The Book Collection That Devoured My Life - WSJ.com
october 2010 by petrichor
But I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too -- the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint.
memory
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wsj
lucsante
sante
reading
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literature
culture
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essay
october 2010 by petrichor
A Library Without Walls by Robert Darnton | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books
october 2010 by petrichor
Behind the creation of the American republic was another republic, which made the Constitution thinkable. This was the Republic of Letters—an information system powered by the pen and the printing press, a realm of knowledge open to anyone who could read and write, a community of writers and readers without boundaries, police, or inequality of any kind, except that of talent. Like other men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers believed that free access to knowledge was a crucial condition for a flourishing republic, and that the American republic would flourish if its citizens exercised their citizenship in the Republic of Letters.
reading
print
printing
printer
history
america
concept
library
digital
nyrb
toread
essay
october 2010 by petrichor
Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated
september 2010 by petrichor
[...] it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of ebooks will slow. Unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it's not immediately clear that an ebook is in all respects better than what it succeeds.
So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it's that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That's value that no ebook reader can unlock. In fact, it remains to be seen whether legions of readers raised on 99c titles at their local used bookstore (or $4.00-$5.00 titles delivered via Amazon.com) will be so eager to start buying brand new books at $10. And then there's libraries--who gets left behind when owning an ebook reader, and not merely literacy, is a requirement to borrow a book.
book
future
concept
technology
amazon
kindle
e-book
reading
publishing
books
essay
recommended
So the world is left with an unconvertible stock of used books that is vast. If the bustling, recession-inspired trade in used books tells us anything, it's that old books hold value for readers in a way that not even movies and music do. That's value that no ebook reader can unlock. In fact, it remains to be seen whether legions of readers raised on 99c titles at their local used bookstore (or $4.00-$5.00 titles delivered via Amazon.com) will be so eager to start buying brand new books at $10. And then there's libraries--who gets left behind when owning an ebook reader, and not merely literacy, is a requirement to borrow a book.
september 2010 by petrichor
What Are Books Good For? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
september 2010 by petrichor
If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated, nuanced, subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.
joy
recommended
book
books
reading
culture
history
publishing
technology
future
bookdesign
bookcovers
essay
tehwin
september 2010 by petrichor
Visual Languages of Manga and Comics « The Hooded Utilitarian
september 2010 by petrichor
(As an aside: now that more and more Japanese are reading manga on their phones, I expect the layouts are changing to fit the new medium. I visited Japan in 2007 and a Japanese woman showed me a yaoi manga she had on her phone. When you paged to the bondage scene, the phone vibrated.) << LOL. Forever.
comics
manga
reading
culture
layout
blog
language
visual
september 2010 by petrichor
n+1: This Will Kill That
august 2010 by petrichor
We don’t know what it felt like to read before newspapers, before mass media, before printing. We don’t even know what “attention” is; one person’s rapt, deep attention is another person’s dangerous trance, while what looks like constant distraction might also be an ability to synthesize. Pragmatically, for intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground: content. There is no valid reason to think that War and Peace teaches deep attention any better than a first-person shooter game. There are plenty of reasons, enduring ones, to think that War and Peace aerates and nourishes our daily lives more fruitfully, and productively, than Call of Duty. Which is to say that staking our claims on a format (the printed book), rather than on specific, lasting artifacts of a bookish culture is a losing proposition.
books
reading
writing
attention
n+1
publishing
future
content
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recommended
history
book
august 2010 by petrichor
INDEX // mb - Imagine a Book Club That Scales – A Book Club on a Global Google Wave.
november 2009 by petrichor
Fake:
While there were photo share sites like Ophoto, Shutterfly, and SnapFish, they took their metaphor from prior technology. They were designed to be reminiscent of pre-digital photo albums. But Flickr was designed the way it was because it arose from digital technology–in the same way jellyfish are designed the way they are because they live in water.
