'Tis the Season... for Jack-o-Lanterns!

Earlier this month, a couple of my childhood friends and I made jack-o-lanterns! I hadn't carved a pumpkin in years and years, so I was a bit out of practice. Here are the finished products:

The first and second ones on the left are mine. I'm especially pleased with this one:

If you can't tell, it's a mini-Totoro! He's starting to wilt by now, but as you can see, he was cute when I first made him. :-)

Any Hallowe'en crafts in your homes?

The Most Beautiful Route from A to B

This is such a refreshing idea!

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528836/forget-the-shortest-route-across-a-city-new-algorithm-finds-the-most-beautiful

It's a navigation app, much like Google Maps, but it takes users on the scenic route -- a welcome change.

I'll first caveat that for the most part, efficiency is a very good thing. When it comes to governments, corporations, public transportation -- it behooves the administrators to optimize for efficiency. But when it comes to the individual, there are many situations when one misses opportunities and inspiration by taking the most conventionally efficient route.

As a New Yorker, I'm the first to acknowledge that some of our subway stations, for example, are not up to scratch when compared with those in other cities. But there's an uncommon beauty to some of the cityscapes I've had the fortune to encounter in my years here. This is a view of an approaching train coming down the tracks, on a typical subway platform in the city:

And this is an evening view of the iconic Flatiron Building:

I'm a believer in stopping to smell the roses once in a while. I've had some of my best ideas while walking alone through the city, or people-watching from the window of a café, or even in a hot shower on a cold day. I find that beauty begets beauty, just as cunning design or sound judgment often prompts the same. The benefits of walking in beauty are often unseen and manifest subtly, so such pursuits are overlooked in the bustle of our lives. It's a shame, and I hope this algorithm helps users inject a little colour into their lives.

Future Library (Margaret Atwood, Denizen #1)

A library is growing in Norway.

The Future Library is a time-capsule project, of sorts. A thousand trees were planted in a Norwegian forest this summer, to be harvested in a century's time. Every year until the day of the reaping, a different author will be invited to contribute a story to this library. The catch? The story will remain unread until these trees are made into the paper on which these works will be printed. The writers who contribute towards the beginning of the century won't likely live to see their books published. And that's sort of the point. In a hundred years, none of the originators of the project will be around to see its completion.

It'll be interesting to see what authors end up participating. It takes a certain sort of writer to produce a work that will likely be published posthumously, and to be happy with having completed it, without any notion of where it might stand in public opinion or among literary critics. It's fitting that the first contributor to the Future Library is Margaret Atwood; a science fiction writer is likely to agree with the notion of art as time capsule for future generations.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/margaret-atwood-new-work-unseen-century-future-library

Her story about the "lost" Haida manuscript in the above Guardian article is particularly apt. Who knows how language might change in a century? We certainly think differently than our ancestors did in the early 1900s. We find references to iceboxes and horse-drawn carriages archaic, for example, and there are many words that have disappeared from common usage in the past hundred years. It begs the question of whether authors who are consciously writing for the future, without the preconditions of a contemporary readership, would choose to write differently. To what extent, after all, does art demand and audience?

I am reminded (as I often am) of the Percy Shelley poem "Ozymandias," as well as of Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech. The Future Library seems simultaneously an endeavour without ego and perhaps the greatest projection of self-preservation instinct an author can have.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see.

Cover Spy

I've recently begun following a blog/Twitter account that's too much fun not to share:

http://coverspy.tumblr.com
http://twitter.com/coverspy

It's comprised of a team of "undercover" New Yorkers (though it has since expanded to other cities around the world) who report anonymously on what the fellow denizens of their home cities are reading in public. It's a little like Humans of New York, but even more anonymous; public readers are never approached by spies and usually don't know that they've been featured unless they happen to read the Tumblr or Twitter feeds and find that the short personal description accompanying the book cover matches them.

I've always been a bit of a Cover Spy. I tend to notice what my subway-riding compatriots are reading (and sometimes peer surreptitiously at the running headers on e-reader screens). Obviously, as someone in the publishing community, there is a natural inclination to pay attention to these things, but work aside, I find that it helps me keep a finger on the pulse of the city. There's usually a certain correlation between the books I see on the subway and bestseller lists or trending news topics. For example, there was a "summer of John Green" on the F train at around the time The Fault in Our Stars first hit theatres, and a spate of nonfiction about modern European history as the Euro crisis has been playing out.

But New York's cultural milieu is more than what's current or showing at the cinema. I often see people reading books you'd never expect at first glance; sometimes those are the most thought-provoking (teaches you not to judge a book by its cover, ha), like the guy in the power-suit reading Betty Friedan, or the little Jewish grandmother nose-deep in a science fiction paperback. I sometimes make up life stories for them in my head. I do.

Sometimes anonymity can be entertaining. Sometimes a title and author allow a moment of genuine insight. Until they catch you staring, and you have to awkwardly look away, or feign interest in something behind their heads.