Don't Mess with the System!
Adjusting Pose Ponder
The following is a work-in-progress update on some adjustments I’m making at Pose Ponder, sent so that you don’t think I’ve dropped off the planet. If you’d rather wait for something definitive, it’ll come, eventually. Feel free to skip this one.
I started writing Pose Ponder (originally “The Daily Inchoate”) back in Nov 2023. I had a single goal: write. every. day. That experiment allowed me to start honing in on what I actually do tend to write about. I’ve become a believer in revealed preferences.
Pretty soon, I developed patterns for how my daily writing would work.
I would write only on weekdays.
I would post a weekly roundup (on Saturdays), so readers could have the option of getting one weekly email rather than five daily ones. (Only a couple people took advantage of this option — although it might be that the Substack setting is too obscure to find, to switch off one or the other.)
I found I really needed a whole week off to attend to projects and read, so the publishing cadence became 3 weeks on, 1 week off.
I fussed with different daily themes or quasi-templates, so that I knew what kind of post I would compose on a given day, and I would try to balance priorities (and reader preferences) across different types of content.
It’s been… pretty great, actually. Perhaps the best part has been meeting other writers here on Substack and engaging with their work. In a similar vein, I’ve begun showing up on Notes, Substack’s social media feed. Whether on the web or in the Substack app (it doesn’t work from one-way emails), by using Notes it’s possible to like, quote, re-stack, and comment on posts from all over Substack. I’ve enjoyed the share and muse: Pose and Ponder, hey!
But wow, is Substack an attention magnet. I’ve been “drawn in,” as Jane Austen writes in Pride and Prejudice. Lady Catherine de Bourgh scolds Jane for having caused Darcy to fall in love with her.
"This is not to be borne! Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"
"Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible."
"It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in."
(Source: https://pemberley.com/etext/PandP/chapter56.htm)
I’m envisioning the 1995 BBC film version, where those last three words just hang in the air.
Breaking up, by travel, my months long daily stride of posting has sounded a wake-up call. As many wondrous things as there are to discover, read, like, quote, re-stack, and comment on Substack — along some few remaining things on the “rest of the Internet” (!) — the real book piles on my coffee and bedside tables are teetering. I need more time elsewhere.
I also have my Sojourners project to attend to — creating a community of practice for lifelong learners. It’s languishing!
To the end of spending less time on Substack, I had thought, simply, to reduce my weekly posting to three times a week, keeping two original(ish) essays and one combo curated post to aggregate findings (previously Mondays), engagement with other Substacks (previously Wednesdays), and resources (previously Fridays). This intention may still end up being the way forward.
But I’m also assessing my reading, research, and note-taking workflow on the backend. To my surprise, I realized some time ago that I often write first, doing whatever research on the fly as needed to compose a daily mini-essay, and then I have to back enter my writing into my permanent notes, my PKM (personal knowledge management system). And in reality, I don’t even get around to doing that back-entry. New day, new topic. On with the next thing. Yikes.
Revealed preferences… ?
Over the past ten months, I’ve covered a lot of ground at Pose Ponder, but the writing is still scattered. A key objective of trying to be a better human is to pull my addled wits together. Will a better organized PKM <cough> help with that? Writing more “intentionally”? Sheesh, I don’t know. Would I be able to write better if my wits were more pulled together. I would hope so!
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: my excuses for not having posted much since returning from Vietnam.
Permit me just a moment’s more lament.
I have notes/ideas on Vietnam that never rolled into a draft. I’m still intending to finish reading Agnes Callard’s Aspiration book, which relates not only to recent posts on travel, but also to the larger scope of Pose Ponder. What are the underlying difficulties with aspiration (as a human)?
As noted, my book pile is begging for me to both expand and deepen my personal canon and to write more on Arendt. Dan Allosso and I will eventually finish up our Storythinking series, and we’ve been planning a new project, a collaborative reading of Dawn of Everything. Then there’s my ongoing dance around political thought (political theory, political philosophy) in more contemporary terms: a whole PPE adventure, much inflamed by the upcoming election and my efforts (in vain?) to sort out my vote.
A1, A2, A3, A4 … whatever happened to those distinctions, which are supposed to guide what’s going on here?
Not to mention, will I ever get brave enough to post more on political theology, on liturgy as counter-spectacle — as a possible antidote to the twisted relation between humans and creation; if such a thing could be done without going all apocalyptic and escapist? Gosh, I don’t know.
So you see, there’s a lot. Some of us have tortured brains.
If you’ve comments about any of the above, please share. You can’t imagine how writers like to hear back from their respected readers. Conversations are way better than monologues. (DMs are open, too.)
Tracy, I had hoped that you would share some observations during or about you recent travel in Vietnam and the Philippines. Doesn't need to be extensive, just some main impressions.