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“What makes an artist an artist? Artists are the people who have this little weird idea and they act on it, and they  keep acting on it, and regardless of the consequence or the outcome, something amazing unfolds.” 

I came across this video on the internet today. A couple, Judith and Richard Lang, make art out of discarded plastic they find at the beach. They go to Keyhole Bay in California and comb the beach for plastic. Then they take what they’ve found home and organize it in boxes so they can use it in sculpture or mixed-media art. They create some truly beautiful pieces and clean up the beach. It’s a beautiful win-win.

This got me thinking about what it is to salvage and collect things in order to use it for something larger or greater than the thing itself. This is like writing, I think. As a nonfiction writer, I observe the world around me and collect data in a notebook and store it for later use, like a topic or a piece of an essay. At least that’s the goal. Something, whether it is a bottle cap found on the ground or a random quote you heard in the line at the grocery store, can meld with another small something and a really interesting connection or product can be made. Collecting is an art and by that I mean that it’s not limited to material things. I’m not condoning hoarding of ideas or things, but we search for something and when we find it, something happens and we can’t let it be lost. If I didn’t carry a notebook, so many ideas, good and bad, would disappear from my memory, lost forever. And as an artist, as a writer, I can’t afford to let that happen.

The Quintessential Sound Changer

I’ve recently been wishing for an umlaut rich keyboard, which made me curious about the history of the umlaut. When I typed that curiosity into Google, the first result was “metal umlaut.” Being a dense and literal person, I expected an entry on welding and metal art.

Once I started reading Metal Umlaut, I no longer needed any other information about the umlaut. This entry on Wikipedia is wholly satisfying. It is such good reading that I want to find out who the author is. It is also “the personal favourite of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”

Here are some of my favorite parts:

A metal umlaut^[1] (also known as röck döts)

Umlaut roughly means changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, “around/changed”, and Laut, “sound”

Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead said about the band name’s umlaut, “I only put it in there to look mean.” Read more »

It’s fall. Every fall, I seem to start a new project. True to form, I’m starting a new study tentatively called the Kokinshu Project. My brother recently immigrated to Japan, and while the Bluegrass has deepening connections with Japan (there are many Japanese-owned factories, like Toyota, where I live), I have to admit that I have spent my time studying Latin America, not Asia. So I have been trying to learn about the country the best way I know how: through a literary study. I originally thought that I would just read some poetry and couple poems with photographs that I had taken on various travels, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would also add a brief commentary to better connect with the literature and this way, maybe anyone stopping by my website would learn something along with me. I also hope to include prose, non-Japanese writing inspired by Japanese style, etc.

Feel free to give me reading recommendations.

This quarter I’m taking a nonfiction class about obsessions. Each book on the reading list is in some way about obsession whether it be an obsession with candy, immortal cells, dead presidents or the passing of a spouse. So I’ve had obsession on the brain since September (you could say I’ve been obsessed with obsession) and it’s got me thinking about the different forms that obsession takes. It’s not limited to the written word.

I found this video on one of my favorite art blogs, and while the video doesn’t outright say that it’s about obsession, it totally is.

A man named Scott Weaver from San Francisco built a gigantic kinetic sculpture out of toothpicks. Yes, toothpicks. Over 100,000 of them. It’s astonishing. Even though it isn’t the largest sculpture made out of toothpicks ever made, it is the only one of this magnitude that is kinetic, meaning it moves. He’s spent over 3,000 hours making the sculpture modeled after his home town of San Fran, complete with working windmills, trolly cars, and streets that move ping pong balls through a tour of the city. It’s obvious how much he loves San Francisco not only by the incredible toothpick sculpture, but the way he describes the city and each pathway the ping pong balls travel. Each pathway has a story.

Hope you get a kick out of it.

Because I am an impoverished grad student, I buy all my books for school used, online. And because I am not a particularly attentive or contentious consumer, I often don’t read all of the product information before purchasing used books online. I kind of just figure as long as the author names and titles match the ones on the syllabus, I’m fine.

This is how I ended up with a large print edition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I’ve always been aware of the existence of large print books, but I can’t remember ever having seen one up close before. I think I assumed they would look like regular books inside, just with, you know, bigger words. But this is not the case.

Ladies & gentlemen of the jury, if I may direct your attention to Exhibit A.

Exhibit A. Also, the pages are weirdly white, like printer paper white.

