Preface, Part 1: What Are Weeknotes?
Weeknotes are notes about what you’ve been doing this week.
Preface, Part 2: Why Am I Doing This Now?
I wanted to do something diary-adjacent, but perhaps a bit more meditative. I learned about weeknotes from Timothy Monger, whose music I’ve enjoyed since my college days, and his weeknotes referred to Walknotes, a writer I’ve also come to enjoy very much and who directed me to Giles Turnbull, who provided some guidelines I will most likely forget immediately.
Why start with a half-week? While the new year and new month are a totally arbitrary point in the earth’s rotation, it still feels less pleasing to start this project straddling December 2024 and January 2025. And doing Wednesday to Wednesday weeknotes for all time feels way too avant-garde. So a half-week soft-launch it is.
Preface, Part 3: Why Am I Doing This Here?
I thought about posting on Medium or Substack, but these days I’m increasingly reluctant to hand over my thoughts to a website I don’t own. And since my freelance admissions consulting business has dwindled in our post-COVID, AI-besotted reality, I realized I was paying for a website I wasn’t really using. So here we are.
Highlights of This Week
The weather has been rainy and the temperature has hovered in the 40s here in the Piedmont. It’s typical of the five winters I’ve spent here, even though many folks insist “It’s not typical!” every year. The climate has changed, evidently.
The sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) around the house have mostly dropped their gumballs already. According to NCSU, the fruit falls between December and April. I need to figure out a better way to clean them up. People even sell the gumballs on Etsy. That seems like a lot of work, but if I take the lazy way out and throw them in the woods, eventually I’ll just have more gumballs to clean up, right?
Despite near-daily headaches (allergies? A cold? COVID?), I’ve been reading. During the pandemic, I started reviewing for NetGalley, and I still take quite a few ARCs from them. Anyway, I started Lollapalooza, which is apparently going to be written like one of those Vanity Fair “oral history of” articles that’s just a collage of quotes arranged chronologically. I’m still in the pre-festival backstory of the bands of Perry Farrell, who seems like a fairly awful person even then (and still). A quick search tells me that Casey Niccoli is not even going to be mentioned in this book. Sorry, Casey. I love the first two Jane’s Addiction albums, and I suspect Eric Avery and Casey Niccoli had a lot to do with that. I suppose it’s the nature of inspiration and collaboration.
On Friday I also started Fox by Joyce Carol Oates, who is now 86. I wonder if she still writes her novels longhand. I was amazed that the subject matter wasn’t more triggering to me. But maybe on some level, once you’ve read a few JCO stories, you know to brace yourself. Also based on past reading experiences, I think I may have guessed the killer already. We’ll see.
