I have successfully passed all of the home-spun html entries from recent months into org-static-blog, meaning that I now have a continuous archive for the last three years. The ones from before that time can be found on WordPress. I don’t plan to move more of them.
A website should be more that a blog, however – I would like to add new features as time goes by. My biggest dilemma is whether to bother with adding some sort of fediverse or social networking to the site; it’s somewhat of a distraction, and it isn’t really possible to do it in basic html like the rest of the site. The simplest format is Bob Mottram’s Epicyon, if I want to get that working. But it looks like it would be necessary to add NGINX to the server. That’s possible too, it seems: one can have more than a single web servre protocol running on a server.
A Life Full of Holes, by Paul Bowles
I finished that today. It isn’t really clear to me whether he wrote the book under a fictional pseudonym, or whether the Magrebi storyteller was for real. Anyway, it’s a great book, written in a very original style. I could easily imagine a Bedouin shepherd relating the story. It’s poignant and creates great sympathy for the narrator. Usually a book like this, written by a western writer would be suspect of disguised racism, condescension or orientalism, but it’s not what I feel here. He doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the westerners, “the Nazarenes”, who appear in the book, and doesn’t romanticize the locals – mainly you think that he’s telling it like it is. I think it most reminded me of a Nectar in a Sieve, a book by the Indian writer Kamala Markandaya that I read years ago, though A Life Full of Holes is less tragic.
Bad News
The Guardian brings today terrible stories of Ukraine, of Uyghurs, of Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The world is full of sorrow. So let’s party?
That wouldn’t be for me to say, since troubles are more likely to make me turn inward. But either way, this is not the “Let’s fix things” mentality that we probably need.