I’m no design expert, but something is not right here. Sure, the print is bigger, which makes sense because some people don’t have the greatest eyesight and need bigger words for easier reading. But it also seems like the margins are off. It looks like the text could be read straight across both pages. Is that also something people with poor eyesight need? Or maybe it’s a font problem. I don’t know what this font is, but it’s not particularly dignified. I kind of feel like this font is talking down to me, saying hey, you’re clearly an elderly person whose eyes don’t work right so you don’t deserve a nicely formatted page.

This is some ageist bullshit right here.

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Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

(Author’s note: Forgive me. I know it isn’t my day, but I felt that something needed to be said. – S.M.)

I owe a lot to Steve Jobs. The Apple II was one of the first machines I ever explored, from kindergarten on through grade-school. I know that Jobs wasn’t involved with Apple at that time, having been forced out of the company shortly after my birth; still, it was his company, always was, and his ingenuity allowed those computers to be there in the first place. It allowed me those first tentative interactions with technology.

Later, as an angry misfit junior-higher, my school’s guidance counselor used to man the computer labs after-hours, allowing us free reign of all the Macintosh computers and educational software he had available. I explored audio editing and computer-aided design; I drew my first digital illustration (a supernova), traversed early 3D-rendered environments, and even explored 3D Atlas, a mid-90′s precursor to Google Earth. I wrote my first short story on a Macintosh. In a very real sense, the company that Steve Jobs created got me started on the path to writing. Read more »

“I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.” — Pablo Picasso

(via thisdotcomtaken)

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“It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.” –Steve Almond

(via tardomucho)

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Do you keep a journal? A little book of notes in your purse or pocket? Do you have an Iphone app that helps you track information about your daily/weekly/monthly activities (highway miles traveled, drinks consumed, nights with strange dreams…)?

I’ve always kept a composition notebook around to record moments and memories. Sometimes I write down epiphanies, but once I realized that I suffer from a strange disorder wherein I don’t actually have different epiphanies, but the same one, over and over again, I dropped that realization as a noteworthy topic. The notebooks are entertaining reads: there’s a record of going down the Bourbon Trail and visiting distilleries with a note about how every tour guide was named Larry; there’s an ambiguous stand-alone line reading “There would a Bob Dylan song about this situation”; there’s that same epiphany (this time disguised as a note about Nietzsche), dutifully written after a few pisco and colas. It’s all for mining later, for a personal essay or short story or poem. And it’s all qualitative, not quantitative.

I’ve tried to record things in a quantitative way: the tally of miles walked each day, or the list of books read in 2011, or the map of the US, shaded to show states lived in. At some point, my Type C Personality beats my Type A Personality at rock, paper, scissors and the quantitative records are forgotten, abandoned, accidentally set on fire.

Quantitative records like these have always seemed like a way to remember, but not to learn. What does one get out of data sets? Nicholas Feltron seems to get something out of them, otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be compiling information for his Feltron Annual Reports. Since 2005, he’s been recording postcards received, minutes listening to music, modes of transport, places dined, etc. and publishing the information in annual reports. After looking at these gorgeously designed reports, I wondered what type of discovery emerges, whether it’s just data collection or  actually data mining, if these reports are like self-published memoirs or if they focus so much on presentation and preservation of information that they are absent of reflection. Read more »

A few posts on Bark have featured MOTIONPOEMS, an animated poetry project founded by poet Todd Boss and designer/general wunderkind Angella Kassube. With the proliferation of design technology and the magical Interwebs, a lot of folks have begun creating animation versions of poems. But over the past couple of years I’ve paid closest attention to MOTIONPOEMS, as it’s been a bit different from the get-go. The quality of the work they’ve produced is quite simply the best I’ve seen. In my experience, many collaborations between poets and designers are lackluster because either the design and production are substandard, or the writing is. In other words, it’s hard to hit a home run back-to-back. But MOTIONPOEMS pulls it off. Boss and Kassube are, in effect, a professional poetic tag team, and their work proves it.

If that weren’t enough, MOTIONPOEMS got some pretty damn good news recently. They’ve inked a one-year pilot contract to animate poems from Scribner’s Best American Poetry. That’s pretty impressive, because the writers they run are already world-class, now they’ll be able to feature even more fine folks.

As one might imagine, this isn’t exactly cheap, so they’ve launched a Kickstarter Project to finance the endeavor. They are shooting for 15K, and they’re happily well on their way. If you’re so inclined, the Kickstarter project is open for donations until Tuesday or so, and there are a bunch of nifty poetry-related “thank you” items for each membership level. My personal favorite is a signed, hand-pencilled 14×20 broadside of Todd Boss’s poem “The World Is In Pencil,” which is due to appear in Poetry soon. It looks like this:

In any event, be sure to keep tabs on this project, as it’s got a damn bright future.