The Bubble of Silence, an essay in which Tiffany Lee Brown examines the discomfort in discussing a certain kind of childlessness. There it is again, this terrible connection between reproduction and death that fascinates and frightens most of us so badly. We don’t seem to have a language for discussing things so physical and in a way so personal and at the same time so not individual at all; something that has so much to do with us as a species and with the tangled and senseless story of us leading up to this very minute. All we seem to be able to do is change the subject or willfully misunderstand.

I found this excellent Chow thread on various Mexican recipes as I was looking for a half remembered soup-stew of lentils and pineapple. I will be following one particular user now. (Why thank you, I ate nopal for brekkers this AM.)

Really, are we still leveling anthropomorphic critiques at various media? Let’s be accurate: people who use Twitter are uniformly narcissistic and emotionally stunted (at least until they publish a book on paper.) Tangentially, you can scoff, but just try to get real time info/confirmation elsewhere when gmail gets gassy or the train catches fire. Which reminds me, I read somewhere that Tweetie (a tidy little iPhone app I like) now has a companion desktop app for Mac. Let me go see… Yup, they do. And very nice it is. And while I’m at it, the Twitter browser should be familiar to Etsy-ers who love the Connections Feature. I originally couldn’t bear to use Etsy until I discovered that. Search has improved a bit, but it was just dreadful for a very long time, and for some reason no one seems to pay attention to browsing any more. It’s very odd. It’s as if, presently it is a sort of faux pas to include tidy old-fashioned, learnable taxonomies (shades of Yahoo in the nineties?), as though everyone is utterly certain that every user arrives anywhere with a highly specific object in mind, or is still busily asserting that only mobs are fit to create categories (Can be we done with rowdy folksonomies always pushing innocent bystanders into holes and setting parked cars on fire?). Pretty shortsighted. I see that DonorsChoose has finally reinstated browsing, thank goodness.

A thoughtful Bookslut review/essay starting with First We Read, Then We Write, Emerson on the Creative Process. Good timing. I have been thinking recently about Emerson’s letters to “anyone whom I love” as I start to (fearfully and joyfully)⁰¹ write online again. It’s the difference between the small safe documentary satisfactions of an un-spell-checked private journal and letters “to anyone whom I love,” in which I eagerly try to convey an experience or idea, to persuade or amuse.

I have been writing with some pains essays on various matters as a sort of apology to my country for my apparent idleness. But the poor work has looked poorer daily as I strove to end it. My genius seemed to quit me in such a mechanical work, a seeming wise—a cold exhibition of dead thoughts. When I write a letter to anyone whom I love, I have no lack of words or thoughts. I am wiser than myself and read my paper with the pleasure of one who receives a letter, but what I write to fill up the gaps of a chapter is hard and cold, is grammar and logic; there is no magic in it. I do not wish to see it again.

It turns out Emerson is worth reading. If they hadn’t foisted his silly poetry on us back in high school, I might have discovered this years ago. I’m having a good time skimming his journals and lining them up with Hawthorne‘s, and a lot of what I read in Megan Marshall’s lovely book on the Peabody sisters and Bronson Alcott‘s (a fascinating idealist/crazy whose writing I like a lot and don’t trust at all) How Like an Angel Came I Down.