Scrivere on manuel uberti

Ricominciamo

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Un breve annuncio che riprende e corregge il tiro di quanto pubblicato qui.

D’ora in avanti scriverò principalmente in lingua italiana. Non è detto che l’inglese sparisca per sempre, ma ecco, non sarà più la mia priorità.

Di fatto è un po’ di tempo ormai che non mi trovo più a vivere quotidianamente con una lingua diversa dalla mia. Ho smesso perciò di pensare in inglese a quello di cui voglio scrivere.

Buona lettura!

In compagnia di Bob e Grant

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Da mesi ormai trovarmi davanti alla pagina bianca mi spaventa. Non riesco a scrivere. Non riesco ad usare le parole per rendere concreto ciò che penso come ho sempre fatto.

Per superare questo per me nuovo tipo di blocco ho deciso di prendere la prima cosa che mi viene in mente in questo preciso istante e usarla come punto di partenza.

Dunque, sto ascoltando Hot Wax di Grant Hart. Ad essere sincero, non ho mai dedicato troppa attenzione alle carriere soliste di Bob Mould e Grant Hart. Mi bastano i dischi degli Hüsker Dü, mi dicevo. Posso sempre tornare a quelli ed essere felice di non essermi fermato a Zen Arcade seguendo chi, tra le mie frequentazioni di una ventina di anni fa, lo riteneva l’unico capolavoro del trio americano.

Il mese scorso mi sono trovato a spulciare, ancora una volta, l’archivio del purtroppo defunto Bastonate. Ci ho trovato articoli sulle opere di Bob Mould e di Grant Hart che mi hanno dato la spinta di cui avevo bisogno per approfondire. Ho letto l’autobiografia di Bob Mould, guardato Every Everything: The Music, Life & Times of Grant Hart, e di certo recupererò anche il libro di Michael Azerrad che è ancora a casa dei miei per un bel ripasso.

Da un lato c’è Mould, prolifico ed esigente, una vita di traslochi, scoperta di se stesso, tour sfiancanti e un’inarrestabile urgenza di mettere in musica il proprio sentire, vada come vada. Dall’altro c’è Grant, una manciata di album che sbucano dal nulla di un’esistenza ai margini, la droga, e la morte che ce lo porta via prematuramente.

Con entrambi, però, il tempo non ha avuto la meglio. È rimasta intatta la capacità di usare poche note e poche parole per dire tutto, per riempire ogni vuoto, per segnare, ancora e per sempre, le mie giornate. Poi si può discutere sul fatto che ciò che di significativo avevano da dire lo abbiano detto con gli Hüsker Dü, ma non importa. Anche da soli, separati da una distanza incolmabile, hanno tracciato un percorso in cui ogni sosta ha la sua magia, ogni direzione vale la pena di essere seguita.

È confortevole avere questa musica con me. In quello che è senza ombra di dubbio il periodo più complicato della mia vita aggrapparmi a questa musica è né più né meno una indispensabile forma di salvezza.

Beating the blank page

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You live in the problems you decided to build.

— Used for Glue, Rival Schools

Today I checked my writings directory and found a lot of unfinished stuff, all sorts of TeX files left abandoned, drafts of short stories or maybe novels I started only to feel unsure how to continue.

This is a weird pattern I’ve tended to follow all my life. As much as I’ve always enjoyed blogging, when it comes to longer writings I seem unable to proceed after a bunch of pages. Why is that? Could this be the real reason why I can’t write for a living?

I often question my ability to write. I never stop working on my style, my voice, and my choices. I also know well that I’m quite far from being a great writer, but this has never stopped me from trying my best at it.

And yet, I can’t shake the feeling that whatever I’m working on isn’t what I as a reader would really love to spend my time with. If I look closer at all my drafts, two of them strike me as projects with a structure, that is a beginning, an end and something in between. I even have chapters titles for one of them. But as I read them all over again, what is already there is not enough to please me.

My partner often tells me: “Keep writing”. Which means: “Keep putting into words whatever you have in mind and fine tune later”. This is what I usually do, though. For example, I rarely get what I want from a blog post in a single run. I may write some ideas, tweak them, leave them there for hours or even days at times, and get back to them with a fresh mind to see if it all still makes sense.

