And for the SF Weekly, a bunch of new blurbs on writers Taylor Plimpton and Angela S. Choi, comedy by Alex Koll and The Denial Show, and the Gallery Hijinks Inaugural Exhibition.

I’ve been previewing a lot of literary and arts events for the SF Weekly, including authors David Mitchell and Tony O’Neill, and street artist David Choe. Over at Shareable, I’m working on a series of posts about social news sites, and have posts up about the iPad app Flipboard and Google Reader’s new social features. I’ve also written recently about the intersections between crypto-forestry and guerrilla gardening.

Significant Objects: The Secret History of Products: Can an unwanted, discarded item of consumer kitsch be imbued with new value by the simple act of telling its story? And what if that story was completely fabricated? This is the question that Significant Objects poses.

Crowdsourcing Disaster Response: As oil continues to pour into the gulf, many of us feel overwhelmed, unable to respond usefully in the face of such devastation. Much has been made of the power of social media and mobile phones to organize people and spur fundraising efforts during times of crisis, but SMS donations only go so far.

Community Solutions to Food Deserts: One of the most confounding issues confronting urban planners, activists, and health food advocates in recent years is the Food Desert phenomenon: low-income urban areas in a city where fresh food is difficult to obtain.

Gadget Lust vs. Good Enough: When last year’s blazing tech becomes today’s e-waste, rendered obsolete by an ever-shortening hype cycle, when will we ever have enough?

Open Cities, Open Data: How do we get closer to a more shareable future? One promising route is the Open Data movement, initiatives to leverage the sheer bulk of data collected from city institutions and services and make them available to citizens who will leverage that data in innovative ways.

Is American Exceptionalism A Myth? Conventional wisdom states that individualism is coded within the very DNA of the American people. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exceptionalism manifesto "Self-Reliance," the American character has defined itself by its iconoclasm. But are Americans actually uniquely individualistic in practice?

(Note: the first line of my performance was cut off in this video; so just imagine me yelling “This One’s A Classic!” in boastful old man voice before watching.)

Here’s a teaser of the story:

“This one’s a classic,” Old-Timer Al said to us, sternly examining our VW Bus parked across three spaces in the Wal-Mart lot, yellow in the sun as a sea lion carcass. Tendrils of rust crept from the wheel wells. It was far from a classic.

“Sure is,” Kevin responded.

“All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours,” Cody said.

“I couldn’t let you boys do that,” Al said to us. “How much do you want for her?”

“Seriously, you can just have it for free if you take over the title.” All we wanted was to be rid of this damned bus, which we’d bought off an acquaintance a month earlier for $800. Still, Al wanted to haggle.

“Okay, how about $300″ Cody said.

“$150″ Al responded. “It’s a deal.”

We’d finally found a taker. Stuck in the tiny town of Yreka, ten miles south of the Oregon-California border, we were selling our only form of transportation for $150, and it was the best news of the day.

Also performing are Darwyn Jones and Andrew Reilly, and there will be musical accompaniment by Elvis Bride. Doors at 7:00, music at 7:30, stories begin at 7:45. Tickets are available online here, and you can RSVP on Facebook.

* actual dead bus pictured, taken moments after it died!

The latest article is about Chicago’s Gabriel Levinson and his book bike. In short, Gabe rides his bike around Chicago during spring and summer weekends, stopping at public parks and distributing donated books to anyone who approaches him.

I’ve also got a number of blog posts up on the site:

The Unconsumption Un-Manifesto: About Rob Walker’s unconsumption blog/wiki/movement, an attempt to get people to reconsider what they’re consuming and what they do with unwanted products

Wisdom of the Swarm: ThinkTank collects the knowledge of your online community: covering Gina Trapani and ExpertLabs’ ThinkTank app, that aggregates responses to questions posed on social networks

Video Games as a Force for Social Good: a follow-up to the DEMO Magazine article about Mindy Faber’s work with Open Youth Networks to use video games as a tool for social good and community outreach

Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, Spring 2010: iPad eBook Preview from Paul M Davis on Vimeo.

I bought an ipad this weekend, and I adore it. This usually-reflexive-cynic is blown away. It makes reading digitally–be the source the Internet, an eBook, or Instapaper–a totally tactile, pleasant, satisfying reading experience. Unlike reading on a browser at a desktop, which I’ve always found vaguely dissatisfying and frustrating.

