- This is to say that I was born in a brick city on a wide street of cobblestones. The street ran down the hill to the East River where boats came from all over the world and blew their whistles and sailed by. My father made rope and his docks were at the foot of this street and there was a smell of hemp and tar and rope in the air. At the other end of the street was a large brick church rising into the sky. And when the doors were open there was the flash and flicker of gold and candlelight and the mystery of stained glass windows. That is all I can remember except the sound of horses' hoofs. All this was in one of the many parts of New York City.

My mother and father came from Virginia and Kentucky and Missouri and I always heard of those places. Once my great-aunts from Kentucky, who I had been told were giants—they were very tall and beautiful—arrived in our house for dinner and I came down in front of the fire to meet them. They were going across the ocean on a boat next morning.

All this is very dim and before I was four years old. Then I drove one day in a big open car, with my grandmother's hat tied on her head with a big blowing veil, to Long Island where we moved into a red brick house under some sweetgum trees. From then on I grew up along the beaches and in the woods of Long Island Sound. This was the country. And from then on I was terribly busy, hitching up all the dogs I could find to pull me around on my sled in the snow and picking cherries high up in cherry trees, and chasing butterflies, and burning leaves, and picking up shells on the beach, and watching the new flowers come up in the woods as the seasons passed. I had thirty-six rabbits, two squirrels—one bit me and dropped dead—a collie dog, two Peruvian guinea pigs, a Belgian hare, and seven fish and a wild robin who came back every spring.

I don't remember many books at that time. Stories of Roland and of the Golden Fleece and Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe and Peter Rabbit and Snow White were all true to me. It didn't seem important that anyone wrote them. And it still doesn't seem important. I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself. True as Hansel and Gretel, true as Br'er Rabbit, true and wonderful as Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp.

I have written more than sixty books and I keep writing them because I like to make them up, because I can't stop.

In New York City I now live in a wooden house with a brick floor and fireplaces and a garden.I have a young Kerry blue terrier named Crispin and a black cat with a big fluffy tail named Hyacinth.

In the summer I go off into the woods in Maine near the edge of the ocean and paint pictures.

(MWB, 1910-1952)

read write live bio graphy
Today the graphy is almost identical (and synchronous) to the bio. We rewrite our lives (in text and image) as stories, as companions, as primers, right in the middle of the action of living them. We allow for no production process (editing, designing, reproducing, distributing) to delay our utterances, trusting our voice to sound in some new veracious way through the web, instantly. We write, edit and montage and lay-out and publish in one uninterrupted process, in near real time. We monitor, and log. We report, and make up. We put into words, and fool with them. We mix private and public and share secrecy in overlapping correspondence, weblog, discussion lists or metalogs. We link to our interests, building context along text. We invite other utterances to invade ours. We produce volume, all the while testing how to interpret the new volume genre of bio-graphy in the making. Writing being just about life size.

Are we up for a long and deep exploration of the publicized personal, to arrive at some point at, or to construct at a certain moment from lives lived individually, a new view on what are the sustainable needs of people in communication and information exchange—living public lives, sharing the risks of communication and production and the hazards of physical presence, the way the world, or powerful parts of it, does today? Six years after I coined it, the 'information habit' is still a dream.

not a dream
Like last year, then on November 7, today a couple in mourning left flowers afloat in our stream. Last year we tried to find out what it would be that they were commemorating, without learning anything about it. Today they are part of the landscape, the milieu, the passage of time, like leaves and flowers and birds and clouds and the river's light and waters which come and go, all having a private privilege and preference.

more bio reading
Bio texting: bio testing.

- (...) the most satisfactory biography emerges from a collection of intentions, which include not only critical examination, but an effort to construct and contextualise rather than to deconstruct a life-story.
(from: Self and society: biography and autobiography in Bahá'í literature)

I have written more than thirty-five NQPAOFUs and I keep writing them because I like to make them up, because I can't stop.

if you can't: 'let the Web decide'
297,990 votes for George W. Bush
444,288 votes for Al Gore
83,348 votes for Ralph Nader

101,305 votes for DUI
96,611 votes for inhale

in from the NL blitz...
having finished the MWB biography on the train, which left my heart rather clickity clink, having successfully shopped in Paris and Rotterdam for 2 Quo Vadis schedules at Gilbert Jeune, and speculaas (HEMA), 2 warm water bottles (Kruidvat), a big pile of porn (of the design and entrepreneurial variety) magazines (Bruna), respectively—with no excuses left not to re: start my postings here asap, notwithstanding the prospect of serious and economically challenging and interesting side businesses coming up the plenty, preparing for my panel at Doors, expect other content here tomorrow.

now playing all thru the pitch black burgundy nite
Iris DeMent, 'Wasteland of the Free':

"we got politicians runnin' races on corporate cash
now don't tell me they don't turn around and kiss them people's ass
now you may call me old-fashioned
but that don't fit my picture of a true democracy
and it feels like i'm living in the wasteland of the free"

...last night watched an accidentally taped (I expected the unbearable liteness of being) video of 'smart teevee', showing my friends Willem van Weelden, Remko Scha, Marianne Brouwer, et al, discussing new interactive media and the arts at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, some 3-4 years ago... IT WASN'T FOR REAL! Awe. Where have we been? Get me another drink. I'm preparing an NL blitz 31/10-01/11. And my week over for Doors 6. I remember Doors 1, 1993. When all the web was young. Time to shift gears.

week-end work out
(some Parenting, Continued (soon—it's fall break), some Moulin, some recreational gardening and plastering, some entertainment, a policier on teevee last night, some MWB reading, I would want more, some adventurous walks along and wading the Beuvron, looking for available tree house sites over the water, all possible since the anticipated Eleven Grrrls, Anne L. c.s., cancelled their trip down to the mill, due to a variety of unhappy events and other seasonal flues: some relief and some sorry as a result of that cancellation; but then some logging, some wine tasting and some cooking)

Cube in a Cube: short cut commodification
Seen at the Centre Beaubourg: G4 Cube and screen and tweeters and mouse in a vitrine. With this new commodity, I have first seen the ad, or some Apple information, which is a usual introduction. My second introduction is a museum display. But it's not for sale. Museums do not sell their collections to the public, they only display it. I go to their bookstore. Museums are no bookstores, but do sell books. Books are expensive and there's lots of them. Lots. Magazines, less. I buy the Art Presse special issue 'Oublier L'exposition': forget the exhibition. Most of the books on display would better be magazines. All the architecture and graphic design titles, most of the art titles: all better magazines. These books have magazine lifespan. The book format does not apply to these titles. Oublier le livre.

The new magazine should have new magazine content. Not book content, not magazine content, a bit of both and new magazine content. Magazine periodicity. Web in print style. Not web content. I can see magazines live next to the web. I can see some books live next to the web. I can see commodities like the G4 cube live next to the museum too. I can see a lot and most of it is in the museum already. Cube in a cube style. Or on the web. Content in content style.

re: search
Every site should open with a single window search interface. Every site. First tell us what your interest is, than we'll show ours. If we find a smart match. I could spend the rest of my life drifting through the AltaVista Image search.

just-in-time
When I'm finally about to write on presence something bombards all three of my sites with hits. Ha ha. Never happened to the galleries or musea where I showed, in previous lives. Wonder what my ISP can do about it. Later.

The essence of yesterday's No News plead was that it favors tipping the balance from the fat pipes that confetti all the colorful general news you can handle (which only refracts off of the logo's that you wear, at best), to some very targeted and even more colorful (but subtler shades of) news, that you carefully take in and process and redistribute, with value added. A palette rich in tone, to replace the 'millions of colors but none you like' feed from mainstream media. The richer palettes have always existed, I should repeat, but they meet new affordances and challenges and a better life expectancy, in some of the current publishing formats, among which the weblog IMHO could become a major genre.

When I read my Dutch weekly newspaper it brings me the most recent of old news.
The format and design is like a news paper, but the news is like passé
It doesn't work. Headline reality is over.

Let's unsubscribe.

pressing agency
I increasingly feel like I don't need this kind of news anymore. I don't need the kind of fresh late breaking news anymore either. The time of the News is over. (better quickly add: long live the News! I know about announcing the End Of It. It's a trap. A Trick of the News. Why not fight it with its own weapons though?) We could do without it. We could even be better off without it. It is too scandalous, too superficial, too new and too nothing and nobody's business to be true. We would save time and energy without it. In an age of information agency each one of us needs one or two or three human agents, who deliver. Or 20, or 30. It depends on the individual appetite and processing power. Maybe we shouldn't bite off more than we can chew to begin with? And admit only as much information as we can handle: process in whatever which way to redistribute it again. We will have to become delivering agents ourselves as well, to some other people. Such agency developments will fragment our interests, 'unhinge' some major interests, but it will work in the longer run. If we do not support diversification we'll again and forever live under media consensus rule. It's the simple take.

All general news (if any would still qualify) could stream in straight from some news broker(s), into a very factual plain text front-end, with links to plain imagery, BW or color to choose from, still or animated to choose from, or to toggle between (this describes my graphical taste for news delivery, yours might differ, and be customized to you). BTW, I counter the idea that color imagery contains more information than BW: it contains more data (a color image is more bits than the same size and resolution in BW), and other information, not necessarily more information, let alone better information. Its a matter of how lenses work, and which lens you would want to work for you. There's no objective, undistorted reality out there. Color doesn't add value. It adds color. Lens adds lens.

Some hierarchy then should result from the impact of the news of course. With the possibility to add on your own interest hierarchy, either overruling a set hierarchy (set by the broker), or subordinate to it. Some world news might be more relevant to you than your stock quotes, if it's too late to sell anyway. General news can be arranged by the amount of people it affects ('lives taken'), the sustainability of the facts presented ('time taken'). Their effect outside the lieu where the news 'takes place' (whether that's a East Timor kampong or the backbone of Internet 2 matters little). These hierarchies should not necessarily be expressed in size and color and column width, or screen refresh rate, like it used to do. There's a real challenge to design a news interface that can meet some of the demands mentioned above, and which can serve unsponsored, no ads, low bias facts about what the heck is going on in this desperate world of ours.

