WeakNotes July 2025 - Week 1

Jul 6, 2025

I already do a sort of weekly recap for myself every week, so I thought I might start translating that to weekly notes for the blog. I'll also use this as a way to highlight things that didn't get their own post that might be of interest. We'll see if this works.

I've been thinking a lot about my morning routine lately, mainly because it's been so scattered. Many mornings I wake up and read first thing: poetry, often, and maybe a bit of fiction or an essay. I try to write a bit and then find a way to ease into the day. Having the summer off of teaching means time is a bit more flexible. It's a wonderful privilege, and I suppose my ideal morning routine consists of one variation or another on that theme.

But time is only so flexible, and it's not at all unlimited. Between plants and trees needing watering, and chickens needing attention, the dog's walks, and the cat's medicine -- not to mention feeding ourselves and getting things around for the day -- a morning of reading is not always feasible. Sleep in just a bit and the math gets funny. Something has to get pushed out of the equation.

So it was this morning, as obligations appeared from the start. Morning chores first - good morning chickens! - and then I needed to mix some dough with a levain I started building last night. From there, a quick clean of the coop with my wife before she headed off to a mid-day appointment. We built nesting boxes this week, as they should start laying soon, and wanted to get them installed asap.

But now she's off, and the bread dough that will become sourdough hamburger buns is fermenting. All of the pets are doing their own pet thing, laundry is spinning in the washer, and I've got some guy named Jaco Jaco playing on the stereo. I'll read in a bit, but I only just realized I hadn't gotten to it yet this morning. Sometimes, you don't even miss the thing you think you'd miss the most.

I've been reading Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital this week. It's absolutely stellar - interstellar even - and very much in line with my current explorations of Cosmic Indifference. The novel's main characters are astronauts on the international space station, zooming around the earth sixteen times in a day.

A recurring motif narrates the passing of the earth below:

While they run, while they cycle, while they push and press, the continents and oceans fall away beneath -- the lavender Arctic, the eastern tip of Russia vanishing behind, storms strengthening over the Pacific, the desert- and mountain-creased morning deserts of Chad, southern Russia and Mongolia and the Pacific once more.^[1]

But that list of course changes with every orbit, and the sort of things included on the list change, too. Sometimes this or that geographic feature, sometimes a description of color and texture, sometimes proper names.

We won't be astronauts any time soon. Until then, I'm enjoying peeking at the earth from this livestream from the ISS.

I also had fun playing with the maps at this interactive site, which allows you to alter map projections by centering them on different countries, like this equirectangular projection centered on Greenland.

Other reading:

• I've continued my slow, occasional reading in Caputo's Against Ethics. I'm enjoying it a great deal, even moreso because I haven't tried to blitz through it. But I'll pick up the pace this week, probably, as I don't want to lose interest and it's given me some threads to follow elsewhere.

• The late Helen De Cruz's paper "Friendship with the Ancients" really tickled me.^[2] In it, De Cruz argues for friendship with thinkers of the past as a creative practice that can cultivate epistemic humility and relational understanding. I am working on a post considering it in light of "Great Conversation"-style curricula, and what the analogue of this might be in the context of thinking about history. Highly recommend the article. H/T digressionsimpressions, "On Pettigrew on De Cruz on Machiavelli and Du Bois."

• I read a few stories from Yiyun Li's 2024 collection, Wednesday's Child. I've had a hard time getting into this set, but the closing story, "All Will Be Well," really moved me.

Although I didn't do a ton of baking this week, I started a Baking Diary and added my first bake of July: Jeffrey Hamelman's Hamelman's Five Grain Levain. I'll plan to add my bakes to the index regularly, and use these notes to occasionally recap successes (and, perhaps, failures).

This week is all about class prep for the fall semester: syllabi prep, assignment planning, etc. I'm also planning to do a bit of preliminary reading for a nascent project I've taken on involving, in part, Charles Erskine Scott Wood -- who I blogged about here. I'll share more notes on that project soon.