Tapestries - tapestries

Sean B. Palmer
2005-02-14T17:41:53Z

Wherein tapestries of miscellany are examined; the rationale behind which, some hints and tips for, and other general discussion around which is also exposited, for the delight of all our readers.

Tapestries

Introduction: Tapestries of Miscellany

I was talking to crschmidt the other night about how difficult it is to write entries. I have tons of stuff to publish to miscoranda, but there are various things impeding my getting around to it. But since I'm listening to SMiLE at the moment, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to address it properly.

<sbp> 'cause you think, it's a great topic so you want to get it right
<crschmidt> Right, but then you have to spend hours getting everything
   straight, getting links and stuff like that, and making it clear to
   the readers
<sbp> but to get it right means researching all the facts again and again,
   tying in links, and rewriting and rewriting
<sbp> heh, heh. right
<crschmidt> probably way more so for you, since your posts are slightly
   more esoteric than mine
<sbp> yeah. and an added annoyance is that I'll end up researching
   something *entirely* different twenty minutes later and will
   practically abandon the post as it first was

Obviously, Tapestries relates back to Carole King's "Tapestry" somewhat too. It's possibly an easier thing to do in music than it is in words.

Successes

Successes in this form of writing include Flibbertigibbet and Purre, All The Operation of the Orbs, and of course the 115th Semantic Dream, though that was successful in a rather different way.

In any case, it's depressing that there are so few successes. I've been working on a couple in the notes directory too: Miscellanea & Collectanea &c., and misc, the latter of which shows the kind of raw notes that I eventually like to compile down into something more singularly readable.

I've also been working on some post collectively offline that I'd like to work together into a "book" of some sorts, though I acknowledge that it's unlikely for it to turn into a real bound published book. I'll probably get bored with it eventually and just throw it all up in a directory on the Web somewhere.

Another point about this kind of thing, though, is that it's important to create some schema or even metaschema for the work in general. You can't do go putting bits of miscellany into a book except seldomly in rare exceptions such as Schott's Miscellany. The bits that I've been working on actually have a quite wonderful schema, but since I write it so much piecemeal, it's not coming along all that quickly. It'll take longer than Eunoia at this rate.

Hints and Tips on Tapestrising

As I said to crschmidt in the quote above, I'll often follow some quite amazing research chains that can go on for hours in which I find out interesting facts about all sorts of stuff, but unless that chain is recorded carefully, it'll be very difficult to fold it together in an interesting sequence in article form.

So, how to reverse that trend? I think it's important to develop the habit of actually writing stuff down as you go along, even if just in outline form. To that end you really need to have in mind the fact that you want to create an article out of what you're researching before you actually do it. That's fairly difficult for me since I often just find things by pure coincidence and it doesn't occur to me until I'm done that it'd actually make for a really great article. Alternatively, I can be sifting through so much information that it'll be really hard to keep any kinds of notes, or redundant as in the case where I was going through the online Times Archives and actually came up with two large article ideas within about an hour of one another.

Scrapuality and Seminalness

As scrappy as this page is, I think it might well prove seminal in establishing a trend for writing those sorts of articles that weave together all kinds of interdisciplinary information. The voynich manuscript is a good example of a field in which this is practically required, but I hadn't really thought of it as a major design principle, for example, in miscoranda posts.

Again, the publishing procedure rears its head and threatens to be all too easy a procrastination excuse, but I'll note here all the same that I'm thinking about article size and publication place: for example Flibbertigibbet and Purre started out as a miscoranda post but outgrew its original station and ended up in /shaks/ on inamidst. So I guess I'd like miscoranda to still be a publication [proving] ground for these kind of tapestrical posts, but to use a new directory in inamidst for the other things that I want to write about. /notes/ was originally supposed to be for that, but it ended up being for... notes, which is sensible. /eph/ is tied to a distinct input mechanism and is certainly fulfilling its promise and purpose, but all the same I think that a separate direction is warranted for this. So I need to Name It!

Sean B. Palmer