My research notebook
plus a recording of the ocean, Offering for August 5, 2026
Dear Reader,
Greeting from a whirlwind of beach visits and pine walks and ghost pipe sightings and ice creams, and the decision that there is truly no place better than coastal New England which has turned me, against all odds, into a lover of summer. I have not been doing much slow focused reading, as the situation—family, sunny days in the low eighties, a state park just down the street, a full moon that required multiple night time visits to the island to catch the orange rise—simply hasn’t allowed it. But I’ve been reading around here and there in the mornings and sometimes afternoons, and am enjoying a new paperback from my favorite childhood book store, The Last Fish Tale, which is about the fishing community in our nearby Gloucester.
We’re leaving tomorrow, and I’ll have a little less than a full week at the house before I head to Chicago for a narrative therapy intensive. I’ve traveled significantly more this spring and summer than I usually do in a year, so keeping up with reading and writing has been difficult. I’m eager to get back, and am still thinking about Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks, which is enabling me to think outside the box of the typical Offerings format, so that I can share things what I’m sharing today, which is simply a list of the things I am hoping to read soon, with a few notes about why. Recently, I described Offerings to someone as “essentially a research notebook, a scroll-like processual letter in which I attempt to make notes from my studies legible, and situate them within the project’s context of grief, loss and mourning. In other words, they are rarely oriented toward ‘original’ scholarship or a coherent argument, but rather are a window into my learning process, in which knowledge never quite lands in a settled way.” I would add also that I’ve been casting the net beyond grief, loss, and mourning to include experiences of disorientation and transformation, in which the self is called into question.
I think that I will also share field recordings here and there, because they are beautiful. Here’s one from last week, at Sandy Point on Plum Island in Massachusetts where Seán Ó Dálaigh and I hosted a field trip for a recording workshop last fall. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to Sandy Point for a summer beach day and it was absolutely marvelous. We went to five or six beaches during our trip these last weeks, and Sandy Point was by far my favorite. 0172 As always, I recommend listening with headphones if you can!
And here’s my reading list! Basically, out of all the stuff I have open either in PDF or in a browser tab, these are the things I want to prioritize. Unless otherwise noted, they’re all open access.