Alan Jacobs

atestu:

preciseandtowering:

Espinosa Nova font family « MyFonts

A beautiful family of 16th c. revival types that not only has regular Roman, italic and bold styles, but also its own Aldine italic, Rotunda, and layerable capitals that mimic the giant drop-caps that were so prominent in books from that era. Spendy, but lovely.

What is remarkable about [Oscar] Wilde’s formalism is that it is so absolutely human. This may come as a surprise, because we’re inclined to think of Wilde’s aesthetics as hothouse stuff. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With Wilde, the unto-itselfness of formalism (and, yes, maybe even the hothouse preciosity of some formalism) is a response to a human problem, a response to the slavery of facts, truths, first impressions. This is not a formalism of necessity but a formalism of free choice—born of the desire to be oneself, to turn away from the world not because history has forced you to do so but because you have chosen to. Wilde’s formalism surely helps to explain what is wrong with Gossart, who knew too little about the art of lying, who was incapable of creating the parallel universe that is a work of art. But Wilde may also show us what is wrong with “Counter Space,” because from his vantage point the elegant formalist look of the show is merely a cover-up, a mask for what amounts to a sociological literalism. Come to think of it, maybe Oscar Wilde, not Walter Benjamin, would be the ideal reviewer for “Counter Space.” I can imagine him anatomizing the artistic virtues of a tinned steel collapsible salad basket before dismissing the entire show as faux formalism and advising everybody to head to Ikea—where, if realism is your thing, the stuff is not only for sale but is actually affordable.

“Frankfurt Kitchen,” Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1926–27. Commentary by Jed Perl here.

When the church’s theological rejection of sadness was secularised, sadness became a pathology requiring medical intervention. The medicalisation of sadness is the final cultural triumph of the Protestant smile. If Luther or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky had lived today, we would have given them Prozac and schooled them in positive thinking. They would have grinned abortively – and written nothing. The truth of sadness is the womb of thought.

The order read: ‘Although plaintiffs are entitled to statutory damages, they have no right to silence defendant’s criticism of the statutory regime under which he is obligated to pay those damages.’ It turns out I no longer had to give a nudge nudge wink wink when I told people: 'Of course, you shouldn’t download!’

And so this order was representative of the legal results we’d received from the case: absurdly disproportionate remedies interspersed with bits of sanity. Though they’d succeeded in fining me, the RIAA hadn’t yet found a way to circumvent the constitutional rights to free speech of the people it sued. And therein lies the potential to restore balance. Just as a huge organisation like the RIAA has every advantage in a legal system where every word and piece of evidence can be censored on technicality, we have the advantage in a world of transparency and free speech.

the commodification of intimacy

more changes

In all the mountain ranges of commentary on [the Gospel of] John — the all but endless attempts to explain John’s alleged dislocations, his stops and jolting starts, his glaring clarities and sudden fogs — I have met with no sustained attempt to see the heart of John’s final draft as, specifically, an old man’s book. Yet an arresting case can be made for its being the product of a single large but aging mind, a mind at hurried final work on the scenes and words of its distant youth — now precise and lucid, now vague and elliptical in its movement, all its memories screened through the thought of intervening years.

Can it be that we tend to overestimate the influence of language partly because we so often underestimate the intelligence of other people? Think about common arguments on the lines of ‘if you call something X, people will believe it’s X just because of the name.’ We rarely hear, 'If you call something X, I will start believing it’s X just because of the name.’ I obviously know better. But others don’t. This type of overestimation has a long history. One of the earliest discussions of the influence of language on thought was an essay by the Bible scholar Johann David Michaelis from 1760, which won the prize of the of the Prussian academy. In it, Michaelis explains that if, for example, one gave completely different names to two vegetables which are in reality quite similar, 'the people’ would never suspect that they are similar. He’d obviously not heard of clementines, mandarins, tangarines, and satsumas.