Unprintable Version

"Only Connect"--Henry James

Cool on The Hill was named City Pages weblog of the day yesterday.  (See Links.)

Place and Thyme was named Favorite Ottawa Blog. (See Sites for Sore Eyes.)

Joe Hart has written a wonderful piece in the latest Utne Reader about his own back and forth between small towns and big cities. (See Sites Mentioned or buy the magazine.) The same issue also includes a nice piece on surrealism by Jon Spayde. Both Joe and Jon have written many fine magazine articles but these subjects are particularly close to their hearts. 

And see Searchscapes, a site by Juliana Sato Yamashita, "a new media artist from Sao Paulo, Brazil, currently living in New York City."

"The intent of 'Searchscapes' is to design a tridimensional map of Manhattan using existing data from the web. The objective is to compare representations of the city’s 'physical spaces' and 'information spaces'."

 

Highway 61 Revisited

I haven’t been back to my hometown much lately. But I heard that the sand quarry where my high school friends swam is the site of proposed town homes.

Too deep and too unsupervised for families, The Pits was a teenage kingdom. We would park along Highway 61 a few miles north of Winona, cut through cottonwood and grape vine thickets, lay our towels and beer coolers on the beach and sprint over the heated sand into the water.

But the Pits is the last in a long line of places that have become something else.

Most of those places served pizza or ice cream or french toast or hamburgers. We were teenage boys and, like dogs, loved any place that fed us and let us bark.

Some of us saw Diner three or four times. That movie tries to see how much love it can press into images of plates bobbing in those plate wells and armies of ketchup bottles draining. We saw Diner at the right time, when we were just out of college, but still clinging to a few favorite places the way a six year old will still secretly grab a teddy bear.

Colson Whitehead shares some of this love of place. The Colossus of New York is an essay written in a second person so intimate it feels like fiction. In it, he writes of his town that “no matter how long you’ve been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge.”

And, then, a beat later: “You are a New Yorker when what was there before becomes more real than what is there now.”

At least for those of us who moved away from a town, our case is different. Live long enough and your past starts to feel like time-lapse photography, at once twitchy and fluid. When what is in Winona saddens us, we know we’ve really left.

This isn’t tragedy. Nostalgia for us is a pang, not a pain.

But give the pang its moment. Whitehead again: “We can never make proper goodbyes. . . . At some point, you were closer to the last time than to the first, and you didn’t even know it. You didn’t know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying goodbye.”

Webfill

Analogous to "landfill." What I hope Unprintable Version isn't.

My Dog, Annotated

People have asked about references in “My Dog Is Awesome.” Norman Borden the Mormon Doorman is Howard Borden’s brother on the Bob Newhart Show. His other brother was, I believe, Forest Warden Gordon Borden. 

“Charismatic Megafauna"—as in “Albert is one charismatic hunk of megafauna”—is a term used by conservationists to refer to mammals with big, expressive eyes. They look better on a poster than, say, a salamander.  To view some, go to www.nlga-mn.org/availablehounds.htm

Wendy Fernstrum Paintings

Our friend Wendy Fernstrum creates paintings that combine the luminosity of abstraction and the grit of realism. To see them on the web, go to www.fernwerks.com. To see them in the world, attend her opening at the Traffic Zone, Saturday, May 7, from 6 'til 9, Traffic Zone, 250 Third Ave N, Minneapolis. She is also the artist in residence at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts. For more information, go to the relevant links in "Sites Mentioned."

Bar Exam (The Fun One)

A link from a friend who, for reasons that will become clear, wishes to remain nameless. I got eight out of twelve right on the first page, but faltered on the second. The more interesting thing, though: some of the candy bars—viewed from this strange perspective, and especially on the second page—start to look like crude faces.

http://www.sci.mus.mn.us/sln/tf/c/crosssection/namethatbar.html

 

My dog is awesome. Yours, not so much.

I heard—and these are internet statistics, once removed—that there are nine million weblogs and four thousand new weblogs a day. A friend of mine fears what will happen when everyone has one and there will be no one left to read them.

"Here at MyDogIsAwesome.com, we’re not concerned."

Actually, I’m not concerned, either. I dismiss 8.9999 million of them: the Christmas newsletters gone fulltime, the adolescent cellphone conversations preserved for posterity, the empowered Joseph Dargars, the model airplane enthusiasts, the third-rate Andrew Sullivans.

I don’t dismiss all of them. The better I know you, the more interested I am in your site. My niece Denise—shades of Norman Borden the Mormon Doorman—doesn’t have a weblog, but if she did, I’d read it. When she posts pictures of her family, I always look at them.

Weblogs personalize the web. How many times can I click on espn or the onion? I work hard, but there are those dead spots in the day.

What interests me most, as I try to determine just what makes a weblog good, are the people I’d never heard of before, but whose sites I now visit daily. I’ve mentioned Place and Thyme and Subtext and I will now mention Daily Dose of Imagery. What makes these places I want to return to is something quite old-fashioned: they are flaneurs, the literary term for a walker in the city, and what they create is something like a contemporary feuilleton. And that is why I recommend my wife’s site, cool on the hill. She gets out there, into the world.

More world, less web.

Especially while I spend ten hours a day at my desk making client deadlines and avoiding thinking about defending my thesis. Neurotic evasion is my real reason for starting this. I’m looking for a better reason to continue it.

And, yes, Albert is indeed one charismatic hunk of megafauna.

A Humble Ambition. Thwarted

I realized today that my goal in writing this blog is to force myself to write one interesting sentence a day. That may have been overly ambitious. But see below.

Below

If you can’t say anything nice—or at least interesting, link to someone who can. Subtext is a photoblog devoted to cameraphone shots of New York subway scenes.

Phone follows function. The murky quality of the images exactly matches the murky quality of the place. But my favorite image was taken outside the subway; it shows a handlettered placard that says, “Marry Me Janeane Garofalo.” It--the placard--has been discarded. 

Noircissist

A gloomy narcissist. Sorry.