I'll be back next week. Iceland beckons.

I was listening to my last.fm library this afternoon and noticed that Johann Sebastian Bach is on tour, 300+ years and still going strong.

Trouble the Water is the second Katrina documentary I've seen this year. The Axe in the Attic was not nearly as good as this one. I was a bit reluctant to go because I've had hurricane burnout lately, but this was worth seeing. Trouble the Water starts out with some homemade videos of a stranded couple that couldn't make it out. They were stuck in the 9th Ward. You see them getting ready, then holing up in the house, then moving to the attic when the levee breaks a few blocks away from their home and their house fills with water, then escaping to even higher ground, then finally leaving New Orleans, and coming back years later. It goes astray with some too-obvious, too-easy critiques of the political bumbling toward the end. The criticism is well-deserved, of course, but not nearly as interesting as seeing their stories unfold, seeing them meet strangers and help each other out, and how they find strength in each other and in their faith. The protagonists are pretty lovable. Go see it in your neighborhood.

George Carlin's last interview is really good. He talks about language, writing, drugs, religion, life, the whole deal.

Perfume is the art for your sense of smell, just as music is for hearing and art for your eyes and cuisine is for taste. This past weekend at the Decatur Book Festival, my favorite author to hear, by far, was Chandler Burr. Chandler Burr currently writes about perfume for the New York Times. He talked a bit about his book The Perfect Scent and led us through a bunch of perfumes, often drawing analogies with the art world. One fragrance was like Francis Bacon. Another with "a broad wash of abstract fruit" brought Mark Rothko to mind. I'd never given perfume a second thought before but it was really mind-opening to hear about the experimentation and the science and the perfumers cooking it all up. Crazy stuff.

Poetry 180 is Billy Collins' poem-a-day selections for high schoolers. It starts off with his poem, Introduction to Poetry.

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore.

This cool dialogue about noticing made me think of three connections. The first one came before I read it. The idea of noticing reminded me of a passage in Anne Fadiman's book, Ex Libris, that I quoted in my review and will quote again because it's funny:

The proofreading temperament is part of a larger syndrome with several interrelated symptoms, one of which is the spotting mania. When my friend Brian Miller, also a copy editor, was a boy, he used to sit in the woods for long stretches, watching for subtle animal movements in the distance. The young John Bethell was a whiz at figuring out What's Wrong with This Picture? Proofreaders tend to be good at distinguishing the anomalous figure--the rare butterfly, the precious seashell--from the ordinary ground, but unlike collectors, we wish to discard rather than hoard. Although not all of us are tidy, we savor certain cleaning tasks: removing the lint from the clothes dryer, skimming the drowned bee from the pool. My father's most treasured possession is an enormous brass wastebasket. He is happiest when his desktop is empty and the basket is full. One of my brother's first sentences, a psychologically brilliant piece of advice offered from his high chair one morning when my father came downstairs in a grouchy mood, was "Throw everything out, Daddy!"

The second thing it made me think of was Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the book, the first way to make people like you is to "become genuinely interested in other people." Authentically give a shit. It's so simple. That's seconded here in the noticing interview:

Portigal: Super-noticing power really is a strong cultural idea. The enhanced human with awesome noticing and synthesizing powers crops up regularly in science fiction...

Soltzberg: Right, sort of like a super-charged version of William Gibson's Cayce Pollard character in Pattern Recognition. Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.

The last thing is the idea of curating, just being open and attentive to influence and where it leads you. Curiosity and curating share a common root, which is... CARING.

RogueApron is Atlanta's independent speakeasy and supperclub:

Food that's been cooked with love, for people who are soon to be your friends, in a relaxed atmosphere where your drunken sated contentment is our only goal.

I just heard about it this morning and I think it could be really cool. I hope it can make it to the next dinner. This pairs well with today's New York Times feature on anti-restaurants.

Deciding whether to read a book.

Bucket hat? Check. Knit woolen sweater? Check. Pipe? Check. I love it when stereotypes match with reality.

Common phrases in Icelandic, a collection of videos and another cool resource I've found getting ready for vacation. Not too long ago, you wouldn't be able to hear a native speaker until you got there. In the same way, when look on Flickr I can see recent photos in Reykjavik, see what folks are wearing, get a feel for the street. It's be easy to go overboard with this pre-immersion stuff and dampen all the surprises, but it's really cool.

