Evelyn Schulz
Architecture, Urban Space, City Research, Town Planning, Urban Development - City Research - Goethe-Institut
n.d. (May 2012?)

Side specific installation on the Brühlsche Terrrasse, Dresden. Railing, messing icons, bone conducters, iron speaker cases, cd player, amplifier, WWII airplane recordings.

on Jeff Mayersohn and Harvard Book Store. by Phil Johnson, Forbes, 10 May 2012

"Just like Barack Obama, my views on gay marriage have evolved. And now I am a reluctant groom"

Edmund White, Comment is free / Guardian, 11 May 2012

"If the president has 'evolved' in his affirmation of gay marriage, so have I. Originally I was opposed to gay assimilation and targeted gay marriage as just another effort on the part of gays to resemble their straight neighbours. When the president 'came out' he was careful about mentioning the many gay couples he knew, even some in government, who had loving, 'committed' relationships and who were parenting children. All pretty suburban, in my opinion. Must we be among the 'good gays' in order to win our civil rights? If we're too sexual, if we're wearing drag or leather, if we have multiple partners, if we're seropositive, will we be thrust beyond the pale? What if we don't want to live with the same partner for many years or adopt a Korean daughter and join the parent-teacher association? // But I became pro-marriage equality once I realised how opposed to it the Christian right is in our country."

Guardian, 11 May 2012 (third in a series on this one novel)
"What I discovered in my researches about this part of the country was a vigorous civic idealism and a deep commitment to education. In its early history there was a significant presence of young clergy from places like Yale and Amherst who came to the frontier intent on starting the civilisation over again on the basis of real equality, and proofing it against the encroachments of slavery. Their approach to every problem was to educate – women, African Americans and, crucially, the general population. It was an exhausting and extremely generous campaign, carried on for decades. Its effects are still palpable. The fine little colleges they founded in surprising numbers flourish still. It is true at the same time that the history behind this heritage is largely forgotten…"

"The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera's settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don't output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content."

from his work-in-progress "The Xenotext," at MIT, 3 May 2012

William Snow Harris (1791-1867), Observations on the effects of lightning on floating bodies : with an account of a new method of applying fixed and continuous conductors of electricity to the masts of ships. London, 1823
"Plate [1] has gold leaf through which an electric current has been passed to illustrate, by oxidation, the course of the current. "
at MIT.
Permalink for this record: http://library.mit.edu/item/001726464

image at:

http://futurebook.mit.edu/2012/03/open-house-of-rare-books/
scroll down.

astronomy picture of the day. NASA.

Sarah Werner talk at Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28, 2012.

There are also the indentations left behind during the papermaking process from the wires and frames used in the forms. Once we start thinking in these terms, we can find more topographical variations on leaves of paper: wormholes, dog-eared corners, holes left from stitches sewing gatherings and the binding together, plate marks from engravings. What might we learn from visualizing books not as texts to be read but as topographical maps?

eksperimen menulis kayaknya sering dibikin. eksperimen membaca udah ada yang pernah coba? //
There's lots of experimental writing. Have there been any attempts at experimental reading?
via: http://lolipopsuper.tumblr.com/post/22100304431/puisibungamatahari-wordpress-com

April 26, 2012
great story.
"...Mr Singh turned dogmatic. 'If you really want this, you must hand in your notice,' he insisted, challenging Sarfaraz to show the whole-hearted commitment which running a hardware store entails."

"The short side of the rectangle must relate to the large one like 1 : √2, or like the side of a square to its diagonal. // This form has something pleasant and distinguished before the ordinary [form]."

"The modern DIN format is based on this ratio, which remains the same with each subsequent halving (or doubling)."

"A nomogram, nomograph, abaque, or abac is a graphical calculating device, a two-dimensional diagram designed to allow the approximate graphical computation of a function. The field of nomography was invented in 1884 by the French engineer Philbert Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938) and used extensively for many years to provide engineers with fast graphical calculations of complicated formulas to a practical precision."

"...nomograms naturally incorporate implicit or explicit domain knowledge into their design. For example, to create larger nomograms for greater accuracy the nomographer usually takes the care to only include scale ranges that are reasonable and of interest to the problem. Many nomograms include other useful markings such as reference labels and colored regions. All of these provide useful guideposts to the user. // Like a slide rule, a nomogram is a graphical analog computation device"

Claire Preston, on Thomas Browne (1605-1682) his Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of ‘remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’.

