand Prize".

It started as raw material capturing the romantic angst and yearning present on earlier entries of this blog. That was potent crude oil. In fact, I read those posts and old journal entries for inspiration and motivation for one of the sonnet's character's. Dozens of drafts and revisions—and several peer reviews—are to thank for its final, refined form. You can see the raw fuel of this creation below.

Anyway, here is the poem.

VAIL (a spirit of winter)
A glacier crawls more quickly than the dark,
When all my waking thoughts surround your flame
I'd break my cracking chest and sighing heart
To know just one more day could stay the same

VERNA (a spirit of spring)
A new day dawns, I must now flee to grow,
To fly like wind, unbounded, free, and true,
To taste the dew, see all there is to sow
By letting go, the sky turns gray to blue

VAIL
Let go? I feel I'm frozen in the past

VERNA
Be gentle with yourself, the present's there

VAIL
I cry to see no way our future lasts
But want for you to fly in warmer air

VERNA
I see your heart as hearth, and mine the sun
This is to say, goodbye, my wintry one

"Award-Winning" Poem 1

Author's note: It's been a very long time since you've last heard from the author. The author (Arthur) is feeling the itch again, and is catching up on that by sharing some treasured poetry from the past little while. [Author's note in note: This blog entry has been ported from another blog, and minor content edits have been made for clarity.] 

Well, hello there. It's me, Arthur. I've missed you. Let's catch up. Below is a poem that won me the "Grand Prize" in a poetry contest in 2018. It's provided with the judge's assessment of the poem for full gravity. 

The Grand Prize Winner:

As blue bark unthaws
Steam rises into gold rays
And the dawn path clears

Such a beautiful and effective haiku! The imagery of the first two lines calls on me to imagine such a vivid image, I see the frozen blue bark, the steam, and it rising into the golden rays of the sun. Then the third line challenges me. Since I have such a vivid scene already painted, my instinct is to try to picture what the "dawn path" is, visually. For me, the challenge of the third line is magic. I would love to hear what others imagine when reading it.

Now for my own commentary. I wrote this haiku for my long-dead Twitter account as part of a series in 2015, where I intended to write a haiku on Twitter every day. (I managed to complete 301 out of 365 days.) I do like the haiku, but I'm honestly surprised it won the contest. But the judge liked it, and getting the judge to like you is part of why I ever got a "1" in the Solo & Ensemble Festival where I grew up. (I played trumpet.)

Insomnia Log 9

Author's note: I generally try to leave old "insomnia" entries alone so they maintain their frenzied, unfiltered observations. They capture a version of me I don't see very much anymore. However, this one was riddled with typographical mishaps, so I made minor adjustments. Where appropriate, I added contextual hyperlinks. I performed these edits as part of my 2026 blog migration scheme.

There's a humming coming from somewhere in the room. Doesn't seem like it's the one lamp on. What could it be?

Sometimes I scroll through my text message logs with individual persons (redundant? seems clear), especially when no new messages come in. Is there a way to link back to old messages and say, "Ha, remember when we said these silly things?" I suppose a screenshot attached to a new message would work. Would people be interested in that besides me? If the log spans years with few large gaps, you probably have a friendship with someone. Or at least plausible evidence of one. I think these blog posts are mostly long chat logs with myself.

I haven't written here in a while, and this was the most likely type of entry to be posted first. I've had plenty on my mind to keep me awake, not least of which current events. Some feeling in me feels like it's waking up (again). It's shaky and too unclear to name. I'm seeing evidence of it here and there. I wept when driving across a long bridge today, at water with large white and gold (or was it blue and black?) spots on it below tumbling purple clouds. Further weeping at a crashing beach below a yellow ring of sky below those same clouds. My most common exhale lately is a sigh. Puzzles seem fine when there are only a few moving parts, and then you learn the full scope and it's daunting. Example: making a 10 x 10 x 10 Buckyball cube; mess up the alignment of one row and the whole thing could be ruined! Similar feeling for sorting through and getting rid of my various junk: one box seems to open another, and eventually it's a good idea to put things away and nothing really happened with the box contents. If only eBay could teleport your items away.

Listening to Courtney Barnett's The Double LP: A Sea of Split Peas has me wanting to play guitar again. Incidentally, yesterday I found a cassette tape of my recordings that I label "Late Night Radio Hour", because in between songs I pretend to be a radio DJ with a soothing voice. This is normally a secret I save for the third or greater time of meeting someone, so shhhhhhh. I covered Courtney Barnett's "Boxing Day Blues" (my favorite song of hers) on that tape, but my guitar Stella is very out of absolute tune (but in relative tune), so I sung, like, three or four half steps down, sheesh.

