Web Walk #1
@0.
This journal is part of a new series at the CDH. It asks questions that I’ve explored in earlier presentations about how we might go about living a life online that truly satisfies. Questions like: “how do we find people, communities, and things that interest, delight, and surprise us; keep track of them; find ways to relate them to each other; and create some of them ourselves?” Looking into these provided the fuel for those presentations, but it also suggested a method to keep the open-ended process going — hence “web walks”.
So, walking instead of surfing, scrolling, scouring, or scraping. In the words of Kristoffer Tjalve we’ll be out looking for pathways into the “quiet, odd, and poetic web”. Tjalve also wrote a piece with Spencer Chang for the wonderful Syllabus Project called “Taking an Internet Walk” and it occured to me that the other syllabi were also in some sense “walks” and that my presentations were as well.
(For an explanation about the format of this site see the opening paragraphs of A Notebook of Sorts.)
November 1, 2024
@1.
Two strong coffees to start the day…
I have a number of delicate espresso cups but sometimes the chunky brown and white “bar grade” cup and saucer brought back from a visit to Rome works best.
@2. The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. —Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)
@3. My interest in the possibilities of armchair walking had been piqued by certain travel books written between the wars. At the time, I was unsystematically collecting some of these (e.g. Edward Hutton). But my interest was also stoked by the thickly descriptive psychogeographic writing of Iain Sinclair (most of his work, really) like his London Orbital (2002).
November 2, 2024
@4. The title of this Web Walk (“A Journey in Web Land…”) references a 10 volume collection my Victorian grandparents had in their library and that I used to lose myself in (plenty of pictures) called Journeys Through Bookland: A New and Original Plan for Reading Applied to the World’s Best Literature for Children (1909) by Charles H. Sylvester.
November 3, 2024
@5. I’ve been thinking how important and coveted, pre-internet, reading lists were. I also had a real taste for books that covered literature and art over large periods of time like the Norton Anthologies or the Time-Life Library of Art (29 volumes received monthly!)
@6. These kinds of surveys reminded me of Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets (1998). The description on the cover says, “From Piers Plowman to post-modernists…” I hadn’t set eyes on my copy for ages so I had to root around my stacks before I found it. It was in the middle of a random pile:
a random pile
Wim Wenders, Wim Wenders: On Film (2001)
Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914-1928 (1986)
David Lehman, the last avant-garde: the making of the New York school of poets (1998)
G. K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed and Other Tales (1998 ed. Alberto Manguel)
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (1998)
Andre Breton, Nadja (1960)
Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You for Not Reading (2003)
Gore Vidal, The Second American Revolution (1982)
Robert Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical (1990)
Paul Hindemith, Elementary Training for Musicians (1946)
November 4, 2024
@7. Lives of the Poets (a 1000 page paperback brick) still works its magic on me — what was meant to be a quick glance to rekindle pleasant memories turned into two hours!
@8.
Letting my fingers do some walking, I found a review of the book on Melissa Beck’s blog called “The Bookbinder’s Daughter.” Of course being a bookbinder myself I was interested to hear that her father had practised for 44 years.
Her review of Lives of the Poets was posted on March 22, 2020, just as Covid was sending everyone online including Beck, a teacher of ancient Greek and Latin. She’d started the blog in 2014 as a place to share her voracious appetite for books and it’s the record of a thoughtful, intelligent reader.
A favourite post of mine is “Six Years of Blogging and New Bookshelves.” (Love snooping around people’s collections of books.)
Two of her collections:
Ugly Duckling Presse
Carcanet Press
On July 2, 2020, her husband was killed in a motorcycling accident. She continued to post but now the blog was a site of both reading and grieving. It is still up, but nothing new has been added since Dec 29, 2023.
November 5, 2024
@9.
Unseasonably warm. Great day to be out and about. Wound up at Flying Books (on College).
Bought:
The Walk, Robert Walser (2012, original 1917)
Objects in This Mirror: essays, Brian Dillon (2014)
@10. Toronto’s “walker-laureate” is Shawn Micaleff. His book Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, originally published in 2010, has just been republished in a revised edition by Coach House. Micaleff has always done an exceptional job of mapping the city in various ways. Here’s an article he wrote for The Toronto Review of Books in 2011 on the “Toronto Twitter Scene.” Those early days of social media can seem so nostalgic!
November 6, 2024
@11. Still so warm. Out in my shirtsleeves…
@12.
The artist/activist Ellen Mueller (Minneapolis) has a rich site/syllabus (and book) devoted to “Walking as an Artistic Practice.” Such a resource!
One link leads to an exhibition catalogue from 2013 called WALK—ON: From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff. Forty Years of Art Walking.
@13.
