Getting Back in the Saddle
This is going to be more of a personal update than a true "note", but I wanted to get back into the swing of publicly blogging again, as I've only posted twice in the past month. So, I thought I'd start by explaining how I've been spending my time.
In mid-May, I started to turn my attention towards properly archiving the 155 Rivington phase. Obviously, there's a lot to say there so I focused all of my writing energy on that work rather than posting daily here. That kept me "on the bench" for about two weeks.
Then bad things happened in the world, which then led to the unfortunate revival of a 2016 project: Letters for Black Lives, which I'll probably write a bit more about soon.
For now, here's a long thread I posted from last week:
🧵Over the past week, I've been part of a ~400+ person effort to produce a 2020 update to @lettersforbl.
— Gary Chou (@garychou) June 10, 2020
On Monday, we published the first round of 26 translations (really localizations + adaptations) of the letter, with even more to come later today:https://t.co/1kuJjHTmqQ
Week 1 was a pretty intense production because it's like everyone's arriving at the party before you're really ready; Week 2 was about managing down the debt incurred from the shortcuts we took in Week 1. Â And so, blogging again took a back seat.
We're now in Week 3 of the project, where we're attempting to gather audio/video readings which will help us get picked up by in-language media, and it's a bit more predictable, so I finally have the headspace to get back into a daily writing practice.
Undoubtedly, the past few months of blogging has proven to be instrumental in preparing me for this project, as I've really needed to lean on writing in order to be an effective communicator and scale.
What I didn't expect was that this project would help uncover a key insight related to my 155 Rivington writeup—which was clearly not going well since I wasn't anywhere near done after already investing two weeks of my time.
And that insight was this:
And, if we don't feel like we can reimagine what we can talk about with our families—in the space in which we "should" have the most control—how can we expect to reimagine anything at all elsewhere in our broader society (goog: grace lee boggs visionary organizing).
— Gary Chou (@garychou) June 10, 2020
That the act of starting Orbital was pretty rational though a bit radical. I needed to address a deficiency I had, and the only way in which to do it was to create my own physical and conceptual space in which to practice the skill (and art) of reimagining.
So, on the one hand, it's unfortunate that I broke my 2+ month-long blogging streak, but it retrospect it looks like it all worked out because that insight was a huge missing piece of the narrative.