http://fragments.malvasiabianca.org/mosaics/Malvasian Fragments: mosaics2011-11-12T21:56:12-08:00David Carltonhttp://fragments.malvasiabianca.org/mosaics/fragments-introductory-thoughtsfragments-introductory-thoughts<p>Some forms that I'd like to experiment with: sutras with commmentary; dialogues; and Nietzschean collections of loosely connected remarks. The mosaics that this blog allows are designed to work for the first and the last; dialogues, not so much. That's okay; dialogues require rather a lot more planning and plotting, and I don't have any active inspiration in that direction right now.</p>
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<p>In both <em>The Mad Man</em> and <em>Pale Fire</em>, index cards play a role. In what other books? <em>Lila</em>, though it's not one of my favorites. How can/should I use that idea to remix fragments?</p>
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<p>How should fragments reference each other? Do I want explicit links in the text, do I want metadata, should relationships be purely external? If I want to write commentary, should the comments be separate fragments, or should the comments be embedded within the commented-upon fragment?</p>
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<p>I'm not at all sure who the target audience for these fragments is. Right now, it feels private, like a diary, and it wouldn't surprise me if it continued to feel that way even after it's been announced. I don't plan to publicize it very broadly, and I don't plan to ever allow comments on it, so I'll have no idea who is reading it, and no reason to believe anybody is. (I could consider forwarding it to Facebook, like I do with my tweets and blog posts; I'm not planning to do that initially, however.) There's always the Apache logs and the subscriber count in Google Reader, but I doubt I'll pay attention to either of those. (Or set up Google Analytics here.)</p>
<p>The danger with these feeling private is that I'll write something that I shouldn't. (I'm unusually bad at setting boundaries these days.) I suppose that's a danger with anything, though, and publishing is a separate step, I'll just have to think twice at times before hitting that button.</p>
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<p>I was thinking of saying, in the eventual post on my blog that announces this project, that it's something that only my stalkers would be interested in. Which, among other things, is a term that some friends of mine at work use to refer to each other: we do keep rather close tabs on where the others are and what they're up to.</p>
<p>That, I think, can be fine with friends joking around; but, as I was thinking about writing that post, it's just not a metaphor that I'm so comfortable with in other contexts. (Or: with less context.) And, of course, gender issues play into that discomfort; two of the friends in question are female, so their usage makes me feel more comfortable about using the term with them, but not more broadly. Not sure this is an appropriate boundary space for that usage.</p>
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<p>I used to write web pages by hand in a text editor; I got a lot more reliable at writing them regularly when I switched to a blogging platform, and I think having a web interface helped there. I'm not entirely sure why, though, and I would really prefer not to have a web interface for these fragments. Which means that I should pay careful attention to sources of friction: for example, it should be as easy as possible to preview a fragment in a web browser.</p>
<p>I'm hoping that these will live in an intermediate space between Twitter and blogging; I generally tweet from my phone, so I should have a way to write fragments there, too. Probably the easiest way to accomplish that is to have the master copy of the fragment files live in Dropbox, so I can edit it with Elements? I won't be able to publish from my phone (other than by sshing into my server), but that's less important.</p>
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<p>As I try to write mosaics, or even individual fragments, my editing instincts are fighting the format. It's not at all clear to me that, by the time my thoughts make it out of my fingers, they're naturally expressed as growing out of smaller chunks: maybe it's more natural for me to start with larger thoughts, and carve smaller chunks out of them, playing around with the organization and divisions as I edit?</p>
<p>Hard to say yet. When I'm thinking about blog posts as I walk to and from work, individual thoughts seem smaller, the train of thought seems chunkier.</p>
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<p>I'm planning to eventually (fairly soon!) publish the source code for this blog, if for no other reason than that I should have some code to point to on github. The one mistake I've made in that regard, however, is that the git repository contains both the scripts to publish the fragments and the text of the fragments themselves. So I have to split those apart, and ideally prune the latter from the git history for the former. (It's not the end of the world if I don't do that pruning, however.)</p>
<p>Admittedly, it seems unlikely that anybody else will ever want to use that source code. And it's not all that representative of the way I program: in particular, there are a lot fewer unit tests than I normally write. I think the breakdown into classes and methods isn't so unrepresentative, at least.</p>
2011-11-12T21:56:12-08:00