I’ve set New Year’s resulotion or un-resolution but I haven’t been carrying those plans out religiously. Maybe it’s just a human weakness that I don’t really want to face. Whenever we make a plan, we’re doomed to encounter some unexpected changes. We can’t foresee the future, so how can we plan everything out till the very last minute detail? I guess I’m only looking for futile excuses to justify why I haven’t stuck with my own resolution. The truth is that I wasn’t ready and I pushed myself. Obviously I wasn’t going too far. But I feel ready now. At least for now I know that I can do this and I’ll try my best. So here come my February resolutions.
1. I will lose 10 pounds. (I’m not going to set a time frame or deadline. I just know I’ll lose these 10 extra pounds that don’t belong to me.)
2. I will take a vigorous walk every day, whether it snows or rains outside.
3. I will finish reading the last 3 volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in 2008.
4. I will make some serious and casual creative endeavors in the next 10 months.
5. I will write more.
6. I will talk less and listen more.
7. I will finish reading all the books on our shelves before buying any new book.
Thing 5 is a little origami book, made by following instructions from this origami site. It’s about 2 inches square, and I haven’t written anything in it yet. There are instructions at instructables.com for a nicer looking one I might try next - I could use actual origami paper for that, this one was made from the wrapping paper from a department store called New Yaohan, which came wrapped around some glasses I bought.
Today’s project took a lot longer than an hour, and it consists of design and artwork that I didn’t make, but I hope you will agree that it was a worthwhile activity: I pulled out a bunch of cool images from this public domain book—
—cleaned them up in Photoshop, posted them to Flickr, tagged them, and typed out the captions and all the text that I could make out within the images, so that it’s all searchable.
So yeah, we’ve been a little ebook crazy lately. And I finally bought ebook studio for $26.95 (I found a 10% discount code). It’s dead easy to use, it can read txt, rtf, html — the more stripped down text formats and conversion to pdb takes one minute. Of course, to add more features like images, page breaks, table of contents will take longer but the basic action takes a minute.
So for my thing-a-day today I made a video of me converting lamplight to ereader format to show: a) I made an ebook and b) it really only takes a minute.
I was going to write something to go along with this, but didn’t have time to write something good, so here goes. These are works of art that I have produced over the course of months or, in some cases, years. Each was the product of love, work, and personal growth.
The New College Latin & English Dictionary. Used nearly every day for two semesters.
The Selected Poetry of Lord Byron. Purchased when I was 16 or 17.
The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659. Used for only one class, one semester, but this book was loved and it shows.
The Poetry of Our World, an anthology of modern world poetry. Purchased this when I was 16. It introduced me to Elizabeth Bishop, Zbiegniew Herbert, Philip Larkin, Anna Akhmatova, Paul Celan, Shuntaro Tanikawa, and others.
John Clare Selected Poems. This is the first book of John Clare that I bought. It sat on my shelf unread for at least a year, and then, when I picked it up and read it, my life changed.
John Clare Major Works. My main workhorse during the year in which I wrote my thesis on John Clare.
