Hello!
Thanks for being here. My name is Lukas and this is my newsletter.
I want to give a brief description of this thing, partly for me and partly for you.
This is the first of what I intend to be many emails. I got my first blogspot account in 2006, tumblr in 2008, and since 2015 I've vacillated between hosting blog posts on my personal site and fits and starts of a newsletter. One of my 2019 resolutions—which I generally take seriously—is to write and publish something here weekly (every Saturday). This is a recommitment to public sharing and development of ideas. I have always loved sharing myself on the internet, but have had more intensely mixed feelings lately about closed platforms and how to keep documents accessible despite a dynamic web ecosystem. A more finite email newsletter settles some of these nerves.
In the time since abandoning my previous blogs and newsletters, my interests have congealed somewhat and I've started a Master's program, in environmental engineering. The discussion around the field in my graduate program has been startlingly narrow, at least as I've found it, especially given it is a realm of study that touches on an amazing number of other sets of ideas we call disciplines. (Environmental science, chemistry, biology, ecology, civil engineering, planning, [landscape] architecture, transportation, anthropology, psychology...) Limited space for broad conversation in my program, and the fact that school required I move away from places where I had established social lives, has lead to a sense of lacking in the kind of conversation that typically gives my thinking structure and makes for synthesis. My brain, right now, is a stewing mess. This writing is to be a starting place.
The name, or name-at-present I should say, seeks to reflect my goals in writing. "Gnamma" is an Aboriginal term for a crevice or bowl carved into stone over time by water (and/or wind). There are multiple things I love about this term: that it is an emergent form, determined by various contextual forces; that an ephemeral media can carve into something enduring, and that it is an object that represents the process by which it is made by its form and location.
Thanks for being here. My name is Lukas and this is my newsletter.
I want to give a brief description of this thing, partly for me and partly for you.
This is the first of what I intend to be many emails. I got my first blogspot account in 2006, tumblr in 2008, and since 2015 I've vacillated between hosting blog posts on my personal site and fits and starts of a newsletter. One of my 2019 resolutions—which I generally take seriously—is to write and publish something here weekly (every Saturday). This is a recommitment to public sharing and development of ideas. I have always loved sharing myself on the internet, but have had more intensely mixed feelings lately about closed platforms and how to keep documents accessible despite a dynamic web ecosystem. A more finite email newsletter settles some of these nerves.
In the time since abandoning my previous blogs and newsletters, my interests have congealed somewhat and I've started a Master's program, in environmental engineering. The discussion around the field in my graduate program has been startlingly narrow, at least as I've found it, especially given it is a realm of study that touches on an amazing number of other sets of ideas we call disciplines. (Environmental science, chemistry, biology, ecology, civil engineering, planning, [landscape] architecture, transportation, anthropology, psychology...) Limited space for broad conversation in my program, and the fact that school required I move away from places where I had established social lives, has lead to a sense of lacking in the kind of conversation that typically gives my thinking structure and makes for synthesis. My brain, right now, is a stewing mess. This writing is to be a starting place.
The name, or name-at-present I should say, seeks to reflect my goals in writing. "Gnamma" is an Aboriginal term for a crevice or bowl carved into stone over time by water (and/or wind). There are multiple things I love about this term: that it is an emergent form, determined by various contextual forces; that an ephemeral media can carve into something enduring, and that it is an object that represents the process by which it is made by its form and location.
On Granite Lake Trail, Lake Tahoe
Regular writing, here, aims to achieve analogous attributes. How can lines of inquiry emerge out of the messy ebb-and-flow of my experiences, media diet, and graduate program? How can a little bit of regular writing in a fleeting medium carve out useful and lasting language and concepts? And how can the archive of this writing capture the process of me trying to build ideas?
I've been (finally) reading Dr Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's *The Mushroom At The End of the World* which, by my read, invests a lot its energy in generating or asserting language useful for making sense of the contemporary condition. I am inspired by this sensibility. All language embeds within it mental models, so I see the act of building language as intertwined in building a set of self-consistent, or at least of symbiotic (non-contradicting?) mental models. The book loops back on itself a lot, as I suspect I probably will, too. That's fine. Redundancy is necessary to build things that can stick, for myself or for you.
The goal is to make manifest the values I want to see in the world. Writing for my friends is the most intuitive starting point to me. (Note: the tone of the newsletter will likely be that of a message for a friend I haven't spoken to in a while.) Please write back!! Conversation is crucial. Share with me things that resonate, things that don't, and anything in-between.
Thanks for making the time,
Lukas