Send Me Your Head, a portrait a day. Note how the portraits have changed through the archives.

Lots of people get a little sniffly when reading Maira Kalman.

Yes, indeed! to Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” the most pertinent thing I’ve read on publishing amidst the current tremendous din… And speaking of everything rolling forward with colossal momentum into a dead quiet no man’s land, there’s a story in the Times on the growth of the web in places where ad revenue doesn’t keep up with the cost of said growth… Also, enough with the “we as a culture don’t read anymore” tripe. Of course we do. We read constantly and omnivorously. We have so much to say and want so much to know. There’s no drought of good and trustworthy words, from the tiny but consequential exchanges that hold us together (This is how we communicate with anyone whom we love. The knowledge that you just ordered a pair of green running shoes or are sweating over yard work is a precious live connection between us. Only oracles speak exclusively in profundities. And who could live with an oracle?) while we document and dissect life and death and geography, or give birth to the important ideas we’ve been gestating for years–  it’s all there. If you can’t see it, you’re not looking. It all counts. We’re reading and we’re writing.

And while we’re on the matter of living in a revolutionary interval in history in which do not exist tidy business models for words, I keep seeing all these suggestions to sell t-shirts or “other products” to pay the rent/web hosting to support your (personal) typing problem. Right. T-shirts are very nice, but just to be accurate, that’s not getting paid for writing. That’s getting a second job. Which may well be a joy in itself but assuming one already has second and third jobs, and may be four or five delightful jobs deep before they start to pay again (which even if it’s not bad money, starts to seems a little thin when it all goes to child support for the nascent first three or four jobs); it is not a particularly inventive solution to the problem of breaking even with one’s babysitter. My current best idea is to swap unpaid work for sleep, which I recently realized is a waste of time. Forget consulting. In all my new free time I am penning an ebook entitled The Definitive Secret to How to Do Your Best Cloud Work Asleep and Get Transformatively Rich, Vampires! which I expect to sell to an estimated nine hundred thousand buyers for a modest 7.99 apiece. I’ll be posting teasers weekly.

However, the whole machine only works as long as my adored pet monkey behaves more or less as expected. On Thursday, babysitter notwithstanding, he and his tummy ache came crashing up against my shins and started trying to climb my legs while I was engaged in my daily plate spinning. I tried to maintain my concentration and the babysitter tried heroically to distract him with a stuffed frog, but neither worked; I kept looking down at his flushed and frantic little face until inevitably, I wobbled off my careful rhythm and everything came crashing to the floor. No one was hurt but there were bits of broken crockery bouncing about the room for a good minute afterward. Meanwhile I tied one end of this metaphor to the doorknob before I took off with the other and now it’s so attenuated that it’s sagging under it’s own weight, draping over the furniture and looping on the floor in little twisting snares around my ankles as I pick through the wreckage to see if any of my dishes are left intact.

The Cy Twombly Letter of Resignation bears an uncanny resemblance to a letter my little niece wrote me a few years ago. It’s not supposed to be funny, but it is. Still, I kind of want one.

Joana Vasconcelos at work. I think. I can’t read Portuguese, so who knows. The best images of the beautiful Contaminação project are on her portfolio site, in 2008.

Besides making us all immoral and stupid, Facebook is just boring. (Except for the world leader status updates.) I tried, guys, but I can’t get myself to give a damn. It’s so rigidly reciprocal and stiff. It’s new, but it feels old fashioned… It also messes with memory in a way I find frustrating. Characters from the past become real life adults with real names and present lives. I’m conflicted about pigmenting my memories with the runny ink of their Facebook-Christmas letter life précis. (No I’m not.) Those précis are just alive enough to force me to regard the characters in my memory (caricatures undoubtedly) as persons, but don’t contain enough to tell me if should care. So I don’t say anything. I don’t want to mistakenly injure an actual human by treating him like a character in my own story. But the truth is, real names notwithstanding, they are characters in my own story. They lived richer, more real lives in my memory than they do now in their variously smiling or intent portraits with their sometimes unfamiliar last names and backward-boastful updates.

Here are two people Facebook is always trying to pimp, drawn from memory and therefore probably unrelated to any sort of reality. I didn’t include the other three, to whom I was not so nice, just in case my memory’s better than I think it is. (Though who was taking notes back then? Oh. Yeah. The yearbook staff.)

01: I wanted to thank you for being so kind to me, but the truth is I don’t remember you all that well. You drove me around and sat next to me in silence lots of times. You poured me (far too much) of your parents’ wine and held my hand when I tried to stand up. You told me about your family and asked me about my classes but mostly you were a solid, kindly presence. I don’t think you were particularly talented academically, though I always had an idea you might be quick in some other way. You had the patient, shut down manner of a person waiting, something in retrospect I imagine to have been the boy shape of a few of the men I now love best. I could be wrong though, I never found out. I don’t recall you ever gossiping or being unkind to anyone. You were a good guy. I bet you still are.