I want to find more random blog posts of people talking about their favorite things. I often search for things like "favorite Radiohead Amnesiac song" or "favorite Magic expansion", but those rarely yield anything. Often I get forums, which I find noisy and unhelpful. I really want to see people with enough courage to just lay down their favorites publicly, and not give a damn about what a "poll" or "top ten list" or "forum discussion" says. I'll answer my own questions for other searchers with the same questions above: 1) "Like Spinning Plates", especially the live version in I Might Be Wrong, and 2) Lorwyn. Bandcamp has a nice feature of marking which song on an album in your collection is your favorite.

While we're at it, I want to find more random blogs that aren't about anything really, or ones that take huge tangents to get at what they are trying to say, or ones that dive deep into topics of personal interest to the author. One example is The Pokémon Sprite Guy, whose blog I found two years after it ended, but whose delivery in writing I really enjoy. That's another criterion: the blog needs to keep being updated! (Hence a stab at writing this very post.) My good friend S and I have scenic detour conversations, and the nonlinear form makes time irrelevant. S had a blog of no-topic musings, but I can't find it anymore. [Author's interjection: S has a cool new blog mostly concerning probabilistic numerical methods applied toward economic problems. It's well-considered and infotaining.] I think I want more "content" out there that is written by people who just like something, not because they want followers, "highlights", or money, or something bogus like that. I'm talking something like Geocities or the original vision of the World Wide Web, where if you wanted a page about your favorite thing, you wrote it, in your own voice. [Author's interjection: I find it fascinating that the cool blogs I linked in this entry are all Blogger blogs.] Now we just click our interests and are served "content". I'm tired of that. Maybe with enough musings here I'll have covered all my interests in some detail. I like to read about others' interests in their own voices, so I'll pay that forward. For the three of you who know who I am, you might even learn something new.

Mostly I don't like signing into Facebook, and I don't want to deal with Messenger. Snapchat makes me feel like I have no life. Twitter is so noisy. [Author's interjection: Do not use Twitter/X.] I want to asynchronously catch up on my friends by reading stuff like what I'm writing here, but I know that the platforms above are easier to use. They just don't give me the same sense of knowing someone like you'd get out of reading their writing or having a real conversation with them. I guess they're not really for that purpose, but it seems shallow to say they are exclusively status-promoting tools. Oh well, I'll relish the longer form stuff as it comes.

Some more favorite things I have searched for, and my answers to them:

• Radiohead album: Amnesiac
• Magic set: Lorwyn
• Album of the 1990s: The Real Ramona by Throwing Muses, followed closely by King by Belly
• Painting: The Nostalgia of the Infinite by Giorgio de Chirico
• Book: If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
• Pokémon game: Silver
• Pokémon: Diglett Cubone
• Color on a guitar: Surf green
• Candy bar: Zingerman's Candy Ca$hew Cow Peanut Butter Crush, but Butterfinger does the job for the most part

Infinitely Yours,
Art

Reflecting on a Year of Daily Haiku

Author's note: This blog entry has been ported from another blog, and minor content edits have been made for clarity. The "tweets" mentioned herein are only discoverable on the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive, because the author's Twitter account has been deleted since 2017. This was back when Twitter was Twitter. As such, links to twitter.com/x.com have been removed. Other dead links have been updated to their most relevant contemporary counterpart. Thank you for your understanding of the limitations of preserving the World Wide Web.

It's been a year since I've taken on the challenge to write a haiku everyday. Before 2014-11-19, I was only writing a haiku tweet about once a month. I had only starting writing haiku tweets in 2014 after my grandpa passed away. On 2014-10-01, I wrote my first haiku tweet in over 10 months.

Vast air shuts my book
They say that, "The wind rises!
We must try to live!"

The haiku was a reference to the poem The Graveyard by the Sea and the movie The Wind Rises, which I had recently seen. The passage I sampled from had to do with living even in the face of death, which was salient with losing my grandpa.

The wind is rising... We must try to live!
The vast air opens then shuts again my book,
The waves dare surge in spray above the rocks!
Scatter, pages dazzled by the light,
Break, waves! Exulting waters, break
This peaceful roof where sailboats dipped like doves!

See https://newcriterion.com/article/the-cemetery-by-the-sea/

I followed the 2014-10-01 post up with one on the first of November, 2014-11-01, all about visioning.

