I’m Daniel Saunders, a Midwesterner in Los Angeles. This site is meant to be a (probably infrequent) chronicle of the things I’m reading and thinking about.
Projects
My biggest project at the moment is a deep dive into front end web development (you’re looking at some of the fruits of that now!), which is part of a general move I’ve been making as a freelance worker from visual and print design to web design. I’ve used Webflow for a long time (and it’s a great tool), but I reached the point where I wanted more flexibility, control, and understanding of the things I was making. It’s been a long process and has taken me through refreshing HTML and CSS fundamentals, learning JavaScript, and adopting new tools like Visual Studio Code, the command line, npm packages, TailwindCSS, and Eleventy (I learned Eleventy from scratch!) for static site generation (because the future is Jamtack). Honestly, it’s made me a better designer, too. I’ve got a lot to learn, but it’s been a blast so far.
I’m slowly working on a top secret personal design project that combines typography, web development, reading, and communism. See more about that here, and stay tuned...
In my freelance work I’ve recently designed and deployed some websites that I’m particularly proud of, two of them Episcopal churches: St. John’s Cathedral in Los Angeles and Trinity Parish in the Boston area.
Reading & Writing
To commemorate the publication centenary of Ulysses, I’m going through the novel for the second time (last time was ~10 years ago) with the help of Hugh Kenner’s incredible critical guide.
Revisiting some of the novels and biography of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis for an essay I’m working on.
Finished Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's excellent new book, Reconsidering Reparations, and will have a review of it coming out soon.
Recently read and enjoyed Alex Ross’ Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, Max Ajl’s A People's Green New Deal, and William Clare Roberts’ Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.
Otherwise kind of a dry season for reading, but things I’ve always got on the backburner: Marx’s Grundrisse, all of the exciting new secondary works on Marx (i.e., Michael Heinrich’s How to Read Marx’s Capital), and Robert Alter’s three-volume translation of the Hebrew Bible.