hey everyone,
i think you should all meet Kate. For the month of February she is going to be doing all of “This is not a book” via her blog/vlog. I think she is really great and talented and funny (and she should have her own show). well, I guess she already does. You have to see the first video in which explains what she is doing and why.
go kate!
p.s. my publisher thinks you are great too.
p.p.s. let’s cheer her on, shall we?

I’m not sure who likes it better, me or my two year old son. (German I think? I can’t decipher the brand name.) Our neighbor/friend gave it to us, a childhood toy of her son’s (who is now in his thirties). A quick search revealed they still make this thing, along with new versions of it and you can buy it on amazon. We really can’t get enough. This variation is referred to as “the super crane”, made by my talented husband. It can be pushed, pulled, raised, and reconfigured as needed. Now if only we had more parts. I’m thinking of buying another set to give us more configuring abilities. Just imaging a whole house of this stuff. You could use it to make your own furniture, create new inventions, affix pulley systems, reinvent household tasks.
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

the korean version of “How to be an Explorer of the World”! Now in several languages. whooohooooo!

I think it’s beautiful and so antiquated. Can you imagine a world where everything was done in such a physical way? It reminds me of one of my favorite books, “All the names” by Saramago, in which the main character is a clerk for the Central Registry of births, marriages and deaths. He is endlessly filing cards in a building that is so big you have to hold onto a string every time you enter the stacks so you can find your way back. Reportedly another clerk was lost in there never to be seen again.*
*written while enjoying a cup of Lung Ching Dragonwell and an Ines Rosales torta from Seville, (one of my current vices). also with a beautiful package, wrapped individually in waxed paper. see remnants here:

“Complicate your garden so it’s surprising, like uncultivated land.” –John Cage

And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.
-Georges Perec (fr. the Species of Spaces and Other Pieces)

instructions here.
also:
I am giving away some of my books through The Bright Side Project. Still a couple of days to enter.

from “Wandering” by Hermann Hesse, translated by James Wright