Books
I usually take notes while reading books, so that I can return to them (the notes) later, to refresh my memory, and clarify certain points. These often turn into little mini-critiques, of course. I thought I’d post them here . . . If you’ve read any of these books, I’d be interested to hear your opinion.
July 25
Bonk by Mary Roach
I read Stiff a couple of years ago, at my sister's urging, and enjoyed it. Roach is an engaging writer, who brings a good deal of humor to topics that might make some people squirm (death in the earlier book, sex in this one).
Bonk looks at the science of sex. That is, sexual research and researchers, as well as their subjects. Of course we hear about Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson. But we also learn about some who went before them, such as Robert Dickinson, a gynecologist who in the 1890s was taking detailed sexual histories of his patients, and trying to improve marriages that were being destroyed by bad sex. And then Marie Bonaparte (great-grand-niece of Napoleon), who believed that the distance of the clitoris from the vagina was the deciding factor in why some women can readily achieve orgasm through intercourse while others cannot. She had such confidence in this that she went so far as to surgically relocate her own clitoris. To no avail, apparently.
Bonaparte later met Sigmund Freud “and decided to become a psychoanalyst. Freud was no friend of the clitoris. Freudian theory holds that grown women who derive their sexual satisfaction from their clitoris are stuck in a childlike state. This ‘phallic’ phase is supposed to end at puberty, when a woman embraces her proper role as a passive, feminine being.” Er, right.
But the book’s not all about men and women. There are also pigs. Roach visits a pig farm in Denmark where she describes the techniques used by the inseminators (humans) to produce the most piglets. Because “research by the Department of Nutrition and Reproduction at Denmark’s National Committee for Pig Production showed that sexually stimulating a sow while you artificially inseminate her leads to a 6 percent improvement in fertility.” You’ll have to read the book—I’m not going to describe it.
There are monkeys. We learn about the faces made by stump-tailed macaques when they have an orgasm. There are rabbits, which are studied for vaginal and clitoral blood flow. We learn about the surgical grafting of chimpanzee testicles into men’s scrotums (I kid you not) . . .
And there are mechanisms. Did you know that there is the female equivalent of the penis pump? To increase blood flow to the clitoris. We learn about mechanical penis-cameras. We learn about people having intercourse inside MRI machines for the sake of science.
There is a section on how men can perform Kegel exercises to improve impotence, as well as “post-micturation dribble,’ a section on auto-castration, and one on penile implants. Roach describes the differences between FSAD (female sexual arousal disorder), FOD (female orgasmic disorder), and HSDD (hypoactive sexual desire disorder).
Do you know what a rectal probe electroejaculator is? Just what it sounds like. Did you know that 40-50 percent of people with spinal cord injuries can still have orgasms? You will learn a lot from this book.
Let’s end with a quote:
“I give you a sentence, my favorite sentence in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey, from Sexual Behavior in the Human Female: ‘Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male.’”
July 9
Weight by Jeanette Winterson
A retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules. Winterson has always enthralled me with her writing, and this book was no exception. Here’s an example of why:
“My father was Poseidon. My mother was the Earth.
My father loved the strong outlines of my mother’s body. He loved her demarcations and her boundaries. He knew where he stood with her. She was solid, certain, shaped and material.
My mother loved my father because he recognised no boundaries. His ambitions were tidal. He swept, he sank, he flooded, he re-formed. Poseidon was a deluge of a man. Power flowed off him. He was deep, sometimes calm, but never still.
My mother and father teemed with life. They were life. Creation depended on them and had done so before there was air or fire. They sustained so much. They were so much. To each other they were irresistible.
Both were volatile. My father obviously so, my mother more alarmingly. She was serene as a rock but volcano’d with anger. She was quiet as a desert but tectonically challenged. When my mother threw a plate across the room, the whole world felt the crash. My father could be whipped into a storm in moments. My mother grumbled and growled and shook for days or weeks or months until her rage fissured and crumpled entire cities or forced human kind into lava-like submission.”
July 3
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
I of course had heard about The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but hadn’t really been interested enough to read it. Then a friend invited me to go to hear Michael Pollan speak, and although I didn’t agree with everything he had to say I was very impressed with him. He was a very good speaker, very passionate and well educated on his topic. He was speaking about his newest book, In Defense of Food, and I decided to read it after revisiting his talk in a YouTube video.
Although he may seem to give up the game on the cover—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—there is a lot more to learn in these 200 pages. Chiefly, what constitutes “food?” For Pollan avers that much of what we consume today is not food but rather “edible foodlike substances.” He therefore recommends that we eat nothing that our great-grandmothers would not recognize as food.
