Stefanie Posavec’s work. (Via Information Is Beautiful) Look at the Writing Without Words projects (some prints of which are for sale).

Todd Hido’s photographs. I’d only ever seen the photos of places and buildings and I found them richly mysterious until I saw the portraits, which somehow made the images of the spaces seem thinner and more static. I still find them very beautiful, but wish I hadn’t seen the portraits. I can’t help populating the spaces with the inhabitants of the portraits and it kills something to know who lives there (American Apparel models).

Alice Finslippy, who bothers to defend herself again, even when she shouldn’t have to.

Amy Martin’s winning poster for Public Option Please.

~

All the two and a half year old wailing and gnashing of teeth and shouting for impossible things like potatoes from Costa Rica or a ripe pineapple is grinding me down. Something’s up right now. It feels like Aure’s on the cusp of something new and is resisting it with all his might. He loses control entirely if anyone mentions potty training or asks to change his diaper. In between rambling stories about imaginary injuries and exquisitely articulated opinions (“To-be-perfetly-honest, I prefer a lot of honey—a huge, a monstrous honey! on a spoon with ghee. Please!”) he insists he’s a newborn baby and needs to be swaddled and held while he fake cries. I’m confused, but probably not any more than he is.

Sometimes I see what he needs and still some part of me rears up in front of that and shrieks that my head is pounding and I can’t think, and I become paralyzed and cold and filled with disgust with myself that even in those moments when it should be possible (i.e. I’m not trying to work), I can’t always bring myself to do what I can see he needs so badly. He’s only two, he can’t control himself, and he’s begging for my help. And worst of all, he imagines I’m not holding him every minute because he’s not acting happy enough. He gags and hiccups, snot and tears everywhere, in a useless attempt to calm himself, choking and stuttering that he’s “so calm now, so happy and tranquilo now.” How did he learn such a thing? As for the other times, this is the thing—there’s never any telling myself that it’s good for him to have me walk out the door while he weeps himself sick. It has to be done, but it’s undoubtedly bad for him. He is shaky and clingy for days afterward. When I drop everything and give him my physical presence and all my attention, he morphs back into his baby self—gregarious, silly, full of questions, and interested in strangers. He actually needs what he says he needs. I can’t give it to him, but it’s not because I don’t believe he needs it…

And after I wrote all that, the lovely woman who babysits in the mornings arrived with her two children, and the three of them began to coax him into showing off his special magnetic blocks and singing a bit, and after a while he asked if he could use the potty and proudly did for the first time and apparently that’s the extent of potty training because he hasn’t gone back to diapers at all. He is suddenly calm and cheerful and normal again as if the decision had been weighing heavily on him for weeks. Huh. Cue end of maternal anguish and ebb sheepishly away from the previous paragraph’s melodrama. I feel like I stomped down on the last step and it wasn’t there… This is why parents should not be left so strictly alone with their own children and children shouldn’t be left so alone with their parents. Which reminds me, I recently learned there’s no use fussing over extended family and the Dissolution of American Life as it turns out increasing residential mobility is a myth, but still something feels lost in the way I live.

If I had known how those minuscule boiled sardines from the Japanese grocery store tasted, I would have been eating them every day for my whole life. And now I will. I do not normally attempt to cook Japanese food for the same reasons I don’t bake much and am not really very good at it: you have to follow precise directions. Thus, distinctly imprecise directions for two delicious American things I made in a not very orderly manner using ingredients from the Japanese grocery store:

Pollack roe spread: Melt some finely chopped shallot and a clove of garlic in a couple of teaspoons of butter or ghee in a heavy skillet. When they are softened but not browned at all, add another two or three teaspoons of butter and melt that too. Let it cool until you can taste it without hurting yourself; you don’t want the roe to really cook, so don’t rush the cooling process. Squeeze the contents of four egg sacks into the butter mixture and stir it around until it’s creamy. Finally, stir in a couple of teaspoons of minced pickled meyer lemon. I add a tablespoon or two of olive oil at this point to make sure the mixture stays spreadable in the fridge. If you’re eating it right away, you can just blop it right on a piece of toast and eat it. If you fridge it, you can spread it on warm toast later and it will melt perfectly, liquidy at the edges and cold in the center. A little chopped parsley or lovage on top is pretty and delicious. The first time I made it I added the parsley to the mix. It tasted good, but muddied the coral color. Now I put it on top.

