The Real Paul Jones

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Cubed Roots?

Fall comes to the Carrboro Farmers Market and with the sudden cool wet weather comes a harvest of root vegetables. I’ve taken those roots and made salads using the greens and roots, made soups and gumbos, roasted and baked them, but I wanted to try something different — crunchy, but not raw; mixed but still with unique flavors, spiced some.

My solution was to dice several roots, stir fry them for differing amounts of time depending on how crunchy or squishy they should be, spice them some and eat ’em up.

My plan for this week is to use garlic then onion then ginger to flavor the oil then add small cubes of sweet potato, turnip, golden beet (red turn it all red and I want some color effect), carrots and stir fry to slow cook the root concoction and add some seasonal spice like basil, rosemary or marjoram.

Looking for other suggestions and experiences.

NC Literary Festival Panel of Twitter 9/12 at 10am

NC Literary Festival
Come see us @nc_litfest‘s Twitter & Literature Panel Tomorrow Sept 12 at 10 am @mightymur @waynesutton & @smalljones Moderator @hartzog / in Murphey Hall at UNC. Full Saturday schedule here.

I plan to talk about several poetic experiments: @haikuoftheday and @sonnets for two and ask for others. One fairly complex moderated Twitter Haiku collective from Phil Boiarski.

I’ll also contrast @PatrickHerron‘s use of Twitter based on this statement:

I often use twitter in series posts (1of2, 2of2, etc.) to go just a little bit further than aphorisms. Or to just sort of “toss up” fragments of text that are scheduled to land in pieces in my new project. Twitter then acts as a sort of ‘locus of detachment” where I can put things in public and be done with the personal dimension once and for all.

with Philip Boiarski’s much more personal statement:

Twitter has been a life saver for me as a poet. I have a real life gig to support my poetry habit. Now, in my : ( sixty fourth year under heaven, I am not, by nature, a man who takes lightly his obligations to spouse and family. How one dares to have a family, a life, more than a tent and a horse, the muse has yet to explain to me. My workday doesn’t make it easy to make notes, or jot down ideas for poems, lines that come to me, etc. The 140 characters in a tweet seem to me to be of a perfect length to hold in mind until a minute frees up to iPhone, keyboard, thwirl, them in. I now link them to my blog about writing and am running there a “Twitter Experiment” (It’s at Boiarski theblog if you want to see). I have thousand plus fans many of whom are poets, avid readers, amateurs, etc. and they react and clue me as to what hits a chord, what I might take time to write further into on the weekend or evenings. So for me, the tweet has taken the place of the little ring notebook I used to carry in my pocket. But now, I write it where a thousand folks can read and react. I have a friendly place to try out my words and objective input into what communicated to real folks and not to just my idea of an audience.

And these two notes from Robin Black:

1) Best 140-character story submitted to our booth at #BrooklynBookFestival or tweeted to @onestorymag wins subscription + dinner with OS staff

2) Georgia Review recently blogged about what Michael Martone is doing with Twitter. I don’t have that link, but his nom de Tweet is @4foraquarter. He’s writing a book about things that come in fours and has used Twitter to explore the idea.

Twitter = epigram, epigraph, epitaph, epithet, epilogue, episode, epiphany, epic, epicenter, epidemic? an epistle to an epicene epicure? the epidermis of an epistemological epitome’s epicyclical by an epiphenomenonal episcopal epigone?

I can also talk about small groups vs larger groups vs broadcast and “thick” vs “thin” tweets if you like.

Battle of the birds

A goldfinch, trying perhaps to convince me that he’s the prothonotary warbler (see below), was hanging on the nectar feeder that has been under the protection of a very aggressive hummingbird. The goldfinch was sipping a little water that was in the feeder to discourage ants from crawling into the nectar when the confrontation occurred. Here’s how it played out as captured by my iPhone.

Yellow Mystery Bird at the Hummingbird Feeder

Few the past few days this bird has been living at our hummingbird feeder, sipping nectar and enjoying him/herself. Note a slender light beak, grey wings with no bars or stripes, yellow to white underside, no easily noticed eye bar or ring.

Candidates: Blue-winged Warbler dark legs, wingbars, eye line (not matching our bird) Northern Oriole aka Baltimore (Female) no white underside as seen on our bird, Summer Tanager (female) too heavy beak and markings off, your guess ???