The main thrust of Pollan’s argument is that we have lost track of what food is, and been bamboozled by nutritionism and nutrition science. Nutritionism is basically the rise to prominence of the idea that what is important is the individual nutrients in our foods that science has identified. And because we need scientists to identify them and explain them to us, they—and ultimately food marketers—have become the experts in whose hands we have placed our dietary faith. The term “nutrionism” was coined by Gyorgy Scrinis, who criticized the message underlying the healthy-eating debate which states that “we should understand and engage with food and our bodies in terms of their nutritional and chemical constituents and requirements—the assumption being that this is all we need to understand.”
Pollan begs to differ:
“[ ] most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace the fats in our diets with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.”
He claims that scientists and food marketers have “convinced us of three pernicious myths: that what matters most is not the food but the ‘nutrient’; that because nutrients are invisible and incomprehensible to everyone but scientists, we need expert help in deciding what to eat; and that the purpose of eating is to promote a narrow concept of physical health.”
And later:
“[ ] the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy.”
I was interested to learn how U.S. governmental agencies—for example the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, and the American Heart Association—began in the 1960s to set dietary standards regarding e.g. saturated fat intake, only to be challenged by the red meat and dairy industries, forcing a change in the wording of the guidelines. When in 1982 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report entitled Diet, Nutrition and Cancer, it “framed its recommendations in terms of saturated fats and antioxidants rather than beef and broccoli.” It was from this point on that “official” guidelines for average Americans began talking not about particular foods, but rather nutrients:
“In doing so, the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report helped codify the official new dietary language, the one we all still speak. Industry and media soon followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids, flavonols, carotenoids, antioxidants, probiotics, and phytochemicals soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible material formerly known as food.”
Pollan’s chief argument with this kind of emphasis on the constituent components of food is that it ignores the possible good and bad of the other components in the things we eat, and how they might interact to produce certain health benefits or dangers. Hence, as scientists learn more, the constant flip-flopping of what is considered healthful and what is harmful. One year butter is bad, and margarine is all the rage, the next year it has changed, when we learn that the trans fats produced by blasting vegetable oil with hydrogen to make it solid at room temperature may be more dangerous than the saturated fats they replaced. And worse yet, in his eyes, is the idea that if we know what nutrients we need in our foods, then we can simply manufacture our meals. Processed foods can come to be presented as more healthful than real, whole foods.
And so the rather simple advice with which he begins the book turns out to have quite a good grounding. I am now thinking that I might try more often to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
June 19
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
I had read Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour a few years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to this one. Then my cousin Maggie was here a few weeks ago, and saw the former on my shelf, and asked if I had read Kitchen Confidential. She told me that it was much better, and that I absolutely had to read it. Mind you, she works in a kitchen herself, so her opinion should count for something. And then, before I could even pick it up, she sent me a copy.
It was a very quick read - Bourdain’s writing style is very engaging and appropriate to the world he describes, one I myself know to some small extent, from my years working at a very fine restaurant in North Carolina back in the 80s. Not that our staff was as depraved and raunchy as those described in this book . . . and yet, many of the characters and elements were instantly recognizable. I was easily transported back to those days when reading Bourdain’s desciptions of the smells and tastes, the sweaty heat of the line at the height of the rush, the burns on the hands and arms, the antagonism that sometimes existed between wait staff and kitchen staff, and yes, some of the goings on that might occur in the walk-in or the changing room or after work . . .
June 14
Chromophobia by David Batchelor
“But this is what I want to argue: that colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture.”
Wow. That’s a hell of a premise for a book. But as usual, I quite enjoyed following along as someone takes a really close look at Art. Or one aspect of art, and design.
“Here is a near-perfect example of textbook chromophobia: ‘The union of design and colour is necessary to beget painting just as is the union of man and woman to beget mankind, but design must maintain its preponderance over colour. Otherwise painting speeds to its ruin: it will fall through colour just as mankind fell through Eve.’ This passage was written in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the appropriately named Charles Blanc, critic, colour theorist and sometime Director of the Arts in the 1848 Socialist government in France.”
Later:
“As Jacqueline Lichtenstein shows in her brilliant study of painting and rhetoric, The Eloquence of Color, evidence of chromophobia in the West can be found as far back as Aristotle, for whom the suppression of colour was the price to be paid for bailing art out from a more general Platonic iconophobia. For Aristotle, the repository of thought in art was line. The rest was ornament, or worse. In his Poetics, he wrote: ‘. . . a random distribution of the most attractive colours would never yield as much pleasure as a definite image without colour.’”