Totally pumped, I began work on an ebook anthology of work from Is Greater Than. This is a preview of the first Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, an eBook designed for the iPad and other ePub-compatible eReaders. This is a very rough draft of what I hope to have submitted to the iBooks store and other eBook outlets by the end of the week. It will include features, art, comics, creative nonfiction, humor writing and fiction by myself, Brigid J. Barry, Jeff Severns Guntzel, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Carrie Sieh, Megan Stielstra and more.

I didn’t know a single thing about authoring epub ebooks before this weekend; it is ridiculously simple. Here’s a post I just wrote for Shareable.net about how you can make your own epub books (which, for the record Cory Doctorow et al, are as easy to drag and drop into iTunes and sync with the iPad, DRM-free, as mp3′s have been with every iteration of the iPod and iPhone since version one.) Read it here.

The new zinemaking is how I see it. Fuck yeah.

This post written on my iPad.

The zombie apocalypse began on a frigid February morning in Chicago when Mildred Cavanagh, age 82, slipped and fell while attempting to step around bum’s puke that crystallized on the sidewalk. When Cavanagh came to a few moments later, she raised herself from the ground, gathered the groceries that had fallen out of her cart, and faintly murmured the word “brains”. Cavanagh was shot six hours later by Officer Mike Kowalski as she attempted to suck her son-in-law’s brain through a straw she’d bored in his skull.

The apocalypse took decades longer than it does in the movies: three weeks after Cavanagh’s fall, only 23% of Chicago’s population had joined the undead. The zombies continued with their day-to-day tasks, harvesting brains under the cover of night. Undead teachers went to school, CTA employees continued to drive their buses, and city workers drank coffee on the side of blocked streets during rush hour. In the early days, it was difficult to tell who was or was not a zombie: there were polite zombies, asshole zombies, plumber zombies and day-trading zombies, Jew zombies and goy zombies, gruff meatpacking zombies on the South Side and college-student zombies who brained their roommates with bongs.

Read the rest (on your mobile device) at Cellstories.

UPDATE 4/30/10: This story is also now up on Is Greater Than. Read it here.

In addition, I spent much of November working on a couple of giant articles, one for Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine (not yet published,) as well as a decade-long retrospective of my hometown’s music scene for the Santa Cruz Weekly. There’s a piece I wrote for community-minded tech site Shareable.net that is in their hopper–not sure when it’s going to run, but I’ll post a link when it does. I also attempted, and failed, at NaNoWriMo, stalling out at 12,000 words.

In other big news, Is Greater Than is re-launching on December 30th. It went on an unannounced hiatus around the middle of the year, due to a sense that I needed to re-focus the site and find a way to re-engage with it. With the help of fellow editor Brigid J. Barry, I’ve figured out those issues, and I’m really excited to get it up and running once again. It’ll have an increased literary and cultural focus: one of my realizations of the past year has been that I just don’t have the stomach to run a politically-focused publication, and that if I wanted to continue working on the site, I needed to focus on topics that gave me a sense of personal satisfaction in addition to the ulcers. There’s a ton of great political work in the archives from many great contributors, and I’ll always be grateful to them. It’s not what the new incarnation will be, though: instead, we’ll be focusing more on cultural criticism, fiction and creative nonfiction. If you’d like to pitch or submit a piece, please take a look at the submissions page for details.

Dan Sinker’s Cellstories project is finally live

I’m honored that my story “Life on Mars” is second up to bat during Cellstories’ launch week: it’ll be visible from your iPhone/iTouch/gPhone/iClone today (Wednesday, September 2nd) and again this weekend. Head over to Cellstories on your phone to read it. If you’re without a fancy phone with a decent web browser, you can listen to me reading the story on this podcast.

The service has been getting a ton of great press, including from Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Reader, Reuters, and the WBEZ Chicago Public Radio blog.

Also very exciting: I’ve been invited to join Serendipity Theatre Collective’s 09-10 season of the 2nd Story storytelling cycle. I’ve long been an admirer of their work, and I can’t wait to collaborate with the prodigiously talented writers and directors already involved in the project.

In other news: I interviewed Nathan Maxwell of Flogging Molly about his new solo project for the newly-launched Verbicide Magazine (which looks great,) and am working on a piece about the challenges facing indie publishers adapting to the web for Utne Reader. In-between those projects, I’m rethinking Is Greater Than and have some exciting ideas to re-launch it, and I’m blogging with a number of IGT peeps over at 12 Pt. Plan.

As always, thanks for reading!