However, those TeX files are a different matter altogether and to conquer the blank page I have to identify the actual problems I have with it.

First, I aim way too high by drawing comparisons with authors I love on every line. This is the perfect recipe for failure. How is one supposed to finish a chapter when all they’re thinking about is what a different writer would do?

The second mistake I make is believing I know the approximate total number of pages I would like to have. Setting a target such as this makes me only feel distant from the target itself, because at every step my mind goes to what’s left to write to reach the ideal number.

The final and biggest issue is that I approach these writings rushing to complete them, so when after ten pages I notice I’m only halfway through the second chapter I give up and put everything aside.

Given I identified the problems, the solutions may be just around the corner:

forget about other authors and write for myself with what I have. There is always room for improvements later;
forget about the number of pages and just write anything that comes to mind. There is always room for improvements later;
sit down calmy in front of the blank page. Nobody is pressuring me to finish anything because noone is out there waiting to publish my work. There is always room for improvements later.

So, yeah, basically my partner is right and there’s really just one thing I have to do: keep writing.

Speculative fiction workshop

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Something is changing in my life. It’s a fuzzy feeling at the moment so I’m not able to explain it as I’d like to. It may have started last year after my trip in Leuven, or at least that’s when I first sensed new things in the air for me. But again, it’s hard to pin down what is really changing.

Mandy Brown says everything changes, and as a philosophy graduate I know there is a long history of thinkers who share her opinion. That’s why I’ve begun a long, tortuous process to carefully figure out where I am and where I want to be. Are they two different places? Am I exactly where I should be?

I don’t think so. I’ve been feeling restless since I came back from Leuven and I know something has to change in order to silence the craving cries in my head. I need to look around for opportunities to understand what is going on. Most importantly, I need to look within me and search for what it is that I’m missing.

However, I can’t do this by myself. I can be the one who sets things into motion, but I need someone to help me clarify what those things actually are before I can do anything about them. Seeking an alternative to myself is the only way to get a fresh perspective on what I can’t comprehend on my own.

Usually when I wish to clear my mind I write on my journal. I set out ideas and facts as orderly as I can, and then draw the best conclusion available to me. This time, though, I simply don’t have all the building blocks in front of me. I have some, yes, but I am struggling to put them together.

A viable solution could be reaching out to professional counselling or life coaches, and admittedly I thought about it more than once. Instead I applied to join a speculative fiction workshop.

I chose this approach because writing is who I am. Every time I write I am expressing and exposing myself, so confronting whatever is going on with me through writing can unveil new paths I haven’t found just yet. Furthermore, I’ll be doing it among people who feel in the same spot as me. Connecting with others might reveal to ourselves what we couldn’t see on our own.

Can't you write for a living?

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If one wants to catch me off guard and make me feel nervous and embarrassed, one needs only to ask: can’t you write for a living? I usually have two different answers to this question, both of them unsatisfactory to say the least.

My first answer is simple and silly: I don’t know how to do it. Friends are kind enough to support me whenever I write something here, but this blog is mainly a conversation between me and someone who isn’t there. The one time I tried a film criticism course with the vague hope of becoming a member of the team behind the magazine the teacher was the director of, I felt out of place. The teacher was pleased enough with my assignments, but I wasn’t going anywhere with my film reviews. My writings sounded all very similar to me and I wasn’t really saying anything particularly interesting about the films we were asked to comment on. It was the same feeling I had experienced some years before, when I had tried my luck reviewing music records. Whenever I am constrained I struggle and can hardly deliver, an obvious sign that writing professionally is something way bigger than me. Furthermore, music and film criticism don’t pay the bills in Italy. Just ask anyone who’s been doing it since before I ever dreamt of writing for a living.