And Batchelor brought back for me a description of a film I much admire:
“The theme of colour as a fall from grace — or a fall into grace — can be updated a little. For example: Wim Wenders's 1986-7 film Wings of Desire, in which the viewer is taken to and fro between two worlds: the realm of the spirits and angels, and the sensuous world of embodied beings. We know where we are only because the latter is shown in full colour, but the spirit world is shown in black and white. When the angel (played by Bruno Ganz) falls to earth as a result of another fall — into love— he lands with a thud. Dazed and amazed, he looks around the Berlin wasteland into which he has dropped. He feels a small cut on the back of his head and looks at the blood left on his hand. He approaches a passer-by:
‘Is this red?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the pipes?’
‘They’re yellow.’
‘And him there?’ [pointing at some painted figures on the Berlin Wall]
‘He’s grey-blue.’
‘Him?’
‘He’s orange . . . ochre.’
‘Orange or ochre?’
‘Ochre.’
‘Red . . .Yellow . . . And him?’
‘He’s green.’
‘And the bit above the eyes?’
‘That’s blue.’
The first questions the angel asks are the names of the colours he sees. His fall from grace is a fall into colour, with a thud. It is a fall from the disembodied all-observing spirit world into the world of the particular and the contingent, a world of sensuous existence, of hot and cold, of taste and touch, but most of all it is a fall into a world. It is a fall into a world of consciousness and self, or rather a fall from super-consciousness into individual consciousness, but it is a fall into self made with the explicit purpose of losing the self in desire.”
The modernists (and architects) are also guilty:
“Heaven is white; that which gets closest to God — the Parthenon, the Idea, Purity, Cleanliness — also sheds its colour. But for Le Corbusier, ornament, clutter, glitter, and colour were not so much signs of primitive ‘degeneracy’, as they had been for Loos, as they were the particularly modern form of degeneration that we now call kitsch.”
Examples from literature are given (Moby Dick, of course), as well as from philosophers and of course painters:
“Kant: ‘The colours which give brilliancy to a sketch are a part of the charm. They may no doubt, in their own way, enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.’ Ingres: ‘Colour enhances a painting, but she is only a lady-in-waiting, because all she does is to make still more attractive the true perfections of art.’”
Inevitably, the discussion turns to language, and the terms various cultures use for colors.
“We point, sample and show rather than say. And in our pointing, sampling and showing we make comparisons. In doing this, we call for the help of something outside ourselves and outside language, and in the process we expose the limits of our words. However complex and sophisticated our powers of description, these films tell us that they are no match for the greater complexities of the world and of colour.”
And things I have learned before, in art classes as well as language classes:
“‘Colour has not yet been named’, said Derrida. Perhaps not, but some colours have. We have colour names, and so we have colours. But how many? A great many more than we can name, to be sure. The human brain can distinguish minute variations in colour; it has been said that we can recognize several million different colours. At the same time, in contemporary English, there are just eleven general colour names in common usage: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, grey. A lot has been said about these. They coincide with the hypothesis, put forward by the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in 1969, that all natural languages have between two and eleven basic colour terms. Furthermore, the Berlin-Kay hypothesis maintains that there is a consistent hierarchy within these terms: if a language has only two colour terms, they will be black and white; if it has three colour terms they will be black, white and red; if it has four colour terms they will be black, white, red and yellow or green; if it has five colour terms, it will include both yellow and green; and so on through blue and brown until purple, pink, orange and grey, for which Berlin and Kay found no consistent hierarchy in their test results.”
Some say that colors only exist as a construct of language:
“[John] Lyons: ‘I am assuming . . . that colour is real. I am not assuming, however, that colours are real. On the contrary, the main burden of my argument is that they are not: my thesis is that they are the product of the lexical and grammatical structure of particular languages.’”
Hmmm. I prefer “William Gass on the relationship between colour names and colours, starting with blue:
The word itself has another colour. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only a bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.”
June 10
Designing Design by Kenya Hara
I am fascinated by good writing about design. I think that a large part of it is the view it gives into my own psyche. To read others’ observations on the design world, and to know that there are people out there like me, who share certain obsessions, certain proclivities, and a particular mindset, is gratifying. Hara, as Li Edelkoort says in one of the introductions to this book, “discusses design like a philosophy of life.” Exactly.
John Maeda in another introductory essay: “I’m not surprised that Hara can carry on a perfectly rational conversation about something so basic as the color ‘white’ as if it were as important as a national crisis.”
In the first part of the book, Hara talks about Art and Design: “All the objects that shape our living environment, house floor, bathtub, toothbrush, are comprised of basic elements like color, form, and texture. The foundation of modernism is the concept that their shaping should be entrusted to the rational, lucid consciousness, whose aim is to organize those elements. And thus design thinking is, in a broad sense, construed to be the pursuit of universal balance and harmony of the human mind through rational, integrative manufacture; design refers to the will to interpret the meaning of human life and existence through the process of making things. Art, on the other hand, is the act of discovering a fresh human spirit.”
