[Reposting this to get it on my blog. @timapple and @apoorplayer: just ignore this. Pretend you’re everyone else in the world…]

@timapple mentioned the new 37 Signals app, which is a simple and fun version of Kan Ban called Fizzy. I went over and checked it out. Now, Kan Bans are used for tracking collaborative projects with a decent number of people [@drjlwells has informed me this isn’t necessarily true], which is not me at all. I’m a solo act these days. However, I watched the demo video done by 37 Signals co-founder Jason Fried, and then signed up for the free trial today and started using it.

So far, it’s been kind of fun. I want to keep track of progress on my book projects, online writing, and home improvement projects. Right now, I’m trying to restore one of my previous books to the web for free online reading, and it is helping me organize what needs to be done. I also threw a “card” up (you created cards that are then added to columns that indicate levels of progress) about an article I stumbled on and might want to want to write about later about “ecoscenography,” which is a design approach for theater productions that tries to create sets, for instance, out of things that can be upcycled, recycled, or reused. I can attach the article to the card along with a few sentences to remind me of what I was thinking, and I put it in the “Considering” column.

I could see this as being useful for something like a podcast (@apoorplayer) or YouTube channel where you have to organize and track various stages of production. If I were still teaching, I was use the heck out of it for my class prep, committee work, production work and so forth.

For some reason, I find this kind of fun, especially recently when my mind has a bunch of new and unexpected energy. I look forward to exploring other uses. The trial gives you 1000 cards, after which you can either pay $20/month or download the source code and run it yourself. Unfortunately, the latter is beyond my pay grade right now, but it might be something I could learn later. @timapple, how is it going for you?

The theater is in desperate need of original ideas, but publishers like Palgrave, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press are so focused on soaking academic libraries that they price their books beyond the reach of those who need these ideas most. This is one reason why I am planning to make available several of my theater books online for no charge. I was considering Pressbooks, but at $12/month for each book, I’ll be looking for alternatives. Anyway, charging almost a hundred bucks for a 300-page KINDLE BOOK is absurd.

OK, let me expose my ignorance. I’d like to create a very simple web page for a book not unlike Matthew Butterick’s – a series of linked pages, the ability to tinker with formatting (e.g., decent fonts, line spacing, text boxes, etc.). I’d actually like to use Microsoft Word for the layout (I think), and then either export as HTML or copy and paste it. But here’s where I get lost, because I’ve always used Wordpress, Scalar, or Blogger to publish, so I don’t really know what is available. I don’t really want to learn HTML, and I don’t really understand GitHub or how to use it (although I could learn). Can anybody give me some guidance? I have a hosting service with the usual CPanel CMS’s. I just don’t get how it works…

When I left to take the dog for a walk this morning, I discovered a small, heavy box on the front porch. I hadn’t remembered ordering anything scheduled to arrive yet, but when I opened the box I found ten copies of the 3rd edition of my textbook, Introduction to Play Analysis! I’m delighted with this new edition, which really is a complete revisioning of the original. None of the analysis process is changed, but I’ve always felt as if the book would benefit from a demo of the analysis process “in action.” So we included the complete text of Susan Glaspell’s classic short play Trifles, and at the end of each chapter I applied the ideas described to the play. Thanks to some careful but ruthless editing, the new book is less than 20 pages longer than the original, so Waveland Press (a great publisher – thank you Don Rosso) was able to sell this edition with only a slight increase on the previous list price. I’m looking forward to seeing how it is received.

I began a new project a few days ago. In many ways, it is the opposite of the Learn in Public orientation. In fact, it is intentionally Learn in Private.

I have been writing (and learning, and sharing) in public for 20 years, and it has been great. I’ve learned a lot, and I flatter myself in thinking that my writing made at least a little difference to those who were trying to re-imagine theater. But the overlap between the Venn Diagram of Learning in Public and Teaching in a Classroom is almost total, at least for me, and that has become somewhat of a crutch. To teach involves an outward orientation: what does the student/reader need to know in order to understand this step? What does the student need to hear at this moment? Even though I retired in 2020, I have found myself continuing in the habit of asking these questions as I’ve written books and blog posts.

In addition, when I started in blogging in 2005, the scene was a lot like social media today–very contentious. Either you were reacting to someone else, or you were the one being reacted to. And soon I found I was becoming like Benvolio as described by Mercution in Romeo and Juliet:

Thou—why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in the street because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter? With another, for tying his new shoes with old ribbon?

In my defense, there were a lot of quarrels that needed to be had. But eventually all this becomes a habit rather than a choice, and (to quote Shakespeare again) you become “damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”

So it’s time for me to learn how to have an inward orientation. To ask not what does the student need, what argument needs to be countered, what information is missing from the world, but rather what do I need. And that’s a question I have avoided.

At 66, I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the years, about a variety of topics. My specialty is theater, obviously, specifically theater history and criticism, but I have done an enormous amount of reading in literary criticism, rural issues, theology, philosophy, political philosophy, education, entrepreneurship, business models, myth and anthropology, psychology, social media, economics, anarchism, and many, many more. Lately, I’ve been having an interesting experience of encountering, in something I’m reading or a podcast I’m listening to, a person or movement or idea that provides the link between two people/movements/ideas that I’ve previously encountered and appreciated, but seemed to be floating out there in mental space without a context or tradition. So I want to spend some time taking a step or two back in order to try to recognize the pattern in my own carpet – i.e., to examine my intellectual journey and figure out what I believe. And in order to do that, I have to learn how to look inward.

I hasten to say that this is not some sort of an announcement that I am not going to continue to write publicly, about theater or anything else. I fully anticipate that I will continue doing so, perhaps even more frequently, with the only possible change being a broader pallette of thoughts. But I will also have this private project that I likely won’t share with anyone except maybe family at some point.

Maybe you’re curious what this might look like. I can tell you it won’t be linear–I’m not writing an autobiography. It will be more like the independent web of the early days: a bunch of pages on different topics hyperlinked together. I’ll be using Obsidian, which is what Obsidian is best at. I suspect the result might look like an Obsidan graph view:

But for readers, it will be like a choose-your-own-adventure book of pages with text and links. Nothing fancy.

My hope is that this process, which I expect will go on for quite a while (if not the rest of my life) will lead to greater self-understanding, as well as to future sources of inspiration–“breaking bread with the dead” (and the living!), as @ayjay would say. And I also hope the process will lead to intellectual or emotional explosions in my mind, like a star exploding in space, producing a massive burst of light, heat, and high-energy particles along with a shockwave of expanding intellectual material. Enlightenment! Or a major headache. One or the other.

On the other hand, it might just be a private version of digital gardening where I can putter to keep my mind active. Either way, it is a net plus.

If you have any examples or suggestions, feel free to share. I see something like Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, or Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language as inspiration. I know there are many more precursors, and that this is nothing new or original. But I think it will make me happy, which I’m trying to learn is sometimes enough.