"Musaeum Clausum (the hidden library) is a fake catalogue of a collection that contained books, pictures, and artefacts. Such collections (and their elaborate indices) were a common phenomenon from about 1500 to 1700 and after."

Abstracts and Bios
Design/History/Revolution (conference)
27-28 April 2012, Parsons New School for Design

A Crisis of Perception: Haptic Interface Design as a Response to Ocularcentric Media

In this paper, I discuss the way that haptic interface designers have consistently responded to the crisis of the “overstimulated” sensorium by nominating touch as an alternative channel for communicating coded information. Doing so has required interface designers to define touch with increasing specificity; as they seek to make touch a sense capable of receiving coded messages, they fundamentally transform its constitution. This sense of touch is therefore not a stable formation, but rather one shaped by the interactions between designers, engineers, and marketers as they attempt to reroute information away from the eyes and ears into a purposively redefined haptic channel.
To inform my analysis, I draw on both historical and contemporary examples of haptic interface design discourse, including material from Princeton University’s Cutaneous Communication Lab, MIT’s Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics, and recent conferences on the process of “haptic rendering.” My aim is to show the way these designers participate in a conversation about sensory epistemology, conceptualizing their design practice as a tacit challenge to the dominance not of vision, but of the visualist paradigm in media interfacing.
Where Marshall McLuhan identified the unbalanced, visually-dominant cultural sensorium as a problem overcome by all electronic media (which he understood as fundamentally tactile), haptic interface designers identify a similar problem, but claim instead that this problem can be solved by the design of a specific type of electronic media interface, one that act directly on the user’s sense of touch. By speaking “the tongue of the skin,” these interfaces mobilize an alternative sensory epistemology, one explicitly formulated as a response to what designers understand as a crisis of perception resulting from ocularcentric practices of interfacing.

How one press [Copper Canyon] is working to solve poetry’s e-book problems
By Craig Morgan Teicher
Publishers Weekly, Mar 23, 2012

via: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/21274815165/e-books-and-poetry-just-dont-get-along-as-well-as

someone mentions Olson's "composition by field" that seems more suited to "pre" formatting in HTML, or – counterintuitively – to presentation of text pages as scalable images.

interview with Caldwell on Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant

opens 28 April 2012
featured in FT Weekend article "Memory lane" by Maya Jaggi (14 April 2012)
"In 2008 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk published ‘The Museum of Innocence’. Now he has built it"

NY Times / Opinionator / March 17, 2012
"The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates."
for me, opening lines of Brothers Karamazov…

interesting observation about reading in a second (or third? or fourth?) language — "Each sentence yields a twin, translated version of itself. When the filter of a second language falls away, my connection to these sentences, though more basic, feels purer, at times more intimate, than when I read in English."

maybe how I felt with Indonesian…

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

-Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume I

via: http://cosmicomicas.tumblr.com/post/20053727292/philphys-a-poet-once-said-the-whole-universe

Justin Elis, Nieman Journalism Lab, posted 4 April 2012

"When Jon Huang was younger he was the type of kid who spent his time making mods for Duke Nukem 3D. So it makes a kind of sense he’s now turned The New York Times into its own kind of shoot ‘em up.

Huang was the multimedia producer behind the game embedded in the Times Magazine cover story on the addictive allure of 'stupid games.' A reader stumbling on the story for the first time would see the video game feature at the top of the piece, be compelled to press the enter key, only to find they now have the ability to blast away various bits and elements of the story page itself. And it gets better: Your nondescript little ship can break outside the multimedia box and destroy all of the page, from the most-emailed stories (BOOM goes the DOWD!) to the navigational links and ads, right down to the 'Inside NYTimes.com' promo. And, to the secret delight of editors everywhere, you can finally blast away commenters with impunity."

via @edyong209

International Poetry Festival (Forum Penyair Internasional Indonesia), Pekalongan 1-13 April 2012

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems
by Jen Bervin, Marta Werner (Granary Books, 2012)

24 January 1996.
digger archives
"…and Winstanley himself, Gerard, was apprenticed to a London clothier, which suggests that his father had ambitions for him to get out of the backward north. And it looked as though he was going to follow in his father's trade. He married the daughter of a London surgeon, quite classy, who owned some property in Cobham parish, which we shall come back to later. And Winstanley had set himself up in business before the civil war started. He had possibilities of trade with his native Lancashire I think, which he presumably was relying on. But the civil war disrupted trade links between London and Lancashire and like many other people, Winstanley was ruined in the early 40s and he left London for Cobham where he presumably lived on property belonging to his wife. And the only job that he could get was herding other men's cows as a hired labourer, not a good start. He was very horrified by the poverty which he found around him and by his own poverty and the powerlessness of the poor in face of eviction by landlords or speculative land purchasers."