If this comes creased and creased again and soiledas if I'd opened it a thousand times to see if what I'd written here was right, it's all because I looked too long for you to put in your pocket. Midnight says the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped by nervous fingers. What I wanted this to say was that I want to be so close that when you find it, it is warm from me

That's from Ted Kooser's book Valentines, which I flipped through the other day. The book collects the annual poems he's been sending out for the past 20-odd years. Kooser read some of the valentines on NPR earlier this year. Most are a bit too ponderous for my taste but there's some good images and quirky personification in some of them.

Hands on a Hard Body documents a contest where competitors try to win a truck by keeping their hand on it for the longest period of time. The contest in the film lasted 77 hours. I've heard about this movie for a while, and now I've finally got a chance to see it. [via waxy]

I've got about two weeks and 3 hours to get my act together.

A Day in the Life of a Musician by Erik Satie:

An artist must regulate his life.

Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.)

Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.

An archive of record covers from Blue Note Records. [via dial "m" for musicology]

I'm not as thrilled with this one as I was with the unusual editon last week, but it'll do. You might recognize the opener from the 28 Days Later soundtrack.

I spent Saturday night in the woods. On Sunday morning I walked back through a nice stretch of trail with blackberries growing along the sides, just turning ripe. Hiking pace went from 4mph to 0mph. I ate pretty much anything I could reach without having to go into the brambles.

Is it harder to write a sonnet than a great hip-hop verse?

The literal rules for writing sonnets, tankas, haikus etc. aren't particularly hard to follow. It's following the rules and actually saying something that's hard. You can write a sonnet that makes no sense, and has no real power in the words. Likewise, you could write a rhyme that's technically on beat and say nothing at all.

Nice sample at the end. Puff is much, much worse than Biggie.

I usually like these annual collections because I can sample a bunch of authors I don't know writing about topics I'm not too familiar with in periodicals I haven't read much. The Best American Science Writing 2007 comes up a bit short on all counts, but here are the ones I liked...

A clear favorite for me is Atul Gawande's article about the childbirth industry, The Score. Women used to die in labor at amazing rates. Even in the 1930s about 1 of every 150 mothers died. But ever since Virginia Apgar invented what's now known as the Apgar score---basically a 0-10 rating on how healthy a baby comes out, based on the first 5 minutes of observation---mortality rates for parent and child have dropped steadily. Gawande talks in kind of squeamish, horrifying detail about how delivering babies has changed and the different technologies (prayer, forceps, C-sections) and maneuvers that we've developed. It's really great. I almost never like writing about biology or medicine, but looking at list of Gawande's writing on his website, it turns out I've enjoyed just about all of his that I read.

My next favorite is Being There. Imagine for a second your spouse or parent or sibling or friend were dying. Like right now. In the emergency room. Would you want to be there as doctors tried to resuscitate him? And should the hospital allow you to watch what is usually a stressful, brutal, and unsuccessful effort? Jerome Groopman writes about the dilemma of "family presence," and it's one of those things that's just cool to read about because I'd never thought much about it before.

Yes, that's 2 (two) medicine-related articles that I enjoyed.

Manifold Destiny was a cool article about the reclusive Grigori Perlman, the guy who proved the Poincar?© conjecture and thereby dismissed a problem that mainstream mathematicians had been working on for a century. There's some cool personalities and professional intrigue here, and it was a nice break from the bio/ medicine/ health/ human interest articles in the rest of the book. Written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber.

Lastly, Oliver Sacks wrote Stereo Sue, a woman who didn't have binocular vision, so everything looked flat. After surgery and some long-term eye therapy, she finally started to see fully in three dimensions:

I went back to my car and happened to glance at the steering wheel. It had 'popped out' from the dashboard. I closed one eye, then the other, then looked with both eyes again, and the steering wheel looked different. I decided that the light from the setting sun was playing tricks on me and drove home. But the next day I got up, did the eye exercises, and got into the car to drive to work. When I looked at the rear-view mirror, it had popped out from the windshield.

Crazy!