Week 1565

Have you heard about the short 20th cen­tury? The notion is that the 20th cen­tury didn’t really go from 1900 to 2000. It went from 1914—the start of World War I—to 1991—the fall of the Soviet Union. Makes more sense, right? And its coun­ter­part is the long 19th cen­tury, 1789 to 1914.

I’ve started to think of 2009 as “long 2009″ in my per­sonal his­tory. It began in Novem­ber 2008, when my co-​​conspirator Andrew Fitzger­ald fin­ished his first novel and I, in a fit of (let’s be hon­est) jeal­ousy, decided to recom­mit myself to writ­ing. And now, “long 2009″ ends this month, when I begin at Twit­ter.

Which is not to say that the writ­ing ends! No: that course has been set. What I mean is that the fulcrum-​​power of the year is bounded by those dates. And “long 2009″ was cer­tainly the most impor­tant year for me since, say, 2004, when I co-​​produced EPIC 2014 and joined Cur­rent.

Mostly I just enjoy telling sto­ries about time: mark­ing out epochs and hinge-​​points. Maybe a bit of coun­ter­fac­tual thrown in there, too.

This week I saw Sep Kap­m­var give a talk at Twit­ter. His project with Jonathan Har­ris—We Feel Fine—was one of the very first things I encoun­tered that had been made with Pro­cess­ing, and one of the things that made me want to learn it for myself, which led to all sorts of other things. Some­thing about see­ing this old influ­ence in this new con­text… it was a nice juxtaposition.

This was a very suc­cess­ful week for Pil­grim. I wrote a lot of mate­r­ial. Very rough, but all in sen­tences and para­graphs, com­mit­ted to the screen, which is the essen­tial thing. I’m mind­ful of my notion to have a barf-​​draft done by mid-​​March, with SXSW as my arbi­trary dead­line; I think it’s quite pos­si­ble, and hit­ting that dead­line is my focus and my mea­sure of success.

That’s it! Short wee­knote this time.

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