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Several days ago a friend asked what I thought of my iPad. I didn’t answer right away, as we were communicating via instant message, and typing more than a few words on said device is a miserable process; and more than a few words are needed. The iPad is a marvelous device — but that only makes its flaws more profound. It’s also a political object, an embodiment of two deep and opposed forces in Apple’s corporate soul: toolmaker and marketer. Continue reading

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by a complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, seeing thereby a feather magnified, the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.” Continue reading

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Don’t cut it to make a flute.
Don’t trim it for a fishing
Pole. When the grass and flowers
Are all gone, it will be beautiful
Under the falling snow flakes.

Po Chu I, translated by Kenneth Rexroth Continue reading