flickr
goodreads
book
reading
caterinafake
publishing
web2.0
future
concept
While there were photo share sites like Ophoto, Shutterfly, and SnapFish, they took their metaphor from prior technology. They were designed to be reminiscent of pre-digital photo albums. But Flickr was designed the way it was because it arose from digital technology–in the same way jellyfish are designed the way they are because they live in water.
november 2009 by petrichor
Jason Pinter: Why the Digital Revolution is Missing the Big Picture
november 2009 by petrichor
iPods sell the experience. E-readers are selling the gadget. And that's bass-ackwards. [...] I don't want to feel like e-readers are targeting me. I'm not the one who needs to be sold on the joys of reading. So here's the challenge: with this new technology, publishing has a small, slowly closing window to do what they've struggled to for so long: show people in doubt just how cool reading is. More readers -- that's how we save publishing.
reading
ebook
e-reader
kindle
books
book
future
publishing
marketing
essay
recommended
tehwin
music
apple
amazon
november 2009 by petrichor
Gen. McChrystal's "Bad Habit": He Loves Old Book Shops
october 2009 by petrichor
"Yet for all his asceticism, McChrystal displays a subtlety that suggests a wider view of the world. 'If you go into his house, he has this unreal library,' Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, McChrystal's intelligence chief and long time friend, told me this summer. 'You can go over and touch a binding and ask him, 'what's that one about?' And he'll just start. His bad habit is wandering around old bookstores. He's not one of these guys that just reads military books. He reads about weird things, too. He's reading a book about Shakespeare right now.'"
bookstore
McChrystal
military
reading
war
currentsituation
october 2009 by petrichor
Why the International Kindle Will Change the Book As We Know It - WSJ.com
october 2009 by petrichor
The development of the codex was a shift from thinking of literature as a unique object, like a painting, to seeing it as an institutional object. Conversely, as the codex came to dominate as a means of intellectual transmission, the scroll began to take on the status of a holy object, which is why synagogues keep the Torah in scrolls.
The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
kindle
book
religion
history
scroll
technology
books
ebook
reading
culture
wsj
digital
The introduction of the printing press brought a similarly enormous change to the nature of reading. One of the most interesting figures in that transformation is the great Benedictine scholar Trithemius. He lived in Sponheim in the 15th century and managed to amass a library fully half the size of the Vatican library, an incredible achievement. He was also the author of "In Praise of Scribes," the foremost defense of scribal practice, in favor of writing things out and against printing them.
october 2009 by petrichor
Is "Fahrenheit 451" Our Most Overrated Required Reading? | Josh Lieb | Big Think
october 2009 by petrichor
You keep using this word "plausible." I do not think it means what you think it means.
author
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Lieb
thedailyshow
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bigthink
october 2009 by petrichor
chris forster · A Final, Belated, Infinite Summer Post
october 2009 by petrichor
“So yo then man what’s your story?” is the question that ends the novel’s first chapter, a question that returns repeatedly throughout the AA meetings. Against the model of narrative as sheer entertainment, what one finds in the question “what’s your story?” is an ethical commitment to others by patiently listening. This, I think, is where the novel leaves us, preferring a mode of engaged ethical narrative to one of self-enclosed narrative pleasure.
infsum
infinitejest
infinitesummer
davidfosterwallace
dfw
essay
spoilers
ethics
reading
stories
october 2009 by petrichor
Three definitions of “reader” / from a working library
september 2009 by petrichor
Instead of asking, how much can I handle? ask what am I learning? Instead of what do I have time for? ask what is the meaning of it all?
Because the meaning isn’t going to emerge on it’s own—you have to create it. The algorithms and tag searches and bookmarklets will only get you so far; afterwards, it’s work only you can do, work the machine has no need for. The reader is your own personal anthology, but you are the editor: you are the sum of its parts.
reading
essay
book
books
aworkinglibrary
recommended
rss
Because the meaning isn’t going to emerge on it’s own—you have to create it. The algorithms and tag searches and bookmarklets will only get you so far; afterwards, it’s work only you can do, work the machine has no need for. The reader is your own personal anthology, but you are the editor: you are the sum of its parts.
september 2009 by petrichor
smnevans » Finishing and Starting Infinite Jest
august 2009 by petrichor
About half the time I read the paperback. The rest of the time was in Stanza on my iPhone. They released an update (to Stanza) recently that makes jumping back and forth between the footnotes and the main text much faster. Not zippy though. It takes about 5 seconds to go to a footnote and about 1 to head back.
Reading the paperback I sometimes caught myself skimming. I found it easier to focus on the text on the phone. This time I’m doing most of my reading on the iPhone. I really want to savour the words.
reading
e-book
stanza
iphone
ebook
book
publishing
infinitesummer
ij
infinitejest
technology
dfw
Reading the paperback I sometimes caught myself skimming. I found it easier to focus on the text on the phone. This time I’m doing most of my reading on the iPhone. I really want to savour the words.
august 2009 by petrichor
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org
august 2009 by petrichor
WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know
This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.
I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.
media
news
healthcare
reform
nytimes
journalism
transparency
future
reading
newspaper
recommended
ezraklein
newyorker
This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.
I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.
august 2009 by petrichor
INDEX // mb - The Evolving Shared Reading Experience: The Life of Pi Edition
august 2009 by petrichor
I have been watching the Infinite Summer website with much interest. I have been wondering what makes the DFW effort successful when the Doris-Lessing-Golden-Notebook group read from last year failed. Is it because — as a recent slate podcast suggested — that Foster Wallace is painful to read and Doris Lessing isn’t? Is it all about the book? Can the success of infinitesummer.org be reproduced?
infinitesummer
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infinitejest
dorislessing
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reading
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dfw
davidfosterwallace
august 2009 by petrichor
Holy Schtitt, a Revenant! « Infinite Tasks, Infinite Summers, & Philosophy
august 2009 by petrichor
Whatever is “to come” in the form of the revenant comes out of the past but more immediately it comes from the future. The revenant, whether in the form of a non-alienated, post-capitalist society or some other edenic pastures – or, conversely, the horror of, say, the Spider that is out there for each of us – is both “to come” and “not yet.” The messianic revenant “to come” is thereby an embedding of both the holy and the profane. As we profane what has become holy to us (and in our society, what is more holy than Entertainment?), as DFW profanes Entertainment by exposing its centrality to addiction, to despair, loss, death, Bottoming, and c., we are nonetheless and precisely for that reason exposed to something, some “thing,” that is more holy, that shows our present-day worships as misguided and replaces them with the truly holy. Holy Schtitt.
infinitejest
ij
infinitesummer
dfw
davidfosterwallace
revenant
blog
InfiniteTasks
essay
reading
Derrida
Hamlet
Shakespeare
august 2009 by petrichor
Rose and Laura Wilder and the Little House stories : The New Yorker
august 2009 by petrichor
In 1936, the Saturday Evening Post published Lane’s own “Credo,” an impassioned essay that was widely admired by conservatives. Her vision was of a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility. Its citizens would be equal in their absolute freedom to flourish or to fail.
Everything that Lane wrote after “Credo”—fiction or polemics—was an expression of that vision. She may have been the first to invoke the term “libertarian” (it dates to the eighteenth century) to describe the agenda of a nascent anti-statist movement of which she has been called, with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, “a founding mother.” To the degree that she is still remembered for her own achievements, it is mainly by a few libertarian ultras for whom her tract of 1943, “The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” is a foundational work of political theory. (It was written “in a white heat,” she said.)
