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Craig Saper is an amazing guy. When he couldn’t get travel funds to deliver a paper on Bob Brown’s “Readies” at a panel I chaired at the Modernist Studies Association conference a few years ago, he sent a DVD of himself, reading his paper from an airplane seat, wearing sunglasses. Midway through, the video began speeding up and slowing down, and the audio track was punctured by bleeps, like a badly edited R-rated movie on TV. It was all part of the performance, on reading technologies and obscenity. I wish I still had a copy of it.

— Kenny Goldsmith, “Littany (for Albie)”

Well, Craig’s curated (with Theo Lotz) an exhibition at the University of Central Florida called TypeBound, on books-as-sculpture. Warning: the web site is actually kind of crummy, animated image files and links that download PDFs instead of going to pages. But the exhibits! Amazing stuff: books made of shoes, books with type written on the edges of pages, books with pages going in every direction, and a slew of typewriter poetry. Well worth checking out.

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We can agree to disagree about Sasha Frere-Jones. David Remnick and I like him, and I’m increasingly convinced we’re alone in that regard. But few critics derive as much pleasure from discussing pop trifles, or do it with as much pizzazz. Clearly I was not about to let his paean to Beyonce go unremarked. Best observation: “‘Single Ladies’ is an infectious, crackling song and would be without fault if it weren’t the bearer of such dull advice. The wild R&B vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What’s next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low sodium soy sauce?”

Low-sodium soy sauce! Swish!

It turns out that there is more money in the inner city than we thought:

In its 2004 report on the city of Cleveland, Social Compact detected a residential population that was 24 percent higher than 2000 Census figures indicated. In studying the new immigrant hub of Santa Ana, Calif., for a 2006 report on that city’s disadvantaged communities, Social Compact found an average household income 40 percent larger than that captured in the 2000 Census — a discrepancy Social Compact says can be partially explained by a thriving informal economy many traditional economic models don’t capture.

In an interview with Miller-McCune.com, Social Compact CEO John Talmage attributed the difference in the numbers to his organization’s mining of data from a variety of sources — including tax rolls, utility accounts and credit companies — rather than relying on computer models based on incomplete or unreliable data. The approach tends to emphasize the economic opportunity — rather than the poverty and deficiency — to be found in low-income neighborhoods.

America’s inner cities, according to ICIC’s Web site, represent $122 billion worth of retail purchasing power.

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Oh, why not. She had me at the paisley fire. This video for this movie was shown at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishers conference today:

A synopsis might help:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

Dan Visel at if:book, in a post titled “Wikipedia Before Wikipedia,” looks at the Trictionary, a grass-roots trilingual dictionary (English, Spanish, and Chinese) created between 1978 and 1981 by high school students on New York’s Lower East Side.

Here’s some text (from Tom MacArthur’s 1986 book Worlds of Reference):

The compilation was done, as The New Yorker reports (10 May 1982) “by the spare-time energy of some 150 young people from the neighborhood,” aged between 10 and 15, two afternoons a week over three years. New York is the multilingual city par excellence, in which, as the report points out, “some of its citizens live in a kind of linguistic isolation, islanded in their languages”. The Trictionary was an effort to do something about that kind of isolation and separateness.

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From The Atlantic Monthly:

Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life. Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results. Fortified by the resources, interest, and insight thus obtained, it can be made to embrace areas of culture and power which are relatively remote and abstract.

David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?,” January 1912.

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Sometimes a single detail makes an entire story. I think that’s the case with Jodi Kantor’s profile of Richard Holbrooke:

(Many people have personal trainers; Mr. Holbrooke has a personal archivist.)

Awesome.

I was actually thinking about archives this morning, after reading this bit from Tim’s Whitman post:

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are.

Cross-reference with Michael Bierut’s wonderful stack of notebooks. I love the idea of keeping a durable, written record like this… but I am congenitally incapable of using and keeping notebooks. I’m way more comfortable with digital notes — emails to myself, short little Google Docs, etc.

What’s a good compromise? Is there some easy way to physical-ize those notes? Maybe I need an app that literally scans my stuff for certain kinds of documents, saves them, and prints ’em out en masse.

I mean, until I get a personal archivist, anyway.

So, this morning, during the Snarkmasters’ sequifortnightly transcontinental gathering over email, coffee, cold pad thai, and cinnamon swirls, the conversation turned to Walt Whitman, and I was reminded of the really quite lovely American Experience documentary on Whitman that was broadcast around a year ago.

Well, as it happens, the whole thing is available to watch online, including this marvelous segment about Whitman’s experience as a young newspaperman in antebellum New York City.

I love Ed Folsom’s account of Whitman’s experience of “urban affection”:

Whitman feels the power of the city of strangers. He’s looking at a city of strangers and how something we might now call urban affection begins to develop. How do you come to care for people that you have never seen before and that you may never see again?

Every day we encounter people, eyes make contact, we brush by people, physically come into contact with them, and may never see them again.

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are. ‘What is this person doing? What’s the activity that defines this person?

“If I were doing that activity that person would be me. If I were wandering the other way, rather than this way, that person could be me. That could be me. That could be me. What is it that separates any of us?’

Folsom co-edits The Walt Whitman Archive, a fantastic resource with complete e-texts, photographic images of all of the alternate editions, biographies, scholarly essays, you name it.

The only real downside to the online presentation of the Whitman Documentary (and it’s a real downer) is 1) there’s no way to watch the whole documentary straight through and 2) the videos can only be displayed as teeny-tiny Quicktime/WMA pop-ups. Come on, PBS! Broadcast TV has finally figured out how to rock the computer screen in fullscreen HD — so has YouTube, Comedy Central, and, um, everybody. The people demand that their public digital television be done up right.

Many of you have probably read John Siracusa’s insightful, entertaining, and long anecdotal history of e-books at Ars Technica. Still, with Amazon set to make a big Kindle-related announcement early next week, it seems like a good time to highlight this sample:

In 2003, Apple started selling music for the iPod through its iTunes music store. Apple sold audio books as well, through a partnership with Audible. Perhaps unknowingly, Apple had just positioned itself perfectly for e-book domination.

It was all happening right before our eyes. First the device, already far past the minimum threshold for screen size and legibility, and rapidly gaining market penetration. Then the digital distribution channel, accessed via a desktop application used by every iPod owner. Then the deals with content owners