A touch screen prototype using a flexible display. You can poke at it! Or, if you’re a grown up, “Data representations gain one more dimension to display their qualities!” The video shows how it can be used to model (punch, squish, squeeze) complex forms. I wonder how long it will take for this to reach our households. After playing with our iPhones, Aure already expects every screen to respond to his little fingers. He scrabbles angrily at my laptop demanding, “Get it! Tough it!” to the hamsters and kittens on Cute Overload, which I keep prudently open in one browser tab at all times.

Sampsonia Way, the strangest street on Google Maps.

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I have been listening to Kathy McCarty singing Daniel Johnston. I listened to Dead Dog’s Eyeball a lot in college but for some reason it doesn’t particularly evoke memories of that time. It’s more like it’s own little world, someplace to escape to.

I’ve got at least a page of notes from the last few days, most of which appear pretty cryptic to me today. The ones I understand seem stupid or pointless. I was awakened about ten times last night and I now I am in a mood so foreign that my usual self seems unintelligible. All humor has been replaced by a uninteresting self pity, or would be if I weren’t so sleepy.

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…if there is such a thing as a revelation…then it can be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing oneself to places that no one else goes to.

W.G. Sebald in an interview with Michael Silverblatt (from The Emergence of Memory).

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A long bus ride home from Harlem on the BX15. We caught it along 125th St and I sat down with Aure in my lap between a pregnant girl on my left and an impressively manicured and bediamonded lady on the right. Aure immediately began to pat the hand of the woman on the right and coo over her manicure. Her nails were a neon pink with artistic swirls of gold and white with rhinestones sprinkled here and there. After a while he got bored though and started shoving his arm down my shirt. The pregnant girl to my left snickered and an older woman a couple of rows down made a hesitant motion to attract my attention. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, but was doing my best to keep Aure from slithering down to the floor or climbing out the window. Two little girls in a variety of pinks sat down across from us, one of the them compulsively tongue thrusting and touching her ear, and the other energetically hitting her inhaler. At the next stop, the lady with the impressive nails got off and a large but jittery man with wild hair took her place. He acted high, talking to himself in urgent bursts as he boarded the bus and sat down. Aure seemed a little taken aback and leaned charismatically toward the pregnant girl in the other direction. The woman behind her signaled to me again. This time I caught her eye. Don’t you have any baby wipes, she asked? He’s touching the window. I murmured something apologetic about not having any and she sighed and leaned back. The pregnant girl cooed to Aure and he smiled at her self consciously, chin down, glancing upward. She made kissing noises at him and he bounced up and down. The wild haired man on my right started yelling at an angry looking guy a few rows back, shouting that nobody better fuckin look at him and does he want to get shot. Everyone got quiet as we all calculated the possibility of something very bad happening. Then the bus stopped and a lot of people got on and stood between them, including a small woman with a two toddlers and a baby in a stroller. The toddlers stood unnaturally still and the baby didn’t make a peep. The woman cuffed each of the toddlers absently and subsided into a private reverie. I stood up to try to edge toward the door, Aure in my arms. At the next stop we and the pregnant girl got off. She waved to Aure, who silently watched her leave, though a block later offered a polite goodbye.

Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data. I’d love to see this tracking neologisms or fashion or specific types of pollution/contamination or a particular gene or all sorts of economic variables… Ha! I just looked at Jer Thorp’s profile and apparently he’s got a background in genetics. Of course he does! Also it looks like he’s since created another video depicting 61 hours.

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Taza Chocolate is the closest I can find to the chunks of black crumbly chocolate with rough cane sugar crystals or the Chocoart sticks I ate every day in Puerto Viejo. I tried to bring some back, but because they contain absolutely nothing besides chocolate, it was stale by the time we were home. It killed me to think that I should have devoured a pound in a sitting instead of prudently hoarding it. Near the end of our trip, we drove up a hill outside of town to buy some chocolate from a guy we met in the little Saturday market selling bags of toasted cacao, nutmeg, and little blocks of spiced chocolate. He introduced us to his wife who showed us her work space, a wide wooden room with a dirt floor, a high ceiling and splinters of sunlight coming through the walls. She set out an array of baby food jars containing different flavors and let us sample them and build little piles to purchase. Besides the plain, my favorite were the black pepper and vanilla. I know the cinnamon (with or without some picante) is popular in Latin America but I always love plain black pepper best. I also bought a bag of toasted cacao that was still pretty eatable from the freezer when I finished it nearly a year later.