How about this: “In the world of design, color and shape are at the apex. Every time some product with a striking shape or made of extraordinary materials comes along, we’re dazzled. We’re amazed by the metamorphosis that a different shape can give an ordinary utensil. this power to bewitch the consumer at first glance with our solutions is one of the allures of design. But it’s not just that. the field of design is human perception. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, there is another possibility for design besides focusing on color, shape and texture. this is in the quiet observation of how to sense and how to make the viewer sense.”
On the relationship of technology to paper, books: “When you think about it, books as a medium for stocking definite information may be inconvenient. They’re heavy, they’re bulky, they get dirty and they fade with time. Their size is specifically tailored, yet they house an amount of information that could be easily contained in a tiny digital memory. But information is not just something to store in bulk or transmit at high velocity. If we coolly observe the relationship between information and the individual, what becomes important is how deeply we can appreciate information. As far as books go, we may have a more pleasant user experience and be more satisfied with information presented on a material of moderate weight and texture than with information whose presence has become rarified through compression into a tiny space.”
Later:
“Thanks to the rise of electronic media, paper can finally behave as it can and should—as an intrinsically charming material.
If electronic media is reckoned a practical tool for information conveyance, books are information sculpture; from now on, books will probably be judged according to how well they awaken this materiality, because the decision to create a book at all will be based on a definite choice of paper as the medium. How fortunate an issue this will be for paper.”
And finally:
“Design is the energetic acknowledgement of our own living world through the making of things and through communication. Outstanding perceptions and discoveries should make us happy and proud as living human beings. New things are not born of nothingness, and they are not taken from without, but from our attempts to boldly awaken our everyday existences, which seem ordinary and mundane. Design is the provocation of the senses and a way of making us discern the world afresh.”
June 3
Plastic Culture - How Japanese Toys Conquered the World by Woodrow Phoenix
There are a whole lot of plastic toys placed around my office. Almost everybody has them on their desks, or on surrounding shelves. Most are of the action figure variety, but there is some urban vinyl as well. I myself have one “Smorkin’ Labbit” sitting in front of my monitor. And so even though I am not by any means an otaku, these figures are interesting to me, from the standpoint of designed objects.
This book does not attempt to be a catalogue of all of the various kinds of toys coming out of Japan. Rather, it gives a bit of background on one specific type - figurative toys - and their rise in post-war Japan with character merchandising and mascots, leading up to the “urban vinyl” trend which began in the 90s. All of the big names are covered: Michael Lau, Eric So, Junko Mizuno, Takashi Murakami, and Yoshitomo Nara.
“‘Urban vinyl,’ ‘designer toys,’ and ‘boutique toys’ are three of the most common names for a movement blending art, graphic design, and toys to create original items that come from a personal sensibility rather than the direct result of merchandising from television or film spin-offs, comics, or video games. These toys are usually made to be displayed, not played with.”
Phoenix finishes by discussing how plastic, from the 1950s onward, became a driving force in not just toys, but also in household objects and furnishings. Specific examples given of furniture designers using plastic include Saarinen’s Tulip chair and the Panton chair. And everybody knows the Alessi household goods made of plastic, which have innumerable imitators.
“Household appliances and general consumer products, whether made of plastic or not, have been given an artistic expression that makes them desirable or entertaining objects in their own right. Toys have shaped our relationship to product design in the wider world by changing what we require from many of the objects we use every day. In the age of plastic culture, why settle for the merely functional, when a witty or pleasurable design will not only work well, but also be fun to use?”
May 25
Speed Tribes by Karl Taro Greenfeld
I was aware of this book back when it was published, 1994, but had never read it. My friends Mike and Alyshia gave it to me a few months ago, and I think it was actually more fun to read it now, 8 years after leaving Japan. The "speed tribes" of the title are the new (at least at the time) youth of Japan, who bear little or no resemblance to the stereotypes we're all familiar with: the kimonoed geisha-types, the grey-suited salarymen, the uniformed schoolchildren.
Instead we read of the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, the Yakuza thugs, the body-con girls, the hostesses, the guys in bands, the otaku computer nerds . . . All accurate (insofar as I had contact with those groups), all really there, in the society but not really integrated. Or are they actually integrated, in their own way? Maybe the vaunted Japanese homogeneity is not all it's cracked up to be.
Anyway, it was fun to read and reminisce about Tokyo, as I read all the names of familiar places: Shibuya, Shinjuku, Kichjoji, Roppongi, etc. Actually, now that I think about it, one of the groups not really detailed in this book is the Harajuku fashion kids. Although Greenfeld mentions the 50s-style Elvis rockers, he doesn't talk about the Gothic Lolitas and all the other varieties described in, for example, Fruits, by Shoichi Aoki. Maybe it's because that scene has blown up much bigger since 1994?
