Monday Scramble: Spring Break

k0524

As announced at the beginning of the month, we’ll be taking a break from the Daily Office for a few weeks.

At first, we’re just going to take a break. There will be daily entries during the week, and perhaps even the introduction of a new feature, to be called something like “Noteworthy,” in which we’ll mention items of interest that we may or may not follow in the Office itself. For example: Martin Gardner just died at the age of 95. We don’t really have anything to say about Mr Gardner (except that we enjoyed his “Mathematical Games” columns in Scientific American even though they were always over our heads), but we can’t leave his passing unmentioned.

Over the past year, we’ve learned that the Daily Office is not a news feature. It’s a collection of links to reflecions on current events. Nothing interests us quite so much as linking to a series of reflections on the same topic, one a day for several days. As we did, for example, with “denialism,” following Mark Lilla’s widely-read essay on libertarian populism. Or as we did when the iPad came out, and we saw early users discover, to their own surprise as well as to ours, what the device is really good for — what it allows that conventional computers do not. (Reading lengthy hyptexts in comfort.) We’d like to do more of that, but we think that it’s going to require a sift in mentality, and another step away from traditional blogging.

(That was fun: “traditional blogging.”)

Once we’re through taking a break, we’re going to pursue the new mentality that we think suits The Daily Blague. One thing seems almost certain: the entire four- (and eventually five-) day cycle of weekday Daily Office entries will be largely composed a week ahead of time.

And of course we’ll be working on the new, iPad-apecific version of The Daily Blague — where less will be plenty.