iPhone Phun

Here are two great accessories for taking photos with your iPhone. Both are from UBSfever.com in Hong Kong, so they take a little while to get to you, though the shipping isn't too bad.

First, is a wide-angle lens which they sell for $11.99. It slips over the camera end of the iPhone and is small enough to be (potentially) pocketable. Close-up it does have a bit of a fish-eye effect, so watch that.

Second we have one of my favorite accessories for the iPhone, the wonderful, if impractical, telephoto lens ($18.99). It looks like, and is, a small version of a zoom lens. It attaches to the back of a clear plastic case which encases the iPhone. I prefer to just use the back of the case instead of having the clear plastic enclosure a permanent thing. I find it works just as well.

Two ways to make your own fonts

A site called FontStruct lets you create fonts from scratch. It can take a bit of time, but it's free and you can have exactly what you want.

Another easy way is a bit more expensive, but extremely easy to use and called Fontifier. Here you just download a grid with the alphabet, numbers and symbols, fill in the grid and scan it and upload it. Then you can preview your font and if you want to buy it, it's just $9. The fun thing about this one is you can have a font based on your own handwriting.

I've been reading Robert Haas' Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Time and Materials. It's a great book, filled with wonderful poetry of every shape and size. From the sparse opening poem (which reminded me of the beginning of Simic's Hotel Insomnia. This poem is very different, much less harrowing, but they both serve as an alluring appetizer to the riches within.) to a take on the classic Japanese haibun, to longer protest poems.

Though Hass' poetry is complex and of a very high order, there is always this friendly voice saying "It's OK, I'm writing a poem and you're here with me." that keeps everything down to earth and accessible and even playful.

It is an excellent book, and well deserving of the Pulitzer and probably many other awards.

For anyone wanting to discover some new poetry, or interested in poetry in general, the books which have won the Pulitzer are a good place to start. I set up some pages via Amazon's aStore service with Pulitzer winning poetry. I've tried to put the actual winning book on the site, but for some of the older ones I've had to put up selected or collected poems. And for some poets who have won multiple times (Robert Frost, for example) I've just added a collection.

You can click here to see the page.

I've often thought, in this age, with its proliferation of poets and scarcity of readers, that more people should follow the example of Walt Whitman. All his life, Whitman worked on his great book of poems, Leaves of Grass. (If you've never read it, or if you've only read bits of it in school, I would highly recommend starting with the original 1855 version and getting to know this work. This is where all American poetry starts. It's a book that rewards study, becoming deeper and greater with each reading.)

Whitman tried to include the entire world and the entirety of humanity in this book, and he never stopped working on it. What would the landscape of modern poetry be like if more people followed this example? I think it would be an amazing thing to walk into a bookstore and find on the shelves hundreds of poet's best works in a single volume, a selected poems selected and perfected by the poet in her life. Each one polished and perfected to diamond brilliance.

If you haven't tried piclens you really should. It's a browser extension which lets you watch full-screen slideshows on sites like Flickr or Picasa. It's totally intuitive to use and just beautiful. It lets you concentrate on the photos you're looking at, rather than be distracted by a Web site interface.

One of the most beautiful things I've seen on the Web lately is something from ElectricSheep.org. The have created a truly amazing abstract art screen saver.

You can see a sample of the work here.

The way it works, is that you install the application (it works on a PC, Mac or Linux), and when your computer sleeps, it contacts other computers with the application and they join forces to make artwork. (Like Seti@Home or Folding@Home, but with art.)

Personally, I love the idea of my computer working on art projects in its down time. The results are simply mesmerizing, gorgeous and hypnotic. You'll be putting your computer to bed early just to watch what it does.

There was never a poet like e.e. cummings for his joy in playing with language, the pureness of his emotion and voice. Returning to him, probably ten to fifteen years since I've really read his poems, I find such a freshness about him, such a love, such an unapologetically unique voice.

He's unafraid to build his world and his style exactly the way he wants it, to break the molds of older poetry and reshape them to his liking, but always with a smile or at least a smirk. He's the rare innovator who does not alienate, but embraces.

Go to manybooks.net! It's a great collection of ebooks of any shape and size. They seem to be mostly culled from the Gutenberg Project, that venerable archive of public domain texts.

The great thing about manybooks is that you can download the files in a dozen or so different formats, so it will look good and be easy to read on your Palm device, Blackberry, iPod, etc. And it's all free. They do, of course, accept donations for this very worthy cause.