About

I’m Trevor Burrows. Nearer and Farther is my website.

What is this space? What might it be? Why am I here? Who knows!

For the moment, I’m mainly thinking of it as a place to experiment with reading, notetaking, and thinking in public. What that means is yet to be determined, and honestly, I also just want a place to blog my adventures in baking good bread. So anything goes, really – this thing could have all the predictability of a John Cage composition.

But in my best estimation, there will probably be some posts about:

• books I’m reading, books I’ve read that continue to haunt me, or books I’d like to read;
• music, as both listener and noisemaker;
• food – baking, cooking, eating, and salivating;
• some tech stuff

My wife and I recently moved to 7+ acres in central Illinois, and a lot of our time is spent trying to figure out what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it – so gardening and related activities are fair game for some blogging, too.

Professionally, I’m an instructor of History at Eastern Illinois University (Charleston, IL, USA). Although I teach, study, and enjoy a little of everything, I consider myself a historian of religion in American history. I’m also engaged in digital history and enjoy fiddling with programming in R, Python, and Javascript. (I’ll probably spin out a more focused professional intro soon.)

So yeah, grab your favorite DOS emulator, download Cage’s I-Ching number generator, and let’s see what happens next.