Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to this extremely creative YouTube video. The funny thing is that I had seen this a while ago but I didn't get it. Of course now that Leigh explained it to me, it seems so obvious. Anyway, the narration is crafted in such a way that it...
A different language
I have always been interested in how we use words to capture intangibles. For instance wine connoisseurs have developed a specialized language (which sadly is quite opaque to me) to explain to each other characteristics of wine. So the words "fruity" and "dry" have...
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
... Or Why I love the web. I stumbled upon a piece (Lotus Blossom) by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries the other day... and it was like nothing else I had ever seen. At some superficial level it looked like kinetic typography, but both simpler and more complex at the...
Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams
My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of...
The Ethics of Dallas Clayton
I just stumbled upon Dallas Clayton's website. Lots of stuff there to enjoy... here's a short poem (as a sampler). ETHIC A father stands at the lip of the wharf with his daughter who is only three. They watch sea lions lounging about in the sun full with fish dazed...
Brevity is the soul
I had posted earlier (see Twittering a tale) about short, short fiction that is suddenly the rage. Matt Koehler just introduced me to another example of this new emerging genre: Six Word Memoirs. Check it out.
Daily routines of creative people
A while ago I had blogged about a webpage that chronicles how "artists work" (see my posting here). Now I discovered a whole website devoted to it. Check out Daily Routines. They are all interesting to read and the common theme that jumps out, for the most part, is...
Political poetry
What do Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin have in common? Turns out that they both deliver speeches that can, at be, without much effort, converted into poetry. Check out this and this. Some of them are quite briliant.
Picturing poetry
Nashworld pointed me towards PicLits a website that he describes as being "part visual literacy, part refrigerator poetry, part… fun." Check out his posting or visit PicLits.
Fortunate
I had discovered the amazing poet Szymborska (on this very blog a while ago). And then today in my mailbox was another poem by her, sent in by a friend. We're extremely fortunate A poem by Wislawa Szymborska We're extremely fortunate not to know percisely the kind of...
Limp Kiss
Just Stumbled upon this: A Poem by Nichita Stãnescu Tell me, if I caught you one day and kissed the sole of your foot, wouldn't you limp a little then, afraid to crush my kiss?... more here
Life is about editing
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
How artists work
An interesting (and growing) collection of "habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work." Kind of cool and...
Beauty in science
An evocative image from today's NYTimes about our improved understanding of the beautiful phenomena known as the northern lights. You can read the story here, but I would like to quote from the end of the article: The next time you see the northern lights, you’ll be...
The Three Oddest Words
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being...