Go The Artist's Way
"Where will you be in five years?"
Answer truthfully

Then on 2014-11-19, I decided to write haiku daily, or at least try to meet that goal. For a month up until that date, I had much lower energy than I was used to. I was, in parallel, facing the aftermath of losing my mentor and patriarch, feeling the pressure of a new job, and reeling from a relationship that didn't work out. I needed something to do that would keep my brain busy. I needed a creative outlet that could help me find my voice again. I already had the haiku Twitter, and I'd written a number of haiku as a fundraiser, so it was familiar enough to keep going, but challenging enough to increase the frequency.

Writing 5-7-5 everyday is hard, at least to write haiku that mean anything. I could have cheated and just assembled random seventeen syllables each time, but I wanted each poem to represent something I'd seen or felt. I think some of the haiku turned out beautifully, and some are a stretch. I found that several haiku talked about the same subjects and ideas. Sometimes I had to resort to clip shows.

As of today, I have written 301 haiku on the daily cadence. There are a few more I squeezed in the next day after I missed a day, but I'm not counting those. I'd like to share some of my favorites from the exercise below. They aren't ranked, and they may not even be the best of the batch. But I think they're worth sharing.

1. This haiku (2014-12-20) is a translation of John Steinbeck's letter to his son and some thoughtful advice on relationships. This advice has helped me get through some seemingly rougher times.

Main thing: not to hurry
If it is right it happens
Good won't get away

The original words:

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
—John Steinbeck, to his son Thom

2. This haiku (2015-01-05) was my reflection on the book Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. I volunteer as a store clerk in a fake robot store that is actually a nonprofit tutoring and writing center. This haiku made the newsletter there.

Robots don't need sleep
They can do your job, better
Player Piano

3. In this haiku (2015-01-08), I was upset about the relatively low temperature outside.

Check if Fahrenheit
Indeed, still zero degrees
My scarf needs a scarf

4. This haiku (2015-02-15) turned out to be advice, as I found several others in this series to be. They feel kind of like fortune cookies. This is advice about learning.

Slow cook mastery
Broil not, lest lesson be singed
All good things take time

5. This haiku (2014-02-17) is about a quiet, starry night.

No wind, stars are loud
Gripped by wonder, vast blackness
Ghosts of long dead suns

6. Two pieces of advice within a week. Maybe I needed some inspiration and comfort when I wrote this haiku (2015-02-21). I get some comfort in reading it again.

Move at your own pace
Be good at being alone
Then it's not lonely

7. I wrote this haiku (2015-03-05) on the day I celebrate as "my favorite day of the year". (There's no particular reason it's my favorite date of the year. I do think it's important to have such a date. For some people it's Halloween or Christmas or the first day of summer.) It's about timeless moments. Note that I accidentally put the line break after the last line. Is there more to this poem?

Short breathlessness, peace
Rare bird spotted once in life
Elusive feeling

8. I wrote this haiku (2015-03-08) about winter's retreat, which seems nice given that I'm currently looking out at the first snowfall of the year as I write this.

Chrome sky, soft mauve, blue
Air thick, sweet with snow's retreat
Dripping percussion

9. This haiku (2015-03-09) sampled from A Tribe Called Quest's track Push It Along, which itself sampled from Grover Washington, Jr. It's about keeping at it, like Sisyphus. I read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus that winter, and I had learned to appreciate tenacity even in the face of futility. The absurd hero pushes the boulder along.

In my way, a boulder
Strength in character, not arms
Just push it along

10. This haiku (2015-03-18) is about naked trees and their gnarly branches. I see in trees a lot of personality, mostly in their shape and not actions.

Inverted talons
Witchy claws scrape baby blue
Begging for new leaves

11. This haiku (2015-03-20) creates a metaphor out of dealing with difficult situations. [Author's interjection: I wrote this before we knew about Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct. In the interest of preserving history, the text that follows is the original text verbatim. The author in 2024 does not support the author's 2015 text for bullet #11. The author still likes the haiku.] Louis C.K. is very good at observing true things (and thus very funny), and he advocates that knowing how to sit with pain and sadness is how to be a person.

Acceptance as moss
Sit with it and it's pleasant
Know your own way north

12. This haiku (2015-04-04) is about the rise of spring and the surprises buried beneath the snow. When I first learned about haiku, the samples I read were usually about seasons and nature. I think these are important ones to highlight in this series.

