My favorite web log is back after a two year hiatus. Three years, even. It promises to be witty and brilliant, just like it was before. Welcome back, Sylloge!

From the ever-fruitful Imagining Language, an anthology.

Sorry about the messed up sidebar; FTP at Dreamhost is currently hosed, so I can't go fix my CSS...fixed in a mo!

In keeping with the monetization of personal content thread below, this has been going around the interweb. It's based on the AOL-Weblogs, Inc. deal, and wow! it seems I'm leaving a lot of money on the table:

It's not realizable, but purely an imaginative exercise. Weblogs, Inc., unlike most of the rest of us blogging away in the trenches and kitchens of the culture of generosity, was able to make a deal because they were a for-profit , with paid -- but replaceable -- bloggers. The blogs and not the bloggers were the unit sold. Kottke.org, who has been experimenting with a sole proprietorship for-profit blog, is apparently worth $2,864,475.96 by the same accounting. If I had a bigger blog, such as BoingBoing, and viewed women as objects first and people second, I could start showing tits on the sidebar to move towards my conjectural $9,386,606.58 valuation.

Building a media empire with blogs is a nice dream, and this little widget may lead to an efflorescence of Gawker Medias and Weblogs, Incs.

Danah and I have these conversations all the time where we discover we're almost the same person. Like circulating petitions and starting demonstrations with other students -- in sixth grade -- to get our teachers fired. Or we discover we're 100% equally matched at Set (and fantastic must-have game for all of you out there whose brains like shapes and spaces.) Or working at Yahoo, for that matter.

She said on her blog someone asked her if she had a billion dollars what would she build. So she said she'd build a university. Me too! I've always wanted to build a university. I kind of envision a sort of college for regularly people, old, young -- non-student-age students. The people excluded from Facebook.

College -- boarding school for that matter -- was for me the perfect place. You fell in love five times a day, and made your brain do unexpected things. Sleeping late was assumed, not exceptional. People invited me to orgies, but my inner Puritan said I'm sorry, we'll stick to hand-holding and the erotics of self-denial. Everyone was the same age, but I think that was a flaw. One of the best things about Smith where I was for a year is that there were the Comstock scholars -- women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s (maybe even 70s?) who were going to college for the first time. They lived in the dorms with all the rest of the students, and while the rest of us were discovering keg parties, they were casually busy being the most interesting people there.

So my university would be a kind of salon, except with less backstabbing, professional jealousy and periodicals. Or like Foo Camp, all year round. Of all the places I've worked since college, Interval Research was most like that. I was only there a short while before it shut down, but it was a bit sad that nothing from Interval ever made it out in the world; I cringed for Laurie Anderson at her Moby Dick show using that embarrassing Interval-designed music stick. Ack! And remember those people who could never graduate from college, who had like 5 BAs or were taking 15 years to finish their first? Dating freshmen? Eek. Professional dilettantes make me insane. Cafeteria food, add/drop period, sadistic administration officials, tiresome know-it-alls.... Maybe this is a bad idea.

Anil wrote a post about The Interesting Economy in which he wonders why those whose photos are algorithmically deigned to be "interesting" do not receive any money. But as some commenters note, in any social software system there are systems of value other than, or in addition to, money, that are very important to people: connecting with other people, creating an online identity, expressing oneself -- and not least, garnering other people's attention.

Anil displays ads on his blog. I don't, but sometimes include Amazon links in my book posts to get the kickback (see below). Other people take what they deem to be a higher road, not choosing, as we do, to exploit the attention we have managed to gather, to wring pennies from the hapless plebes subjected, however willingly, to our drivel.

The web -- indeed the world -- would be a much poorer place without the collective generosity of its contributors. And to look at Anil's question further: Is it more wrong for people not to reap rewards from their algorithmically computed interestingness than it is for them to not reap rewards when they are recognized on your blog as being interesting? Is a human assessment of interestingness less valuable than computer assessed interestingness? I mean, he gets traffic in part because of the other sites he discusses . And all the links on his blog post are there for free -- I'm assuming he's not cutting a revshare with the sites he links to (Anil, re: the interestingness link? Email me for my address for the checks...). I'm linking to him now, but to be sure, he wants me to, he's got his blog monetized.

