The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history.

— opening lines of the Gutenberg Galaxy

The New Oxford American Dictionary on my Kindle offers this special-usage definition of the word mosaic: “a combination of diverse elements forming a more or less coherent whole.” That strikes me as a wonderful description of McLuhan’s work.

It also offers early guidance in my nascent project here. Each day I’ll reach for a more or less coherent whole comprising a photo, a passage from McLuhan, and my own written rumination.

My favorite part is finding the photo. Today I had about 10 shots to choose from, taken just after dawn at the cottage, before I left on my bike ride. The big bulb of orange sun rising over Prouts Neck seemed the obvious choice at first, but those shots did not survive my quirky winnowing process. In choosing the daily photo, I’m after what feels like whole-brain impact, the left and right brain in satisfying agreement, each for their own reasons or yearning. I start by deleting what I can live without, enjoying how the iPhone sucks the rejects into a trash can icon after opening the lid. That left just one contender from the sunrise set, scenes of the cottage roofline against a pine tree, and shots of the beach chairs we sat in yesterday. In the final, wordless choice, the beach chairs took a surprising win.

Since I left my paperback copy of Understanding Media in Cambridge, I don’t have the baffling chapter on photographs to work with, so the MM quotation today had to come from The Gutenberg Galaxy on my Kindle. Backtracking, I found the mosaic reference, which sort of fits with the photo’s diverse elements, right? Part of the fun of these blog-mosaics is knowing that attempts to create them may fail, falling into unintended parody of McLuhan Mind.

I like that McLuhan frames the opening line as an approach to problems. They are all of his own making, of course. As are mine. Finding the problems to solve is at least as much fun as arriving at the solutions. Sitting in those chairs yesterday by the sea with Darlene was more or less perfect.

I’m sitting with Darlene and Deb at a wobbly sidewalk Starbucks table at Larimer Square. This is a good spot for admiring Chalk Art Festival makers and lookers. Lots of digital media is being made here this morning. All of it will last longer than the exquisite chalk creations on the street, which will be washed away before tomorrow morning’s rush-hour traffic. This makes the painstaking work of the artists poignant. They toil on kneepads, rubbing chalk into the concrete with their fingers. One girl uses a skateboard as her seat. Dogs of all sizes take their places among the onlookers.

I like how the iPad shot gives similar emphasis to the artists and their admirers. It could be a street scene in Paris, a random moment capturing a dozen people gathered briefly in the midst of a dozen lives. It feels weird to hold an iPad up to take a photo in public, but the view is pleasingly different than that from a camera or iPhone. It’s as if you’re holding up a frame and you can see the painting still moving.

Remembering my post from Darwin’s Ltd. in Harvard Square, I wonder what clues would lead a viewer to know this is Denver, not Cambridge, Mass. There are fewer sports coats here, I realize as I spot an older gent wearing one with a dress blue-striped Oxford shirt, faded jeans and dirty running shoes. More men wear shorts here – long cotton shorts with lots of pockets. The women wear brighter colors. Everyone looks slightly healthier but not as smart or neurotic. I’m in danger of projecting my own stuff on what I see. The fact is that I feel healthier in body and less neurotic in Mile High Denver, compared with my 02138 self.

It’s difficult not to feel healthy on such a perfect day, in such a pleasant spot. Darlene and Deb have left for the apartment, to get ready for our next in-town tourist destination, the Capitol Hill People’s Fair. Enjoy the coffee!

Morris Louis, Number 11 - 1961

A week ago, I spent a lot of my time at the Art Basel Miami Beach show hanging out with this painting by Morris Louis (1912-1962). It was on display at the booth of Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, a New York gallery. It’s six and a half feet square, and the asking price was $1.5 million.

The show was huge and filled with amazing art from all over the world.  I strolled around, enjoying the
variety of creativity on display and the sense that the art market is making a comeback from the depths of the great recession.  That news had been reported in a Miami Herald story about the opening of the show that I’d read on the flight to Miami from Boston.  It was also fun to watch the art watchers.  Let’s just say most of them don’t buy their clothes at L. L. Bean.  They were all ages, speaking many languages, but mostly white, I noticed. None of them looked as if their feet hurt as much as mine did. I felt slightly more stylish just being there.

I found other art I liked, but I always came back to Number 11.  I still have trouble getting Morris Louis’s name in the right order; I posted a Twitpic photo listing him as Louis Morris. I planted the image of Morris the Cat in my mind as a way to remember it correctly.  I’m not sure why this one painting made such an impression on me.  It may have been largely a random event.  I get overwhelmed in museums and usually decide to stop somewhere for quite a while instead of ambling everywhere and taking in fleeting images of everything.  The Morris Louis was about halfway down the first aisle I explored at Art Basel, and it was displayed in a nice space. You could stand back a ways from it without bumping into something else.