Presenting the Mushroom Book Project

Jeff Beam presents John Cage's Mushroom Book

Jeff Beam, Jeffrey Pomerantz and I are there in the picture showing one of the rare copies of John Cage’s Mushroom Book which will serve as a jumping off point for our presentation/project/happening/theatre piece at the CHAT or Collaboration: Humanities, Arts and Technology Festival early next year.

CHAT, which will take place on the UNC campus February 16-20, 2010, will showcase the possibilities for innovative, collaborative arts and humanities work enabled by technology by drawing together the region’s diverse digital resources in a series of performances, colloquies, demonstrations and training sessions.

We say:

John Cage’s Mushroom Book captures the experience of mushroom hunting through a collaboration between a noted mycologist (Alexander H. Smith), an extraordinary illustrator (Lois Long), and Renaissance man/visionary John Cage. Using scientific illustration and description, poetry, typography, and text the book is essentially an early multimedia event. We will re-capture the experience of their hunt and collaboration through a reinterpretation of the Mushroom Book: an interactive, three-dimensional, technologically-enabled multimedia experience.

This Happening will fulfill the as-yet unfulfilled promise to Dr. John Couch’s widow, by the UNC-CH John N. Couch Biology-Botany Library to make use of the Mushroom Book in the educational mission of the University. The volume was a gift from Mrs. Couch in memory of her husband’s and John Cage’s friendship. Dr. Couch was a world-renown mycologist for whom the Biology-Botany library at UNC was named. Couch, Cage, and others made a number of mushroom forays together. [revised/expanded JB 7/14/2009]

The book is discussed here in Cage’s biography, Roaring Silence (Amazon preview) page 235-236. also Cage on technology on page 237. (at UNC Music Library ML410.C24 R5 1992 ) In Conversations with Cage, John Cage says 10 lithographs were by Lois Long (the scientifically correct mushroom images) and 10 by Cage, himself ( “My texts … handwritten in five different litho crayon intensities (… superimpositions making much unreadable) … enabling the reader … to go hunting in my handwritten page.” (letter to Smith from Cage)

Read more and help us think about how to do all of this on this Google Doc at http://tinyURL.com/18Hn6Pz

Four tasty local tomato dishes

Watermelon Tomato Salad tastes great too! Thx Bill Smith on Twitpic

That’s dishes made with local tomatoes — not all of them contrived locally:

Chilled Yellow Tomato Soup (used local Yellows – Sungolds perhaps)

White Wine Gazpacho (used Cherokee Purples)

Watermelon and Tomato Salad (from Bill Smith) (used a variety for colors and textures) Subbed Thai Basil for regular and dropped the cayanne in favor of a dash Cackalacky Sauce.

Vegetarian Gumbo (used locally grown Romas) – you know this one Trinity (from Red Onion, Roasted Peppers, Celery) + Garlic + Okra + Maters in stock

Time off the blog explained

I started this blog in August 2004. At the time, I made a commitment to post an entry per day no matter how brief and I kept that commitment for several years — I did give myself time off for weekends and I did post multiple posts per day in some cases.

In the past two years, I’ve been slowing down on my posts to once a week. Twitter, which you see on the left hand side of the blog, picked up the traffic for short comments. Delicious, which is also on the left side bar, picked up the interesting links traffic. Last.fm keeps my itunes listening current. Facebook mostly picks up tweets as its status updates but it’s there too.

I claimed that Twitter Ate My Blog! but it is more complicated than that. The interlacing of my social communication meant that different special tools (twitter, delicious, last.fm picked up a lot of what the most general tool (the blog) was doing — and better they have become part of the blog itself instead of separate disparate entities.

Over the past three weeks, when there was blog silence, there was plenty going on. We were on a long for us vacation on the Left Coast and then moving our son into his new school, NC School of Science and Math, but the blog as still active — even though no new articles were being posted — thanks to Twitter and others.

Almost five years into the blog, it’s now updated more often with more information than ever before even when I’m off, I’m on. Scary in a way, but also reflective of the why we all work and play these days.

No readings, no writings, all video

I’ll be teaching my blogging, social media, virtual communities course this semester only using video on the net. The syllabus is here.