Branches a-dancing
Rich spring soil beneath leaves
Wind blows fall away

13. I wrote this haiku (2015-04-19) while feeling sad during my road trip through the southern United States. I had stayed in some hotel rooms by myself, with very populous cities outside. I thought about the millions of people surrounding me and how I didn't want to meet any of them. I looked out my hotel window at a skyline I didn't recognize, and I hated the skyscrapers I saw. Conceptually and architecturally they were impressive, but by that time I'd seen building after building in different cities, and they were all starting to look the same: just metal, concrete, and glass. My best friend P says, "Home is the skyline you smile at." This wasn't home.

City far away
Buildings are generic blocks
Hotel room quiet

14. I wrote this haiku (2015-05-25) about a stunning mutt named Zeke.

Soft, cool plot of grass
Gallop gives to gravity
Dog day afternoon

15. I wrote this haiku (2015-06-22) in thinking about the joy of exploration. When I was little, the forest outside my grandparents' cottage seemed to unfold larger and larger as I walked through it. That forest is now someone's property with dusty driveways and not the fresh, untrodden paths I once knew and still yearn for.

Loamy, twiggy floor
Soft, wild, and new to the step
Undiscovered glade

16. This haiku (2015-06-26) is about Lake Michigan at night, to my left as I was driving to my grandparents' old cottage. The moon had risen white, and the small waves on the lake were picking up its quiet, clear light.

Licorice lakeshore
Ripples like vigil candles
Soft and sure in dark

17. One common trait among haiku in this series is the subject: clouds. I hadn't before recorded how often I look out windows at clouds, for significant lengths of time, and it became very clear that's my most practiced hobby after writing so many haiku about it. This one (2015-07-17) is one of my favorite "cloud haiku", in that it doesn't have the word "cloud" in it, and it doesn't need a picture of a cloud to support it, but a nice picture is attached anyway. (Most of these cloud haiku have an associated cloud picture attached, but I think the haiku should stand on its own.)

Turquoise shines from soot
Late day sky ponders next move
Lumbering liftoff

18. This haiku (2015-07-29) is another "cloud haiku" that doesn't mention "cloud", but finds ways to express what I'm seeing in metaphor.

Suspend in gray clay
Sun is somewhere, butter spread
Ambiguous light

19. This haiku (2015-09-04) is another "advice haiku" about using the right words.

Diction is a knife
Too sharp, certain injury
Honed just right, a tool

20. I have a fascination with rivers. When I stopped going to church, my temple became the riverbanks. I wrote this haiku (2015-09-09) to express my reverence.

Rivers never end
To sea, to rise, and to fall
Infinity stream

21. This haiku (2015-09-10) is about "the little things". It's also about my grandpa going on a walk with me through the woods on a cool summer morning when I was maybe 8. He told me to look closely at the sparkling morning dew on a spider web below a fern along the trail. I've been looking at those kinds of details ever since.

"Is all common, base?"
"Have you seen the morning dew?
There's no rarer gem"

22. This haiku (2015-10-13) is about a dream I had the previous night, where I was lost at sea and questioning some of my values.

Silent sea beckons
Great water doesn't douse your
Roaring inner flame

23. I wrote this haiku (2015-10-27) about the impermanence of the beauty of fall. Some people living near deciduous trees make rituals out of seeing them in their traffic light state. I'm one such observer. About 10 years ago I remember falling to the ground as one of my crutches landed incorrectly, and I didn't get up because I was lost in the golden leaves of a tree. I was feeling a similar awe when I wrote this.

Rush and lust for gold
Great treasure needs reverence
So impermanent

24. Precisely one year after I started this practice, I wrote this haiku (2015-11-19) about the practice itself. I think to live up to the phrase, "We must try to live!" we have to do more than merely passively survive, but create artifacts, ideas, and practices that can help and inspire others. (The owner of a local bookstore here replies to "That author has a gift!" with "No, he has a practice.")

Create or consume?
The former a firmer stance
Against entropy

25. I wrote this haiku (2015-11-21) at the first snowfall of the season, rounding out the weather observances for the year.

Light and sound diffused
All will be immobile soon
As silver dust falls

That's it for the highlights, but there are plenty more haiku available at my Twitter page, @ArthurHovinc. [Author's interjection: this Twitter page is only discoverable on the Wayback Machine at this time. I highly discourage the use of Twitter/its (in)appropriately named successor X.]

I intend to continue the "daily" haiku practice for the rest of the year. I'll decide then if I want to keep the frequency into the new year, or resume a monthly contribution.

—Art