The big story is not about blogging. It’s not about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Friendfeed or whatever.
It is about..
Cheap. Easy. Global. Media.
CheapEasyGlobal is the big story.
(via Gaping Void) Link
Month: July 2008
another decision the company has made which has ‘…lead to the watering down of the Starbucks experience, and, what some might call the commoditization of our brand.’
brand autopsy
From the Editor’s Desk
“May the wind take your troubles away…”
—Son Volt, “Windfall” from the Trance album
A hiatus from blogging was needed and taken. Many reasons exist for disconnection from the matrix—the blogosphere—which I may detail later. The primary reason is that I could not maintain the luxury of blogging and accomplish work-related tasks.
After Christmas, and during the following six months, I released seven projects to the market: this book
A respite was needed. So I took off three and a half weeks. I pointed the auto to parts unknown and hit the road in search of coffee houses and lost threads. Three thousand miles were traveled. For five nights during the journey, I slept in a different bed each night. For four nights, I spent in a cabin miles from the nearest phone and six miles from the closest town which is not marked on most maps. Three times I got lost. Twice it was my fault. Once it was not, but that once was a beautiful distraction.
I don’t know if the wind really “takes your troubles away.” I don’t know if I found those lost threads. I did find a couple excellent coffee houses (remind me to tell you where to find a Boris Latte). I’m back in Asheville now. I guess it is time to reconnect and get back to work.
“The biggest disappointment was that I found so little “poetry” in Poetry…. Very little of it was readable, enjoyable…. many of the poems were burdened with unnecessarily complex, high-falutin’ diction… as well as obscure references to literature and literary figures; abstract, illogical metaphors and comparisons (”postage-stamp bright” and “chasms of flatness”); tin-ear rhymes (”state/copulate” and “drowses/blouses”) and hamstrung syntax (”surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting”).” Link
PLOTUS: Kay Ryan
Wifi Nomad
Some caffeine addicts are Starbucks groupies. Some caffeine addicts are Caribou Coffee lodgers. And then there’s those aficionados of caffeine dealers (the last legal drug dealers) that warm there wifi receivers at indie joints like The Java Connection.
Of course, if you’re reading this on tumblr, you are probably already perverting the language.
I would rather read a book
Betty Adcock is an excellent North Carolina poet.
From the Charlotte Observer:
[Betty] Adcock tells me that she is not connected to the Internet and would “rather write a long letter than answer multiple e-mails, would rather look in books for information than be over-informed by Google.”
Further, she says, she belongs to few organizations and is active in none.
“I rarely attend conventions of writers or conferences. I do not e-mail,” she says.
Link.
U.S. Gas Prices
A heat map visualization via Gas Buddy
Society… did not favor the reading of poetry…. By the ’90s, it was all over…. consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it…. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold….
I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets. I want to read books with buzz… and I can’t remember the last book of poetry that created even a dying mosquito’s worth of hum. I am also lazy, and poetry takes work.
Bruce Wexler
B.I. – a poem sketch with photo
before the internet
i often read
books or magazines
during breaks and lunches
at the office —
then i ate
at my desk and surfed
web pages or placed
orders on amazon.com
for books i didn’t read
and remain in storage.
i often read
books or magazines
during breaks and lunches
at the office —
then i ate
at my desk and surfed
web pages or placed
orders on amazon.com
for books i didn’t read
and remain in storage.
now i read
books and magazines
during work breaks and lunches —
while someone else
in some other office
sells his/her x-men comic
collection and some other
digital fetus in another office
far far away
buys a x-men comic collection
during lunch hour
and later sells it
because he/her
didn’t make time
to read it.
Coffeehouse Junkie 