morning wake-up time corner

I'm a fan of good habits, and I've always been fond of waking up early. 

I seem to have forged a new habit in my wake up time down here in Maryland.  I get up at 6:36 now, without need of external alarms or devices of any kind.

children's book reading corner: the enormous egg

I borrowed Leonard's copy of The Enourmous Egg, which arrived in the mail along with a couple of handsome Lincoln stamps on the envelope.

The illustrations are pretty great.  Dr. Ziemer's labeling of reality using his notebook and aristocratically mighty pen, less so.  At least Nate acquires the same art by the end of the story, cf. above.

book reading corner: persian letters

I finished reading Montesquieu's Persian Letters. It was a bit of a trudge. My edition had a slew of errors and missing footnotes which didn't help my trudgery. Grr.  

A selection of the letters I liked:

- number 108, on reviewing and reading: "the great mistake made by reviewers is that they write only about new books, as if the truth could ever be new.  It seems to me that until a man has read all the old books, he has no reason to prefer new ones instead"

- number 143, Rica to Nathaniel Levi, a Jewish doctor.  This is the letter on literary remedies, the power of the mind on sickness.

- and the Fragment from an Ancient Mythologist, which was found in a series of items not originally published by Montesquieu.  I'll post it here:

In an island near the Orcades a child was born, whose father was Aeolus, god of the winds, and whose mother was a Caledonian nymph.  He is said to have learnt all by himself to count on his fingers, and, at four years of age, to have been able to distinguish between the different metals so exactly that when his mother tried to give him a ring made of brass, instead of gold, he realized that it was a trick and threw the ring on the ground.

     As soon as he was fully grown his father taught him the secret of catching the wind in balloons, which he then sold to travellers.  How-ever, since his wares were not greatly appreciated in his own country, he left, and began to lead a wandering life in the company of the blind (bling?) god of chance.

     In his travels he learnt that in Betica everything shone with gold, which made him hurry to get there. He was made very unwelcome by Saturn, who was then on the throne, but once the god had departed from the earth he had an idea, and went out to every street-corner, where he continually shouted in a hoarse voice: 'Citizens of Betica, you think yourselves rich, because you have silver and gold.  Your delusion is pitiable.  Take my advice: leave the land of worthless metal and enter the realms of imagination, and I promise you such riches that you will be astonished.' He immediately opened a large number of the balloons he had brought and distributed his wares to anyone who wanted them.

     The next day, he went back to the same street-corners and shouted: 'Citizens of Betica, do you want to be rich? Imagine to yourselves that I am very rich, and that you are too.  Every morning, make

(it stops there, and it sure is a great way to end a bedtime story)

(the thought occurs to me that the Barthelme short story "the balloon" might offer a new reading of this story, too)

on fugazi, michael jackson, and we are the world

^^^ the glen E. friedman book of Fugazi photos is fascinating.  

The introductory essay by Ian Svenonius is a good piece of writing with Lacanian underpinnings and makes a nod at political songs by mainstream artists.

One part of the essay, referencing a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, is worth noting in view of yesterday's news:

[and particularly] "We are the World" a disgusting declaration of ruling-class supremacy disguised as a paternalistic, Kipling-esque 'save the savages' statement.

The album cover drives this point home in a real way, via wikipedia:

There was apparently a bit of a controversy around the lyric there's a choice we're making / we're saving* our own lives which has at least 2 interpretations, indeed.

* cf. save, entry 2: keep and store up (something, esp. money) for future use -- via trusty os-x dictionary.app

napkin drawing corner: the what and the how

^^^ from an earlier conversation about goals n tasks w/ Dad.

and a concatenation of lines from this and one other conversation:

well you have three boxes to put your energy into now the what the how and the do and so just do it like the drunks do it  - you know all Don Gately style - and just plow one day at a time style and make 'em* all say wow when did you get so tall?

I absolutely love my family.

