Found the door to the spare room open and went in to find the Gigantic Dane settled on the bed munching the gilded tassels on a little Oriental embroidered throw pillow. He looked like Judge Marco Polo in the Forbidden City, that solemn dignity Great Danes have at the most inappropriate times, quite at odds with their comic characters. My fault for leaving that door open.
Planning a brunch dish of semolina Gnocchi Romano with a freshly made tomato sauce, torn-up leaves of opal basil as a garnish. Soft summer rain falling, birds with iridescent wings flying back and forth across the wet garden — but a sad day for reasons I can’t write about here. A storm blowing in from Paradise.
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940
What will the Internet do next? I’m reading articles about the end of the ‘desktop’ screen with its graphic trash bin, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter on the end of static websites, the change to flow:
“The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream,” he writes. “This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the ‘flatland known as the desktop’ (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a representation of time.
“It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment… Until you touch it and then the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down and the pages start turning again.”