We will view videos of lectures and other events pertaining to the class topics: Categories: Brainz!, Citizen Journalism and New Journalism, Cyberculture, Marketing, Remix (including legal issues), Simplicity, Social Networking research and theory, Vernacular Video and YouTube Anthropology. The viewings are presentations by some of the top experts in each area — the kinds of people, sometimes the exact same people, that whose papers and articles and books I would have had the class read in other years. We will not be viewing videos during class; we’ll be discussing the topics when f2f.

Class members will not be writing papers in response to the viewing, but instead will be producing (very lightly produced in most cases) video responses from their webcams, phones or digital cameras (such as Flips).

We will also have several guests during the course of the semester. These guests will not be lecturing but instead will be holding a question and answer session with the class over Skype. The class will have prepared for the session by having had watching a video by each speaker before hand. Among those who have agreed to visit us are: Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Fred Turner, Barry Wellman and in person, our Duke Law neighbor, James Boyle. The response from the potential speakers has been overwhelmingly positive. This has turned out a wonderful way for an expert to engage with students at a very low time cost and with on special preparation.

The class has not yet met, but the class members have already been helping design their course but voting on polls to determine how video intensive the course will be and on how the assignments and grades will be handled. — No, I didn’t use video for this part. I did use Doodle for the polls and email for contacting the class.

So participatory culture, vernacular video, simplicity all played a big part in the class already.

The mundane but discretely lovely details of our daily lives

Yesterday was a good day in ink for me. I had a poem called “The mundane but discretely lovely details of our daily lives” featured in the Carrboro Free Press special “Waste” or trash issue and was listed in the TechJournal South as a technology maven — there were some pretty damn smart folks listed along with me too.

Neither of the publications are yet online although both promise to be. In the meantime, folks outside of the Carrboro area here’s the poem which some of you liked from Twitter and Facebook snippets (“Where dumpsters meet their dumptruck lovers and are raised in their arms like whales”). Thanks to the editors of both publications for liking me and the poem.

The mundane but discretely lovely details of our daily lives

The list on the refrigerator
gives all the signs of family:
peanut butter and tuna steaks,
garbage bags and red wine,
an offer to discount the mortgage.

On the sill, a reddening pepper.

The green side in shadow
with a crip dried soap bubble
breaking the reflected light
like rose cathedral windows
warming the cold grey church–
hearts welcoming in a spirit–
exotic and solid as mango seed–
sweet pulp of these days;
like a map with too many details.

Gods of a world too mundane for gods,
you blinded me. Now you amaze.

So much, so small, and so irregular–
who will sing of you?
Who will tell your particularity,
your temporary insistance,
the way the pepper sinks in the sill
when overripe, how a drop forms
then falls from the faucet?
Only those who have been too wise
for too much of our lives,
who pause before you here
and for a moment know
that one beautiful fear.

For you I will rise early
before dumpsters greet
their dump truck lovers
and are lifted in their iron arms
like passionate whales,
I will gather what is wasted,
what remains American,
and be forever true.

Equinox – True to the Blues

The jazz – mostly – band Equinox plays an original True to the Blues (by drummer Spence Foscue) at Weaver Street Market accompanied by hoopers, a juggler, small children, small dogs and off camera a pygmy goat.

True Manning Marked

But with the Mark of the Best or the Mark of the Beast? This image was discovered on the steps of the One True Manning Hall at UNC – Chapel Hill this morning by the ever alert @taranga. A shadowy figure in round glasses and a fez. What could it mean? Someone monkeying around? Andre the Giant gone Morocco-academic?

@smalljones vandal fan club? or unpaid guerilla worship: on Twitpic

ibiblio, a founder of Open Source for America

Open Source for America

ibiblio helps found open-source advocacy group

CHAPEL HILL – ibiblio, a conservancy of freely available information on the Internet based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a founding member of a new group aiming to promote use of open-source technology by the federal government.

The new group announced today, Open Source for America, is a cross-section of more than 50 companies, universities, communities and individuals holding that government can and should become more transparent, participatory, secure and efficient by using open-source software.

The group also holds that the open-source community can drive collaborative innovation for government; and that a decision to use software should be driven solely by the requirements of the user. For more information about Open Source for America, visit http://opensourceforamerica.org.