* that is, gently suggest or invite them to say such nice observations in a polite, non bat-nudging way

give it a try corner

That’s all I do now–go out about 2 and find some place to sit till the pubs open and get back here about 7 and cook liver and read the Evening News. I couldn’t stand the British Museum any more. Plato & Artistotle & the Gnostics finished me. I bought the Origin of Species yesterday for 6d and never read such badly written catlap. I only remember thing: *blue eyed cats are always deaf* (correlation of variations). I finished Vanity Fair and Cunt Pointercunt. A very painstalling work…. I bought Moby-Dick today for 6d. That’s more like the real stuff. White whales & natural piety… I haven’t opened my mouth except in bars & groceries since you left this day week: to haughty barpersons and black-souled grocers. About going where I don’t know. I suppose I must go home. I haven’t tried to write.

^^^ Samuel Beckett in a letter from 1932

Thankfully, Beckett eventually tried to write.  Like my Dad says, maybe the point is to just try.

idea corner: rare book cafe

I had a good conversation about rare and antique books a year or so ago, mostly around the question why are they so expensive? One example: $5k for a copy of the Fountainhead (!)

I see the whole point (well, a whole lot more of it anyhow) of truly unique and limited objects now - especially those with long and fancy provenances - but I sure don't care very much for it.

What if there were a nice cafe where you could go and read these books? It could charge $20 for a cup of coffee, with a big burly bouncer at the door to make sure no rogues or roustabouts nick a book.  Pastries would be $30.

You wouldn't have to buy anything there, of course, but the cafe's librarian would give you the equivalent of a "shh!" to spend a few bucks if you made a habit of not spending money and mooching all the love off the books*.

(i don't know what this equivalent would be, any thoughts?)

This idea might be part 1 in a series of posts on places to go if you love to be around people, but don't like boozing it up, dancing around others, etc.

* off the books = (1) the spiritual quality of love taken off margin notes, torn pages, etc. (2) off the accts receivable books

^^^ this happened naturally, zut alors

go bo go

^^^ bo and obama, i am a fan of the running.

talking and walking corner

via Leonard, on how the brain treats talking versus walking (or working):

Recently an article made the rounds of my syndication feeds, to the effect that you shouldn't even mention things you're working on until they're done, because your brain treats announcing a project as work on the project. [...]

time mgmt corner: my schedule

this is my current schedule, from y'day.

comments are welcomed.

i'm making some edits today, to get a better handle on the wtype tasks.

Schedule for 6/16	Time	Notes
morning routine	8-9am	waking. grind beans, mr. coffee. shirt on.
Morning reading	9-10am	The Trivium.
walltype	10-12pm	image cropping
lunch	12-12:30pm	turkey sandwich + swiss, and several grape leaves.
walltype	12:30 -2:30pm	more cropping. design size 1200x800, crop to 600x400.
writing	2:30 to 3:30pm	water. names, the importance of.
walltype	3:30-5:30pm	rm'ing cruft of dependencies on image size and the junky old queue / approval system.
running	5:30-6:30pm	drive to Jim's part of town, then ~2.5mi run. outran pops + Jim. next time? run the course twice and lap them. oh yes.
supper	6:30 - 8:30pm	shrimp salad, made by Vicki. mmm.
interactions	8:30-10:30pm	lots of talking and txtos at home.
evening reading	10:30 - 12:30am	Tocqueville, Democracy.

names writ in water corner: pool in dc!

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

   -- Keats tombstone

Well, it looks like there is a pool to visit down here.  Oh yes.

I just hope the proprietors didn't feel the need to try and bronze and emblazon their name into the water of the pool like they did in this Post article.  

It occurs to me that another reason - among a slew of 'em - it takes so long to read some pieces of writing is the necessity of filtering out the intentions and Rococo-esque lack of directness as to why someone's name is banged into it, the given specimen, so many times.

The truth is easy (and fast) to read.  If we lived in a more honest world, we'd all maybe read a lot faster and forget less.