May 15
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
I decided to re-read this, 25+ years having passed since I first encountered it. I’m sure that first read was at my father’s urging, as Wolfe is one of his all-time favorite authors. I can certainly understand why that is, both from a thematic standpoint, as well as a stylistic one. Despite Wolfe’s pessimism re the human condition, there are some beautiful passages here.
“And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.”
And this:
“His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.
And it was this that awed him—the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge—movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending, without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.”
April 23
Why Darwin Matters - The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer
Preaching to the choir here, of course. But it was an interesting read, not least because the author is a former creationist. And when half of all Americans reportedly reject the theory of evolution, I’d like to know what the deal is with at least one faction, the ID crowd. Intelligent Design is today’s flavor of Creationism, and Shermer explains just what kinds of “arguments” they present in their fight against evolutionary theory, and what is wrong with both their “science” as well as their theology.
Shermer cites many interesting–alarming–statistics, some of which I’d read from various sources in the past few years:
“The evolution-creationism controversy is a cultural tempest in a scientific teapot—the debate is entirely cultural, even as professional scientists go about their business without giving Intelligent Design a second thought. Consider the geographic and political differences in attitudes about evolution, starting with the fact that evolution is under debate only in America (there are a few small creationist pockets in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom). And within the states, geography matters: 51 percent of Southerners accept the strict creationist view that humans were created as we are now and only 19 percent believe that we evolved through natural selection, while 59 percent of Northerners accept evolution through natural selection, and only 32 percent are creationists.”
He also clarifies some aspects of Darwin’s theory that many people get muddled:
“An understanding of evolutionary theory, however, makes clear that natural selection is not ‘random,’ nor does it operate by ‘chance.’ Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes.”
And regarding Darwin himself:
“Darwin insisted that theory comes to and from the facts, not from political or philosophical beliefs, whether from God or the godfather of scientific empiricism.”
March 29
Paul Rand - Conversations with Students by Michael Kroeger
How could I not like a book which begins, “Everything is design. Everything!”
And yet I’m not sure how much I would’ve liked Paul Rand. He seems like an irascible egotist, but certainly the power of his pronouncements and his design philosophy is backed by an illustrious career. You may know his work, even if you don’t know his name. His best known work is in corporate identity, including the logos for IBM, UPS, and ABC. And a lot of what he said, I agree with.
“All art is relationships, all art. That is how you have to begin. That is where you begin. Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content.”
“It is important to know aesthetics - the study of form and content - which we also attribute to design. [Aesthetics and design are] the same things. Aesthetics is the study of design, the study of relationships, and it is very complicated.”
Everything is design. Certainly everything man-made is design. And so, because in the past my pronouncements about how Everything Counts have often fallen on deaf ears, it is gratifying to read this, in the closing section of the book:
“My wife, Kathy, and I had recently invested in some new quasi-Danish teak furniture. Paul sat down and, instead of graciously accepting our hospitality, he pointedly critiqued the crummy proportions and subtleties of our stuff. That was, in fact, the most gracious thing that he could have done. It was an important postgraduate lesson concerning design that enhanced my understanding, future standards, and respect for Paul. I was nudged to believe that excellence, as a way of life, was a prerequisite to being a superior designer or educator. How we live reflects our true understanding and nourishes us concerning what we do.” (Gordon Salchow)
March 21
Vladimir Nabokov - Alphabet in Color by Jean Holabird
Nabokov wrote some of the most beautiful sentences that I’ve ever read. Pale Fire especially stands out in my memory, I’m sure because I read it with the Post-Ginzanites in Tokyo, and we discussed it in detail . . .
But I did not know that he had the condition known as synesthesia, in which senses get mixed together. In Nabokov’s case, this manifested as colored hearing - he involuntarily attributed colors to the sounds of letters. He described what each English letter looked like to him in a passage in Speak, Memory. In the present book, the artist Jean Holabird gives her interpretation of those letters.
I am happy that I have not read all of Nabokov’s books . . . I have much to look forward to.
March 20
Graphic Design as a Second Language by Bob Gill
Brilliant. Gill is one of the biggies of 20th Century design in America, but I’d never read anything firsthand. He is eminently sensible. Here’s how he begins the book, with a quote from Mao Tse-Tung:
“Never begin an important design project unless you have had at least eight hours’ sleep followed by a nutritious breakfast.”
Everything he says is simple, and I think that therein lies the rub. As usual, simple is best. What happens is that he starts with very simple elements, but he looks at them very, very carefully. And something emerges. It’s usually something small, just turning something at an angle, or the scale changes, or two things become one. And you think, “Wow - that is brilliant.”
A couple of my favorite passages:
“The ideas that you have, which come from your personal take on every new job, every new experience, largely determine the quality of your graphic design.”