The term “open source” refers to software that is distributed with its source code, so that user organizations and vendors can modify it for their own purposes. Most open-source licenses allow the software to be redistributed without restriction under the same terms of the license. For more information, visit opensource.org.

ibiblio, accessed at www.ibiblio.org, was one of the world’s first Web sites and is the largest collection of collections on the Internet. It is supported by UNC’s School of Information and Library Science and School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“We’re delighted to help explain and promote the rewards and benefits of open sources to the government sector,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at both schools. “Open code is a giant step toward providing the kind of transparency and accountability that democracies require.”

Only two North Carolina universities are represented in Open Source for America: Carolina and N.C. State University in Raleigh. Others represented are the University of California’s Irvine and Merced branches; Carnegie Mellon; Oregon State University; and the University of Southern Mississippi.

ibiblio’s goals include expanding and improving the creation and distribution of open-source software; continuing UNC programs to develop an online library and archive; hosting projects that expand the concepts of transparency and openness; and serving as a model for other open-source projects.

School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 843-8337, wmonroe at unc.edu

School of Journalism and Mass Communication contact: Kyle York, (919) 966-3323, sky at unc.edu

News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589

Django Haskins at Saxapahaw

Listen!

Django Haskins plays “Blood and Oil” solo at Saxapahaw

We love getting out to Saxapahaw, an old but re-enlivened mill village on the Haw River about 10 miles west of Carrboro, for their Saturday music, farmer’s market and food. One of the nice surprises, and there are many, is that we run into friends from all over the area out there.

The farmers market is more of an artisans’ market than a vegetable purchasing place. Wine, jams, pickles, flat breads, new wave sock monkeys, and the like are all there and all local, very local, to the area.

The BBQ Joint brings a truck up and there is always ice cream (all local of course), but the big surprise for us this time out was the great food up at the Shell station aka Saxapahaw General Store. Yes it is a functioning quick stop store and gas house, but behind the grill something else is happening. Goat burgers, roasted veggie sandwiches, seafood specials (until they run out which on Saturdays is apt to happen), local beef, taters fried in duckfat (I donno why this is so good but it is), great greens, nice wine that you uncork yourself which makes for a great price. Ambiance? It’s a quickstop so you could be eating in a booth facing the motor oil and the wine is next to the fishing worms, but outside, if eating by the worms is not your ideal eating situation, there are some nice tables and while not quite a river view, a good place to sit in the evening. You could take out as a picnic to the music and farmers market or down to the river tho.

Thanks Heather and Tom LaGarde for putting on the shows and market, and of course Django for the music this time out.

On the Dino Trail at the Museum of Life and Science

Just back from a walk around the new Dino Trail at the Museum of Life and Science. Beck Trench aka @10ch arranged an early preview especially for bloggers and tweeple that she could reach from the @lifeandscience twitter address. Over 100 of us checked in by 3:30! Too many to namecheck here bit check the hashtagged links. Our tweets are all tagged either #dinotour or #dinotrail.

Beck has set up a page for participation called /dinosaurs that will allow visitors to upload their videos, drawings, links to their blog posts etc.

On the #dinotrail on Twitpic

Steve Burnett and Theremin at Carrboro Coworking

We took at trip over to lovely Carrboro to see and hear @steveburnett play theremin. Steve managed to get everyone in the room to play at the instrument and gave some generous explanations of how it works. His theremin and several of his effects boxes are from Big Briar and signed by Bob Moog.

The Ramblers aka Jim Watson, Bill Hicks, Mike Carver and Joe Newberry at Southern Village

We were over on the hill behind us called Southern Village eating the great food we’d picked up at the Carrboro Taco Truck (the one near Fitch’s) — great home made tamales pollo con salsa verde since you asked — and listening to the Ramblers or Watson, Hicks Carver and Newberry if you prefer playing some good old time music and telling very corny jokes. I captured a couple of songs (Piney Mountain a new old time song done acapella with Joe Newberry at lead vocal — above; Uncloudy Day an old old time song with Jim Watson at lead — below ).

Hugh McManaway statue in Charlotte

Hugh McManaway statue with link this time on Twitpic
I was in Charlotte yesterday to attend a memorial service for the father of an old friend when I ran into a whimsical statue of another old acquaintance. Hugh McManaway used to direct traffic from the median of Queens Road at Providence Road across from his church, the place where he used to eat (once the Town House Restaurant) and the grand old house where he lived most of his life.