I was surprised to learn that it was okay to take photos at the art show, but my friend Kes Woodward assured me that this was the case.  Once I had a shot of the painting on its own, I switched to taking photos with people in them.  A problem was that the people often stopped in their tracks, thinking they were spoiling my view.  When I waved them on or said, “it’s okay,” that made them nervous.  By standing a ways away and holding my camera or iPhone just above my waist I was able to snap away without it being immediately obvious that I was taking photos. Maybe I was checking Twitter.

It would have been fun to shoot a video sequence, to see what patterns of walking and stopping and viewing emerged. No one stopped long enough to join me as a fixed element of the space.  A guy who seemed to be with the gallery visited at length with a friend nearby and seemed to be monitoring me from the corner of his eye.  I thought about introducing myself and asking questions about the painting but decided against shifting into reporter’s mode.  My pleasure was centered on simply being in the presence of Number 11 and watching others take it in.

I’m looking at an image of the painting now on my iPad screen, seeking clues. Why this one?  I suspect it’s about being vertical.  The painting presents lines of color forming a bold swath dividing the canvas in thirds.  To my eye, the movement is clearly upward. At the bottom of the painting, the colors are separated by white space, as if they are streams joining in a single river. By the top, there is no white space, just a solid swath of colors.  The yellow strip peters out before reaching the top, and slivers of blue never make it all the way up, either.  Four stripes of brown and a single green one make it from top to bottom.

At the very top, the left side of the river makes a slight bend to the left.  Will this continue past the upper edge of the frame? The right side of the river is straight from bottom to top.  But that left side is sneaking outside the lines.  Within the overall vertical there are lots of starts and stops, different mixes of color, and a sense of movement and flow. But in my view, the whole thing moves upward, and that’s probably what drew me to the painting as my main focal point at Art Basel.

I’d like to think I’m in an upright phase of my life, standing tall but not alone. And trying to figure out which way is up from here.

Briefly, we’re here.

Our scheduled transport from the Johannesburg airport to the Protea Hotel Wanderers never showed, and I was not able to make a call from my iPhone.  A police guy at the airport helped out, contacting the hotel, and that resulted in a driver making the trip to fetch us.  Lots of waiting, and check-in at midnight, but all’s well.  The hotel is terrific, but the Internet is expensive and slow, so I’m not sure how steady a blogging habit is indicated.  We’ll see.  For now, one person in the room is trying to sleep and the other is typing on a clattering keypad.

We will rendezvous with Jim and Linda tomorrow morning for help in our orientation.  I have no idea where we are in Johannesburg, but I can tell you the city has an impressive modern airport, as you can tell from the photo taken in the main arrivals area, which we got to know quite well tonight.

More to come…

One of the great pieces in the current New Yorker is about the composer John Cage, who confounded audiences with four minutes of silence and other acts of random attention. My life is like that. It’s a crazed mosaic of random attention punctuated by plans and attempts to get organized. Meanwhile, the trees race by with hints of fall color, and Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in.” Boston is coming sooner than I’d prefer.

I noticed at Podcamp Boston 5 last weekend how many presentations and conversations had to do with fending off the addictive allure of online life. I learned about nine steps to get more done with less work and the Pomodoro technique of focusing on one single task — imagine that! — by setting a timer for 25 minutes. It’s a great topic for authors, because the demand for hope is bottomless. But pity the poor guy, like Stever Robbins, who takes on the challenge and spends two years trying to focus on the work of writing a book. He confessed that he broke every one of his nine steps as he wrote them down in a way that might inspire and motivate the rest of us.

It’s possible that if I got more sleep I would be less susceptible to distraction. So I signed up for a $199 sleep-monitoring gizmo at MyZeo.com, whose social marketing guy I visited with at lunch during Podcamp.

It’s a gray, soft day. Most of the trees are still green, so the early reds and yellows stand out in the crowd. The train has stopped in the middle of the woods, because of a problem with the signal system. I see rain drops on a leaf, and a bug. Now we’re moving again, slowly, past brick mills, three-story tenements, and graffiti sprayed on the back of an abandoned semi. This is Lawrence, Massachusetts, and I’m not getting off yet.

A month after the original Kindle launched, you wrote, “We can’t quite put our finger on it, but if Kindle’s launch feels at all to you like the act of reading has just turned a major corner, we’re on the same page.” If you’d known then what you know now, how would you have revised that characterization of the Kindle’s significance?

Did you own a RocketBook?