This equation makes the idea of putting a web site up without charging for it seem naive, even stupid. Look at all the web sites deigned interesting by PageRank? By the principles of the economy of interestingness, they should be getting a cut of the ads served adjacent to them. And the biggest interestingness freeloaders of all have to be the ISPs -- all this interesting content provided by me, Anil and everyone else is the reason millions of Americans monthly DSL bills.

Everyone needs to get paid, businesses need to thrive. I don't begrudge blogs like Anil's their AdSense links, or Flickr displaying ads on free accounts (I may have a bias there). But monetization strategy or no, the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet. It is why I have always loved it. When I discovered, in 1994, that there was no web page about Vladimir Nabokov on the internet, I immediately built one, cutting and pasting HTML from another web site, taking up residence on a friend's server. Thousands of people did the same, about herpetology, or collector lunchboxes. Later, when that server went away, I moved the site to Geocities. But never once did it occur to me that I should get paid.

In The Gift by Lewis Hyde, he talks about why artists, and people in the "caring professions" -- i.e. nursing, teaching, etc. are poorly paid. Certain things in life seem repugnant if you when you put a monetary value to them: I'll have dinner with my senile grandmother if you pay me $50. We're going to let your father die unless you pay us $500,000 to keep him alive on life support for another month. Of course you won't pay that/of course you'll pay anything it takes. Giving and caring include even the simple acts of putting pieces of yourself on the internet -- your photos, your poems, your words -- and these too are fraught with difficulty when it comes to money.

One more thing. If economies are things that get gamed, attention economies are among the hardest to game -- it's really difficult to make something uninteresting interesting. They're also in a condition of radical readjustment. You don't need to be television anymore to get a significant amount of attention. You can be Caterina Fake, or Anil Dash. Especially if everyone links to you and increases your....interestingness.

• Me and You and Everyone You Know, especially the "Back and Forth. Forever" which everyone who as seen the movie will understand. Wait! Since yesterday the Miranda July web site has changed! I hate that! Where is the blog? Oh phew.

• The Encyclopedia Britannica entries on defunct card games. I tried to blog about this the other night but my computer was sulking.

• The Giant O'Brien by Hilary Mantel. Fantastic, gut-wrenching, dark. Wow. Lent to me by Quentin after I told him I was disappointed in No Country for Old Men but love Blood Meridan and Suttree. I've ordered a bunch more Hilary Mantel books as a result.

You're not going to get away with not looking at this wonderful house sewn in nylon, the childhood home of Korean artist Do-ho Suh. It's an exhibit from two years ago, in Providence, Rhode Island. Isn't the bathroom particularly beautiful?

We went to Myth last night for dinner -- hard to get a reservation there, so we kept it in spite of the fact that our dinner companion had a veterinary emergency and had to stay home consoling her wounded doggie. We were waiting at the bar for our table when some women came in with big bleached hair wearing skirts better suited for use as tube tops. I don't know about you, but I find it impossible not to look at women wearing spandex leopard print lingerie in the middle of a dining room. Every convex part of their bodies was Japanese anime convex; every concave part a weird brown wrinkly no-man's land between the attention-commanding jumbos front and back. The gents accompanying these blowup dolls were recently emerged from today's Tammany Hall, great groaning fat loads of men, old leering men, men in their 60s who gave the impression of massive exposure in international securities markets, ill-gotten gains, matrimonial betrayal. I suddenly realized the women were hookers. Which made the atmosphere there at Myth a bit weird.

Across from us was a Chinese anorexic with her Chinese anorexic boyfriend. You find anorexics at restaurants like these with suprising regularity -- anorexics don't necessarily dislike food, they just dislike their bodies after they have eaten food. She excused herself from the table after every course to go, presumably, barf up the tasty dinner before it got too acidic and sour with stomach bile. Anorexics often have enormous eyes, given their hollow cheeks. Boyfriend went to the bathroom after every course too. A match made in heaven.

Stewart became interested in the silk caftan worn by the woman across from us -- see how lovely, will you wear one of those? he asked. I've never considered myself a caftan or muu-muu candidate before -- Earth Mother, yeek -- I don't even like sarongs, to difficult to tie. But it turned out to be a sham caftan after all, just a beautiful scarf. A let-down. When I thought about it, he'd noticed other shirts with a lot of billowy fabricky sleeves, which his mother wore as a hippie in B.C. and thought this may be some weird Oedipal thing he was unaware of and decided not to buy shirts with billowy sleeves on them, ever.