Later, when talking about “the grid” that every graphic designer who’s done any page layout knows about, and the need to sometimes leave the grid behind when designing:
“Have you ever seen Autumn leaves, after they fall to the ground, arrange themselves in a very boring composition? I haven't.”
March 18
I’m No Lady - When Objects Have Women’s Names edited by Sylvana Annicchiarico
This is a book about designed objects, largely chairs, which are named for women. It was written in Italy, and the huge majority of the designs are by Italians; Philippe Starck may be the only exception . . .
It begins with a series of essays, on language, and the relationship of a thing to its name, etc. This is predictably tedious, and veers toward the unreadable when the usual triumvirate are invoked: Foucault, Baudrillard, and Barthes.
“We are only interested that the language as a whole is the principle instrument of disclosure and a space of use, that is implementing the axis of gender opposition as a fundamental metaphor for understanding and describing much of the world.”
Huh? I’d like to think this is just an issue of bad translation from the Italian, but I don’t think so.
The book then moves on to the objects themselves. Oddly enough, I like almost none of them, regardless of their names: Diva (a mirror), Miss Sissi (a lamp), Irma (chair), Luisa (chair), Carlotta (chair), and many more. The only real exception is a chair by Marco Zanuso that I have coveted for a while now: the Lady armchair (available from DWR!).
March 15
Catching the Big Fish - Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch
I have a love/hate relationship with David Lynch. Some of his movies, such as Mulholland Drive, I love. With others I think he’s just trying too hard, is obtuse just to be so, enigmatic for the sake of some kind of coolness, I don’t know . . . But in all his films, even the ones I don't like so much, there are always some great scenes, some fantastic characters, something unlike any other director’s work. Plus with Twin Peaks, he created some of the only television that I watched from debut to end. I also saw an exhibition of his paintings in Tokyo, and recently saw some early short films that I thought were really good.
So when I saw this book in the store, without having read any prior reviews or notices, I bought it on the spot. Which is something I don’t do so much anymore - usually I go home and order on Amazon!
I had no idea that Lynch was into transcendental meditation. He likens his meditation to diving into water, and the ideas that he finds there to fish:
“Ideas are like fish.
If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and astract. And they’re very beautiful.”
The book is a series of very brief chapters, just two or three pages each, some on his meditation practice, some on his films, some on his early background, his painting, his family, identity, religion, drugs, dreams . . .
He gives some specifics on the making of certain films, and much of this is very interesting. But then there are examples of what I mean above, when I say that sometimes he is just being obtuse. On the box and the key in Mulholland Drive:
“I don’t have a clue what those are.”
March 10
Big Snake by Robert Twigger
I’m a sucker for books about snakes. They’ve fascinated me since I was a kid, when our dad would take us out on snake hunts - to capture them live, of course - whether wading through creeks in southern Ohio, lifting up rocks to find queen snakes and eastern water snakes, or middle-of-the-night drives through the Florida everglades, looking for diamondbacks, or yellow rat snakes, or, the most desired quarry of all, the indigo snake.
Twigger is after a larger specimen - the reticulated python, and he wants a world record snake, of at least 30 feet. As the cover says, the book is part travelogue, part natural history, and part mythology, as this pasty white poet from England, looking for one last adventure before getting married, and hoping to earn the $50,000 prize being offered for the live capture of a 30-foot snake, heads to the jungles of Malaysia without much of a plan.
The story is told with humor and a good dose of self-deprecation, and of course we learn along the way that there is more driving Twigger than just the prize money.
“It was what I knew I sought, the opposite of big-city isolation where one is reduced to an insignificant tag. Here in the jungle I was existing on full strength; trees falling depended on me for their reality, and listening to the trees fall I felt, for a brief while, the marked and primitive joy of custody of wild places.”
Also a motivating factor in Twigger’s adventure is his relationship with his deceased grandfather, "Colonel H. Twigger, soldier, boxer, photographer, engineer and, most latterly, beekeeper," a real hard-ass type whose manly ideals Twigger never seemed to live up to.
“At least part of my purpose with the Big Snake hunt was to do something he would have approved of.”
So, does Twigger get the snake in the end?
“The snake was inside me. I was free to choose. The other snake, Big Snake, was anything I wanted it to be. Desire, ambition, a place in the world. Catching Big Snake proved nothing or everything. Its real meaning was just symbolic. The snake is the messenger. Listen to the message, conscience, and decide. All the things inside me I had been putting off, thinking there was some external solution, or someone just round the corner waiting to deliver the answer on a plate. It wasn’t out there at all. it was in here.”
February 19
The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig
This is a book I’d been meaning to read for quite a while. His ideas are relevant to any content creator with work in the digital realm, and of course they relate directly to the work I do in selling and marketing IP online.