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Elizabeth Kiem on W.G. Sebald. I could have written this. I almost started writing her a fullsome all caps email full of exclamation points and underlining to tell her how much I adored her essay but then I remembered, wait, I don’t write emails to strangers. But let me tell you, I came damn close this time.

Snippets from the letters of Emily Dickenson on Twitter.

Happy cowpox innoculation day!

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Who was I talking to about those horrid balloon games of childhood? I don’t recall the point but you were supposed to sit on a balloon and pop it for some reason as obscure to me now as it was then, and to this day I shudder when I think about it. I remember being three or four and crying because I didn’t want to go to a birthday party because I knew we would have to sit on balloons again. This was the stage during which I would lie down on the ground and weep if I or my mother failed to follow a carefully prescribed parting ritual as I went off to nursery school. (One walked the three blocks to nursery school all alone in the seventies!) I find myself trying to remember the logic behind the tantrums and sobbing, but all I remember is the feeling of tragedy and unending awfulness. Aure is only one, but he can say nearly anything he needs to, so I find myself expecting him to be as rational as he is articulate. It’s impossible for him. Yesterday I sat down for a moment with a cold drink, and he looked at me and suddenly lost his mind, crumpling to the ground, head thrown back, tongue out, shrieking and red, tears and snot everywhere within seconds. When he paused for a breath, I asked him, Aure, why are you saying gwaghwrghh? Is it because you wanted a sip? Yes please, he said happily and picked himself up off the floor.

Allison Arieff writes about Steven M. Johnson and finding value in the ludicrous. I like that she’s writing about him but—do people really need to be told that his work might be more than simply silly or that flirting with the absurd is a normal part of invention? I can’t decide if I’m annoyed with her for pointing out the obvious or grateful to her for gently articulating something that maybe isn’t obvious to a lot of people. It reminds me a little of those practical philosophy ads in the subway, as though the prevailing assumption is that everything worth spending a moment on has to have an immediate return on investment, to use a phrase that dependably sends me into a frothy fit.

From Sweet Juniper:

…It is the story of a family unsatisfied with a typical yuppie trajectory in San Francisco who intentionally moved to the most maligned city in America. It is the story of a man who finds that city beautiful in ways that may be difficult to understand at first, though if you stay long enough he’ll try to explain. It’s the story of thousands of people around the world who for some reason return to this website despite having no connection to this failing Rust Belt, one-industry town wounded by racism and poverty but surviving with a compelling grace. This is, I believe, ultimately a story with hope: another family choosing to root itself where so many are warned never to go. A city full of beautiful people surviving among the ruins. Strangers who come here to read with care and concern in their hearts. A seed that germinates in words never before read.

Some thoughts on urban homesteading in Detroit. The discussion in the comments is, for the most part, really smart. (Though name a city that’s throwing money at artists because where’s my cash? And also, “artist?” Just say uppity cracker and get on with it.) At first I thought there was something faintly odd about using the word homesteading to describe what’s going on a tiny scale in Detroit, but after all there’s something good about using that word, with all it’s historical baggage tucked full of divine American entitlement and vicious hierarchies of race—just to keep people honestly asking uncomfortable questions.

And since artists obviously need chickens, here’s a recording of a guy trying to find out if he can keep chickens in Chicago. I dunno, the Chicagoans sound awfully helpful and succinct to me. (Is this the Chad Kimball my sisters and I went to Sunday school with in Detroit? Somehow I think it might be.) True to form, I keep lobbying to stick chickens in our back yard, but V has Doubts and the feral cat situation seems to confirm them. We will continue to trot over to the rocky garden across from the People’s Park where Santos keeps a lovely flock of fat brown birds.