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.

Bullfighting, bull slinging and bullshitting. (Just becuase I agree with Zelda, doesn’t mean I don’t love this novel.) A textual history of The Sun Also Rises. I got a little nosy for the first time, and started looking up who the characters were based on. I wanted to see a picture of Duff Twysden (Brett) and Kitty Cannell (Francis Clyne), though it makes me feel a bit dirty and faintly embarrassed to read about this stuff. It’s really no less prurient or absorbing than Star Magazine or TheSkinnyWebsite. (I read until googlebooks slammed the thing shut on my fingers.) It’s also always a bit annoying to be reminded of the hand of the author in the work, who, as a person, shares a certain sort of desperate pathos with a lot of other good writers (Truman Capote). Shoo Hemmingway, enough with the protests and justifications– let me read in peace.

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The Finnish Bitches Jewelry show. Especially see Janna Syvanoja.

And how about Mia Pearlman installing things?

There is a good interview with Chris Ware and Jerry Moriarty in The Believer, though the whole thing is not online. The Comics Bureau suggests the audio interviews 1 and 2 at Inkstuds as background. I just started the first.

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I think it’s time to take one way friendships seriously. I was reading something about Julia Child and how once she was on TV everyone loved her and felt like they had a special relationship with her. People would write her letters, at first a little self conscious about claiming a relationship, and then go on to call her by her first name, tell her intimate details of their lives, and ask for help choosing appliances. This has always been regarded as mildly aberrant, but I think if they were really honest, most people would admit to a few unidirectional friendships. (I call most of my favorite cookbook authors by their first names and take them to bed with me.) The internet is perfect for devoted unidirectional friendships. I have long term imaginary friendships with a few people. I even periodically get angry at them and swear never to have anything to do with them again, but eventually I go back to reading them. I have actually even come close to sending a couple of emails over the years. Anyhow, the media in which we communicate changes more and more to support these genuinely meaningful connections, so why are they still faintly weird? Maybe because there isn’t yet an etiquette? Twitter goes a long way in legitimizing what would have been stalking a few years ago. You there, study this.

It turns out it must have been a Bengal tiger, not a tepesquintle (“regarded by some authorities as the tastiest of all rodents”) I ate a few years ago. The restaurant where I et it descries any mention of the incident as foul slander (but I forgive them for their chicharron.) I remember the conversation perfectly. They used to be endangered but suddenly they (whomever they were) learned how to breed them in captivity and the country was frothing with indigent tespesquintle queuing up at soup kitchens to be eaten. I did my duty to rodentkind, ate and did not question the source of this revelation, an amiable bullshitter famous for believing his own yarns. Oops. In the future I will be more cautious of things magically delicious.

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From The Princess and Curdie (I have been revisiting my childhood reading. Perfect for insomnia.)

…Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in body than in mind—with the usual consequence, that he was getting rather stupid—one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind. Still, he was becoming more and more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew. On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.

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A note while reading In Defense of Food (very good, though no revelation for anyone who has been pondering food and nutrition science for a while): Maybe we don’t understand the sensual—the literal use of our senses, because we no longer have a food or physical culture much connected to the—empirical, to a tangible reality. (Is that the right way to put it?). This is why things like psychoanalysis, meditation, or fertility seem magical, mystical to us. They are so at odds with our rootless versions of sex and eating, which are decreasingly tethered to our own senses, which in turn are decreasingly tethered to the natural world. So many aspects of our culture encourage us to doubt our senses or outright deceive them with calculated fakes that satisfy enough to make us fat and sleepy as we float farther and farther from the earth; out of visual, auditory, or tactile range.

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Pink Tentacle highlights some monsters from Yōkai Jiten.

Fishing in the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

Overcoming Creative Block (via SwissMiss). I’d add that in my experience, creative energy comes in waves and when it retreats the only thing to do is wait quietly. I find I have to switch back and forth between the stimulating and the soothing to not burn out.

Luke Jerram’s Acoustic Wind Pavilian.

5-d geometries. (See the video animations.)

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I am back in NYC now and besides feeling more energetic than I have in some time, everything that happened in the last month feels far away as I try to make notes on the farms and tangle of gardens we visited. I am still nibbling the last of the crumbly chocolate we bought in Puerto Viejo, where the best chocolate is cacao paste and grated tapa dulce and nothing else. It doesn’t stay fresh long so there’s no point in saving it for my hope chest or something. I have a bit of that astonishing honey left, a bag of nutmeg, lots of cacao beans, some banana vinegar, achiote paste, a tub of cacao butter, and a lot of different tropical fruit jams. We arrived home around 3am. All three of us were wide awake, enervated but alert. It was twenty degrees outside and the sky was brilliantly clear. New York looked cold and sharply beautiful from the window of the cab.