Clever perhaps not. Scintillating surely.
The glass is neither half full nor half empty. It is filled with whiskey awaiting seltzer.
Refreshing assuredly.
And so for day 2710
15.05.2014
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Mastodon (hcommons.social)
Repartee
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Cross-Pollination
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
(PM Press, 2011)
Cory Doctorow interviewed by Terry Bisson
On staying on top of information flows…
With a little help from my friends. As a culture, we have gone from a deterministic method of consumption of media to a probabilistic one.
[…]
Now what happens is that I can’t even read all my RSS feeds or e-mails or tweets, much less the novels or events they are about. But the good stuff bubbles up anyway because of reflagging, retweeting, whatever you want to call it. That’s what I mean by probabilistic.
[…]
It is the only way we can have an adequate navigational apparatus for negotiating the sheer volume of material available to us. Without it, there would be no movement from inside your first orbit of social and cultural contacts, no line to the million who know a million others from a million different walks of life, the cross-pollinators who gets [sic] a little bit of information from here and send it there, and connect us all. Without them, the conversation would die. These are the people who are essentially making sure that whatever is locally good for you bubbles up to the top of your pile. They are as important to the future fecundity of media as bees are to the future fecundity of plants.
The stochastic pre-cursors of Johnny Appleseed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
Many books and films have been based on the life of Johnny Appleseed. One notable account is from the first chapter of The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. Pollan states that since Johnny Appleseed was against grafting, his apples were not of an edible variety and could be used only for cider: “Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus.”
Let us raise a glass of applejack and re-broadcast. Sharing the abundance under conditions of attention scarcity.
And so for day 2709
14.05.2014
Posted in Booklore, Reading
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Autocorrect Greatest Hits
On a monthly basis I exchange food remarks with a friend. In some of the messages there is often a linguistic puzzle to solve. A veritable cornucopia of the deliciously memorable.
Look how squash turned out: shush
From an exchange on dashi:
bonito — bingo
Out of the monetary unconscious:
“One of my favourites is his famous pasta dish made with pricing, bacon and peas in cream and topped with parmigiano.”
porcini — pricing
On the batter front:
“Zucchini fritters were also present. I battled and deep fried them.”
And so for day 2708
13.05.2014
Professions
Having a friend who is a psychoanalyst made me twig to this passage (and some recollection of the figure of silence in her early poetry) …
If I weren’t a writer part of me would become a psychiatrist so that listening would still be the biggest part of my job. In that alternate vocation I would heal most deeply through my silence. Relying on the spoken to understand feelings and not on reconstructions of reality from my notes. No more notes.
Canadian Poetry Online reproduces a piece from Brick as her writing philosophy.
Mary di Michele. “What I’d be if I were not a writer,” Brick, Fall 1994. p. 19
https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/dimichele/write.htm
It just so happens that I had previously noticed on the appearance of the figure of silence in a fragment of a poem and am now content to realize it’s added significance:
https://berneval.hcommons-staging.org/2009/02/19/moonlit-shoulders/
And so for day 2707
12.05.2014
Posted in Poetry
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bones to pick
At the ending…
Brian Simoneau
“The Fossil Record”
https://www.briansimoneaupoet.com/
Until now I was never one of those kids
obsessed with dinosaurs. Scientists say
we find, with luck, maybe forty percent
of a specimen’s bones and reconstruct
the rest. […]
Every bird on its perch discloses ways
the dinosaurs never left at all, bits
of life even extinction couldn’t kill.
The news offers daily apocalypse,
daily strife. So nightly watch the sky
and remember how much rubble there is
to fall from space, its height never fated
to hold. Missiles swivel to face our homes
and glaciers loose a new flood’s weight. Against
such days, may we all become dinosaurs.
Let us love the stories our bones will tell.
At the beginning… [the ending of the first poem]
Rob Schlegel
“Show Cave”
in In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps
https://www.robschlegel.com
[…]
The oracle touches my face.
Language is where you live in mere fidelity to narrative, she says.But language is not my first language.
And so the story goes beyond our speaking.
