I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it. Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all of my favorites from this book are available online, and only two of those are behind paywalls. Score. These were the ones I especially liked:

• In Rome's Basement by Paul Bennett
• Fishering by Brian Doyle (my top pick)
• Cooking for Eggheads by Patricia Gadsby
• Cyber-Neologoliferation by James Gleick
• The Final Frontier by John Horgan
• How to Get a Nuclear Bomb by William Langewiesche
• The Flu Hunter by Michael Rosenwald
• Ruffled Feathers by John Seabrook
• The Rape of Appalachia by Michael Shnayerson
• Delusions of Space Enthusiasts by Neil deGrasse Tyson

John Mark Harris arranged a piece for piano by Iannis Xenakis to make it, y'know, playable by a human. You can see and hear the graph for Evryali. Harris comments:

The title refers to the "Medusa, with head of writing snakes", as well as "the open sea". Both allusions have clear meanings upon hearing the piece...

Evryali was composed without regard to the limitations of the human anatomy, as the branching often expands beyond the range of two human hands. In more than one instance, the branching has caused bushed to appear at the extreme right and left of the keyboard, yet there are also bushes in the center of the piano. The performer must obviously edit the score. The graph I made became a tool for determining what I would leave out...

The music that remains, after editing, is anatomically possible. Yet the performer is left with an undertaking that can not be thought of as reasonable. The relentless repetitive motions, wide leaps, and awkward streams of chords directly challenge the pianist's need for fluid fingers and free arms. The pianist runs the risk of gazing into Medusa and freezing solid. Brute force and physical endurance are not enough to solve the difficulty. Only through the same imagination that one finds the music "possible" can one find the answer to its realization.

As one can never view Medusa directly, without cheating in the manner of Perseus, one can never hear the piece performed exactly as composed. The audience is not granted a true image of Evryali, but must, like Perseus, experience only a reflection of the monstrosity.

Further commentary from Marc Couroux:

Evryali is not virtuosic, nor is it anti-virtuosic. It is highly unlikely that this state could have come about as a result of the composer's insufficient command of pianistic technique. The gauntlet is so clearly thrown down that the difficulties cannot be anything other than premeditated... The fact that one cannot physically realize the totality of Evryali makes it seem unnecessarily utopian. The task of any performer is to strive, regardless of difficulty, to achieve every detail and to project them into a broader context.

[via phil harnish]

ROTHKOesque, a group of photos with Mark Rothko-ish qualities.

A video of Bob Becker playing some novelty xylophone tunes with a college group. I saw Becker playing with Nexus a few years back. He's insanely skilled.

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself by Wallace Stevens.

Audio and video from the New York Public Library is now on iTunes.

An interview with Mythbusters:

We're just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science... That being said, the fact that we don't have formal training, that makes what we're experiencing a little bit more accessible to the viewers. If we actually knew what we were doing ahead of time, it would just be like talking at you, instead of experiencing the situation with you.

Dave Gray teaches how to draw a stick figure.

"As unseemly as it is for America's wealthiest people to strive for more money, America's political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more."

10 Things I Have Learned, Milton Glaser's life lessons.

Eddie Murphy riffs on wanting McDonald's food when you were a kid. "I had one of those mothers, no matter what you want, she has the ingredients at home." It's Eddie Murphy so, nsfw.

The title of Pierre Bayard's book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is a bit misleading. Don't get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn't feel awkward in the first place. Assuming "cultivation" is a worthy goal, you have to remember that "being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others."

It boils down like this: There are a lot of books out there. You can't read them all. As soon as you begin to read, you begin to forget what you're reading. What you actually remember is incomplete, anyway, and the way you remember it changes. Lastly, the way we actually use our incomplete, mutable memories of books varies from time to time, place to place, person to person, conversation to conversation.

In the end, Bayard says, "what we talk about is not the books themselves, but the substitute objects we create for the occasion." This makes me think of the idea of social objects in marketing.

Hugh MacLeod: "The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them."

Compare Bayard: "The books themselves are not at stake; they have been replaced by other intermediary objects that have no content in themselves, and which are defined solely by the unstable social and psychological forces that bombard them."

There's also the interesting idea of ambiguity when these discussions come up:

Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.

Ambiguity and play comes out because most of our conversation isn't about books per se, it's about situating ourselves to each other. It's about relating. This brings to mind a Chuck Klosterman essay on why we like the music we like:

When someone asks me what kind of music I like, he is (usually) attempting to use this information to deduce things about my personality... But here's the problem: This premise is founded on the belief that the person you're talking with consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings. It's also predicated on the principle that you know why you like certain sounds or certain images, because that self-awareness is how we establish the internal relationship between a) what someone loves and b) who someone is.

Shakespeare in the Bush. "An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet.":

I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, “That night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet’s dead father spoke.”

“Omens can’t talk!” The old man was emphatic.

“Hamlet’s dead father wasn’t an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.” My audience looked as confused as I sounded. “It was Hamlet’s dead father. It was a thing we call a ‘ghost.’” I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn’t believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.

“What is a ‘ghost?’ An omen?”

“No, a ‘ghost’ is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.”

They objected. “One can touch zombis.”

“No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made Hamlet’s dead father walk. He did it himself.”

“Dead men can’t walk,” protested my audience as one man.

I was quite willing to compromise.

“A ‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.”

But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.”

“They do in my country,” I snapped.

The New York Times writes about the upcoming collaboration between Big Boi and the Atlanta Ballet. [via around midtown]

Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.

Pecha Kucha Night is an informal gathering of presenters who are limited to 20 slides of 20 seconds each. So, theoretically, it's a forum with less rambling and more variety in the course of an evening. Lots of cities are having them now. Could be cool. The next Atlanta Pecha Kucha will be next Sunday at Octane Coffee. The Atlanta Pecha Kucha also has the previous podcasts available on iTunes.

Eyeglasses and the pushing up thereof, an analysis of optical adjustment techniques. Good commentary from the audience.

This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:

My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don’t know how to say it without it being pretentious---I’ll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, where there’s absolutely no urgency to read it. It’s like putting on one of your great anthem songs. It’s like cranking the stereo.

This fictional Paris Review Interview with "Constance Eakins" is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor's Tongue. Here's a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:

Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?

Eakins: No, I always wanted to be a writer, even before I was born. My first story was what I like to call an image-story. When I hadn't yet learned how to speak, my dear mother would give me a parcel of rusty nails, which I used to draw abstract shapes on the walls of our home.

I: How do you know that these were stories? I mean, doesn't every child make drawings if given some sort of writing implement?

E: They were image-stories and if you went to look at them now they would make you weep from the beauty of their narrative swoop.

The classic nuts and bolts...

I: When do you begin writing each day? As soon as you wake up?

E: Yes, when I wake up in the morning I always have the desire to sit down to write. The first thing I do is write down my dreams, then I get to my fiction, poetry, theater, film scripts, monographs, critical essays, and journalism---in that order. But then I constantly am receiving telephone calls, gawking fans come up to my house, friends try to visit, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing.

[via maud newton]

The Atlanta Film Festival starts next week. Here's the festival schedule. The big opener is The Lena Baker Story, which "recounts the tragic true story of the first and only woman sentenced to die in the electric chair in the state of Georgia." She was pardoned just a few years ago.