The view from above

Boston.com's The Big Picture has a feature on residential construction in southwest Florida, offering a bird's eye view of real estate in places like Port Charlotte (pictured) by drawing images from Google Earth. The patterns are simply mesmerizing.

Booker barnburning: C

Have recently plumbed the Booker shortlist; read (and liked) Room, and just picked up C, by Tom McCarthy.

It's a cool sort of book; you're plugging along with the protagonist, Serge, as he grows up in the early 20th century, and then you find yourself in a seance, the ghost of his sister looming unacknowledged in the ether of the pages. Or you discover yourself in Egypt, thrust back into Serge's childhood fixation with decoding messages hidden in the pages of the newspaper when he discovers the way early Egyptians secreted stories in scarabs. At times difficult to connect with, the narrative nonetheless crackles with a kind of fateful electricity.

My favorite excerpt (fascinated as I am by the commonness of my life and its definitive experiences, which I've come to imagine are little more exciting than discovering the sky is blue):

[Y]ou have to look at all of this, at all these histories of looking. The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they’re the first—-or, even when it’s clear they’re not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter …

Washington Post review.

Guardian review.

Nuit Blanche in Greenpoint

Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche NYC from Michael Zick Doherty on Vimeo.

I think I'm still too under the weather to venture out for this, but durn, it looks pretty cool. From Bringtolightnyc.org:

Bring to Light is New York City's first-ever Nuit Blanche festival. A Nuit Blanche is an all night arts festival of installations and performances celebrating the magic and luminance of light. Nuit Blanche events enliven cities all around the globe, but there has never been one in New York.

BRING TO LIGHT NYC will be held in Greenpoint, Brooklyn primarily on Oak Street between Franklin St. and the East River waterfront in Fall 2010, beginning at sundown. The event is free and open to the public. This unique block will play host to local and international artists, performers, galleries, and musicians as they Bring to Light the street itself as well as its unique assets including metal, set design and textile workshops, residential facades, an indoor gymnastics park, and much more.

Post-reading project

If you can stand to sacrifice one of your tomes, do something cool like these sculptures by Dutch artist Boukje Voet.

Papering up the walls

Cool ... public-art installation? Pasting project? Not quite sure how to classify it, but doesn't matter: I like it anyway. World Famous Design Junkies features Nerea De Diego's "3,000 Posters Plastered on the Street" (or, "Intervention").

Build it to the sky!

Via BoingBoing:

Seven years ago, Horace Burgess prayed and received divine inspiration. He says that God told him "If you build be a treehouse, I'll see that you never run out of material."

And so Horace started building... and building... and 15 years later, he's still going.

The tree house is now 97 feet tall, supported by a living 80-foot-tall white oak, with six other oaks for support. It currently has ten floors, and a belltower.

Photo is by John Hudgens (zteamproductions) on Flickr.

Sniffles, &c.

It's no Spanish flu, but I do feel like a gigantic, walking germ. Ginger, honey, and lemon tea for me.

Visualizing NYC

(Jelly NYC skyline by Liz Hickok.)

Super-cool art show alert: the Pratt Manhattan Gallery is hosting You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City, which runs through November 6. Descriptions of pieces that caught my eye:

• A “loneliness map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington 
• A scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
• A New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
• The preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post-9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city

Happy National Punctuation Day!

You -- yes, you -- should celebrate this momentous day by punctuating your sentences well. Or by getting an interrobang tattoo, like this one from Flickr user Emily Lewis:

From the bookshelf

Summer reading was, for the most part, indulgently pedestrian: I checked out those durned Girl books by Stieg Larsson; I read the Hunger Games trilogy (by Suzanne Collins); I sped through Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett; as an aside, check out the author phot on his Web site: classic!). I also worked in A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender) and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness (Robert Whitaker -- highly, highly recommended, if you're of the nonfiction bent).

It's feeling more fall-like (pumpkin spice lattes: they're back!), and I feel a transition to heavier books coming on. I've been doing a bit of exploring of the Booker short-list; I just finished Room (Emma Donoghue), and I'm a few chapters into C (Tom McCarthy). 2666 (Bolano) and Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel) are waiting for me to crack them open. At the gym today, gasping and red-faced and sweaty, the woman on the machine next to me looked over quizzically.

"How do you read like that?!"

"So many books, so little time." (Also: a bit of mania!)