Can you now reveal how you were able to publish in Engadget on Sept. 11, 2006, photos and specs of the original Kindle, more than a year before the launch?

Do you still consider Search to be the killer e-book app?

What’s been the most surprising development that you didn’t see coming when you were liveblogging the Kindle launch on November 19, 2007?

I’m surprised that Engadget still is not available on the Kindle. Doesn’t it make sense to pay 99 cents a month for the convenience of getting the blog on Kindle? Does that really undermine free availability on the web?

What’s your experience reading on iPad versus Kindle? Which iPad reading app do you prefer?

What do you want to see next in the Kindle?

I can’t read an ePub book I buy for nook on other ePub readers – Sony and Kobo. It does work the other way. How come ePub gets touted as the emerging standard when it accounts for such a small share of eBook market – probably 10 to 20%?

What a gorgeous spot Acadia National Park is! Compared with Yellowstone, it’s a postage stamp. But we had a sweaty, great time biking from the Brown Mountain gate to the excellent restaurant at Jordan Lake. Popovers and seafood chowder, served on a patio overlooking the lake = a sweet way to turn 60.

I’m reading a poignant, brilliant novel that keeps making the point that being human is a rare gift, often wasted on those to whom it is granted. It’s The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, who chose as narrator a dog named Enzo. Darlene read the book for a book group in Denver, and she thinks it failed, partly she balked at the idea that life is like race car driving, another important theme in the novel. Me, I’m loving Enzo, who believes he will be reincarnated as a human. In the middle of the night when I was reading on my Kindle, I bookmarked this pearl:

To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something I aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.

I love that my Kindle tells me that 258 other readers highlighted that same passage in the book. If Stein has a Kindle, he can go through in real time and see which lines of his creation are touching hearts and minds the most. Very cool.

He hasn’t said so in the book yet, but I bet Enzo is looking forward to riding a bike, too. I’m headed out now for a ride on Eden Street and the Acadia loop road. This one’s for Enzo…

It’s a simple routine here at Ocean Park in August. I go to bed at a decent hour. The sun wakes me up with soft colors arriving through the window next to the bed. I fetch the Nikon on my way out to the beach and take photos in my bare feet. I make a pot of French Roast. As the bedroom in the cottage glows with golden light, Darlene reads her Kindle, the Yorkie Claire licks her paws, and I pick an image I like, crop it, and Twitpic it to Twitter. All three of us are on the bed now, listening to my favorite Pandora mix, based on “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Eventually–in a matter of minutes, actually–the coffee cools, the light gets too bright, and I can’t figure out how to copy and paste a link to my Pandora station on the iPad. At 6:54 a.m., the first unsolved problem of the day. There turns out to be a workaround, using the laptop, but that won’t help if I travel this fall with only the iPad. Ah well.

I’ve spent just shy of 60 years looking for adventure, trying to be important. If you’d told me when I was 18, or 35, or even 50 that there’d come a time when the best things in my life would be boring, I’d have puked. But that time has come, my friends. I’m plenty engaged with fun stuff, but what I prize the most these days is pretty tame by my previous standards. Or, as the song says, “My world was dull each minute until I found you in it.” Without getting all theological, I’d capitalize that You as I move into this day with ordinary gratitude and a fresh cup of coffee.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

This was the view out our window at the SpringHill Marriott Suites in downtown Fairbanks.

I love the discombobulation of time which this quick trek to Fairbanks and back has accomplished. I see it’s dark out my window on the final leg, from Minneapolis to Boston. If I pause and focus, I can fetch the day of the week from memory – Friday, right? My iPad, hooked up to the Internet via Delta’s Gogo service, tells me it’s almost 9 pm, so I’ll go with that. But mainly, I’m adrift in time zones and days of the week like an amnesiac. Darlene and I take turns remembering when the next plane boards, and where. I was happily working on E-Books for Troops at the Minneapolis airport, assuming I had a couple more hours, when she pointed out we were 20 minutes from boarding. Huh? How did THAT happen. No worries. You pack up the gear and head for the gate. Once you’re in the chute angling down to the plane, you can’t go wrong. Just find your seat and sit. Simple, and discombobulated, all in one.

Minor memos:

The new Kindle’s separately available case with a built-in light would have solved Darlene’s problem reading on this night flight with her overhead light broken.

My iPhone 4′s LED light helped for a while, thanks to TwItter Samaritan’s reply to my plea for help. You switch the camera to video and turn on the light, and you don’t ever have to shoot the video. But after about 15 minutes the light cut out because he iPhone was getting too hot.

There’s more, but we’ve begun our descent. Days of linear time resume soon, after a suitable amount of sleep. It’s been nice living in the vague and discombobulated now for a few days.
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- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad