Welcome. I’m Jacob Sam-La Rose, and here’s what you need to know: I’m a published poet; I devise and facilitate projects for schools and other institutions, emerging poets, teachers, literature professionals and other creatives; I’m a geek for web technology and productivity; and I’m pretty handy with a camera. I exist in a few different places online – this particular site serves as my lifestream, an overview of what I’ve been doing on the interwebs. The content you see here is aggregated from:

Miscellany (my personal blog)
Forthen&Evermore (my iPhone photoblog)
Jacobsamlarose.com (my professional face)
Twitter (text messages to the world)

If any of the above sparks your interest, don’t be shy in saying hello (Jacob at jsamlarose dot com).

“Is pursuit of clarity technique? Maybe. I hope so. I want to make sense. I want to be clear and say something true about the world, my world. I recently saw a statement from an editor who said “I am certainly not advocating a return to know-nothing plainspeak.” Since when does plainspeak equal know-nothing? I’m not talking about dangerously folksy politicians here. I’m talking about art. I think it’s very scary to be direct and clear – in a poem, in prose, in life — because people will be able to see you. Really see you. It’s very vulnerable, being seen. But I’m not much interested in playing around with language for the sake of playing around. I’m not interested in toying with readers. I’m with Vonnegut on this: pity the readers. I have very little patience with pyrotechnics. We all have so little time.” - How a Poem Happens: Lori Jakiela
At @daddydark's Accidental Powercut gig. Acoustic music in a church. And Mr Dark's looking trim. Must be all that RunDemCrew business...
Last.Fm vs iTunes Ping? Wondering if they'll intermesh or collide... #mac
iOS4.2 on the iPad in November. Was hoping sooner, but can't complain. Steve's currently pimping updates to every iPod model... #mac
I've been asked to spread the word: Tongues on Fire - A tribute to the Black Panthers, f/ The Roots, The Last Poets... http://bit.ly/cMbnBY
In this day and age, I take a very dim view of any web based systems that only support IE or Firefox. Very, very dim.
Just found the Prosody radio show, and the poetry of Jennifer Perrine. Pretty good start to the morning! Listen here - http://bit.ly/cBfzYT
Most Listened To (Week Ending 2010-8-29):
  1. Shed (39)
  2. Mount Kimbie (23)
  3. James Blake (17)
  4. Bunny on Acid (14)
  5. Dirk Rumpff (9)

Did I really listen to that much Shed? Wow. Drifting into tech-house territory. Mount Kimbie’s still up high, James Blake is here for ‘CMYK’ , Bunny on Acid is here for ‘Snow’, and as much as I really like Dirk Rumpff’s Offtrack Radio Show, it only charted this week because he played Dimlite’s remix of Ahu’s ‘To Love’ (let’s just say there was much looping of that specific part of the show). Looking forward to the release…

Chart powered, as ever, by the popular Last.fm/Tumblr pipe by JoeLaz

RT @flippedeye: To read all the blogs from the @flippedeye residency on @incwriters, visit: http://bit.ly/flinb14 Thanks for reading & p ...
Michael O'Hare's open letter to his incoming Berkeley students... http://j.mp/9NZTva

Smoking. On the Southbank. 

'Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” One sentence, common words, but never before placed in that order. And yet, oh and yet, all of us spend our days saying the same things to each other, time after weary time, living by clichaic, learned response: “I love you”, “Don’t go in there”, “You have no right to say that”, “shut up”, “I’m hungry”, “that hurt”, “why should I?”, “it’s not my fault”, “help”, “Marjorie is dead”. You see? That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.' -

Stephen Fry (via quotesaliraefinds, via linguish)

Note: Linguish has recently become the hot new thing on my Tumblr dashboard. Recommended reading.

