kip/bot/blog

I recently moved from squared Moleskins to blank ones and found it liberating. When I went to the Municipal Art Society’s Urban Center Books store to replenish they were out of stock. But! They had a nifty new (to me) line of notebooks: Whitelines (cue earworm). Lookie!

White rules on a grey background. The lines don’t pop too much, don’t fight with the lines you’re putting down, and, the guy at the counter told me, they don’t show up in photocopies!

This might even be better than the notebooks that just have the vertex dots.

Oh! They’re not terribly expensive either. An 8.5 by 11 with 48 sheets (96 pages) is only $4.50. Might have to buy a couple cases before the price goes up or we embargo those clever Swedes.

http://www.whitelines.se/

This summer seemed rich (or richer than usual) in social media’s provision of alternative/deeper/more thoughtful views of the 4th of July. Lots of ironic postings, flickrs, and twitpics displaying gluttony or stupid bottle rocket tricks, or song lyrics showing how the 4th, like Christmas, is increasingly detached from its original meaning.

Egalitarian Bookworm (chick?), a blog that always has something good, posted 4 poems on July 4th. Saying these poems are united in that they’re from the dissenters’ POV is too strong, though that’s the easiest category for lumping Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Walt Whitman.

Ginsberg’s line “America, why are your libraries full of tears?” was always a favorite of mine (especially in the 80s), but even that poem — a long list of things America isn’t/doesn’t/should — is as hurt and mournful as it is angry. But, thanks to Egalitarian Bookworm Chick, I’m back in touch with this passage from Langston Hughes, which seems in line with the charge to dust ourselves off and begin again:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!