So what is this book about?
“The argument of this book is that always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. Thus, and especially in the digital age, the central question becomes not whether government or the market should control a resource, but whether a resource should be controlled at all. Just because control is possible, it doesn’t follow that it is justified. Instead in a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.”
Later:
“But now we have the potential to expand the reach of this creativity to an extraordinary range of culture and commerce. Technology could enable a whole generation to create – remixed films, new forms of music, digital art, a new kind of storytelling, writing, a new technology for poetry, criticism, political activism – and then, through the infrastructure of the Internet, share that creativity with others.
This is the art through which free culture is built. And not just through art. The future that I am describing is as important to commerce as to any other field of creativity. Though most distinguish innovation from creativity, or creativity from commerce, I do not.”
Later:
“. . . many resources should be free. The right to criticize a government official is a resource that is not, and should not be, controlled. I shouldn’t need the permission of the Einstein estate before I test his theory against newly discovered data. These resources and others gain value by being kept free rather than controlled. A mature society realizes that value by protecting such resources from both private and public control.
We need to learn this lesson again. The opportunity for this learning is the Internet. No modern phenomenon better demonstrates the importance of free resources to innovation and creativity than the Internet. To those who argue that control is necessary if innovation is to occur, and that more control will yield more innovation, the Internet is the simplest and most direct reply.”
Lessig differentiates between property rights in the sense of physical property versus intellectual property, ideas. And he argues for the benefits of the commons:
“The aim of an economy of ideas is to create incentives to produce and then to move what has been produced to an intellectual commons as soon as can be. The lack of rivalrousness undercuts the justification for governmental regulation. The extreme protections of property are neither needed for ideas nor beneficial.
For here is the key: The digital world is closer to the world of ideas than to the world of things.”
The distinction between rivalrous and nonrivalrous resources is of paramount importance to his argument:
“This distinction between resources helps us isolate the different reasons why a resource might need to be controlled.
1. If the resource is rivalrous, then a system of control is needed to assure that the resource is not depleted – which means the system must assure the resource is both produced and not overused.
2. If the resource is nonrivalrous, then a system of control is needed simply to assure the resource is created – a provisioning problem, as Professor Elinor Ostrom describes it. Once it is created, there is no danger that the resource will be depleted. By definition, a nonrivalrous resource cannot be used up.
What follows then is critical: The system of control that we erect for rivalrous resources (land, cards, computers) is not necessarily appropriate for nonrivalrous resources (ideas, music, expression). Indeed, the same system for both kinds of resources may do real harm. Thus a legal system, or a society generally, must be careful to tailor the kind of control to the kind of resource. One size won’t fit all.”
As he tells us at the outset of this book, “We live in a world with parks as well as private property, with pubic roads as well as private drives. We in this world understand the importance of balance between private and public. It would be silly to sell the sidewalks; it would be crazy to nationalize GM. Yet when it comes to cyberspace, and in particular, to the laws that regulate cyberspace, we are increasingly forgetting this lesson of balance. Perfect control – through technology and law – is not resisted. Extremism in this space seems normal.
If you take one idea from the pages that follow, let it be this: We can carry the tradition of balance that has been our past into our future. We are failing that ideal just now, but we need not fail if principle – not politics – defines the fight.”
January 24
Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut
I knew Michael Bierut before reading this book, but I still don’t really know what his graphic design looks like. Most recently I saw him in the movie Helvetica. This book is a collection of his essays, on a variety of design topics and, predictably, there was a lot that interested me. Every essay, really.
For example, I didn’t know that designers held The Fountainhead in high regard. Architects, yes, of course. But Bierut says that when he was asked by a non-designer what book it was that everyone has to read as the fundamental textbook in design school, he wanted to say that there really was none, that designers do, rather than read, but then realized that everyone he knew had read The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. That many designers claimed that this book was their inspiration for entering the profession!
Other things that particularly stood out for me were discussions on Art vs. Design, what’s happening currently with Saarinen’s TWA terminal, the reaction when the New York Times changed its font, and whether or not it is possible to avoid political bent coloring one’s design work.
Bierut talks also about the business and political aspects of the profession:
“I have always known that graphic design requires a degree of tact, especially when dealing with clients. But I would not have expected to get useful advice from a diplomat, as I did in Kennan’s Memoirs: ‘It is axiomatic in the world of diplomacy that methodology and tactics assume an importance by no means inferior to concept and strategy.’ That’s as useful a description of the interplay of the forces we designers grapple with as any.”
And his own early days:
“Working for Massimo Vignelli in 1980, I had no doubt whatsoever that the purpose of graphic design was to improve the life of every person on earth beyond measure by exposing him or her to Helvetica on a three-column grid. That was certainty, and it made design into a crusade.”