 

Okay then.  Just putting a few observations and opinions out there.

truth and consequences and observations

A passing thought from this morning:

The truth can set you free

   but you might not like what you see

Anyhow, on a different topic:

The farm which used to be next door (give or take a few hundred yds.) to my Dad's house in Maryland was developed into a shopping mall a few years ago.  One of the open-air, outdoor bazaar variety.  It has upper-tier stores for the 'burbs: an American Eagle, JoS A. Bank, Barnes and Noble (the lower tier equivalent maybe being Waldenbooks), one of those places with $10 chicken dinners*, etc. etc. 

And the food court has a Dairy Queen.  Mmm.

It also has piped-in muzak on outdoor speakers to prevent loitering and skateboarding.  An Ipod and earphones offer a reasonable answer, but they feel like wearing a scuba tank for noise. It's no coincidence the small earphones are called earbuds**.

It's all not so much different from using one on the subway. There the Ipod blocks out the noise (or lack thereof) of others, rather than noise intended to make you feel uncomfortable.  One wonders if the buds will ever come off ...

* for the new yorkers reading these updates: ten bucks is kinda high for a chicken dinner.

** why? because they've become everyone's best bud.

supplemental corner: the trivium

Bores make cowards of us all.

    -- E.V. Lucas, "Bores"

I've been staying up past my bedtime to read The Trivium for the past few days, which makes use of a slew of good examples.  The above is an example of an allusion. The author, Sister Miriam Joseph, explains this sometimes-misunderstood literary form and then states:

For those whose literary background is inadequate and who therefore are unfamiliar with the source of the allusion* [in this quote], a work such as the concordance to the Bible or to Shakespeare, both frequent sources of allusion, will prove helpful.

I imagine presents of concordances, no doubt a delight for any child** on Christmas morning.

(Sister Miriam is one tough nun)

* ... the source is Thackeray's Pendennis, with perhaps a subtle nod to Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream

** well, maybe not any child ... but surely some child, somewhere.

maryland

^^^ pic from train window this afternoon, the chesapeake and a boat and sunny skies. i'm in md for the summer.

rails corner: roustabouty routes

Rails routes  == remarkable

new school path routing - walltype.com/$user/$design - works now and works well.

cookbook corner: the futurist cookbook

^^^ I've been looking at some cookbooks while browsing through Leonard's bookshelves this morning, one of the best so far is The Futurist Cookbook.  Paraphrasing the introduction:

In 1932 the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proposed a revolution in food.  [...] It was not a collection of recipes for self-nourishment but a disguised artistic game, full of ideas for avant-garde experiments.  [He] blasted the nineteenth-century culinary ideal - a Romantic, Rousseauan notion - as one of nourishing fare prepared with loving care and replaced it with an ideal of modern brashness.

The chapter containing recipes for definitive futurist dinners is fun and full of cleverness. A small sample:

*** astronomical dinner *** 

served on a table made of crystal, sources of variable light illuminate the table in a hundred different ways. all the plates, bowls and cups are also made of crystal.

the meals change with the refraction of light throughout the day: lunch at high noon consists of smoked meat, pistachios and red pepper, sprinkled with lemon and delicately perfumed with vanilla.

*** simultaneous dinner ***

for businessmen unable in the whirl of affairs to get to a restaurant or return home, a meal designed to continue various activities (writing walking talking) and eat contemporaneously:

a big smoker's pipe of lacquered red metal with a little electric oven to cook a soup.

small 'thermos' bottles in the form of fountain pens, containing hot chocolate.

pocket diaries containing fish pastilles.

letters and invoices of different strengths of perfume, available in a perfume to calm, satisfy, or excite the appetite. 

*** bachelor dinner ***

eaten in a dining room filled with paintings and sculpture by the Futurists Tato, Benedetto, Dottori, and Mino Rosso [the meal matters less than the art in this one]

There also seem to be several parts about food in pill form, an idea which probably had more currency in the 1930's than it does today.  

I'm more fond of the 19th century nourishing fare than modern brashness, but the book offers a slew of good ideas for a dinner party.