reading
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newyorker
family
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Wilder
essay
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llibertarianism
republican
Reagan
book
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publishing
children
Everything that Lane wrote after “Credo”—fiction or polemics—was an expression of that vision. She may have been the first to invoke the term “libertarian” (it dates to the eighteenth century) to describe the agenda of a nascent anti-statist movement of which she has been called, with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, “a founding mother.” To the degree that she is still remembered for her own achievements, it is mainly by a few libertarian ultras for whom her tract of 1943, “The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority,” is a foundational work of political theory. (It was written “in a white heat,” she said.)
august 2009 by petrichor
Kindle and the future of reading : The New Yorker
july 2009 by petrichor
The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
kindle
newyorker
reading
iphone
design
book
usability
amazon
ebook
e-book
baker
bookdesign
typography
print
technology
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?
july 2009 by petrichor
André Kertész: The power of reading | Art and design | The Guardian
july 2009 by petrichor
What the camera captures is their thirst for knowledge or hunger to escape their circumstances. One memorable image features a boy sitting in a New York doorway in 1944, amid a heap of newspapers left there to alleviate the wartime shortage ("Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time," reads the poster behind him). Times are hard yet the boy looks perfectly happy: amid the detritus, he has found a page of comic strips.
guardian
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reading
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artist
nyc
newyorker
history
war
currentsituation
comics
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art
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july 2009 by petrichor
Largehearted Boy: Note Books - Mark Olson
july 2009 by petrichor
There is a lonely train called “reading” in your youth. My mother had warned me against it; her brother had done it. While others ran wild in the woods, my Uncle sat there and read. Other horror stories followed about the effects of reading on him—Korea, detention, Iowa, to name a few—and I saw him a few more times before he died, and loved him, but was scared with him and for him ‘cause he was lonely. I punched my ticket for that train the day I read Desert Gem Trails by Mary Francis Strong. I wasn’t in my youth and Christmas will never be in June—I was near forty and about ready to lose everything I ever worked for.
At first, I didn’t go out into the desert alone—too big, too hot, too scary. I tried to drag other people out there with me. I had a van and I would saddle up to anyone with this book in my hand.
reading
music
jayhawks
largeheartedboy
essay
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At first, I didn’t go out into the desert alone—too big, too hot, too scary. I tried to drag other people out there with me. I had a van and I would saddle up to anyone with this book in my hand.
july 2009 by petrichor
R A I N T A X I o n l i n e Winter 2008/2009
july 2009 by petrichor
David Foster Wallace’s primary concern was for the reader. While he knew every literary technique and stratagem, had a mind that computers might envy, had read everything, and was a linguistic and philosophical titan—“obscenely well-educated,” he said of himself—his greatest strength as a writer was simply that he loved. He was feverish about whether you would feel pleasure from what you read.
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RainTaxi
literature
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july 2009 by petrichor
IJ Manuscript Comparison
july 2009 by petrichor
A few months later I was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction to be called “Novelist As Critic.” It amounted to little more than inviting my favorite novelists to contribute an essay on any literary topic, the working assumption (which I still hold) being that novelists write better criticism than most professional critics. Since all of the authors I invited were well along in their careers, I thought I should have at least one emerging writer, so I wrote to Wallace in care of his publisher and invited him to submit something, an offer he found “intriguing” (he had never written an essay for publication before). His “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” appeared in the fall 1988 issue and confirmed my impression that he was brilliant. (Our typesetter, on the other hand—a wonderful middle-aged woman who had her doubts about much of the stuff we published—thought he sounded snotty.)