02: You, I didn’t know very well. We were both nerdy teacher’s pets, you a good deal smarter than I. In my recollection you came from a large family too. You were quiet and obedient at school, and although I suspected you had a secret wit, I also detected a whiff of fundie Catholic about you. I doubt anyone else did, but it takes one to know one. I think that repelled me faintly. It still felt like a world I might not escape and I didn’t want to be reminded that that’s who I was and where I came from; I didn’t want to risk being trapped where you were. One time you sent me a note chastising me after hearing me make excruciatingly self conscious small talk about some sort of typically small town Texas drunken high school event the Monday afterward. I remember how suddenly pleased I was at being able to fit in, even momentarily, and how distressed and sick I felt when I read your note. I can’t remember what it said, but you used the phrase “role model” and I think you said you were disappointed. I was very angry, how dare you choose me as a role model, we were the same age! (My conception of authority and standards correlated directly with age at the time.) I think my disproportionate anger arose from a feeling of annoyance at myself. Even then I wondered why I cared so much what anyone thought and wished I didn’t. You look happy in the picture Facebook is always trying to push as Someone I Might Know. I bet you are. I’m sorry now I didn’t try to know you better in those days, but my parents might have liked it.

As I was looking up Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, (I think that’s the whole text of his Treatise on the heathen superstitions that today live among the Indians native to this New Spain), I found this paper on the Social Reproduction of Late Postclassic Ritual Practices in Early Colonial Central México, with a curious diagram showing the clandestine circulation of ritual texts in a single town, including a superimposed schema depicting kinship between the individuals involved. And just so you know, the ritual texts included sets of incantations for things like inducing sleep before theft or rape (fine, yes, that’s the most salacious incantation, everything else is for stuff like carrying heavy objects); as well this paper on family structure in pre-Columbian Nahua culture. It sounds as though the idea of nuclear family didn’t really exist on it’s own, but rather as part of a directly nested structure that ranged from husband-wife-child unit to “ethnic states.”

In Defense of Eye Candy. Thanks Stephen P. Anderson. I heave a great sigh of relief that someone bothered to stitch this all together so elegantly. I have to confess to being far too impatient at this point in my career to defend this in loving detail ever again (and again and again). I just march in assuming that everything must be beautiful and steamrolling anyone who wants to sit down and debate at length lovely versus crappy… And speaking of crap, though only the noun, Virginia Gardiner is making all sorts of things out of poo. But the really interesting thing is the GCH4 toilet she’s working on. The mechanics still sound a bit fuzzy (though maybe that’s just what’s available online) but the idea is to capture the methane output from human waste as fuel. I am curious to see where this goes. At least to hear more about the proposed process/program. And while we’re at it, have The Humanure Handbook.

A conversation with Jan Fabre, the guy responsible for Heaven of Delight, the installation of bazillions of iridescent green scarabs in a glowing mosaic in the Royal Palace in Brussels.

The lovely work of Ackroyd & Harvey at PechaKucha Daily. And some more, and more.

Early the other Saturday morning we were waiting at Union Square for the 6 train, arms full of awkwardly mismatched bags of eggs and leafy things from the green market when I saw a guy wander right off the platform on to the tracks. It happened very quietly and very quickly. He lay there on his back in the black water between the tracks for too long, ignoring the knot of people holding their arms out to him from the platform. Finally he pulled himself up and reached unsteadily for the hand of a woman in a white hat, who’d been yelling at him. She continued to shout– falling down in the tracks, what do you think you’re doing and nobody going over there to help you what on earth are you thinking, you could have been killed, just get up now, and you’re fine, what were you thinking, what kind of a world is this? as she and a man in the black and white uniform of a busboy pulled him back up on to the platform. He stumbled over to the bench and sat down next to me, staring straight ahead. I wondered if he was in shock, but realized after a minute that he was high instead. He didn’t look homeless, but his clothing was filthy and drenched from the fall. He boarded the train with us. We sat down and he leaned back against the door and appeared to go to sleep, dripping a vile puddle on the floor. One hand was bleeding a little. He continued to sway, eyes shut, against the door as we rolled into the next station. I thrust the baby into V’s lap and half stood to yank him forward just as the door opened behind him. The woman who’d pulled him from the tracks met my eye and shook her head. I sat back down and he edged in to stand in front of me. He began to sway above me, mouth working, eyes closed again. Every so often his hand would slip from the bar above my head and he would lurch down toward me, arms suspended, hands half closed around nothing, dripping onto my knees. After a while, we got up and moved to the other side of the train. The woman in the white hat said, I was wondering how long you were going to stay there. Everyone in the train watched him in anxious silence until, with surprising decision, he opened his eyes and got off the train at 59th Street.