Month: October 2011

A philosophical primer:

The first video embed wasn’t on a computer, it was in your living room. VHS tapes moved movies out of the movie theater and into the house. The smaller screen shared attention with the cluttered room, the eclectic seating, the lights, the refrigerator, the family, the pizza delivery, and all the other distractions that one normally needed to tune out in order to focus on a film. Except that we didn’t tune them out. We let them in; talking and eating in front of the set, pausing to do something else, de-emphasizing the designated experience into a mere feature of a larger, busier environment.

Capturing the life cycle of Burning Man:

And it wasn't PETA that did them in:

Fur was falling from favour well before the activism of the 1980s. In the late 1950s the price of mink fell dramatically. The cost of manufacturing a mink coat now exceeded that of the raw materials and there were many in the trade who felt that the luxury status of fur was becoming a thing of the past. Demand began to fall. The widespread adoption of central heating no doubt played some part: in bitter cold, nothing keeps you warm like natural fur. But the truth was that the fur coat, once the epitome of glamour and luxury, acquired unfashionable connotations from the 1960s. It signified an older, less trendy and more dependent kind of femininity. 

(Hat tip: Virginia Postrel)

Why monsters and superheroes have invaded upscale literature:

There was a time in recent memory when writers took their cues primarily from the literary figures that came before them. But in 2011, our literary, media, and entertainment landscapes are unprecedentedly vast and various. Not only that, but appropriation has become an important artistic currency—seen in everything from hip-hop sampling, to Internet remixing, to literary mashups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We define our current cultural moment in terms of media consumption, and we try to reflect our varied interests in our art. In the hands of pop culture wizards like Jonathan Lethem or the late David Foster Wallace, you're likely to see prose equally indebted to Catwoman and Catullus, Star Wars and Keats' "Bright Star."

That was Charles Bukowski's message to the Nijmegen library in 1985, after they removed one of his books for being "sadistic and discriminatory":

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth. … In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of "sadism" it is because it exists, I didn't invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds.

Sunni Brown's argument:

Doodling, at least in the US, is perceived as inappropriate in virtually every learning environment in which we find ourselves – in the classroom, boardroom and Situation Room. But this persistent cultural view works against us. As a cognitive tool, the doodle is incredibly useful. … Visual language – something as sophisticated as a wireframe or as simple as a doodle – is native to our brains. To suggest implicitly or openly that learners should rely solely on text or auditory content to understand complexities and solve problems is to deny the brain one of its most fundamental and profound ways of understanding.

Some lovely little sketches for fans of Doctor Who and classic literature. Artist Kathleen Jennings captions the above illustration, "This is one for the Australians, or at least those who grew up with Margaret Wild and Jane Tanner’s classic There’s a Sea in my Bedroom."

I was never that scared of the Daleks because I figured they couldn't get up the stairs. It was the cybermen who freaked me out.

(Hat tip: Dustin Rowles)

"Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending," - Lemony Snicket, a member of the Occupy Writers movement.

Phoebe Connelly recalls a long-distance relationship with another bibliophile:

Books were a substitute for the sex distance made impossible. I sent him Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and, on one visit to L.A., we snuck into the Los Angeles Athletic Club near closing and spent a blissful hour floating in the column-lined 1910s pool and exchanging chlorine-flavored kisses. There was an automatic romance to putting ourselves in the landscapes we'd shared through fiction.