The second answer is even sillier: Work gets in the way. For one reason or another, I’ve always been a software developer. I started as one twenty years ago and, beside a brief period within a language school my partner and I built, it’s always been software developing for me. Undeniably, I’ve also been very lucky, because it’s been eight years now of me using the only software I still care about every day: Emacs. However, work is the first thing I blame for my lack of success with writing. In terms of hours I feel like I could be creative with, I often say my job steals the most valuable time of my day. But this is nonsense, of course, especially if we consider that nothing stopped me on my way to a BA in philosophy, not even office hours. Ten plus years of this blog speak for themselves as well, I guess. So what, then? Is writing the one and only thing I wish I could do for a living and I’ve been postponing since forever? What’s actually stopping me? Again, this makes me uncomfortable.

One of the reasons I keep writing every day is that the urge to do it is impossible to resist. Journaling helps me reflect at the end of the day, for instance. When I read a particularly interesting book, I need to write down whatever it makes me feel even if only to record those precious moments. Moreover, writing is my way of keeping track of myself more than anything else. This is why every now and then I browse the archive and go read some old post of mine. Do I still believe what I wrote back then? It’s a useful exercise. Just like journaling, it puts things into perspective, showing me how I’ve changed thus far. Besides, it gives me a sense of the quality of my writing, at least from my own point of view. I don’t like my early writings, for example, since it’s pretty obvious that I was struggling to find a way to translate my thoughts into English. And yet I like this blog for this reason as well, because it shows that I’ve not given up and I’ve never intended to.

Maybe this is the most important lesson I should take away here. In spite of all my fears of not feeling that good at what I do, and likely not being that good either, I’ve kept doing it. I should treasure this persistence. I should thrive on the mere fact that I simply love writing and forget about everything else.

A new artwork by Disagioia

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you visit this website on a regular basis¹ then you may have already noticed that my poorly customised hawthorn SVG is gone.

The new, brilliant artwork comes from the cleverly creative hands of Disagioia, an Italian artist who saw the lack of artistic skills on my side and was kind enough to spare me some much deserved criticism.

The great thing is that we share a common interest in veganism and anti-speciesism, so she immediately understood what I was looking for to make this corner of the web a bit more personal and beautiful.

Isn’t it pretty?

Furthermore, Gioia updated the Open Graph image as well, adding the right words from my beloved Baruch Spinoza.

If you enjoy her work do check out her portfolio to see what she’s capable of. I’m rather confident you’ll find something you’ll like in there.

Thanks a lot for that! ↩︎

Un avviamento qualunque

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Non mancava altro che un’occasione, una spinta, un avviamento qualunque, per ridurre le parole a fatti; e non tardò molto.

— I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni

Un breve annuncio per segnalare che, a partire proprio da questo annuncio stesso, d’ora in avanti troveranno spazio sul blog articoli in lingua italiana.

È qualcosa cui stavo pensando da un po’, a dire il vero, e più di una volta mi è stato chiesto perché non scrivessi in italiano. La mia giustificazione è sempre stata la stessa, ovvero che con l’inglese avevo l’impressione di raggiungere più persone possibili. Tuttavia, può essere un bell’esercizio per me scrivere in entrambe le lingue, poiché sarò costretto ad adeguare la forma dei miei pensieri in modi diversi.

Ad ogni modo, gli articoli in italiano saranno raggruppati sotto la categoria italian. In homepage e nell’archivio l’apposita bandierina (🇮🇹) indicherà gli articoli in italiano. Un click su di essa vi rimanderà a tutti gli articoli nella suddetta lingua.

Buona lettura!

Small is good

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I like to think it’s not a coincidence that, as this website is about to approach its tenth birthday, I happened to read Philippa Markovics’s words on blogging.

I grew up during the heyday of the blogosphere. RSS was the new hot thing, and there were so many nice, quirky, weird, and interesting websites to subscribe to. Most of them are gone now.

This is so true for me as well. I used to follow all these beautiful blogs about random topics such as Thai cinema and Italian jazz. I don’t know whether social media or real life are to blame for their disappearance, but I do know I miss these places a lot.

Part of the reason why I made this website as small as possible is to keep that old spirit alive. True, I also did it because it makes maintenance simpler. However, I love the fact that whenever a random reader comes here they only have my writings to focus on and, if I’m lucky, the contact options they can use to get in touch with me.

