Augie March sings, "for one crowded hour you were the only one in the room." This line reminds me of another piece from Kundera's The Curtain, a discussion under the heading, "The beauty of a sudden density of life."

We do not lead lives of epic proportions, but we have our moments. Kundera describes the epic beauty of the boyhood fantasy of encountering three women in a single day.

We lurch from stasis to change to stasis again, just like the geology of plate tectonics and erosion. It is the duty of a short story to capture a single shift, and the duty of a novel to collect them all.

At this point, infused with Kundera, Augie March and the final scenes of As it is in Heaven, I suggest the following metaphor, that the novel should press on the keys of our lives' changes and play a single chord. 

Next thing, I read the final sentences Milan wrote and realise I have just plagiarised him: "and their three bodies were like three long notes played each on a different instrument and bound together in a single chord. It was a quite particular beauty, the beauty of a sudden density of life." I guess I read this passage a couple days ago and forgot the details but retained the images. My brain cannot be trusted.

"But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin."

Milan Kundera is obsessed with the idea of kitsch, which is as it should be as the novelist explores that which is new (it's right there, in the name). To write a novel in the style of another is an act of creating a piece of kitsch. He discusses this in his recent essay on novel writing, The Curtain.

The novel in French is the nouvelle romaine (new romance), and Kundera contends that romance and kitsch are opposites. Now, romance has a much broader definition than the common association today with amorous affairs, but it is interesting to see how this opposition works for that narrow definition.

Valentine's Day is an annual celebration of romance that is heavily promoted by those who have a profit motive: flower sellers and restaurateurs. To me, it is a tacky, slightly creepy occasion that reminds me of fish spawning. Valentine's Day is kitsch romance because one does not conduct an amorous affair according to a cultural calendar: it is a creative process with a rhythm uniquely its own.  

Character depends on context. I remember as a kid being shocked at the way Indiana Jones would return from the high adventure of the jungle to his staid lecturing role at a fusty college.

Another example is in Evelyn Waugh's A handful of dust where the main character abandons England and sets off for no special reason to the Amazon, where he is trapped by a crazy man in the jungle and forced to read Dickens aloud.

What is it with the jungle anyway? It's a place to explore the concept of civilisation. In the wilderness, we carry the empire of civilisation inside of us, or, like Kurtz, we abandon it. It tests who we are when we are beyond social norms.

On flattening myself against the grass, I am chemical: an oxidation reaction on the skin of a planet. The citric acid cycle is my heritage; Mitochondria are my family. I am 61% oxygen. I am also gold, tellurium, uranium, molybdenum. Elements contemplate themselves lying on the grass.

On flattening myself against the grass, I am physical. Dandelion seeds accelerate into my gravitational field at 5 nanometres per second per second.

On flattening myself against the grass, I am overcome. I blink and watch invisible things: the blood in my eyelids, the floaters drifting over my retinas, Haidinger's brush, a spash, like a yellow bowtie. I stare at the sun.

On flattening myself against the grass, I think of myself as a body in motion. Every decision belongs to chemistry; every action belongs to physics. 

My voice reflected back off a slatted fence is one of my favourite sounds. Pulsed Matthew in perfect rhythm.

They say that the ability to keep a rhythm is correlated with your intelligence as it is something to do with the way things are synchronised up in your head. I am not sure that thinking is exactly the same as a waltz, so I'm skeptical — but that could just be my retarded brain which got no rhythm.

This week I:

• waited by the phone for my landlord to call, twice;
• learned to fit contact lenses;
• bought an expensive jacket;
• fixed my broken weblog;
• taught a computer to read a few sentences;
• programmed, planned, managed, documented, tutored, facilitated, liaised, photographed, and even started a client's car;
• discovered Beach House and Asobi Seksu;
• made two mix CDs, neither of which sound like Johnny's;
• talked at length about running businesses and making choices in life to a friend who is closing her shop;
• talked to a far-away friend;
• spent time alone and with friends;
• made it home six nights out of seven;
• was sleepless;
• discovered a musical soulmate;
• started running again;
• wrote poems in my own way;
• made space in my life for Caren;
• loved;
• felt lucky and grateful and euphoric.

The cliff nearby holds a V: a gully flooded with lava and sheared back to a plane. But a clogged gully is nothing at all, just lines recording natural history.

When everything you are is everything you are not, you are the disarticulated wing of the albatross I found last month, dead on the beach. You are the angle it forms against the sand, inconsequential. You are just like me, foraging for meaning amongst crumpled feathers and dust, and finding none. 

Forgotten sweet summer leaves and sun,
this landscape of rivers and doors
leading anyplace but here —
everything is a metaphor for change,
if you want it to be.
(Everything already changed.)
I'm still not right.

As I dip into the last of the apricot jam,
I wonder what you would do.
So much depends
on whether you would restock the same
or whether you would diversify . . .
black cherry or . . . feijoa?
Contemplating fruit I realise
I do not know my own answer.
But the question must mean something.
As so much depends on it.

At the weekend, a friend gave me a list of musicians I might like, scribbled on a bus timetable. I was surprised to find I already had samples of most of them on hand -- no doubt picked up on sites like last.fm or Stereogum.

As information becomes separated from physical atoms, we are shifting from the economics of famine to glut. Today, the problem isn't so much getting music as it is finding the good music.

I was surprised though to discover I needed help finding the good music that was already on my computer's hard drive. The scrap of paper was like a path cut into a dark forest.

Information retrieval has shifted markedly in the past 10 years from a categorisation model (Library of Congress) to tags, keywords, folksonomies, collaborative filtering, and personal recommendations (the mavens Gladwell talked about in the Tipping Point). This is a good thing as anything of interest transcends its boundaries.

There have been two exceptional changes over the past ten years. The first is obvious: the democratisation of publishing and the resultant community of voices. This shift in the way we store and search knowledge is the second, and it is equally important.

Muhammad Yunus on microcredit loans to third world women at the Grameen Bank:

When she says, "no, I can't handle money" don't accept her answer because it's not her voice. It's the voice of history, the voice of fear that we have generated in her for generations.