We stayed in touch.
ij
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We stayed in touch.
july 2009 by petrichor
Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty? - Times Online
july 2009 by petrichor
Out in the farthest reaches of the internet, mediated only by e-mail and a rudimentary code of interpretive etiquette, five men are discussing the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.Not the uncharacteristically straightforward first sentence (“Later than usual one summer morning . . .”), nor even the title page, but the dedication and publishing information —the dates, addresses and typographical notes that most readers skip on their way to the fictional meat. “There’s no dedication in V or The Crying of Lot 49,” one reader remarks. Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to Richard Farina and Against the Day is dedicated to the light in the darkness and Thelonious Sphere Monk.” This is the beginning of a Pynchon-L “group read”, and a beginning in every sense of the word.
book
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Times
july 2009 by petrichor
a few thoughts on A Supposedly Fun Blog | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen
july 2009 by petrichor
don’t think that James Wood has any right to define the aesthetic, don’t assume that any experimentation must be an affect, don’t confuse the intentional difficulty some of you have noted with an intentional lack of pleasure, which after all is a beast of many faces. And enjoy the novel.
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recommended
july 2009 by petrichor
The story behind Infinite Summer | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times
july 2009 by petrichor
And watching the event spill out onto other sites on the Web has been nothing short of amazing. If we four were to get lost at sea for the next three months, Infinite Summer would barrel on unimpeded, and our absence might not even be noticed until the news article, three months hence, in which it was revealed that the sole survivor had eaten the other three.
infinitesummer
infinitejest
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2009
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july 2009 by petrichor
Blographia Literaria: "I am in here." Infinite Summer Post #1
july 2009 by petrichor
After looking up Kosinski (listed as one of the parodied in the endless filmography for james orin incandeza in the endnotes), I found out that his (Kosinski's) suicide note reads: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity", which has a nice, detachedly understated echo in Hal's "Call it something I ate", by which he (Hal) explains perhaps why his father—then disguised as a professional conversationalist—is unable to understand what his son is saying.
I'm pretty sure the riff is intentional: the wikipedia article on kosinski lists some fairly hyperbolic praise by Wallace for the polish writer, and Hal's metaphorical death-by-intellectuo-physical abjection has a kind of literal parallel in suicide.
infinitesummer
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kosinski
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mathematics
I'm pretty sure the riff is intentional: the wikipedia article on kosinski lists some fairly hyperbolic praise by Wallace for the polish writer, and Hal's metaphorical death-by-intellectuo-physical abjection has a kind of literal parallel in suicide.
july 2009 by petrichor
Sealed Abstract » The joy of electronic books
june 2009 by petrichor
You start doing random searches, and the results are scary. How many books reference the wood chuck chuck question? Let’s graph my books by publishing date. Can we use a bayesian network to classify my books by genre? Can we write a script to rip cover art from Amazon.com? The possibilities are endless.
books
howto
digital
DIY
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iphone
OCR
scan
nerdpower
e-book
june 2009 by petrichor
Why the newspaper still beats the Amazon Kindle. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
june 2009 by petrichor
But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design. The Kindle presents news as a list—you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.
Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important.
newspaper
newspapers
amazon
design
journalism
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kindle
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publishing
Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important.
june 2009 by petrichor
New Central Park Shakespeare boss Barry Edelstein on the best way to "speak the speech." - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine
june 2009 by petrichor
Get a blank sheet of paper and cover the entire speech except for the first line. Read that line and when you get to its end move the paper down just enough to expose the next line. Read that then the one beneath, again repeating this process until you've reached the end of the speech. ... Many actors find this exercise revolutionizes their approach to Shakespeare.
Yes! Ordinary readers, too. It changes the way you read to yourself and the way you read out loud.
Shakespeare
ShakespeareInThePark
nyc
newyork
theatre
slate
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history
verse
Yes! Ordinary readers, too. It changes the way you read to yourself and the way you read out loud.
