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.