Boy, do I ever want to go to that IxDA workshop with Scott McCloud. I normally am unmoved by professional workshops, conferences, mixers, networking, talks, and bondage shows; but for once I want to use my nonwork hours to do something explicitly work related! Actually the reason I don’t usually bother is because with a little acrobatics, I am perfectly capable of making nearly anything I want to do be work-related, and not just in the tax-deductible sense, in the genuine triumph of either logic or self deception.

And more Mark Doty! Wow, that book is making me happy. Looks like he writes online too. Thanks, mister! It’s like being set up on a reconciliation date with the city. We’ve been distant or downright snappish with one another for a while now and, no matter how I try, I can’t seem to stop trash talking New York behind it’s back, but these poems keep grabbing us and making us hold hands again until we stop protesting and get all embarrassed and look up at one another from under our eyelashes.

More middle of the night iphone impulse purchases. This time Mark Doty’s poems (like very small stories). I refuse to link to the Kindle edition because it costs more than the beautiful hardcover and because they have the audacity to include in the download a wretched cover image that looks like it was designed in PowerPoint. No typographical formatting to speak of, bilious blue underlined links (at least they bothered with a TOC), and then they foist this bizarre image on me instead of at least letting me cling to the lovely cover image of the real thing! But loopy and uncritical with sleeplessness I bought it. The Kindle editions need a meta review category for formatting.

- Tatebanko (via LowTech Magazine)
- Jerzy Goliszewski

Despite agreeing heartily⁰¹ that,

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.

I don’t think the author is offering any new options. Everyone’s floundering on this. The thing is, selling access just doesn’t work for many things other than porn and certain types of impulse-buy entertainment content. I think the author is making the basic mistake of assuming that people (users) in general feel the way he does (just because you’ll pay for the WSJ online doesn’t mean everyone else will, mister); or worse yet, that one’s behavior reflects one’s stated priorities. It doesn’t, it don’t, and it never has. Paid access has been tried from personal blogs to the NYTimes to any number of internet magazines. Everything from yearly subscriptions to micropayments to awkward requests for donations (I donate regularly to a couple of blogs I read, but I know damn well it’s only valuable when compared to nothing, a comparison which the authors/writers/blogkeepers? are for some reason willing to make.) doesn’t seem to work in any broadly applicable way. In the we (the business) pay, you (the users) pay, or they (some third party) pay model, the great big internet you (Me too! Us! These pronouns are getting out of hand. Maybe I should draw a diagram to try to understand what I meant by that last clause.) has the most power. If we (no italics), the great big internet, don’t care to pay, we’ll find what we need elsewhere, because it’s out there, or maybe we’ll just get distracted and decide we need something else altogether. Here’s the thing: For the same reason unpaid internships are a terrible/bad/unethical/yucky idea (Do you really think only rich people or the children of rich people deserve entrée into x,y, or z profession?), I think writers and makers have a right to be compensated for their work, and I think we should be able to get our paws on as much information as possible on the internet with as few barriers (money or time) as possible.

Have you noticed that I’ve been thinking about Emily Dickenson and choosing not choosing? I haven’t read the actual book, though I think I can borrow it. Most of all it makes me want to rush away to read Dickenson in order. I think the idea just permeated scholarship on Dickenson and even civilians can now get editions that include at least her word variations. Really what I’m saying is that I am never going to have to choose one word/potato/fellowship for anything again. I presume to take this as Encouragement from Beyond the Grave to write in clumps/tufts/fascicles (since we’re talking Emily D.). I can’t stop myself anyhow, any more than I can eschew parentheses or learn to spell.

I went looking for more on what’s happening to the Ogallala Aquifer and found these incredibly beautiful NASA ASTER via Wikipedia. The land use images are amazing. Anyhow, after reading The Worst Hard Time (Which is really good and meshes nicely with all the agriculture and land use stuff I’ve been fascinated with this year. I read it on the Kindle app on my phone in the middle of the night. I have to say that as much as I adore books as objects and have no plans to stop buying things I plan to reread, I really like not having to juggle a book and reading lamp in the middle of the night. Though god knows anything with an expired copyright thus far has been formatted for crap. Don’t try to read Thomas Browne on the iphone. You will have a temper tantrum. Formatted so poorly, I’m not sure it’s worth the $1.79 or whatever they are charging, especially given he’s free elsewhere.), I wonder if my fantasy of living in the high desert should really stay just a fantasy.

A catch up on some Moby Dick notes:

Eugène François Vidocq

and

The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while sucking will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at a time; and while yet drawing moral nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence, even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of gulf-weed in their newborn sight.

and

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.