Mary Beard, TLS, 30 March 2012
"…that do-it-yourself form of fortune-telling which involves opening a text of Virgil at random, plunging your finger in, and whatever phrase it lands on, that's your answer."
some nicely (donnish) comments, too.

Tom Cox, Guardian, 30 March 2012

Tom Cox's bookshelves were less about him than about a stranger he subconsciously imagined would one day visit his house – and so began the great sort.

"When I think of the way my book shelves looked when I was 23, I realise they perhaps were no more about me than they were about a stranger I subconsciously imagined would one day visit my house. This stranger was an uncommon combination of extremely tasteful, hugely judgmental and ridiculously attractive. // I waited very patiently for this stranger for quite a while, only for the finicky bastard not to show. Somewhere along the way, I became a more honest book owner: I now know that nine times out of 10 I'll enjoy a book about a dysfunctional family or the comedies of small-town American life more than I will one about a drug addict or rock star. I don't hold on to books I didn't enjoy – even those that critical wisdom told me I 'should' have – and I no longer keep a copy of Gravity's Rainbow around the house for hypothetical purposes."

includes me.
Teddy Wayne, "A Smartphone Future? But Not Yet." NY Times, 23 March 2012

Anne Eisenberg, Novelties, "Avalanches of Words, Sifted and Sorted"
NY Times 24 March 2012
probabilistic topic marking : sift through millions of works and find their common themes by sorting related words into categories.
could yield new "topics", new themes?

September 11, 2011 to January 15, 2012
Winnipeg Art Gallery

in particular, Cal Lane, "untitled" (2009), two plasma-cut shovels. collection of Art Mûr.

YouTube, uploaded by capitantotti Feb 13, 2012

Annie Murphy Hall, NY Times, 17 March 2012 ¶
Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.”

posted March 20, 2012 at metaLAB (at) Harvard

Evgeny Morozov, Slate, 19 March 2012 ¶
reminded of telegraphic reports of sports and other events that would lend themselves to formulaic assemblage (box scores, etc.) ¶ here viewed with alarm

Bulletproof Shield Briefcase for Laptops - Executive Cruiser Briefcase - with Threat Level IIIA protection shield.
good enough for dictators, might be good enough for me...
via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2012/mar/14/bashar-asma-assad-shopping-pictures?picture=387235605#/?picture=387235597&index=9

14 March 2012
Each robot is composed of two halves: the upper part, shaped like a stunted surfboard, is attached by a cable to a lower part that sports a series of fins and a keel.

To move they do not use fuel but instead convert energy from the ocean's waves, turning it into forward thrust.

Solar panels installed on the upper surface of the gliders power numerous sensors that take readings every 10 minutes to sample salinity, water temperature, weather, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen.

every Sunday 9-10pm

Ed Yong, not exactly rocket science, 7 March 2012
"Swanton found that even the primary tumour was surprisingly varied. He found 128 mutations among the various samples, but only a third of these were common to all of them. A quarter of the mutations were 'private' ones – unique to a single sample."
and
"He sequenced their genes to look for individual mutations – the equivalent of typos in a book. He checked the activity of different genes. He looked for big changes in the structure or number of chromosomes. Most similar projects typically focus on the mutations, but that’s like looking for typos when pages of a book have been smudged, or entire chapters have been rearranged."

photo caption: Bernard Inchauspe, left, Jose Fragoso and Fernando Gomez have seen a lot of changes during their long tenures [half a century each] at Taix.
Kate Linthicum, LA Times, 29 February 2012

remember the old location, long tables, apples for dessert.

Peter Stanford, Telegraph, 26 February 2012

1-3 April 2012

Things, LA Times, 24 September 1986
re: ironing, irons, and Ivers!

Mary MacVean, LA Times "At Home," 17 February 2012

Hammer Museum, August 2011
comments to come.

Alex Hudson, BBC News magazine, 17 February 2012
"It's vital information first and poetry incidentally."
"And the broadcast's strict timing, rhythm, format and script - a maximum of 370 words, except for the final, longer broadcast - mean that delivery has to be precise."
I listen not on radio but rather web, despite undependable (changing?) URL...

