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Friday, December 25, 2009

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

—Saul Bellow, in The Writer’s Desk

Monday, November 30, 2009

A note from Mandy Brown on extracts from Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful:

Along with a new vision for eating, McKibben notices an alternative definition of work—one in which the value of work is held in higher accord than the labor it demands.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Father Jonathan:

A church lady, at an oxymoronous event called “the coffee social,” chided me for not being up to date.

“Are you on Facebook, Father?”

“No, I’m not,” and she looked stern, because she was ready to offer me a prize that had something, but not exactly, to do with Friendship.

[…]

“You probably don’t even Tweet.” Her disdain was peeking out from under her suburban charm.

No. I shook my head like Charlie Brown in the discouraged pumpkin patch.

[…]

I couldn’t manage it. I could not read or think with all the chatting and practices and associations and shows and games. I could not think in paragraphs, or a sentence, with all the talking about what other people are doing while they themselves are wondering what I’m doing while I’m pecking and swiping with thumbs on a touch-sensitive screen.

What are you doing? Typing? What are you saying while you chat? What are you thinking, while touching the wares at Chico’s and Brookstone’s? What do you mean, behind the screen?

Nothing, of course, is the answer — but nothing while the background music is at full.

She and her Facebook Friends, usually frenetic, are bored. Full of information, but unable to hoist belief against the anxious and

…

Friday, November 20, 2009

I took out a winter coat today and found, pocketed, a paper with this quote written on it (no source noted; Google didn’t find anything):

The future is technological, mechanistic, and robotic, but our souls and bodies are only truly fulfilled when connected to nature and the earth.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Extracts from Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet (PDF) (published 1932, 1955):

If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice.

[…]

Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

[…]

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words.

[…]

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

John Dewey, Art As Experience, as quoted by Paul Rand in A Designer’s Art:

Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being aesthetic. No matter how useful it is for special and limited ends, it will not be useful in the ultimate degree — that of contributing directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

From the New York Times’ “On Language” column, Ammon Shea on old dictionaries:

As people increasingly rely on Internet dictionaries and other online reference works, it seems that passing down an ancestral book will become more and more of a rarity and that keeping older versions of these books will become exclusively the province of the professional and the persnickety. Although who knows? Perhaps one day a child shown a dictionary will be told, “This is the very same HTML that your grandfather read when he was your age.”

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Dan Phillips on architecture:

You can’t defy the laws of physics or building codes, but beyond that, the possibilities are endless.”

He’s quoted about his work in a NYT article, One Man’s Trash. He builds homes for low-income folks using “mismatched bricks, shards of ceramic tiles, shattered mirrors, bottle butts, wine corks, old DVDs and even bones from nearby cattle yards” and other discarded scrap. (I wish there was a web design equivalent. Is there?) His work is beautiful.

Photo: Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

I’ve finished reading James Howard Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere. It’s a fantastic and depressing tale of how the American landscape has come to be. In his own words:

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer afford to support. Undulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

This should be required reading for all Americans. If you care at all about design, the environments natural and built, agriculture, architecture, economy, beauty, history or the future, you should read this book.

More: suburbia dissected (amusing, enlightening TED Conference presentation); …

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Father Stephen Freeman on beauty:

We see beauty not simply by looking at a thing — but by seeing it.

And:

There is much in our life and culture that pushes us away from beauty. Mass production and the nature of our economy (marked by a level of productivity unknown in human history), are driven by questions other than beauty. Beauty has value as it can be marketed, but too often is absent in any depth from much of our experience. […]

Deeply distressing is the drive to “utility” in our lives. Value is given to that which is “useful.” Beauty thus becomes an avocation, a luxury not seen as useful or necessary to our existence. Of course, this is a deep miscalculation of the nature of human existence. Human beings do not exist well without beauty — and in most of human culture throughout most of human history, beauty has been valued beyond many of the things which we think of as “useful.”

The article is foremost regarding beauty within Christianity — specifically within the Eastern Orthodox Church — but also all of life in general. It has me thinking further on the concept …