After we commisserated with the waiter about the illuminated water gimmic pressed on him by the Norwegian water distributor, cocktails were served that were so strong as to impair our ability to order further drinks. The food was foodoo: pumpkin soup with duck confit, sweetbreads and crispy wonderfullies, salmon in a miso broth, beef cheeks, tender and kissable. Go there and eat, my friends, and when you leave you will be full, happy, poor, possibly drunk, and exposed to strange, alluring and distasteful individuals in the guise of other customers. Emerged, perhaps from their very own myths.

These look like some good lectures (I can't believe they made that a graphic!) -- Miranda July is coming, and I have to decide if I'm going to go see her or Broken Social Scene. She's also appearing the following night at Yerba Buena, which makes the decision a little easier. Yes, one of these days I'm going to post my Upcoming events on the sidebar.

Coming a little late to the party, I've just discovered actually buying things on eBay. I had thought it was just for looking at curious objects, but then discovered that you could actually pay for them and have people ship them to you. A revelation of sorts. I bought an enormous pair of Count Dracula style candelabras with eight arms that are almost as tall as I am. Perfect for the game of Werewolf we are having here in November. I also bought a model stomach from the 1880s, made in Warsaw, Poland. See the little hinges? You can open it up. I'm going to use it as a candy dish, or, perhaps, for serving the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.

I saw this woman drive by the other day and she was laughing hysterically, her face all smiley and happy, it was amazing. But there was no one with her in her in the car, she was just talking on the phone. And I thought: how weird. Facial expressions are essentially involuntary; they're meant to communicate with other people, and yet they occur even in situations where other people are not present. Funny!

Maybe what is weird is that technology has made it possible for us to communicate with each other without being physically present, so we throw off smiles and laughter and angry expressions and quizzical and unhappy and bored expressions without any audience for them. Trees falling in a forest.

Weirder still are those conversations people have with themselves in the mirror (yo, other people, not me!) trying to see how they look and sound to other people, the whole Japanese mirrored rooms and karaoke booth thing where people prepare themselves for human encounters.

What bizarre creatures we are, if I landed here from another planet I wouldn't understand the need for comedy clubs, we are hilarious and strange, always, all the time.

My ISP (Dreamhost) changed from Debian X to Debian Y which fouled up the Berkeley DB which was running on my old version of Movable Type. Stewart helped me debug this (with some help from Anil), installed MT 3.2, and this morning after the Dreamhost ppl di this or that, I was finally able to move everything over.

It's also been a bad time for my blog not to be working, since I've read so many good books I've wanted to write about, done so many interesting things, and watched so many interesting movies. But it all will come soon.

Hopefully this won't result in ookiness when I publish this post. We shall see!

A delightful photo, found on Flickr, by Anandamide.

I was at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference today, appearing on a Tagging panel first thing in the morning with Joshua Schachter, Jeff Veen, Tony Stubblebine and Tantek Celik. But I think the best part of my day was when I ran into Tim O'Reilly in the hallway and told him that I also was a big fan of Wallace Stevens and he said:

It is from the poem Esthètique du mal.

Eric and Nikki got married this weekend, hooray! Their wedding invitation requested hats, and from hats, everyone's outfit followed. As a result, it was one of the best-dressed weddings I'd ever attended. And sweet and lovely, you know those weddings where everyone's so happy they're together? Hooray!

I was telling Stewart that Heidegger'd said we're too late for God but too early for Being, and he said, but the latter's not true, at least not in California. This made me laugh.

And another choice quote, discovered this weekend:

War, language, power, meaning. All I want is language and meaning. This weekend I was trying to explain to my new acupuncturist that I was a General and not a Soldier, but perhaps I'm neither, just a wrangler of language (which calls to mind that lovely title of that Barthes book, The Rustle of Language, what a title.)

I have a new acupuncturist. I say new as if I'd had another one, but I haven't. I've been sleeping dreadfully lately. Part of it is that I am no longer self-employed and so can't keep weird hours (up at noon, lunch a 4). Part of it is that I have to spend two hours a day commuting. And part of it is I'm working hard, but in the wrong way. (I love working hard.) So, acupuncture, so far so good. And now this:

I am reading Seven Pages Missing.