"But there's a contradiction - as Braille use spreads across everyday objects, the number of people using the system has actually been in long-term decline." ¶ Damon Rose, BBC News, 13 February 2012

Bob Pool, LA Times, 9 February 2012

Grown Adult Actually Expects To Be Happy
The Onion 47:10 (March 10, 2011)
NORMAL, IL—According to incredulous sources, local hardware store employee and grown adult human being Rob Peterson, 37, actually expects to be happy in life...

John Macdonald, in a reply to Col. Pasley's charges that Macdonald has stolen his signals idea... in The Asiatic journal and monthly miscellany - East India Company (December 1828)

via Orion the Coffeemaker (kcw)
criminalwisdom: Witch Crafts
“Sheep’s heart, stuck with nails and pins. Said to have been used to break a spell cast by a witch over a farmer’s cattle.”
~ Miracles & Charms
(Source: Nerdcore)

January 23rd, 2012

Created by Joseph Herscher, a kinetic artist from New Zealand.
like the important role played by the laptop computer.

Michael Sokolove, NY Times Magazine (22 January 2012)
"'We’re going to see a point in this century where the running times, the jumping heights, in the Paralympics, are all superior to the Olympics,' Herr said as we wrapped up our conversation. 'The Paralympics won’t constrain technological development. So what’s going to happen is the Paralympics will be this exciting human-machine sport like race-car driving. It will make normal human bodies seem very boring.'"

"Herr says that what will make sport fairer is 'more technology, not less.' But that doesn’t really settle the Pistorius question, because no one is likely to want to trade his biological legs for artificial ones, no matter how cool and sexy Herr can make them."

that remains to be seen. lots of issues here, which are well explored in the comments.

LA Times, 21 January 2012

BBC News, 20 January 2012
A suburban Chicago man accidentally shot a 3.25in (8.25cm) nail into his skull but is recovering after doctors successfully removed it from the centre of his brain. // Dante Autullo, 34, was in his workshop when a nail gun recoiled near his head. // But he had no idea the nail had entered his brain until the next day, when he began feeling nauseous. // Doctors told Mr Autullo that the nail came within millimetres of the area used for motor function. // His fiancee, Gail Glaenzer, told the Associated Press on Friday that he was in good spirits after the two-hour surgery to remove the nail at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois....

Rick Gekoski, Guardian, 17 January 2012
"Books are peculiarly invasive. Any "madness" in the literary process is more appropriately assigned to the act and experience of reading, than to that of creating. // So a throng of characters clamorously demands our attention, voices rise and fall, fade in and out of our consciousness, we suspend the everyday, ignore the telephone and doorbell, eat with our eyes fixed to the page, overcome, ravaged by the demands of the text..."

Alberto Manguel reports an even more brutal method in his book A Reader on Reading. Joseph Joubert in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century did not cut out of books what he needed, but rather discarded everything he did not need or did not like. He quotes Chateaubriand: "When he read, he would tear out of his books the pages he did not like, thereby achieving a library entirely to his taste, composed of hollowed-out books bound in covers that were too large for them"

ex An alphabetical list of English words occurring in the literature of the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and forming a basis of comparison for the use of contributors to the new dictionary of the philological society. London: Printed by Emily Faithful and Co., Victoria Press, Great Coram Street, W.C., 1861.
"muchness," a word made much of in Warren Weaver his Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland (1964), in a passage on "manufactured or nonsense words."

Steve Tice, LA Times, September 21, 1992
as my brother writes, a "superbly researched" article.

"H.S. Sternberger and his twin sons, Van and Lionel, came to Pasadena from San Diego in 1916 and chose the southwest corner of Colorado Boulevard and Ave. 64 to open a fruit stand. The site was atop the half-mile long slope that Colorado climbs from its intersection with Figueroa St. // Drivers of that era often had to stop their cars after climbing a steep grade to allow the radiator to cool down. Sternberger's location was perfect for selling fruit and cold drinks. That may be how he came up with the name "The Rite Spot."

"The next eatery to achieve notable success at 1500 W. Colorado was a 'Henry's' drive-in francise. A photo from the 1950s shows one sign reading 'Henry's' perched above free-standing 3-foot-high letters on the edge of the roof proclaiming 'Famous Rite Spot.' // Another sign on a tall white pole near the curb said 'Chicken in the Rough.' (Some confused customers called the restaurant by that name.) The chicken dinner so named featured fried chicken nestled atop a tangle of french fried potatoes. Those seated in the front dining room could look out across the Annandale golf course, which may have prompted the menu's reference to 'the rough.'"

