skia

Demo vault. Fictional notes.

Join skia
Mara’s page

A note from Mara’s vault

Issue Ideas

undated

Issue Ideas

The overflow. Do NOT organize this. (I organized it once, in a fit, color-coded and everything. It grew back within a month, wilder.)

Strikethrough = shipped or dead. Everything else is fair game, or a fragment I will absolutely not be able to explain to myself in six months.

Live-ish (could actually become issues)

  • The difference between a note and a souvenir
  • "Reading is remembering with a stranger's eyes"
  • Why I stopped highlighting and started copying passages out by hand
  • The blue dot problem, part 2 — now that I've watched eight people get lost for work, I have Thoughts (some of this is really about the game — see On the Almanac as a Form)
  • Annotating the notebooks the dead leave behind (careful. this one's a landmine.)
  • What a diary study taught me about my own memory
  • The desk as an argument you have with yourself every morning
  • In praise of the unfinished — or is that just cope? (interrogate this)
  • How to end a newsletter issue (I am the wrong person to write this)
  • Marginalia the practice vs. Marginalia the newsletter — the name was a promise I keep almost keeping
  • Cold water and attention — why the swim is the only time my brain shuts up
  • The almanac as a form — HALF-DRAFTED, keeps collapsing, see On the Almanac as a Form. the Halina thread is the real one and I keep flinching from it.

Fragments (do not touch, do not delete)

  • Erosion.
  • Fog as a reading condition.
  • Palimpsest.
  • "attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity" — Weil. build an issue around the whole quote.
  • Tide tables are poems that happen to be true
  • The margin is where the reader becomes a writer
  • Grain. (film? memory? both?)
  • The museum of intentions — I already have the phrase, I need the essay → On the Almanac as a Form?
  • Halina's handwriting, the word after "wind" I still can't read
  • Why every January I start a new system
  • Perec's endotic — the infra-ordinary — LOOK AT THE THING NOBODY LOOKS AT
  • what the phone deleted
  • rereading as devotion not efficiency

Series I keep threatening to start (and won't)

  • "Field Notes" — one close-looked-at object per issue. sustainable? no. tempting? yes.
  • Reader almanacs — ask subscribers what THEY record. (this could be lovely or a moderation nightmare)
  • A slow read of Species of Spaces, one room at a time

Dead / already said it / shipped

  • How to Look at a Thing (No. 1 — the manifesto, still the most-opened thing I've written)
  • The Collector's Fallacy (No. 4)
  • The Museum of Intentions (No. 5 — shipped the phrase, not the whole idea. the real essay is still owed.)
  • Fallow (No. 7)
  • The Blue Dot Problem (No. 8)
  • What the Almanac Knew (No. 9)
  • How to Reread (No. 12 — got it wrong, too clever, too listy. redo, properly → On Rereading, which is finally good and which I am too scared to send)
  • The Sea Rises Regardless (No. 18)
  • On Not Finishing (No. 19 — the irony is not lost on me, I shipped it a week late on purpose)
  • Recording a Disappearing Thing (No. 23, last one out)

Note to self, written at 1am and left here as evidence: the problem was never a shortage of ideas. It's that ideas are the fun part and I keep eating dessert first. Ship On Rereading. It's done. It's been done for a month. Send it.