about

If you are looking for a credentialled authority, expert or guru, you aren’t going to find one on this site. This is the product of one person. I am not affiliated with any academic or other institution. I have nothing to sell. You are free to take anything you see here and do whatever you like with it. Or don’t. It’s up to you, as is everything else you do.

The archive, the site, is the argument. I’m working out certain ideas, and I’m keeping the garage door up. Many things posted here are scheduled to be posted immediately after I have them made. It i snot unusual for me to have scheduled posts out a week to a month in advance.

The ideas follow a certain chain of thought, but they are also mutating. The only criteria is that I think something is interesting. But, interesting could also be wrong. Or partially wrong. Or right. It really depends on where you are sitting. Also, no one knows enough to be completely wrong, or right, about anything. Error is everywhere.

The site

I started cafebedouin.org in January 2017 after reading this bit of advice from Don Joyce, just after his death:

“‘Over The Edge‘ would never have achieved its present level of adeptness if it had not had years to develop. This aspect has allowed not only the perfection of techniques, but also evolving practices such as subtle but fruitful themes which would never occur as anyone’s first choice, returning casts of characters, regular ‘features’, a whole fictional network called The Universal Media Netweb, and countless interrelated ‘plots’ and fantasys which have developed over time. And just when all that becomes too familiar, we can pull a complete hoax and pretend to replace O.T.E. with some other show entirely. All this depends on the ability to play with regularity. (A key to understanding the effects of all transmission media.) Being somewhat interactive in unfamiliar ways, O.T.E. in particular, requires a regularly scheduled slot which listeners can become acquainted with and, over time, explore their own ways to develop a creative relationship with it. Such potentials are not always fulfilled, but they are important potentials to hold out, and there is always next week… I repeat: GET YOUR OWN SHOW.”

—Don Joyce, “GET YOUR OWN SHOW!” Negativland.com. 1995. Accessed November 2016. http://www.negativland.com/archives/002getshow/

This is my show. It’s a blog as hupomnemata. Michael Foucault defined hupomnemata as a personal notebook similar to a spiritual journal but with a different goal. He did not want “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid [like a spiritual journal does], but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.”

The Japanese have a literary tradition in a similar mode, zuihitsu. The method to zuihitsu can be described in this way:

“[S]he writes personally and casually, for the joy of it, about anything that comes to mind, providing that what she thinks might impress readers…excluding anything completely fictional.”

-Stephen Carter, ed. Introduction to The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century. Washington, D.C: Columbia University Press, 2014.

My method is to post something at least once a day (barring the vagaries of life). I post quotes from articles, images, video and so forth that I think are interesting, even if they might not “impress” anyone else. Posts are stacked in next available slot, as I find or create them. Sometimes I push more timely entries to the front. Any commentary I wish to add is just added to a post if it short enough. Longer comments get added to the stack, like any other post. Most of my longer comments are written in a day or less, in the zuihitsu style. Prior to July 2025, these used to be by written myself. Sundays are for music I’ve listened to recently.

Since, mid-July 2025, I’ve been more focused on ideas and essentially outsource writing to LLMs, primarily Claude for writing and other models for multimodel evaluation. Read On Method: How This Blog Works for additional details. Many essays are seeded in an automated process that takes any input, applies a lens and generates reports that serve as a seed. I then talk about it with Claude, get it to write a draft when the ideas are solid, do a multimodel review and optionally, there’s an editing, reality check, grounding and other review that I call the UKE suite on essays that are particularly important.

My intent with this blog is to just go with the flow and see if any patterns or creative directions emerge. The original tagline: “Every day, without hope or despair,” came from a post from Austin Kleon, a reminder that regularity is key. Evolution requires iteration. However, I changed it to: “The archive is the argument,” on March 7, 2026. By this point, much of what the site is doing is related to the Deferential Realism concept. Presumably, the creative concept will change in the years ahead.

I don’t imagine an audience for this blog beyond myself and perhaps a few friends. But, over the years, there seems to be some content that people like. Take a look at favorite posts, if you are looking for an entry point.

If you have somehow stumbled upon cafebedouin.org, then welcome. Comments are open. If you prefer email, I can be reached at contact@[sitedomain]

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