june 2009 by petrichor
Op-Ed Contributor - But Always Meeting Ourselves - NYTimes.com
june 2009 by petrichor
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
bloomsday
dublin
ireland
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McCann
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Nabokov
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
june 2009 by petrichor
The POINT Magazine: DEATH IS NOT THE END: By Jon Baskin
june 2009 by petrichor
Wallace’s method was rooted in the conviction that literature ought to address the paradoxes and confusions of its moment. His moment was late capitalist America, which he knew from his own life manufactured nothing so surely as a sense of fraudulence and despair. [...] He saw how we despised ourselves for being persuaded by the same advertisements we parodied and ridiculed; how we settled for pleasure in lieu of fulfillment; how our achievements tended to multiply our dissatisfaction.[...]Deleuze, Jameson and especially Lacan show up in Jest in various capacities. For Wallace, the significance of such theorists lay less in their theories than in their endorsement of a pattern of thought that tended to bend back on itself. In a central passage of “E Unibus Pluram,” he had criticized the “frankly idealistic” postmodern belief that “etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.”
dfw
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essay
literature
death
happiness
reading
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history
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america
addiction
AA
philosophy
june 2009 by petrichor
Rambling About Reading - Ta-Nehisi Coates
june 2009 by petrichor
What makes me most crazy about historical texts is how stunningly boring they are. Real history is chock full of the kind of incredible stories that make you actually feel like you have a kinship with your country. Why we weren't taught more about Jefferson and Adams' epic bromance in high school, for example, I can't imagine.
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philosophy
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Coates
blog
atlantic
june 2009 by petrichor
Book Review: Michael Dirda on 'Built of Books' -- Reading and Oscar Wilde - washingtonpost.com
may 2009 by petrichor
Despite frequent ecstasies about sumptuous bindings and beautifully designed pages, Wilde clearly intended his library for use not ostentation. "Surviving copies of his books are generally in extremely poor condition," Wright explains. "Their spines are often fragile and their corners knocked and bumped." Pages show wine stains and inky marginalia, and sometimes entire sections have been cut out (when needed for lectures in the age before photocopying).
oscarwilde
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library
england
may 2009 by petrichor
Remembrance of things past | Art and design | The Guardian
may 2009 by petrichor
"My education was deeply spotty, but Diana was amazing." What did she teach you? "Chiefly, how to gut books. She would say of some sacred text, such as [Stendhal's] Charterhouse of Parma, that it was about a rather silly boy. She had a son called Alexander who wasn't quite right in the head. She couldn't read Proust because she knew enough about the book to know it was about a very delicate boy, and it would perhaps have been too much for her."
Hodgkin is now lost in the upsetting memory of Diana and Alexander. "She taught him to speak fluent Russian. And she always insisted that his opinions on films were important. Somebody would say, dismissively, 'Why would Alexander know?' and she'd say, 'Alexander just knows.'" What is making him cry now? "Something she said." He says something, but it's lost in sobs. I ask him to repeat it. "She said, 'If you love someone, you include them in your life in any way you can.'" Out of homage to Diana, perhaps, he never read Proust.
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Hodgkin is now lost in the upsetting memory of Diana and Alexander. "She taught him to speak fluent Russian. And she always insisted that his opinions on films were important. Somebody would say, dismissively, 'Why would Alexander know?' and she'd say, 'Alexander just knows.'" What is making him cry now? "Something she said." He says something, but it's lost in sobs. I ask him to repeat it. "She said, 'If you love someone, you include them in your life in any way you can.'" Out of homage to Diana, perhaps, he never read Proust.
may 2009 by petrichor
Your brain is an index. | Culture | The Media | The American Scene
may 2009 by petrichor
At the end of my favorite novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury posits a rebel faction in which a group of people have formed a society around preserving old books, all of which have been banned. Their method? To memorize the books, to store them in their brains in their entirety — to, for all practical purposes, become the books. This is a tremendously appealing thought to those of us who find meaning and purpose in books, to those who seek refuge in stories (which, let’s face it, is what all of us story addicts are really doing with our lives). The idea is that you can give yourself over to a story not temporarily, but forever. These days, that’s an idea that’s fading fast, as it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information .[...] We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.
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may 2009 by petrichor
Why E-Books Look So Ugly | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
may 2009 by petrichor
“It won’t stay ugly forever.”
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typography
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may 2009 by petrichor
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