(it also makes good use of the Futura typeface)

climate and clouds corner: salter's plan

There are also a slew of climatological ideas in next month's issue of the Atlantic. One of my favorites is a salty Scottish idea that is not crap. How to save the planet? Paint it white:

Stephen Salter, a Scottish engineer, has mocked up a strategy that would cool the planet by painting the skies above the oceans white. Salter's designs - based on an idea developed by John Latham at the National Center for Atmospheric Research - call for a permanent fleet of up to 1,500 ships dragging propellers that churn up seawater and spray it high enough for the wind to carry it into the clouds. The spray would add moisture to the clouds and make them whiter and fluffier, and therefore better at bouncing sunlight back harmlessly into space.

            -- "Moving Heaven and Earth", Graeme Wood.

The estimated cost? 300 ships for $600M plus $100M a year to keep the thing running.  The effect of all the new clouds would *theoretically* be a return to pre-industrial revolution temperature levels.

(the other ideas in this article are even wackier: pumping sulfur into the upper atmosphere via Zeppelins, etc.)

attention and awareness corner: jamais cascio in the atlantic

There is a decent response, of a sort, to Nicholas Carr's piece "Is Google Making Us Stupid" in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, which doesn't appear to be online quite yet.  An excerpt:

    At present, however, finding the most-useful bits [on Twitter] requires wading through messages like "My kitty sneezed!" and "I hate this taco!".

    But imagine if social tools like Twitter had a way to learn what kinds of messages you pay attention to, and which ones you discard.  Over time, the messages that you don't really care about might start to fade in the display, while the ones that you do want to see could get brighter.  Such attention filters - or focus assistants - are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives.  We'll move from a world of 'continuous partial attention' to one we might call 'continuous augmented awareness'. 

    [...] Our ability to build the future that we want - not just a future we can survive - depends on our capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world's systems, to take advantage of the diversity of knowledge and experience our civilization embodies, and to fully appreciate the implications of our choices.

                 -- from "Get Smart" by Jamais Cascio

Cascio makes some interesting references and posits new ideas, but there probably won't be a need for the software-based external attention filters he describes. Our consciousness adapts to perform the filtering we need for this world, and it is this adaptation which has led us into a world of continuous partial attention (ie, partial a.d.d, described by Linda Stone at an unsubtly revealing url). It is our own consciousness rather than a Twitter plug-in which performs the display adjustments.

Advertising and intentions aren't discussed by Cascio, but offer a deeper examination of the larger issue of attention and awareness: 

If you entwine advertising into the things which someone chooses to pay attention to, well, then they pay less attention to the whole thing. Imagine you are reading and get nudged with a bat upside your head. Just a nudge, not a full thump. You aren't going to read as fast after the bat-nudging: you might be a little bit preoccupied - what's going to happen next with this bat? - and more than a little bit wary of the person nudging you with it.

To take it a step further, if you force someone to give a portion of their attention which they would never otherwise choose to give freely (and who would make a deliberate choice to view ads?) they feel less capable of making a choice, much less fully appreciate the choice's implications. I'll choose not to extend the thumping metaphor of the bat-nudge here.

It is true that we are probably headed for a world of continuous augmented awareness; however, it is more likely to arrive via forms of communication and media which augment our awareness in an untainted way.  That is to say in a more pure and curiosity-stirring way.

I feel it's possible that everything made by others in our world could be either art or art criticism.  And in art the maker counts just as much as the message. Maybe even more so.

There is a small audience wading into the Twitter trenches to hear about a kitty sneezing or if a taco is delicious: honest messages don't require fancy words, and hearing these messages from someone you know augments one's conscious awareness in the greater world.  