And so for day 2706
11.05.2014
Posted in Poetry, Storytelling
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The Sensual and the Intellectual
Why food matters
Ruth Reichl’s 2005 Tanner Lectures
https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/r/Reichl_2007.pdf
When you eat with all your senses you open yourself to the glorious pleasures of taste and touch and smell as they go rushing through your body. That is no small thing. But when you eat with all your mind you discover everything that is good—and bad—about the way we live on this earth.
And the integration is through storytelling: “I am convinced that the stories we tell about food, in all their wonderful complexity, are capable of revealing as much about our place in the world as any other subject of human discourse.”
And so for day 2705
10.05.2014
Discourse Parkour
Before Twitter there were discussion lists where lurkers found a festival of democratic impulses in action.
This is a wee bit of dated humour sent by Midnite of the Stingray talker
Q: How many internet mail list subscribers does it take
to change a light bulb?
A: 1,331:
1 to change the light bulb and to post to the mail
list that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light
bulbs and how the light bulb could have been
changed differently.
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.
27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about
changing light bulbs.
53 to flame the spell checkers
156 to write to the list administrator complaining about
the light bulb discussion and its inappropriateness
to this mail list.
41 to correct spelling in the spelling/grammar flames.
109 to post that this list is not about light bulbs and
to please take this email exchange to alt.lite.bulb
203 to demand that cross posting to alt.grammar,
alt.spelling and alt.punctuation about changing
light bulbs be stopped.
111 to defend the posting to this list saying that we
are all use light bulbs and therefore the posts
**are** relevant to this mail list.
306 to debate which method of changing light
bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs,
what brand of light bulbs work best for this
technique, and what brands are faulty.
27 to post URLs where one can see examples of
different light bulbs
14 to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly, and
to post corrected URLs.
3 to post about links they found from the URLs that
are relevant to this list which makes light bulbs
relevant to this list.
33 to concatenate all posts to date, then quote
them including all headers and footers, and then
add "Me Too."
12 to post to the list that they are unsubscribing
because they cannot handle the light bulb
controversy.
19 to quote the "Me Too's" to say, "Me Three."
4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ.
1 to propose new alt.change.lite.bulb newsgroup.
47 to say this is just what alt.physic.cold_fusion
was meant for, leave it here.
143 votes for alt.lite.bulb.
I wonder in observing contemporary discursive antics how the joke might be translated.
And so for day 2704
09.05.2014
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Albino Carrots
Memory chains. Sitting in our living room, facing each other, contemplating what might be for dinner, he can’t remember the word. Out comes “albino carrots”. And so I contribute “parsnips”. Forever to be remembered as “albino carrots”. Chained to memory.
Like an association game, poetry inhabits our lives in the oddest moments.
And so for day 2703
08.05.2014
Random Access Stash
Jan Morris interviewed in The Guardian by Tim Adams
Morris looks around her bookshelves, the thousands of books that line this long room floor to ceiling. “People always say: ‘Have you read them all?’” she says. “No. but I have an emotional attachment to them all. I pick an old book out and if it is interesting I read a few pages. I put letters and photographs and cards in them to find later.”
Reading Morris brought to mind Ali Smith minding what gets inserted into books that get donated… (“Now when I donate books to the shop I have a flick through to make sure that anything tucked into them isn’t something I might mind losing.”)
Sometimes we placed things with the intent of casting them into the wild.
Sometimes we bury <! – – comments – – > for the observant.
Sometimes we are winked at – take the comments in the HTML coding at Bianca’s Smut Shack where we were enticed not to peek beneath the floorboards – such a lovely metaphor for the relation between source code and browser display. A comment now only floating in memory.
And so for day 2702
07.05.2014
Clearing
Nadiya Hussain
Time to Eat
I have a few rules I always tell myself:
#3
The Freezer is My FriendI always have one drawer totally empty, having just that little bit of space means you have room to think on your feet.
Space to add more. Space created by making sure nothing stays too long in the freezer.
I wonder how the approach applies to bookshelves … tough to keep that clearing open.
And so for day 2701
06.05.2014
Posted in Food Writing
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