An old interview with Kay Ryan. Unsurprisingly she is also a fan of W.G. Sebald, who is right up there with my favorite writers in the whole wide universe forever and ever. I reread and I reread and he only gets better. Sometimes it’s nice not to be a critic and have to be objective and bursting with disclaimers. If I love a writer I can even regard his weaknesses as a curious clue to his other work, though it’s hard to find much fault in Sebald’s writing. I was knocked over when he died in 2001.

Ethan Zuckerman on Argentine maker culture (and steak). This is really exciting to me for all sorts of reasons.

I want to make a very small film, but I am not in the frame of mind for collaboration these days. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s partially feeling that for the moment my personal routine doesn’t lend itself to advanced planning and tidy schedules and it makes me unhappy to appear to behave unreliably. Even working from home the interactions with clients or potential clients in the outside world are stressful enough (mostly because V, the baby, and his babysitter are also working from the same home). I don’t want to pin my schedule in more places than I have to. However, a long-term-part-time consulting job I was lightly planning for just evaporated into a mist of budget cuts and lack of funding, so I may have a bit of time to make something as I wait for another client interested in jumping through my particular schedular hoops. So I thought maybe I’d try to make a little film I’ve been thinking about for a few years now. However I get hung up on the idea of using myself as an actor. I feel as though I don’t entirely own my own image, which is something I thought about a while back when I was looking at a lot the work of Miranda July, who owns her image with a vengeance. I was talking to V about this and he suggested I look at the work of Miru Kim and listen to her speak. There is a fine tension in her work particularly because she has determined to use her own image even as it seems to slide out from under her a bit. In the TED talk, she speaks with increasing confidence then suddenly falters as if catching sight of herself standing on stage, speaking about work that contains her own body. And even as I write this I am faintly vertiginous at the thought of it being read. I thought I’d start writing and only after a while make the writing public, maybe behind my own back when I’d already ceased to trip over myself; but catching hold of one’s own image (or alter image) isn’t such an orderly process. The other morning as I was getting dressed I was thinking of the seeds I have variously sprouting and not sprouting in the south facing window of my bedroom/office/closet/mead hall/copy room. I pulled back the curtain and started squinting at them. Right now my onion seeds look like specks of punctuation balanced improbably atop unstraight threads of green. A few of the cosmos are sprouting happily and a few more promisingly fat, as though they might still split open. Some of the eggplant and peppers have sprouted, only to hang at the clam valve stage with bits of white fluff on them. It is not really very warm yet in my south window. Maybe I gave them to much water. I haven’t grown anything from seed since kindergarten or preschool. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen and am irrationally surprised when they actually grow. On the other hand, I anthropomorphize the seeds like mad and feel terrible when they rot. So I was wringing my hands and poking around in the peppers and eggplants and trying to talk to them without sounding too patronizing the way adults do when they talk to children, when someone on the sidewalk strolled by talking on the phone, or rather bellowing into his walkie-talkie. He didn’t look up, but his presence a few feet away made me realize with a shock that I was standing there in the open window my underwear… A long time ago people used to send me beautiful emails with long descriptions of bread baking or conversations between fictional characters or the early memory of moving to a new house.