Julie Sedivy at Language Log "The unbearable loss of words" — on Paul West's aphasia... very nice, via ajay tumblr post. based on Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names for Love.

Sedivy: "I explain to the skeptics that having a collection of seven near-synonyms allows you to pick out just the right one for the occasion—the one with exactly the right connotations, degree of formality or crudeness, the right history of use sticking to it, even the one with the right rhythm, vowels or consonants. If you're using language as paint, why in the world would you want to be limited to just the primary colors? // No doubt, Paul West was also driven by similar pleasures, devoting sprawling acres of neural real estate to his vocabulary. "

LA Times, 30 December 2011 ¶ mentions South Pasadena house

LA Times, 30 December 2011 ¶ includes longer 2004 article on same house. ¶ do I remember such a house on Alta Vista, in South Pasadena? ¶ "It came as no surprise that Neff had taken a keen interest in dealing with world housing issues. As the grandson of Andrew McNally, the cartographer who founded Rand McNally and developed La Mirada and Altadena, he came from a family of forward thinkers."

Alice Rawsthorn, Design : "Deciphering 2 Embedded Signs of Our Times." NY Times, 9 January 2012. ¶ "Each one has a dramatically different impact on the visual landscape, aesthetically and symbolically."

comment is free / Guardian 27 December 2011 ¶ observations by Avital Ronell, Tom McCarthy and Stuart Jeffries (who wrote Kittler obituary in the Guardian) ¶ "what remains of people is what the media can store and communicate, what couts is not the messages or the content with which they equip [us]... but rather their circuits..." ¶ McCarthy: "that nails it, that's the basis on which poetry has to proceed, or any literature."

Monocle news report (January 2012?): on overhaul of Karaköy neighborhood; a good portion of this 6:31 feature is devoted to the hardware stores there.

lovely story. LA Times, 4 January 2012 — The Global Garden, a look at multicultural L.A. through its garden plantings, usually appears on Tuesdays.

Gramophone, 19 December 2011 ¶ via @aamonnz

The U.S. Navy and Communications Intelligence, Cryptologic Quarterly 5:3 (Fall 1986), recently declassified (via Steve Herman tweet, pointing to
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/files/cryptologic_quarterly/A_New_View_of_Pearl_Harbor.pdf ).
focus on Navy Comint.
JN-25 code changed in last two months of 1941, but traffic analysis might have been better exploited. Problems: manpower shortages and wrong priority : diplomatic cables, development of own codes, but insufficient attention to message (and especially traffic) analysis.

Guardian / Observer, 31 December 2011 ¶ The Maestro's Loss, by Hari Kunzru ¶ "The Maestro is a world-famous man of letters, renowned for his soaring talent and iron discipline. But one afternoon, a lapse in self-control causes him to lose the precious object that lies behind his genius."
"but only a Scrivano possesses the range of rhetorical effect that top-flight literary performers require. The action is, of course, superlative, the keys having an unparalleled fluidity and lightness of touch, but it is the perfection of the Scrivano's plotting, its width of assonance and crispness of alliteration, the ease with which a skilled author can tease out breathtaking metonymies and cliffhanging aposeopeses, complex internal rhymes and unexpected subplots, that raise these instruments over the Ortegas or Sholes-Gibbons used by writers of the second flight."

essay & Avant-garde : the biography of a Metaphor (late 2011)

In the final analysis, the avant-garde artist, like the colonist or athlete, metaphorically represents the mobility of the creative mind. All these metaphors, moreover, have in common a connotation of winning the lead, of being in front, of arriving first. Competitiveness lies at the root of all creative endeavour.

long article on writing / drawing automaton, at Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, built by Henri Maillardet. Henry Fountain, NY Times, 26 December 2011

Articulations of Structural Mythopoeia in the Para-Classical Realm for the Metrickally Measured Linguistical Motivics and Deeply Felt Cinematic Apoggiatura of Mr. David Gatten, Gentleman by Michael Sicinski. Cinema Scope issue 49 (2011)

Jennifer Schuessler, NY Times, 26 December 2011 ¶ "…The lecture was drawn from Mr. Kirschenbaum’s book 'Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,' which Harvard University Press is set to publish in 2013, or as soon as he can finish tapping it out on his iBuyPower 64-bit laptop…" ¶ not my questions.