Designers design the feedback they get from clients. Bless their hearts. (Via Adam Roberts on Twitter)
Roth told Les inRocks that when he turned seventy-four he reread his favorite authors—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hemingway. Then, he said, “When I finished, I decided to reread all of my books beginning with the last, ‘Nemesis.’“I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”
“After that, I decided that I was finished with fiction,” Roth went on. “I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!”
When asked if there could possibly be another book, Roth said, “I don’t think a new book will change what I’ve already done, and if I write a new book it will probably be a failure. Who needs to read one more mediocre book?”
Roth said that he saw nothing strange in retiring from literature. “Look at E. M. Forster,” he said. “He stopped writing fiction at around forty years old. And me, who wrote one book after another, I haven’t written anything in three years.”
He seemed to admit to a certain distance from everyday life. “I am seventy-eight years old, I don’t know anything anymore about America today. I see it on TV, but I am not living it anymore.”
A “Vade-Mecum Memorial Manual of Muses, or Compleate Compendious Complexe and Companion, of Learned Languages and Sciences.” The Folger Library
Shiho Kanzaki (via עבודות חדשות - ארז | פורום קרמיקה)
Here’s the cover of Ian Sansom’s book, quoted in the previous post.
Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar Studios, who worked on Monsters, Inc and Ratatouille, has described a culture of paper drawing and picture-making at the company’s headquarters in California that wouldn’t seem out of place in an impressionist’s studio in 19th-century Paris. At Pixar there are daily life drawing and painting classes, open to everyone, and the story department employs between five and 15 full-time artists solely to work on storyboards. (And a storyboard, as Jessup explains, just to be clear, “is literally a 4ft x 8ft bulletin board covered with rows of 3½in x 8in hand-drawn story panels”: no gimmicks, no gizmos, no graphic design.) These story panels are scanned and cut together to produce story reels – basic black and white cartoon versions of the film – and are only then replaced by computer-graphic sequences, developed using yet further hand-drawn sketches, paintings and sculptures. Jessup adds up the number of storyboard drawings produced for various Pixar films thus:So, no signs of a paperless office at Pixar.
- A Bug’s Life 27,555
- Toy Story 2 28,244
- Monsters, Inc 46,024
- Finding Nemo 43,536
- The Incredibles 21,081
- Cars 47,000
- Ratatouille 72,000
Nor, as far as I can see, anywhere else. All our modern businesses and institutions are built on paper, from plans to contracts to share certificates, to memos, to Post-Its and HP desktop printouts. Blizzards of paper. Tonnes of the stuff. Torrents. Avalanches. Foundations.
buzz:
pheezy:Awesomely creepy people hanging out together.
David Lynch + Vincent Price
Generally speaking, it’s important to remember that ‘openness’ is less often a virtue or even an activity than it is a declaration, a rhetorical framing, a kind of branding. It’s often used to make something appear open that isn’t (part of Shirky’s point), or to associate a product or domain with the spirit of openness. In this case, most things called 'open’ really aren’t, just as most things called 'green’ really aren’t. Some of us have been calling this 'openwashing.’ Contemporary technology culture loves the idea of being 'open’ so much, it spreads the rhetorical ideal in place of the reality through the 'opener than thou’ logic of shame. Shirky’s an expert at this particular homily.
In the original [Star Wars] trilogy, though, and in Casablanca, all the mixed-up old elements are turned inward. Grand Moff Tarkin may be a cheekbone-for-cheekbone copy of Major Strasser, but he doesn’t know it. If you’ll forgive the expression, Star Wars and Casablanca are postmodern without being self-aware. They’re coherent, self-contained worlds that, because they’re made out of stories that have been fulfilling wishes forever, happen to conform in a particularly accessible way to both the weirdness and the innocence of our desires. They’re fully operational miniatures of the kind of world to which we want to escape when we’re at our most simple and open and thoughtless.
At colleges across the land, panel discussions organized on the economic crisis have bemoaned such things as the absence of oversight, a lax regulatory regime, failures of public and private entities to exercise diligence in dispensing credit or expanding complex financial products. But what university president or leader has admitted that there was some culpability on the part of his own institution for failing to well-educate its students? After all, it was the leading graduates of the elite institutions of the nation who occupied places of esteem in financial and political institutions throughout the land that helped to precipitate this crisis. Our universities readily take credit for their Rhodes scholars and Fulbright award winners. What of those graduates who helped foster an environment of avarice and get-rich-quick schemes? Are we so assured that they did not learn exceedingly well the lessons that were taught them in college?