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October 17, 2007

'Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse'; Dustin Hoffman at 70; Electronic paper: Not here yet

Some days it seems there's nothing new on the Web but operating-system chatter, young men's fantasies and life hacking ("How to wash your hands"), and political outrage. It's wearying, and the tilt toward geek dudes' concerns betrays the promise of the universal Web. The competitive nature of social bookmarking seems not to appeal to people with more substantial interests, and their finds are often not recorded and shared.

Worth a look:

Woman Beat: Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse by Steven Moore at Gargoyle Magazine.. I had never heard of her, either.

No notice was taken by the press of artist-writer Sheri Martinelli’s death in November 1996, unfairly ignoring the significant role she played in the cultural history of our time. A brief overview of her career indicates her range of roles: she was a protégée of Anaïs Nin and is described at length in her infamous Diary; she was the basis for a major character in William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions and then became the muse and (some say) mistress of Ezra Pound (she appears in various guises in the later Cantos); Charlie Parker and the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet hung out at her Greenwich Village apartment; Marlon Brando was an admirer and Rod Steiger collected her art, as did E. E. Cummings; she knew and was admired by all the Beats, Ginsberg was an especially close friend and mentions her in one of his poems, and was herself known in San Francisco in the late 1950s as the Queen of the Beats; H. D. identified with her and wrote about her in End to Torment; Pound wrote the introduction to a book of her paintings, and her art is now in collections throughout the world. She wrote unusual prose and poetry, much of it published in her own ‘zine....

More:
Sheri Martinelli by Lee Lady:

I met Sheri Martinelli and the guy she was living with, a Chinese named Gilbert Lee, in Washington, D.C. in 1956 or 1957 when I was 17 years old. Sheri was a red-headed woman of Irish descent (as she never let you forget), maybe about 40 years old, though she claimed to be more like 32....

Not midnight yet: What I've Learned: Dustin Hoffman in Esquire.

Dustin Hoffman is 70? Shoot, we're rolling off the edge.

Midnight Cowboy was done on a low budget. You gotta have money to pay for a scene that includes a bunch of people on the street in midtown Manhattan. So Jon Voight and I were walking in regular traffic and being filmed by a camera hidden in a van across the street. That's a stolen shot. That was a cab that almost hit us. In my brain, I wanted to say, "We're making a movie here, asshole!" But your brain knows that would ruin the take. So I'm walking here! really means We're shooting a film here!

Via Robot Wisdom.

Take this blog to the bathroom: The Future of Electronic Paper. An Interview with Nick Sheridon, Father of E-paper at The Future of Things.

I've been reading for decades about the thin sheet of something -- portable, unobtrusive, flexible and indestructible -- that will let us read the paper wherever. Soon come, for decades.

Q: How do you see the future of e-paper?

A: I like to tell people that the holy grail of e-paper will be embodied as a cylindrical tube, about 1 centimeter in diameter and 15 to 20 centimeters long, that a person can comfortably carry in his or her pocket. The tube will contain a tightly rolled sheet of e-paper that can be spooled out of a slit in the tube as a flat sheet, for reading, and stored again at the touch of a button. Information will be downloaded—there will be simple user interface—from an overhead satellite, a cell phone network, or an internal memory chip. This document reader will be used for e-mail, the Internet, books downloaded from a global digital library that is currently under construction, technical manuals, newspapers (perhaps in larger format), magazines, and so forth, anywhere on the planet. It will cost less than $100, and nearly everyone will have one!

How easy is it to lose? I was afraid so...

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:25 AM | Permalink