Hugh was special. I’m not sure exactly how this specialness would have been diagnosed, but he was innocent and childlike in many good ways.

I first met Hugh one night as I was walking down the street later at night than I probably should have been out. As I walked passed Myers Park Methodist Church, I was met by a large man wearing a hat, raincoat and carrying some pamplets. He introduced himself and handed me the pamphlet which turned out to be some sort of religious tract. I didn’t get to read it before Hugh started talking telling me that he had a key to the church, I think he meant a chapel there. I was sure, for a second or two at least, that I was meeting some sort of prev and that the chapel invite was something else. But that was only for a second or two, Hugh’s voice, his body language and his eyes peering through what I remember were thick lensed glasses told me otherwise. Hugh was just explaining something that was interesting to him and he thought to me.

I saw him other times eating at the Town House where they delivered his meal to him. No money was exchanged. Hugh wasn’t eating for free. His trust fund paid the Town House as it paid his other bills. Hugh was alone by this time and, I didn’t know it, in his decline.

A few years later he would be placed in a nursing home, his house restored and declared historic home (for its architecture — not for Hugh).

Someone, not sure who (statue is credited to Elsie Shaw), memorialized Hugh with a highly polished statue placed at his station in the median. Soon, he became subject to good natured decoration and signs congratulating newly weds (usually those married at Hugh’s church, Myers Park Methodist) and flowers.

Jones-mania: national and local editions

Did quite a bit of talking with Vadim Lavrusik for a fairly long article on “10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media” in Mashable which also features Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Sree Sreenivasan, and a couple of others. Very good company and some very good ideas for teaching.

More locally, The Daily Tar Heel has a nice story about how UNC Health Care has been using Twitter including their tweets during a surgery (Note: the DTH calls this “live surgery” as opposed to “dead surgery”? Isn’t that an autopsy?). I get a couple of expert lines which are slightly on topic. Basically I describe a “thick tweet” here: “Jones said the ingredients to an appealing update include mentioning someone else, featuring a link and adding a picture or video.” And I state the completely obvious:

Paul Jones, a journalism professor at UNC who has one of the most followed Twitter accounts in the Chapel Hill area, said gaining followers on the site requires posts that grab readers’ attention.

“Keep adding value, give people a reason to follow you,” he said. “The only people who will follow you are the people who want it.”

On another Twitter front, I did a little bit — not sure how much will be used — for WCHL about Twitter and Iran. In the parts selected I talk about how Twitter is difficult to block because it can be sent by cell, SMS, satphone, or a variety of internet protocols and interfaces (I did point out that the WTO protesters were hit with a total communications black out somewhat successfully) and later I talk about the social contract between social network service providers and their users and how users are free to leave and often do.

36 Hours in Carrboro

The New York Times just did their 36 Hours on the “Research Triangle.” Like most locals, I had plenty of beefs with their selections, which I have to admit are all pretty good. They did end up at the Cat’s Cradle. They did drive through the Sunshine Biscuit drive-thru. They did like my favorite parts of the NC Art Museum. They did discover Fathers and Sons — and the Scrap Exchange. They also took some very nice photos. They did miss the best BBQ, the best taco trucks and a lot more by staying in Raleigh too long. They missed out on a lot in Durham and in Cary. But for a sort of 30-something kinda visit to the area, it wasn’t all that bad.

First, it occurred to me that my own past 35 hours in Carrboro was a more walkable and more fun time than they found spending too much time in the car. In fact, the wonderful “It’s Carrboro” song gives great shoutouts to many of the treats of Carrboro. Just visiting those would make for a nice 36 hours of visit. You’d want to add the biscuits from Neal’s, a coffee stop at the Open Eye, beer stop at Milltown, another stop at the Station, and a great dinner at Acme, Glass Half Full, Provence, Aki Hana, ice cream at Maple View, and a trip to Johnny’s for crepes, tacos, coffee, wine and atmosphere. And you could walk all of it — if you were timing things right during the 2nd Friday Art Walk so you could party at Wootini and hear klezmer music at Carrboro Creative Coworking.

How would you lay out your unique visit to Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, HIllsborough, Pittsboro and/or Raleigh?

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