"A flâneur is anyone who wanders, and watches, the city. The 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire called the flâneur a “perfect idler” and a “passionate observer.” Baudelaire was a flâneur himself and, when he wasn’t writing poems and spending his trust fund on dandy outfits and opium, he drifted through the streets of Paris. Later, philosopher Walter Benjamin collected a chunk of thoughts on the idea of the flâneur in his epic volume of notes on Paris, The Arcades Project."

"The flâneur wanders the city, slightly invisible, just on the outside of everything – he or she observes from an anonymous perspective. That invisibility can disappear, however, if your gender is a little more female or your skin colour a shade or two away from white. What I’ve done for my columns and my book — walk largely unnoticed — may not be possible for everybody. I’ve been lucky — I fit the mould of flâneur more easily than many others.

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.” ~ James A. Michener

The Beatles (Photo credit: The Economist)

Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, by Edward Burtynsky

Pilot Handwriting demonstration (via youtube.com)

This strikes me as a great first step, but one that's not particularly enticing to me. On the other hand, if Pilot Handwriting could leap frog forward a couple of paces, I would be extremely interested. Here's what I mean:

Flying Fingers (Photo credit: The Hamster Factor)

Plenty of keyboard clatter of late, but less productive than I need to be. To Do lists remain long. The "I'll get right to that" pile is growing. The twitter chatter is excessive. Time to knuckle down and knock out an outline, another chapter, a running commentary for 15k+ photographs. So if I vanish from the blogosphere for a few days, please celebrate. If you find me back in the banter, remind me not-so-gently to get my posterior back to work.

Like a persistent two year old throwing a tantrum, a chain saw whines and screams and subsides only to whine again a few minutes later. Angry. Testy. Persistent. Closer -- outside my window -- chimes cling and clong in the breeze. They dangle beneath an enormous ginkgo tree and emit pleasant music whenever the wind blows. Chain saw versus wind chimes. I try to organize my thoughts in digital scrawl, postulating, developing, concluding. Posting. Re-posting. Whine. Cling. Scream. Clong. A garbage truck thunders past, doubling (tripling?) the thirty mile per hour speed limit. Then a slow car. Another. Then quiet except for the crinkle-strain-crinkle-strain of the palm paddles on the ceiling fan above my head. Type. Click, click, click. The ferry rumbles, reversing its engines to slow its momentum as it glides into the dock where it will disgorge motorcycles, cars, trucks that will parade past my window. Think. Type. Post.

Are you familiar with Ryu Murakami? He's a successful, established Japanese novelist, and he's breaking away from the heard with his next novel, A Singing Whale. Although he's still ironing out the details for an ink and paper edition, he's releasing the digital version directly to his audience via Apple's iBookstore, "circumventing his traditional publisher in the process..."

Murakami’s project should be hailed less as a blow against the monopoly of big publishing houses over authors and the circulation of their work, and more as a celebration of the kinds of opportunities that devices like the iPad can provide for creativity and cost-efficient distribution.

Mike Cane has posted a link to the press release posted by Amazon earlier today announcing that Amazon.com is now officially selling more Kindle ebooks than hardcover books. You heard right! With month over month sales growth in the second quarter, the Kindle device seems to have reached a tipping point for growth.