• O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2009 – O'Reilly Conferences, February 09 – 11, 2009, New York, NY
  The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, happening February 9-11, 2009 in New York
  (tags: publishing conference)

“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”

–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.”

The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler.  I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.

But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted.  For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.

“Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it… Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.

Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology – but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their own lives.”

–Radical Software, 1970

via active social plastic

Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

BENEDICT CAREY, “You’re Checked Out, but Your Brain Is Tuned In,” nytimes.com, 8/5/2008

• Giant Green Caterpillar
  we have one of these in our garden
  (tags: gardening)

Photos taken in an “abandoned” building in Shan State, Myanmar in January 2008.
[imgset:72157604022148578,thumbnail,true]

Vocat aestus in umbram

I see a redness suddenly come
And the ship of sunrise burning
To save our honour and a world aflame

And though he strew the grave with gold
Would it have been worth while
Never relaxing into grace

A gold-feathered bird
Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown
Farther and farther, all the birds
And the cries of the ships
But one telling me plain what I escaped

The stream of everything that runs away

The joy of your approach
I add added it to it
Made merry because it is so
You are lifted
I will rise
And time seemed finished ere the ship passed by

Note: “Advent” is a cento.  The epigraph translates to “the heat calls into the shade” and comes from Nemesianus by way of Ezra Pound.