A salad of golden beet greens and tiny sardines: Fry the teeny tiny sardines in butter until they are crispy and slightly colored. Wrench some beet greens apart and put them in a bowl, or wilt them slightly if they aren’t in the finest shape. Chop a golden beet or two into tiny matchstick strips and toss them until they are dripping in a vinaigrette made with shallots and a little bit of mustard. (I don’t abide with this nonsense about forty to one ratios of oil to vinegar. Vinegar is delicious. I usually use something like two to one with plain raw apple cider vinegar and lots of salt. I don’t normally use very much dressing though.) Dump the beets atop a pile of their own greens, and throw the sardines on top of that.

~

A few unimaginative types scoffed at the idea of open source housing. That in itself was so surprising (where have you people been?) that it has been on my mind a lot lately. Voila a Metropolis article and the Sam Mockbee film.

~

The Rules About Hotlinking and Deep Linking are foggy and skewed a bit toward the paranoid; Wikipedia includes the anachronistic charge of “changing the perceived meaning through an unapproved context” as a controversial use of inline linking. (The meaning of this is something to tussle with, but trying to prevent it from happening is like debating infant baptism. I suppose I believe in it becuase I’ve seen it happen.) Most people assume a hyperlink comprises, or ought to comprise, an explanation and an exit warning, and must be either a species of footnote or a blunt way of shuttling the conversation or interaction elsewhere. That makes sense in a business application or a website designed to accommodate the completion of specific tasks. In the vast rest of the internet, that misses an awful lot. Links, especially within paragraphs of the kind of trailing, conversational text that’s characteristic of so much of what’s warm and intimate about the internet, ought to poke through as secondary sprigs of of communication and familiarity. Any robot or search engine can provide a definition, but so far only a human writer can use hyperlinks in a distinct, idiosyncratic manner; as a tangents, jokes, arch references, or ways of noting the obscure. Linking in online writing is as distinctive as voice.

I listened to Bruce Sterling talk at the end of SXSW interactive. (That was a very good talk. Sad and outraged and prophetic. Where’s the audio? But this is not about that.) He was talking for a moment about Mark Twain and how he reinvented himself so many times throughout his life and made a cranky aside about how the peculiarly American quality of reinvention is quashed by Facebook et al, where one is forever a prophet without honor, always the larval human someone else went to high school with. (Okay, I said that.) And that got me thinking about why Mark Twain’s reinventions seem so hard to comprehend and wondering about a question someone asked⁰¹ an hour before in a panel called Maps, Books, Spimes, and Paper, on the relative perceived credibility of different media, e.g. digital vs. paper. And then I started wondering about how print supersedes digital and why, and thinking it’s not just a matter of incumbency and the permanency and volume of the medium. It has to do with curation, with being chosen, of course. Being printed means/meant being chosen. How will the meaning of print change when everyone is self-published? What will the post publication method of curation be?

I’m also thinking about failure (Mark Twain had his share of business failure) and how, because Facebook facilitates a sort of necromancy with our long dead selves, it’s harder to live down failures. The normal process of living and living beyond those moments of failure should balance and renew us, but when others have shortcuts back to those discarded selves, we’re constantly forced to engage these inscrutable zombies that look like us from ten years ago, but whose judgment is opaque to us now. And all we want to do is fall on the abject fiend and dismember it before it devours us horribly, but it’s hemmed in by Facebook Friends backslapping and high fiving it and elbowing it gleefully in the ribs… Wow, that came out sounding a bit more terrifying than I intended. All I was trying say is that it’s nice to give people credit for growing up. Except people you went to high school with. You don’t have to give them credit. But if you don’t want to give them credit, don’t friend them, ferchrissake.