Hello World

This is Tom Hull. I've been compiling an online notebook since Feb. 13, 2001, later styled as a blog. I was 50 at the time, so I'm looking toward 75 later this year. At the time, I had 20 years experience as a software engineer, mostly working in pre-Linux operating systems and programming tools, including a fairly ambitious but long-forgotten piece of open source software. After losing a pretty comfortable — and thus hard to follow — job, I thought I might pick up some long-gestating thoughts on social systems I could imagine eventually turning into some kind of book. I figured blogging would be practice writing. Indeed, I've written 5-10 million words since then, enough for a dozen books, but I've tended to get side-tracked by news events, and by a music sideline where I've reviewed or at least rated more than 45,000 albums (mostly jazz, but also a lot of rock/pop/rap, and a fair smattering of country, blues, world, and other odds and ends).

At this point I have little idea what I'll write about in this "newsletter." I see it as a supplement to my blog/website: some posts here may anticipate updates to the blog, while others may recapitulate items in the blog. The main advantage to subscribing is that you get to see (if only to quickly delete) everything I put out, and I get a bit of reassurance that there are readers for my work. I haven't set up a paid tier, and doubt that I will. I've never made enough writing to depend on it for a living, and I've come to like the freedom of only having to please myself. I don't have any brand marketing monetization scheme. I'm not going to "niche down" and pass myself off as some kind of Expert Witness or Honest Broker. I'm just a guy who observes, thinks, and jots down some notes, drawing on still fairly decent memory. And while I'm exposed to quite a bit of music, that's just one of many things I'm likely to write about.

Which brings me back to the title I chose: Notes on Everyday Life. Back in the early 1970s, some friends picked that as the name of a new left/underground tabloid they wanted to publish, and they invited me along for the ride. Although I doubt that any of us had actually read Henri Lefebvre, the notion that the personal is political (and vice versa) was in the air, reinforced by all the critical theory we did read, and all else we viewed through that prism. The title was a license to write about anything and everything, confident that whatever understanding we could glean would align with our new left/countercultural commitments. Some things have changed since then: notably, the linkage between cultural and political radicalism, as well as the faith that both are headed for progress, has been broken by the cynicism of post-modernism.

But I still like the notion of writing about anything and everything that comes to mind. They say write about what you know. For a chronic introvert like myself, that mostly means your own self, your perceptions and thoughts about them. And so that's the plan. Not that I expect to write up everything that crosses my mind. To make the newsletter, those thoughts will need to cross two thresholds: the first is whether it is interesting enough to me to write about; the second is whether I think a fair number of other people might find it interesting to be briefed on. The bits that clear the first hurdle but not the second will appear on the website somewhere, but not in the newsletter — although don't be surprised if the latter includes links and sometimes even excerpts.

I have no set plan for how often the newsletter will appear. (Substack recommends regularly, like weekly. I intend to consider their advice carefully, but follow it only when it suits me.) Music Week should continue to appear on the blog weekly, along with less frequent Loose Tabs and Book Roundups, and less certainly the occasional odd special. One approach might be to push the most important parts of those columns out whenever they're timely, and turn the blog posts into repositories. To some extent, the website is just a big storage unit, a place I can store anything of possible future interest, to me even if not necessarily anyone else. But with the newsletter, I'll try to be more mindful of your time and attention.

I'm not yet sure how comments work here, but I'll try to give them a go. My Q&A forum has fallen way short of my hopes, but some of that can be chalked up to my own tardiness in responding to the few questions I get. I don't feel the need for Substack's Notes, but I often hit character limits on X and even Bluesky, and both have been disappointing in terms of reach. So this is an experiment. Let's see how it works.