Brian Dillon writes about going through his father’s things after he died and finding a notebook. “Each page was the outline of the life and works of a great Irish writer: from Jonathan Swift to James Joyce. On the final leaf was a heading for Samuel Beckett, above an otherwise blank page.” The notebook was an Alwych. Dillon compares the “honest” Alwych, “beloved of trainspotters and birdwatchers, although also, apparently, of Antarctic explorers…” to its “more flamboyant, glamorously continental cousin” the Moleskine, “…supposedly the notebook of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Louis-Fernand Céline, [and Bruce Chatwin, of course] though nobody believes this…”
Sadly, the “honest” Alwych “WITH THE WATERPROOF COVERS” is no longer in production.
November 7, 2024
@14.
Back to the cold weather.
Made leek and potato soup. Always amazes me how something so simple (water, potatoes, leeks, cream, salt, pepper, and parsley) can taste so heart-warming.
@15.
Word of the Day: “Intertwingularity”. This was coined by Ted Nelson in his Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) where he wrote, “EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no ‘subjects’ at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.” (In the early 60’s he coined the word “hypertext”.)
Since I’m musing on the web here, both universal and digital, I could add the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net. In Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach (1979) he writes about it “as a metaphor for the complex interconnected networks formed by relationships between objects in a system — including social networks, the interactions of particles, and the “symbols” that stand for ideas in a brain or intelligent computer.”
November 8, 2024
@16. I’ve been binging the movies from the YRF Spy Universe (ongoing, starting in 2012). These are Bond meets Bollywood productions with fabulous action sequences!
@17.
The sountracks are wonderful as well. This piece has a Celtic lilt as much of the film is set in Dublin.
November 9, 2024
@18.
Went with M. to see Monica Tap‘s paintings at MKG127.
I can’t say enough about this show. The paintings are of landscapes structured by snippets of pre-existing sources collaged together, the seams often visable. From the gallery description: “Tap’s practice celebrates the natural world in all its life and vigour. She begins by harvesting images from decommissioned auction catalogs—depictions of the natural world. From these fragments new collaged compositions are built up and become the source for the paintings. The first act can be understood as deconstruction, literally tearing the canon to pieces. The second act is reassembly, integrating multiple viewpoints into a new form. Then, reanimation through the act of painting.”
November 10, 2024
@19.
Lawrence Weschler writes a newsletter called “WONDERCABINET: Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse.” On Oct 31 (Issue #79, just before the approaching election) he offered: “Some thoughts and resonances, this dread-filled moment, on the eve, no matter what, of a new world — by way of a visit with Canadian landscape artist Monica Tap.”
Weschler met Tap at Banff in 2005 and has followed her work ever since. He writes, “I got a letter from Ms. Tap the other day…” She talks about the importance of an introduction Weschler gave her to the work of W. S. Merwin, in particular, Unchopping a Tree (2014) and says, “I’ve often returned to that prose poem and recommended it more often than I remember to students and friends.” She says the work has “extra significance” at this moment after the “clearing over 850 trees under cover of darkness” to make way for a spa at Ontario Place.
@20. The title of Tap’s MKG127 show is Everything is going to have to be put back which is the last line of Merwin’s poem. Weschler included the entire prose/poem in Issue #43.
@21.
Took the long bus ride to the Japanese Cultural Centre with F. to check out “The Old Book and Paper Show.” F. was mostly looking through boxes of old photos. What caught my eye was a copy of the Journal of Canadian Fiction Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1973. The cover features a re-drawn map of North America by Greg Curnoe where the U.S. has vanished and Canada and Mexico share a border. He worked with this idea a number of times.
While Curnoe omits the States he does include Clipperton Island which, although small and uninhabited, has a rich history. Among other things, it is beloved by ham radio enthusiasts.
The Journal’s editorial references a 1972 sci-fi novel by Stephen Franklin called Knowledge Park where Franklin proposes that “Canada should begin to build the greatest library the world has ever known.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction helpfully clarifies that “the Ontario-Quebec border north of Lake Abitibi houses a community of conjoined libraries in an edificial Keep known as the Igloos of Minerva which comes to contain the shared memories of human civilization.” For a reality check about Canadian Libraries…
Afterwards F. and I visited the Aga Khan Museum, which was, conveniently, right across the street.
November 11, 2024
@22. Seems as if a year ago, because of the lapsing of some trade agreement, we were supposed to stop seeing any more British cheeses. What — no more Stilton!? But the better part of a year later I’m seeing more of it: Dorset Drum, Isle of Man, and West Country Farmhouse Cheddars. Whenever I get a chance to visit the U.K., after landing in London I proceed (almost immediately) to Neal’s Yard Dairy to buy cheese. And right around the corner (in the mews) is an historical blue plaque for Monty Python.