(thank you Judith for the inspiration, 'heartbroken', 13 October 2000)

- With the advance of remorseless time and space, the past becomes lost and falls into nothingness. (The word néant is used in this absolute sense for the first time in the seventeenth century.) God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death. No longer present within the cycles of time, no longer the hub of these cycles, he becomes an absent, waiting presence. All the calculations underline how long he has already waited or will wait. The proofs of his existence cease to be the morning, the returning season, the newborn; instead they become the "eternity" of heaven and hell and the finality of the last judgement. Man now becomes condemned in time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefor something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both sentence and punishment.
from John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

If a voice, which was silenced nearly half a century ago,
all of a sudden can be heard in all vital clarity, addressing you,
connecting to your simplest desires—if so happens,
why resist, why question what is going on?

---

One can but hope to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed

as he follows the simple rhythm to its logical end. It can jog him with

the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar, lift him for a few minutes

from his own problems of shoelaces that won't tie, and busy parents and

mysterious clock time, into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy

living in the timeless world of a story.

(MWB)

20001005 links
what's a word's worth? (courtesy subterranean notes)
dictionary of neologisms (www.net22.com/neologisms/)

(followingclickpath)
onwards neologist soldiers!
transhumanist terminology (www.aleph.se/Trans/Words/index.html)
more nograj
Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak (the jargon files) (www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/jargon/html/A-Few-Terms.html)
who's talking infection?
Memetic Lexicon (www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/meme_lex.html)
jargonia revisited
Tasty Bits from the Technology Front (tbtf)'s Jargon Scout (www.tbtf.com/jargon-scout.html)
blog ho!
Home Groan: the nqpaofu blogabulary
speechless we are, or are we?
constructed human languages (www.quetzal.com/conlang.html)
nuff is enough? (71,493 votes for nuff / 9,647,256 votes for enough)
SpellWeb (www.spellweb.com)

One of the best neologisms ever: ADHOCRACY (no link, just underlined for articulation), rules it all.

checklog in/out
How often do you talk about your daily publishing urge? To whom? What's you tellin'm? Just wundering. Meanwhile I allow myself some Distraction. (didn't know this could go out of hand, see above). Still working on God's own attic. The more you paint the more you paint. Colorful is the temptation. Bright's the solution. It's a stretch though. There's all the plaster and the primer to be applied first. But it's competing. The light's so comforting two flights up. It's silent. You don't even hear the river. And I have to get ready. We're expecting major invasion at the Moulin, 27-29 October. Another femfest. 12 close Amsterdam friends who have been meeting since I don't know when. This time we know only one of them: Gil's best kindergarten friend Anne. I trust they'll be a thrill to have around for three nights. Some run restaurants, there's a photographer, a designer, they published a little book on their cercle. You can find me in my sublet attic (call me if you need some help to open another bottle from our réserve). Women have informed me best, throughout my life, I'm not complaining, just unscrewing. Distract.

she blogs me, she blogs me not

the narrative experience
courtesy tbtf: eNarrative, which coincides with Doors 6 (11-13 November), but could be an interesting alternative (hey, an alternative for Doors? You must be kidding) November 11-12, 2000 Boston, Massachusetts: "The role of narrative in the Web experience is a pressing concern throughout the Web world, from entertainment to ecommerce. How can we manage the narrative experience in the presence of both interaction and animation?" Here's the program.

Me myself and I will be managing our own narrative experience at Doors 6, as one of four interviewers to churn out a live webcast of the event. For your pre-eNarrative breakfast web tv.

from subject to project
Vilém Flusser (more links to follow) is a seminal new media and technology philosopher. He died in a car accident in 1991, outside Prague, his native town, a day after having given his first lecture there. Most of his life he had lived in Brazil and later years in France. From his estate I copied the following table, which was left in hand writing, listing the with his Menschwerdung connected activities (all manipulations) (taken from the editorial epilogue in 'Flusser Schriften 3', 'Vom Subjekt zum Projekt/Menschwerdung', Bollmann 1994, isbn 3 927 901 387). I hope to re:read him the coming period, especially for his thoughts on 'work'. I still do not understand why his oeuvre has not been translated in English. That's another question to be found out about.

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Fingern Greifen Holen Wenden Stellen Handeln Heben Gelenk

befingern, tasten, tippen, digitalisieren, Fingerspitzengefühl angreifen, zugreifen, begreifen, unbegreiflich, Rückgriff, begrifflich denken einholen, ausholen, überholen einwenden, abwenden, anwenden, verwenden, hinwenden, wendig vorstellen, hinstellen, herstellen, anstellen, abstellen vorhanden, zuhanden, abhanden, handgerecht, Handel, Händel, Handlung, Abhandlung, manipulieren, Manifest, Manuskript, emanzipieren, Manual, manuell Handlanger, Heber, Hebel, erheben, aufheben lenken, linkisch, artikulieren, Artikel, art = Kunst = Technik

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