A Momentary Taste of Being

Pens that record while the user records

While I have much to blog--Wordsworth, Barrett Browning and other things, time has been limited because I've recently received an iPad that I've had to become acquainted with for things happening at work.  A marvelous and frustrating machine--combining both the remarkable world of entertainment and the possible world of larger functionality.  I would say at the moment it is not ready for primetime as one's laptop--(no ability to have multiple screens, etc.  But as a palm-like device, instantly ready, it has some interest.  As an e-reader it has the considerable disadvantage of large weight--it does not rest easy in the palm, as it were.

The perfect infusion of the luddite into the modern--see the typewriter extension for the iPad. I should have noted that this looks like a machine out of Burroughs's Naked Lunch via David Cronenberg.

I don't have an iPhone, and I sha'n't have one until the company decides to turn over all Blackberry service to iPhones (perhaps not far in the future as most execs are now thumbing away at their iPhones) however, if I did have an iPhone-- City Poems would be a required app .  I think of myself as a literary tourist.  Wherever I am sent, I seek out the historical, the unusual, and the literary.  On a trip across the bleak corn-strewn midwest through the country from Columbus, Ohio to Macomb Illinois--so flat that, as Bill Bryson stated in Lost Continent, standing on a telephone book gives you a view--I passed by (and visited) Dickson Mounds state memorial AND Garnett, Illinois, birthplace and chief setting of The Spoon River Anthology .  Similarly, while living in Ohio, I took a trip up to Amish/Mennonite country and seeing it on the map, the allure of Winesburg, Ohio was not to be resisted.  I come to Boston and walk the Freedom trail, so, there near the grave...