"Going West" passage animated

Via EW.

Lively leaves

Biodiversity by Christoph Niemann for the NYT blog.

Book dissections

Brian Dettmer blows my mind! He does great stuff with cassette tapes, too (thanks, Gene!).

Smell of Books

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.

Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much. (Thanks, Kat.)

In B Flat

In the mood for a little music In B Flat?

Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin has the best interviews of anyone I've read of late. The comment about getting no pleasure from writing was incredible, and this bit about being bald as well as gay was a nice zinger.

"The world is peopled by ghosts."

"The Office Girl," a short story by Joe Meno.

Delicious words

The Language Log article mentions the word "kumquat," which makes me think of this little girl's face.

PERPENDICULAR!

The Language Log on word attraction.

Happy Mother's Day!

Image via MNArtists.

In celebration, may I present Postcards From Yo Momma.

May 7

By Embloggery.

I've been working for years to get the job offer I got yesterday.

Letter by Strange Letter

Have I mentioned I finally fulfilled my dream of starting a blog of alphabets?

Just alphabets.

Sometimes blogs are better when they're simple.

Flying Dreams

My boss tipped me off to this series by Tabitha Vevers, titled "Flying Dreams." She painted all sorts of people's dreams about flying - simple but delicious, isn't it?

Kindle is bigger, not better

I get it, Amazon. You hired Toni Morrison and Steven King to advertise for you. But a bigger screen doesn't add the color photos or interactive elements a handheld reading device could offer. Let me know when the price drops lower than $500 and the design is a little more attractive. The pink doesn't help much of anything, even if it makes Steven King smile.

Before the notebook computer there was:

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.

Brilliant little video with a high-tech little black notebook. (via BookFutures)

James Wood finger drums

James Wood's finger drumming, analyzed by Alex Rose for Opium Magazine.

I had the pleasure of seeing Wood lecture at Columbia in a very crowded seminar room just a few weeks ago. Everyone held her breath while he talked. If only they'd seen him drum!

Lunch numbers

Maira Kalman meets Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the Supreme Court, sees cherry blossoms.

It's almost summertime

If a stop-motion video of Morocco doesn't make you ready for summer vacation, try Stuart Gibson's photos of the ocean. (via NotCom)

Peter Kaplan

Sorry to hear that Peter Kaplan is stepping down from The New York Observer. I liked him enormously when he lectured last summer at the CPC. Hope the paper will survive without his guidance.

On keeping things separate

Image via ThomasMoronic.

I had with me a copy of Le Rouge et le noir. He riffled the pages. Do you like this?

Yes. I read it first in Arabic. Now I'm rereading it in French. And I added: Julien's family life is like my own in some ways. One thing in particular is almost identical: Monsieur Sorel bound out his son Julien to the mayor of the town for three hundred francs a year, and my father rented me for thirty pesetas a month to a hashish-smoker who ran a cafe in the quarter of Ain Khabbaz where we lived in Tetuan.

I see your trouble. And you're not the only one. You'll never find beauty in literature that way. You shouldn't read with that sort of thing in mind, with the idea that the life of one or another protagonist has something to do with your own life. You have to keep things separate. Your life is nobody else's life.

-Jean Genet in Tangier by Mohamed Choukri, translated by Paul Bowles (page 7)