Warp & Woof

Warp & Woof

v.1.3

Welcome to Warp & Woof, a blog from William Sundwick. Its purpose is to share with its readers some ways to navigate the philosophical, moral and aesthetic dimensions of life.

It is not a scholarly blog, but the author hopes that his own life experience and reading can inform his readers’ journeys through such realms.

He wants to share some things that he believes matter, not “fake news,” and he will offer frequent enough doses to motivate you to keep checking in. Comments are welcome. While Blogger requires you to identify yourself via your email address, the author will anonymize any comments before publishing them.

Warp & Woof has a structure. There are five departments of thinking (pages) -- but some entries may be cross-posted in more than one department. These five “realms of deliberation” are:

The Present

    … what matters, for sure!

 

                     The Past

                              … what used to matter       

                                                               

                                                                              

                                             The Future

                                                      … what may matter, who knows?

 

                             Totems

                                    … objects that matter (or mattered)  

                        

Beats

    … sounds that matter, since we never get tired of hearing them! 

Author’s Introduction

Switching to the first person now and translating -- readers can expect entries dealing with health and wellness for seniors (that’s me) in The Present, along with musings on bigger psychological/philosophical issues. This includes a fair dose of writing on child development (I spend some time babysitting my grandchildren).  

The Past will be filled with lots of hopefully knowledgeable meanderings around politics, sociology and history. I’m a liberal arts type, undergraduate major in history, and professional librarian for something like 30 years before imperceptibly transitioning to IT professional. I retired from the Library of Congress in 2015, after 42 years at that institution. History and politics are very big topics for me, despite their vague and uncertain impact on the present or future.

Exciting (to me) developments in science and technology will be found in The Future, along with a healthy dose of fear about things like global warming and other planetary or civilizational catastrophe! Perhaps I have an apocalyptic frame of reference -- most of my thinking about economics and anthropology belongs in The Future. Economics covers consumer behavior and marketing, both interesting fields for me. Anthropology deals with primitive roots of tribal life, which I claim will become more apparent in the future, as more complex social arrangements break down, putting sociology in The Past. The Future is not the place for invective about the status of American politics -- that belongs on the page for The Past!

On the page for Totems, you will find lots of apparently senseless, but exciting for me, information about cars, past, present, and future. I’m a “car guy”, by virtue mostly of my upbringing as a General Motors brat in Flint, Michigan during the fifties and sixties. I’m not a car guy mechanic, however. I never open the hood or crawl under my own vehicle (much less anybody else’s!), but a car guy who was raised in, and by, mid-century American “car culture.”

Finally, on the Beats page, another personal obsession gets its due: rock music, from the origins in the Great Migration, through the British Invasion, hard blues, acid rock, punk, metal, techno. If anybody thinks these genres are still alive, please let me know! I’ve “got my ear down to the ground” to paraphrase Jim Morrison, When the Music’s Over. Yes, there is audio here, via YouTube videos.

That’s been the concept. Version 1.0 of Warp & Woof launched on Ground Hog Day, 2017.  I made some changes to the layout and design recently, for v.1.2 (sounds better than v.1.1).  And, true confessions, this v.1.3 is informed by two-and-a-half years in my Arlington, VA Writers Group. These folks may be my only audience – except when I beg my Facebook friends and relatives to read my posts. I hope my mission statement remains unchanged at least through version 2.0; i.e., helping my readers see the “big picture” more clearly, making the complex simple, and having fun while we expand both our peripheral vision and depth perception!                      

         

Me, at Filene Center, Wolf Trap, 2018