50 Great Examples of Infographics, (heavy on the pretty).

Riki’s Food Blog. Thai tea sounds awfully good right now.

And about that vanity googling…

Merce Cunningham plus Sonic Youth. It was as sublime and dreamy as it sounds, though I have to agree that the space pod didn’t quite work out. It was better as the rotating 3-d model shown in the video by Franc Aleu (there is a lot of really rich stuff to see on this site). And my neighbor to the left and her friends didn’t care for the “awful music.” (They were perhaps hoping for a staging of Giselle?) At one point, the video showed live close-up footage of a hand casually dropping screws into an enamel tray and shaking them around. There was an absolute roar of metal on metal, a huge blurry zigzag sound as they rolled. I felt like I was drowning in the noise and the dancers seemed far away, brilliantly reflected from some other separate, silent dimension.

Vandana Shiva speaking at the Organicology Conference in February. I’m having a great time going through the notes (pdf) on the Grandmother’s University (An eggplant pickle recipe!) And speaking of Seed Sovereignty, has anyone else noted the barrage of Monsanto adds on the back of the New Yorker lately? Really, Monsanto? Improving farmers lives? Really? (And also, don’t I even get a basic IQ cred for reading the New Yorker? I’ve been carrying it everywhere trying to look smart for years. If Monsanto thinks I’ll be convinced by reading the same thing over and over again, maybe it’s not working?)

I put off reading the actual memos linked in the Times story on the CIA’s torture tactics. I wish… I wish I could unread them… I don’t know. I can only read this. I can’t write about it.

Anni Albers taught at Black Mountain College when Ruth Asawa was there. I go back to Ruth Asawa’s work every few years, which usually starts me looking at Lucy Rie again, which reminds me of a recent show of (yet more) Giorgio Morandi at the Met.

And lastly, a lovely iphone photo using ToyCamera.

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.

I was pacing around a few whiles ago, reading that article in the Times magazine about the NIH and that poor woman who is falling to pieces, and bellowing at the page in front of me. There was so much in that article that seemed wavering and odd. Like this idea of looking and looking for a new diagnosis. Why? I honestly don’t understand. A diagnosis exists as a tool. Approaching it as an end seems nonsensical unless as an excuse to fundraise for Pediatric Restless Leg Syndrome. You arrive almost immediately at a weird continuum where we have to start making proclamations about what a “healthy” body looks like in comparison to a diseased body. So, what does a “healthy” body look like? Structurally perfect in every respect? Free of genetic mutation? Probably not going to drop dead within the year? No complaints? Going to live forever? Able to cheerfully undertake the full catalogue of human activities without pain or madness: defecating, running, reproducing, crying, eating, orgasming, toe-touching, differential equation solving, back handspringing, tight rope walking?

I don’t know why the Times Magazine article reminds me a personal blog entry I read once in which a doctor complained about a list a patient brought to her appointment. The list was written in a jerky, trembling hand and included a handful of nebulous symptoms like dizziness, headaches, back pain, and stomach aches. Anyhow, at the bottom of the list were written a series of nervous and confrontational notes in full sentences, addressed to the doctor. The patient, sounding frenzied, demanded certain lab work and refused to take any more medication. I am inventing some of the detail; I can’t recall it word for word and I don’t particularly want to link to the specific entry because the writer seems like more than a decent person. However, her diagnosis here was a piece of misogynist crap as common and invisible as air. The patient is hysterical (the laden historical translation), she likes being a patient and will never be well. Ah, the bad boyfriend school of diagnosis. If you don’t find me irresistible, you must be gay! Damn, I felt sorry for that poor patient. I imagined her panicky preparation for the appointment, breathing deeply and rehearsing the list of symptoms every magazine on earth solemnly asserts, at the ass-covering imperative of their legal department, you should “talk to your doctor” about; picturing herself standing undressed and un-speeched, just like the previous appointments, sweaty-palmed and acquiescent during the entirety of the six minutes then cursing herself afterward for forgetting to offer the list of clues that would surely have resulted in the One True Diagnosis; deciding it’s a better idea to write everything down so she doesn’t waste the six minutes and the fifty dollar copay again… I feel sorry for the doctor too, but not nearly so much. The doctor is invested with a degree of power unfair to both her and the patient. She carries a license and degree that give a terrifying weight to the indifferent bad boyfriend diagnosis.  I need to come back to this when I have a moment, to try to articulate why I was so bothered instead just pounding away. In the meantime, lest this should read as a doctors suck rant, props to our family doctor, who saved the baby from a lot more pain, and to my father whose dinner table diatribes on everything from hormone replacement therapy, to h. pylori, and what happens when you play on the railroad track, nearly always turn out to be news twenty years later. Though the railroad thing was pretty evident right off.

Is online conversation engendering a return to a more oral culture, where the last word acquires a different kind of importance? Words upon words upon words. Look into history of oral culture and comparisons. See Walter Ong and secondary orality… What on earth did I have in mind when I wrote this? Is this even my handwriting?