Smorgasblog – Page 50

July 14, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Micro-Journaling and the 10-Mile App

Open Book Lab:

Location is almost the whole of meaning. Where you are pretty much defines what you are. This is not a new idea. Twitter and most mobile apps feature location data. There are limits to this feature. You can note the writer’s location if they have shared it, but you are remote. The Morning Porch improves on this by making location more than just metadata. The porch is literally the stage for the message. It adds a texture to the observations not found elsewhere. Each detail adds to the experience so you feel you know the porch and can see from it.

June 30, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Summerberry

Ann E. Michael:

Summer’s like a mulberry,
a blueberry, dark and vivid.
It stains the day sweaty,
leaves bright pollen on our noses
as we inhale the sun

on lilies…

June 25, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Remembering Rio

tasting rhubarb:

Aqua or turquoise is a favourite colour. It always makes me think of the ocean lapping the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the blue-green light of a natural beauty that infiltrates the soul, surpassing all the sadness, confusion and fear in a big city or a small heart.

June 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Amos

The Velveteen Rabbi:

Amos stands on a subway platform
littered with stubbed-out cigarettes.
For three sins, even for four,
I will not reverse it! The commuters
skirt his dirty robes, avoid eye contact.

June 8, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Otolithic

too much august not enough snow:

A passport with stamps, the otolith acquires a new ring for every day and every sojourn in a fish’s life. One for the natal stream, separate rings for spawning and rearing. Cradles and diplomas. Stable isotopes. One for every drift and foray into distant waters. Marriage and divorce. Calcium carbonate and trace minerals. A protein skeleton.

June 5, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Notes on a heart attack

Helmintholog:

They wheeled me up to the recovery ward. There was a huge tree outside the window whose foliage dipped and bobbed as a squirrel moved round in it. The room was full of a brassy, beeping monitors. I learned quite quickly to identify the tone mine made when I fibrillated or missed a beat, and for a while observed as my thoughts wandered round; every time they touched on work my heart stuttered. Somewhere around dusk a trolley came round with tea, and two digestive biscuits. They crumbled in my mouth like a sacrament.

June 2, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Protest and survive

the cassandra pages:

Marching with the students last Saturday was a high point in my life of protest: it was absolutely astounding, at 11:00 pm, to see not only this great throng of demonstrators, but the people in their homes, in their cars, spilling out of restaurants, bars and cafes, all cheering, making noise, smiling, waving their arms, encouraging their children to join in. It was more like a parade than a protest march.

May 31, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Spread Mind

NYRblog:

Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.

May 28, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Camping in bear country

too much august not enough snow:

Our worries, we confided around the campfire, are long and keeping. No matter where we are, they stay with us. But when we camp, everything is so much bigger, we don’t think beyond the fire ring. Up here it was easy to fall silent. Sweet, really, to have an empty mind.

May 28, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Human “thingliness”

The Myriad Things:

What I’ve always loved about the notion of the ten thousand things is that we ourselves are included in their number. Human beings, the Zhuangzi says, ‘are but one item’ amongst the countless things of the world. We are not separated out from the world. We are not a separate creation. I find this restoring of human existence to the thingness of things—this restitution of our status as things in the world, in the same way that cats and telephone poles and supernovae are things—a huge relief after centuries of philosophical labour that sought to demonstrate that we are set apart from other things.