MANUAL FOR AN EFFECTIVE WORK DAY

- Wake up early
- Do the MOST IMPORTANT WORK in the morning
- If it is important – STAY AWAY FROM THE OFFICE

Take one day – which is your day.
- Turn off the phone
- Don’t check email
- Let everyone know you are not available on that day

Keep an active and accessible list of tasks, needs, wishes:
- Make wish and needs visible | accessible | in the office

Utilize Interns and volunteers
- Have them do the little stuff – pass it off

Focus on the big picture

dream

ask others to help you


a letter
from greg kelly,
(via facebook) may 24, 2010

-

via Max Fenton

Interns and volunteers? Dang. Knew I’d forgotten something.

Sandra Alcosser on Brevity in #poetry | Robert Peake http://instapaper.com/zqnvxp51T

Speaker’s Corner, Hyde Park 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett 

For 10 years (1999-2009) I ran a moderately popular website and mailing list called Metaroar - dedicated to spreading the word about poetry and live literature events and opportunities in London. It started as a bcc’d email to a group of people I bumped into back in the late 90s when I was making an effort to attend every poetry or spoken word event I could find. Someone always wanted to find out when the next gig was, so I took email addresses in exchange for a promise to keep people in the know. The first few hand-crafted messages went out from an AOL account (that has long since been mothballed), based on whatever I’d heard was up and coming. And it grew from there.

Fast forward a few years. The mailout spawned a website, with a direct email subscriber-base of over a thousand people, not to mention some fairly respectable web stats. No ad-supported revenue, no funding, just an hour or two a day, and some extra time at the top and tail of each week to research and queue content. I stepped back from Metaroar late 2009 (for a number of different reasons - that’s another blog post), though the site’s been available since then like an old, abandoned building. Yesterday, I turned off the life-support. The account that the site lived on was up for renewal, and it made no financial sense to maintain it. I archived databases and squirrelled through directories, Wordpress backups, defunct installations of forum software, orphaned pages and all the different versions of the site - wading through all the code that accumulated over the years. And really, it was like wandering through an old house I haven’t visited in years. Of course, the code, the data, doesn’t quite capture the ideas and vision that existed in between. They remain like ghosts. 

Halfway through drafting this, it occurred to me that it’s an elegy of sorts. I learned a lot from running the site, beyond all the mechanical skills that came with managing a website, listings service and brand from top to bottom. And there’s another lesson here - something about letting go. I spend so much time bouncing from project to project, I (and when I say “I”, I’m also speaking to a bunch of people who share my particular array of type ‘A’ proclivities…) rarely allow myself the time to appreciate the significance of any individual enterprise - and if it’s tough to do that when I’ve got something right, it’s even harder to do that when I don’t think I’ve nailed it. I’d be lying if I said I’d made peace with what I’d hoped the project would achieve and I’ll admit, I still regularly think about setting something up in it’s place. All this time, I’ve kept a light on in the window, just in case I ever wanted to come back. But really, it’s well past time to move on. 

RT @ScrivenerApp: WordPunk article on what tech genre writers and editors use in their day to day writing/editing lives http://bit.ly/a0C3T2
Most Listened To (Week Ending 2010-8-22):
  1. Mount Kimbie (38)
  2. Sepalcure (35)
  3. Cecilia Stalin (26)
  4. Andreya Triana (15)
  5. Daisuke Tanabe (14)

Powered by the popular Last.fm/Tumblr pipe by JoeLaz

Hm. It took me a minute to get there, but dubstep finally took control of my playlist last week. Digging Mount Kimbie hard. Andreya Triana? She’s up here courtesy of a Mount Kimbie remix of ‘A Town Called Obselete’. As for Cecilia Stalin - find her versions of Afro Blue. For a piece of music that’s been covered a zillion different times, she’s put a couple of interesting spins on.

“…photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don’t speak to me of the document; I don’t really believe in it, particularly now. A picture’s not the world, but a new thing.” - Tod Papageorge

(Quote via Alex Soth, via A Photo Student, via La Pura Vida

Yes, I know it isn't Friday yet. But you really should follow @Meryle11, even if only for her #studentwatch. Go ahead. I'll wait.