(from a stranger, the same words don't carry the same meaning) 

We'll help each other get to a more aware and attentive place, we just have to talk more about cats and tacos and help each other stay away from the bats.

cairo corner: alexis' poem

I packed up most of my books last night, and came across Alexis' chapbook on travel.  This poem - At the Lobby of the Ramses Intercontinental, Eid, 2000 - makes me think of Obama in Egypt:

Who would blame you stone in your chair, struck

by that long strong soul in flowing white, black rope

round his head, chunks of diamond at his fists?

He's come to Cairo for air conditioning and CNN,

a spin at roulette, a few females for as long as he cares.

A vague fringe of sand still hems his robes, evidence 

for you. (He does not need to prove the dream

of gold and heat to which he will return.)

The marble floor melts to jelly in the wake of his bare feet.

Stare, rude girl!

He makes no note of you - and be glad of it.

Though in you too lies a keen streak of Bedouin

that roves sere desert without need (it is your heart)

till it vaults at some bystander with a grand, indifferent thirst.

(I imagine Obama had ready access to air conditioning and CNN)

I wrote down a few pages of notes while packing up my books, which might make their way to a blog post at some point.  

Someone said somewhere - I think it was Norman Mailer in The Spooky Art - that one has to absorb 1,000 books in order to be a writer.  I'm not quite there yet, but I have read somewhere on the order of 600-650 works of fiction (ie not non-fiction, tech books, etc etc). While reading has its rewards, it can also make for a bumpy ride in life, one which I'm not sure anyone would willingly choose with full knowledge ahead of time.

I also think some works, ie Ulysses or Paradise Lost or the Jest, should count double or triple towards one's thousand book count.

spelling correction and good signs

I've been trying out the quick shorthand of wtype for walltype in text msges, which results in a spelling auto-correction suggestion on my iphone: 'style' 

I have no idea why this happens, but I'll take it as a good sign.

music corner: adron

Good music to listen to while reading ruby code in Textmate? Adron.

Best track thus far? Airplanes.

Muxtape seems nearly operational. It is a life star (not a death star, though it is equally kick ass) that is sure to dominate the world. I envy their seed investors.

fish or cut bait corner: walltype2

well, you know you've let a project go when you're weighing whether to fix up the code you've laid down thus far or just make a new project in svn and call it xxx2, as in 'walltype2'. 

phew.

(i don't have time to make a witty pun involving fish or bait or the cutting of)

obama speech at cairo university

On Obama's speech at Cairo University in Egypt, via the nytimes:

Mr. Obama said the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 caused “enormous trauma to our country.” He offered no direct criticism of the previous administration, but reminded his audience that he has “unequivocally prohibited the use of torture” and has ordered the prison to be closed at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals,” Mr. Obama said. “We are taking concrete actions to change course.”

That line, as well as many others, was met with booming applause from the crowd, often several seconds delayed because many in the audience were listening to the speech through a translator.

“We love you!” one man yelled from the audience halfway through the speech.

(there was a notable absence of shoes being thrown)

The reference to Guantánamo Bay brings that issue to the foreground once more.  Plans for closing the base are underway, yet it remains open for business.  The ACLU has loudly called for Gitmo's closing for some time now, and this refrain is echoed by numbers of clipboard kids throughout the city.  I'm a fan of closing the base for humanitarian and pragmatic reasons (it does us no service and is a negative symbol now) but also because it might mean fewer requests on the sidewalk.

lincoln log corner: morning construction

Just posted on flickr, a small house rebuilt for a more airy floorplan.

Lincoln logs were created by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's kids - John Lloyd Wright - and now seem to be owned by the K'nex company.  

They come in two varieties which, on the surface, seem to indicate the same thing: Nostalgia or Classic.  The latter has new accessory pieces.

I wonder how many other things in the world are also made in these two varieties, but are not labeled as such..

paperwork corner: in parkett

Via Amber, there is a great essay by Zoe Leonard someone else about the art of Zoe Leonard and on the topic of art, commerce, money, and postcards in the most recent issue of Parkett.  

They don't post their contents online, and I had to borrow the thing (is it a magazine? a book?) to read it.

I also posted up some pics from this weekend on flickr. Yay!