Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Elliot
Always remember to irradiate your water in a DOWNWARD motion only.
I wish I was this cool.
Is knowing obsolete?
Yep, that’s art made from toilet paper. Sakir Gökçebag, who’s name looks awesome and takes patience to type, has made some pretty interesting sculptures/installations out of TP. From Design Milk
Bitponics- digital personal gardener
Bitponics helps to automate your personal hydroponic garden. It looks really fascinating, and like something that could easily suck up all of my time. with monitoring and tracking data. I mean that in a good way.
For the last couple of weeks I have been waking up with really odd songs stuck in my head. I am going to start recording them here to see if there’s a secret message being sent from my subconscious. Also, these are usually catchy, torturous songs that people get stuck in their heads, and I am a musical sadist.
This morning’s song: Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl) by Looking Glass. Allison said it reminds her of being young in Virginia Beach. I really have no associations with this song that I can think of, and no clue what secret message my brain is trying to pass me. I’d like to think it has something to do with the band’s hair-doos, because those are pretty cool. Enjoy.
Life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.
David Rothenberg
Max Sebald’s Writing Advice
On Reading and Intertextuality
- Read books that have nothing to do with literature.
- Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.
- There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets.
- You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.
- None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.
- I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.
- Don’t be afraid to bring in strange, eloquent quotations and graft them into your story. It enriches the prose. Quotations are like yeast or some ingredient one adds.
- Look in older encyclopaedias. They have a different eye. They attempt to be complete and structured but in fact are completely random collected things that are supposed to represent our world.
- It’s very good that you write through another text, a foil, so that you write out of it and make your work a palimpsest. You don’t have to declare it or tell where it’s from.
- A tight structural form opens possibilities. Take a pattern, an established model or sub-genre, and write to it. In writing, limitation gives freedom.
- If you look carefully you can find problems in all writers. And that should give you great hope. And the better you get at identifying these problems, the better you will be at avoiding them.
And I forgot the elements of chance introduced by circumstances, calm or haste, sun or cold, dawn or dusk, the taste of strawberries or abandonment, the half-understood message, the front page of newspapers, the voice on the telephone, the most anodyne conversation, the most anonymous man or woman, everything that speaks, makes noise, passes by, touches us fightly, meets us head on.
Lapka: Beautiful environmental sensors for your iPhone. It’s a very exciting take on personal data. In the video they ask:
“Is it magic, or have we finally reached the point where we can add a touch of love and emotion to the tools we know nothing about?
The only thing we know is our own personal knowledge and lack of knowledge. And since it’s the only thing we really know, the key to making things understandable is to understand what it’s like not to understand.
Richard Saul Wurman
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