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.”

In 1997, parody newspaper The Onion published an article called “Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts”, about a congressional attempt to add umlauts to the name of the United States of America to make it seem “bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy metal manner.”

Fictional rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) of the mockumentary, Spın̈al Tap, says, “It’s like a pair of eyes. You’re looking at the umlaut, and it’s looking at you.”

The spoof band Spın̈al Tap raised the stakes in 1984 by using an umlaut over the letter n; i.e., over a consonant. This construction is found in the Jakaltek language of Guatemala and in some orthographies of Malagasy, a language of Madagascar.

In contrast to other examples, the spelling of Queensrÿche was chosen to soften the band’s image, as it was feared that the original spelling, Queensreich, might be misconstrued as having neo-nazi connotations.

Björk’s diacritical marks are genuine.

I am loving the umlaut and all it can do for us visually and aurally; loving all sorts of works of mockument; loving Wikipedia; loving the various ways and types of information we can write and read about. Here’s to an umlautinous year.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, I have seen books that look like this before. I’m not sure what the genre is called, but they’re the books in between picture books and YA novels. When I was a kid, I remember them being referred to as “chapter books,” but I think that’s just a term adults use around youngsters to make them feel more grown up. Like “big boy pants.” Anyway, these books have big letters and crumby fonts. Which is weird because little kids usually have the best eyesight and also don’t you think The Great Brain deserves a little more respect than that? Come on, those were good books.

The moral of the story here, I think, is that really old people and really young people are totally getting shafted by the publishing industry. This is concerning because 1) children are the future, so shouldn’t we be cluing the future in on what a proper book is supposed to look like? And 2) someday we will all be old. I don’t want to read books that look dumb when I am old.

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.

Where writing all began for me: Mac OS 7.

Even before Jobs’ return to the company in 1996, Apple was doing things differently. Compared to the blocky, complicated PCs sitting down at my local public library, Apple machines were open, accessible, intuitive. I know this sounds like shameless fanboy gushing, but to a poor kid from a small town, with few outlets available beyond petty vandalism, that difference was the path to new worlds, a path to the power of creativity and imagination. Even the advertising: stark black-and-white photos of creative icons in intimate moments. Albert Einstein, Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso. In each, the focus was on the qualities each image shared; bright dark eyes that pierced and that simple slogan in 32-point Garamond: “Think Different.” To a kid drugged out of his skull on Ritalin, languishing in a dull, uncaring educational system, that slogan was a catalyst for powerful ideas.

There exists now an entire generation of young, passionate, tech-savvy creatives fixing the world’s computers, crafting the world’s entertainment, and bringing new art into being because Steve Jobs dared to “Think Different.” Many of us grew up in the shadow of his genius; many of us grew up in the faint hope of trying to follow his example. And it breaks my heart to think that he’ll never know now what he gave us. So for all that I say to him: thank you, Steve. We owe it all to you. You will be sorely missed.

(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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“I’ve been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I’ve learned to resist that.” — David Byrne

(via thenewgravycake)

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“To dare every day to be irreverent and bold. To dare to preserve the randomness of mind which in children produces strange and wonderful new thoughts and forms. To continually scramble the familiar and bring the old into new juxtaposition.” — Gordon Webber

(via martinvorwerk)

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.

I mean, it’s still data. Personal data, but data all the same. Analyzing data is different than reading a journal. There’s cluster analysis: Maybe the reports show that he often eats in one area of Manhattan. And association rule learning: maybe one year reveals a that if he goes to the bar, he’ll have a short interaction with someone. And there might be anomaly detection: in 2009, he used 23 methods of transportation, 15 different cars, and one limo. But what does one really get out the data? Is it only a hint of a larger story, a story hidden behind numbers, charts, maps, and graphs?

Then I saw this spread:

Totally cool.

Maybe I should chart where and when I have my insistent epiphany. Maybe I could analyze that to look for relevant correlations (proximity to a river? was a cathartic moment recently read or experienced? was it windy that day?). Maybe there’s an essay in that after all.

If I had an Iphone, I might even be tempted to download the Daytum app, engineered by Feltron. This app allows everyone to record the incidental data of their personal lives and have it displayed in beautifully designed pie charts and graphs. This app might be the new journal–maybe we’re moving from the composition notebook to the iphone app, from qualitative record keeping to quantitative data collection. Maybe memoirs are changing into annual reports.

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.

some day my home will be plastered with posters as awesome as this.

i heart the library of congress.  these WPA posters are just one reason why.

holy shit, dfw fans—someone made a poor yorick entertainment website (a.k.a. proof that there are people in the world more obsessed with infinite jest than me).  revel in all that is the totally fictional filmography of the totally fictional mad stork.

national geographic has dug up declassified photos from area 51.

those “great ideas” book covers that i love/covet oh so very much?  you can see all 100 of them on penguin’s site.

holy shit, cloud atlas fans—the wachowski brothers (the guys responsible for the matrix films) are making a film adaptation, with hugo weaving starring in multiple roles.

there are now awards, complete with their own fancy ceremony (“formal wear suggested”), for book trailers.  the event was yesterday, the trailers are all linked to here.

not to be outdone by marvel, which seems intent on “rebooting” their biggest movie franchises (e.g., x-men and spider-man), dc comics is going to restart ALL of their comics with issue 1 later this year.

science can now delete your totally bummer memories.  from your brain.  wtf.