@23.
These days, listening to lots of Japanese Ambient music. Albums like Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green (1984) using early synthesizers, and the more recent work of H. Takahashi who composes using his iPhone on the commute from the suburbs into Tokyo.
November 12, 2024
@24. This past year has been full of re-reading my collections of fantasy and science fiction. The Imperial Radch Trilogy (2013-15) by Anne Leckie is perhaps my favourite. One of the features of the books is an obsession with tea drinking and all the paraphernalia associated with it. I’m not really a tea drinker but when I’m reading the series I become one, mostly consuming Russian Caravan which is slightly smokey. When I taught book design I would always show copies of The Book of Tea: A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture, and the Simple Life (originally published 1906 and of which there are many editions) by Okakura Kakuzō. I would also show an amazing 2 volume set called The Time of Tea (2001) by Dominique T. Pasqualini (text) and Bruno Suet (photos). A book so idiosyncratic it’s impossible to categorize.
@25. Made chicken soup tonight. M. made the dumplings.
November 13, 2024
@26. In 2000 my sister, who was living in Hong Kong at the time, illustrated with watercolours a little book called A Small Pot of Chinese Tea about Yixing teapots. Fast forward to 2024 and I’m experiencing plenty of “autonomous sensory meridian response” (ASMR) watching Instagram videos of the artistry and craft of making those same teapots. @yinxingteapot_handwork
November 14, 2024
@27.
When I came across the work of Kristoffer Tjalve (already mentioned in a previous entry) something clicked. He articulated many of my own rather inchoate inclinations regarding the web. Tjalve is best known for his newletter Niave Weekly and has gone on to create the annual event Naive Yearly.
On the site he writes:
“Naive Weekly aims to expand what the internet is and can be. Every Sunday since 2018, I’ve delivered postcards with links to the quiet, odd and poetic web. I prefer avenues different from technology optimism, criticism and solutionism.
The sites I include are made by artists, designers, educators, developers, organizers and writers who seek alternatives to nostalgia for a lost web without being blinded by the eternal utopian promises of infant technologies.”
@28.
Tjalve has also started a number of other projects:
Internet Phone Book
My Girlfriend is an Artist
URL Poetry Club
Tiny Awards
Postcard Place
Wilderness Land
Penpal Café
Diagram Webite
November 15, 2024
@29.
For the presentation I want to spend some time with his “Diagram Website” which is an exercise in trying to map his personal experience of the web. Using somewhat nebulous “labels”, the whole thing suggests (and encourages) a kind of drifting exploration. A video of Tjalve talking about the development of the Diagram Website is featured on the excellent Screenwalks project (Feb 7, 2024).
Here are the “labels” along with a couple of example links for each:
IDIOSYNCRATIC:
Prof. Dr. Style
Folk Interfaces
HTML:
The HTML Review
Wesite as Instrument
SMALL:
Small Web
Personal Web
Low Tech
PUBLISH:
The Doc Web
Hypertext Gardens
ATMOSPHERE:
Indigenized Internet
Alt Computer Histories
ECOLOGY:
Cyberfeminism
Fermented Code
MYTH:
Ritual Technology
Feral Web
TEXT:
Your World of Text
1kB Club
INDEPENDENCE:
Startpages
Scapism
MULTIPLAYER:
Networks of Care
Spring ’83
FUN:
Silly Useless Software
Useless Web
@30. Here is my expanded spreadsheet for the full diagram.
November 16, 2024
@31. Once I’d heard about it I had to make it! Risotto with pears, gorgonzola, and walnuts, a recipe courtesy of my favourite Instagram Sicilian-American cook; Chef Luca Corleone Fontarosa. @cheflucacorleone
November 17, 2024
@32. Only a couple of days to the presentation.
@33. Craig Mod is a book designer, writer, photographer, and walker that I have followed for a number years. His walks across Japan have been the source material for some wonderful books. In his early writing he thought a lot about the future of online publishing, now he has recommitted himself to the physical book. He was also an early adopter of a sponsorship model to help fund his book productions. I challenged my students to reimagine their design protocols with Mod’s essay “To Make a Book, Walk on a Book” (2017).
November 18, 2024
@34.
A few final sites (just because):
Hypertension Mindful Liberation
Rotating Sandwiches
this won’t last forever
Marco Land Handyfoto Foundation
elle’s homepage
Calendar Collective
day one: nature (from Weird Web October)
@35. Presentation prep. Quick review of the material. Opening up tabs. Making cottage pie…
November 19, 2024
@36.
Showtime!
A website is a poem that is already in everyone’s pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book… —HTTPoetics