It may seem like I’m not offering much because I lack the skills to build a prettier website, and yeah, maybe this is true as well. For instance, among the websites Philippa highlights as their favourites I already know and love two of them: Todepond and Trivium. I don’t have the creative talent to design something as pleasant as Philippa’s, Lu’s or Leah’s work, but it’s OK.

I know that every reader who for whatever reason lands here has no chance to feel lost or overwhelmed by irrelevant content. What I write is what they get. What they get is just me.

Words and the other

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I wanna take up space.

— Angie McMahon

I do not often think about why I write. I usually write in different places for different reasons, and not everything I put into words is meant to be read by someone else. There is this very blog here, of course, and there is also my Bujo notebook where notes, tasks, and all sorts of rants are stored.

Lately I have found myself sending small comments on the films I watch to a friend. It started off as a joke about my love for cinema, but they greatly underestimated my desire to share. Nothing serious, though. Five, maybe ten lines containing my thoughts on a film and that is it.

Nevertheless, after a while I noticed something. I noticed that when I am explicitly addressing somebody, I write much better. Maybe it has do with my language of choice. The small reviews I send are all written in Italian, which is the language I feel more confident with when I write, especially after some years at university. Or maybe it has to do with the feeling of having someone truly on the other side, someone I know and with whom a certain degree of confidence has been established prior to the exchange.

The things is, unless it is in my notebook, I always write for somebody other than me. This blog, for instance, is clearly not just an excuse for English practice. When I write, I am looking for a kindred spirit. I share not because I want everyone to know I care a lot, but because I wish to reach people who care enough. Recent experiences have showed me that I had been looking too far away. Deep and significant connections demand shorter distance and physical presence.

This is not to say that long-distance friendships never work. I have been into one for almost twenty years, and every time I receive news from this friend it is an emotion in and for itself. We both know, however, that a phone call, a message, or an e-mail will only take us so far. Our lives follow paths that never cross, thus we end up writing each other recaps in which one of us is not really a part of.

For my writings to mean something I must look elsewhere, somewhere closer to my blank page than I thought. Will this realisation lead the blog towards another direction? I am not sure yet. Most probably I will not stop writing in English, but even if I see room for updates in Italian from now on, I also need to understand what makes sense to share and what does not. One thing will not change, though: I will keep writing.

From Jekyll to Hugo

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is yet another one of those articles that bloggers¹ put up every once in a while to state they have moved to Hugo as their static website generator.

Ruby dependencies are hard to manage, especially when building my website across different machines with different operative systems. Recently I was forced to use an Ubuntu image on SourceHut because a specific version of a gem was not available on Debian stable, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Every time I change OS I need to fight with Ruby and rvm, which is not fun at all. I simply do not want to waste time in technicalities. I want the basic architecture under this corner of the web to be simple and easy to use.

Following a path similar to what Julia Evans did some years ago, I would say that overall the migration went fairly smoothly.

First I ran hugo import jekyll to have a starting point, then I grabbed the CSS generated for my old website and used it as the basis for the new version. The thing is I do not want to deal with SCSS files and SASS plugins any more. One CSS file is enough for my trivial needs, although I will need to clean it up a bit soon.

Moreover, I had to write a custom render-image.html to make sure I could use a caption under my images if needed. Other than that, combinations of project-find-regexp and query-replace let me quickly fix the syntax in my posts to make Hugo happy.

Moving to Hugo resulted in a smaller .build.yml manifest to package and deploy my website via SourceHut pages. In practical terms, I can now use an Alpine image where Hugo and hut are readily available to handle everything after a git push.

I feel old writing this word. ↩︎

The Mast-Head

manuel.uberti@mailbox.org (Manuel Uberti) — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am not really good at advertising so this will be short and straight to the point.

My wife is back at blogging after a long hiatus. Head over to The Mast-Head to read her ideas on whales, fountain pens, knitting, yoga, and whatever else she feels like writing about.

I also know for a fact that she uses Emacs, so surely her blog will be an awesome project indeed.