It all gets real

I want to move to New York...

...so I can get (and use) one of these babies:

I doubt I'd read books in digital format, but as a newspaper or magazine replacement, absolutely.

Bring on the citywide wi-fi Toronto!

Thanks to How to Change the World for helping me figure out what I want for my birthday in 2015 (the year in which we may, if we're lucky, get to use one here).

Jim Henson: more frightening than fuzzy

Were you ever frightened while watching Sesame Street? Afraid to admit it? You weren't alone. Here's Jim Henson's infamous opera-singing orange that kept many a kid awake at night:

Henson also created this piece to freak out grown-ups on The Tonight Show:

Still life

Perception. I think it's Thomas King who talks about people rushing through life in The Truth About Stories. Life doesn't rush by you. And then I guess there's the opposite: sitting, waiting for life to happen. A friend once said, "It's like you're sitting at a stop sign, waiting for the light to change."

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin describes a world whose technological progress may seem to be at a standstill if only observed for a relatively small amount of time. She then reminds us that progress can be a matter of perception:

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

Image Source: Dru!

Latin American Literature

A couple of reading suggestions from my good friend who teaches Latin American literature in Peru:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. I've read The War of the End of the World, which was great, so I'm looking forward to reading more. According to my friend The Time of the Hero is "...the novel that made him famous, and opened the doors for the Latin American boom of literature in the 60's."

Reading List

Now that I am finished my course, I can read whatever I want again. One of the words that came up regularly in the course was bildungsroman: a novel of personal development. I was reading up on it while I was studying and came across a list of books that falls under this category. There are some real gems on the list; a few of which I've read, many authors and books I've been curious about and more that are entirely new to me. It could take a lifetime to read all these. Here they are:

Pre 1930

• the 13th century Hrafnkels saga
• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
• Jane Austen, Emma
• Leslie Barringer, Gerfalcon
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (novel)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
• Jeffrey Farnol, The Amateur Gentleman
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
• Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
• Maxim Gorky, In the World
• Maxim Gorky, My Universities
• Hermann Hesse, Demian
• Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
• Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
• Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless
• Daniel Owen, Rhys Lewis
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• Leo Tolstoy, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth trilogy
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
• Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
• Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Link

Post 1930

• Sherman Alexie, Smoke Signals (film)
• Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
• Paul Auster, Moon Palace
• Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road
• Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia (Tree of Knowledge)
• Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
• William Boyd, Any Human Heart
• Camilo Jose Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte)
• Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
• Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
• Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One and Four Fires
• Abha Dawesar, Babyji
• Samuel R. Delany, The Tale of Gorgik, Empire Star, Phallos
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Janet Fitch, White Oleander
• John Fowles, Daniel Martin
• Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
• Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song
• Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
• Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• John Irving, The Cider House Rules
• John Knowles, A Separate Peace
• Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Doris Lessing, Children of Violence Series (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, The Four-Gated City)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men
• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing
• Michael McClure, The Mad Cub
• Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
• Frank O'Connor, An Only Child
• Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar
• Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
• Terry Pratchett, Mort
• Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
• John Ringo and David Weber, Empire of Man series
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
• Jack Vance, Maske: Thaery
• Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons
• Richard Wright, Black Boy
• William Maxwell,The Folded Leaf

Link

Image Source: callumscott2

Jeff Lemire launches web comic

I’m pleased to announce my friend Jeff’s foray into the blogosphere. He’s a very talented illustrator and comic book artist and has just launched a serialized web comic “Soft Instruments” . Check out Jeff’s new graphic novel “Tales From the Farm” published by Top Shelf Comix.

Work

Discover your own Productivity Profile courtesy of Web Worker Daily. Which led me to this morsel from Creating Passionate Users that Sean will love.

Back to work.

Cracking the creative whip

I've heard the argument that if one were truly passionate about something they would just do it. It seems to me that there are a few ingredients missing in this theory though. Some I know, some I think I know and, no doubt, some ingredients I'm not yet aware of (read what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about "knowing". Thanks adliterate!) . Discipline for sure. I don't think that discipline is born out of passion. You've gotta have it to get anything done obviously. Maybe passion necessitates discipline? I'm thinking out loud here folks (the three of you who may read this). Fear? Fear can certainly hold a person back from pursuing something. Fight or flight man. Are we all passionate? Is passion sometimes buried under layers of expectations? There seems to be a lot of pressure to know what one's passions are. And then, when you know what you're passionate about, it would be unforgivable not to dedicate time to your passion, right? How much time? Bah! I could go on, but what I really wanted to post about was the following:

This is the last day of "Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month". What a great way to invite a little creative commitment into your life (and your community). Thanks to Keri Smith of Wish Jar fame for pointing me to the site. I loved Keri's piece "Things that I've Consumed Today". It reminds me of an exericise in practicing mindfulness.

Here are the basic rules of Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month:

For 4 weeks starting on Thursday the 1st of February,
Participants create one new work/exercise a day.
Choose your own themes, one per week,
Work in any medium.
And post your work on the group blog every day.

It's a bit late to get involved, but maybe I'll invite a little creative commitment into my life as a result.

Image Source: jcolman

All men are created equal?

Sometimes a simple, coincidental gesture sheds a bright light on a new discovery. This time it was a click (courtesy of Rocketboom).

When I visited Compact Histories of Native Tribes in the Americas I thought I was going to find some interesting historical information about First Nations, and I did. Vast amounts of it in fact, well organized and fascinating. What I hadn't given much thought to is how powerful the content on the site would be and the tremendous emotional connections people would obviously have to the stories. In retrospect it seems insensitive that my initial interest was largely historical, not emotional. I know very well that European settlers devastated the indigenous societies of the Americas. The fact is, I'm largely unaware, uneducated, out of touch, disconnected. I woke up, at least a little bit, when I read the following quotation from a reader of the site:

"I am crying and the tears signal my relief. After reading more than I have ever been told by my family about our history, I am overjoyed to know that we are documenting ourselves and not losing history. The history of the powerful Ojibewa Nation is everyone's history.

My mother, born at Turtle Mountain, sent to boarding school in Alberta, and eventually adopted by a white family, was a chronic runaway. She was full of war. Her inability to overcome her anger lead to her early death. Without her, I seek answers to where she/we came from. Who were her/our people?

I am in the middle of final exams and am searching the web for statistics on Native American death rates. I am struggling with how much theory I am taught in my classes. I must write critically, analytically, theorhetically about something I intuitively understand. Being able to check in with this site takes the morbid edge off my homework. Writing about how we die becomes depressing and reinforces the myth that native peoples are dissappearing.

This site renews my energy for finishing my projects."

(link)

I was reminded that we are not alone in our pain. That we all have to take responsibility for the legacies of our ancestors. That in some way we must share the pains and the joys of everyone we are even remotely connected to. That is everyone. That there is so much more to know and that we can never know it all. That our history is everyone's history.

I continue to uncover more stories on the site and know that I have barely scratched the surface. I'm certain that Compact Histories of Native Tribes in the Americas will be an invaluable resource to many and a powerful means of connecting people to our shared history. I hope that posting this will help someone else find their way.

The Machine is Us

Saw this video about the birth of Web 2.0 on The Center for Graphic Facilitation blog. The piece was produced by Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch. Welsch is part of Digital Ethnography, a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

Thought you Social Media/Web 2.0 folks would enjoy...