I also liked this:
“[...] the most devastatingly effective design program of the twentieth century was commissioned by Adolf Hitler. A rigorously applied graphic identity, potent event planning, single-minded architectural design: no design detail was too petty for the Third Reich, even (in a weird echo of this moment’s obsession with the political uses of vintage office equipment) the customization of typewriters, each one of which was fitted out with a key that would render the twin lightning bolt logo of the SS.”
January 11
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
I saw Steve Martin doing his stand-up routine back in the late 70’s, when he was at his self-described peak. This autobiography tells the story of how he got there, and why he quit shortly thereafter. He describes in very straightforward fashion how he got started, working at the newly-opened Disneyland, the various people he met and who influenced his career, the next jobs he got, performing at Knott’s Berry Farm, and comic clubs in San Francisco.
He never goes for a big laugh in this book, although a few times he does give us a chuckle, and the descriptions of the gags, the songs, the wild and crazy techniques he developed and which made him unique brought back memories of but-gusting laughter from the past, whether watching SNL, seeing one of his films, or listening to Let’s Get Small. Very good.
January 8
Redesigning Humans - Our Inevitable Genetic Future by Gregory Stock
This has been on my shelf for a year or so, and it was actually printed back in 2002, so I wanted to hurry up and read it because the subject matter is, of course, changing very rapidly.
Stock is director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the School of Medicine at UCLA, so this is no crackpot futurist book. I am always heartened to see this kind of reinforcement of my ideas - particularly those in evolution and the future of humans, which can be so very difficult to share with others. So few people, if they are even paying attention, really get it. And if they do read a story on this topic in the paper or wherever, even if they can vaguely accept the possibility of the science, it is for most people something still in the far-off future, not “real” and not really anything that concerns them today.
But Stock wants to tell us that not only is genetic engineering of humans inevitable, it is basically upon us, and we need to deal with it rather than ignoring it, or worse yet, letting others decide how to deal with it. A great fear of his is that the U.S. government will continue down the path of prohibiting research and development, allowing other countries to surge ahead. What he wants us to be clear on is this: because humans have made these discoveries about the ways our bodies are genetically programmed, and the human genome has now been transcribed, we WILL go down that path, wherever it leads us. And so the best way to ensure that another Nazi eugenics program doesn’t spring up is to regulate the science from the beginning.
“As always, we will have to earn our knowledge by using the technology and learning from the problems that arise. Given that some people will dabble in the new procedures as soon as they become even remotely accessible, our safest path is to not drive early explorations underground. What we learn about such technology while it is imperfect and likely to be used by only a small number of people may help us figure out how to manage it more wisely as it matures.”
But of course, there’s more to it than just forming an oversite committee:
“The current discussion about human enhancement is not what it seems, however. It is not about medical safety, the well-being of children, or protecting the human gene pool. At a fundamental level, it is about philosophy and religion. It is about what it means to be human, about our vision of the human future.”
Later:
“Understanding the forces that will affect the adoption of today’s budding germinal choice technologies requires a global perspective. After all, outside the West, some scientists will push ahead regardless of what happens in North America and Europe. Societies in the Middle East and elsewhere that are driven by religious ideology will hardly embrace these innovations, but they will not figure heavily in the equation of global change. The fleetest, not the most cautious, will set the pace.”
And later:
“Policymakers sometimes mistakenly think that they have a choice about whether germinal technologies will come into being. They do not. If, in the mid-1700s, the British Parliament had banned the steam engine to try to stave off the industrial revolution, the action might have altered some of the details of the mechanization of human endeavor but would not have stopped it. The same is true of the computer and genomic revolutions of today.
At the heart of the coming possibilities of human enhancement lies the fundamental question of whether we are willing to trust in the future. Will we accept humanity’s eventual transformation into something beyond human, or will we battle against it and try to protect those aspects of the human form and character that we see as intrinsic to our humanness?”
You know where I stand on this: bring on the changes!
“To some, the coming of human-directed change is unnatural because it differs so much from any previous change, but this distinction between the natural and the unnatural is an illusion. We are as natural a part of the world as anything else is, and so is the technology we create.”
Stock is, however, much more conservative in his estimates of how quickly humans will merge with machines than, say, Ray Kurzweil. To Kurzweil’s prediction that the distinction between humans and computers will no longer be clear in 100 years, Stock says, “Such techo-exuberance, though an increasing influence on our culture, is far-fetched.”
I also learned a new term, “fyborg,” in this book:
“The difference between a fyborg–as conceived by the artificial-intelligence theorist Alexander Chislenko–and a cyborg is one of boundaries. Cyborgization incorporates machine components into our bodies. Fyborgization fuses us functionally, rather than physically, with machines.”