Alan Jacobs

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Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project; Berlin, 1921-2, opaque version of photomontage; here

[gallery] muspec:

Today, we’ve got an interesting study in form and content in the form of two editions of the same book.

On the one hand, we have a modern artist’s edition of Flatland, published by Arion Press in 1980.  On the other, we’ve got the very first edition, published in 1884.  It’s the same text, printed nearly a century apart, and in very different formats.  

The artist’s book is interesting; it’s an accordion book, and so could be laid completely flat and read end to end as a single, flat sheet. Its construction also means that it can stand freely (with a little support, just to be safe!) and act almost as a sculpture.

The first edition, meanwhile, is, well, your traditional book-shaped book.  Easier to hold and read, to be sure, but it’s difficult to deny that it lacks something of the dramatic impact of Flatland as a flat book.

“When politicians today praise America’s system of checks and balances, they seem to understand it as a self-correcting mechanism: When one branch pushes too hard, the other branches must push back, preserving equilibrium. That understanding actually encourages politicians to overreact, in the belief that they are playing a vital constitutional role. It also encourages complacency, because a system that rights itself requires no painful compromises to preserve.

Neither Congress nor the president has the capacity to govern alone, but either can refuse to compromise, and prevent the other from governing. If the system is thought to be indestructible, the temptation to take stands becomes overwhelming. Filibusters, shutdowns, and executive orders multiply. The veneration of the Constitution becomes its undoing.”

We are all easily lured into what might be called “package deal” ethics: if you are committed to one cause you will probably be committed to a particular set of causes, even if there is no clear logical connection. The danger then is of reducing ethics to style, to a set of superficially matching accessories. It is an important jolt for us to have to come to terms with those who look for a deeper kind of consistency – whether they are radical libertarians uniting a pro-choice position with a deeply individualist social morality, or Catholics uniting an orthodox sexual ethic with root-and-branch hostility to market economics or nuclear arms. It was one of the choice ironies of the era of the Second Vatican Council that the stoutest defender of the inherited position on birth control – Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani – was also one of the fiercest advocates of nuclear disarmament. Having to think through the connections between our moral perspectives so that we can have intelligent arguments about them is a rather urgent need in the current climate, where policy and principle are so often created reactively and opportunistically. (Do I have any political party especially in mind? Perish the thought.)

This Adorable Alabama Bookstore Only Sells Signed Copies

These gently animated book covers by Javier Jensen are wonderful! Via Open Culture.

Five years ago we bought a house built in 1988 in the town of Bedrock, Indiana — a town that met all of our qualifications of having a drive-up restaurant, a stone quarry where I could get a job, and very lenient laws about street legality of vehicles. When we moved in, there was an electric fridge in the kitchen: We sold that as soon as we could. Now we have a period-appropriate bird that waves a fan at our food to keep it cool. Before the first wave of that fan I had to spend two weeks teaching the bird to look a guest in the eye, shrug his wings, and say, “It’s a living.” Most of the time he just makes car alarm sounds and plucks out his own feathers.

In a fascinating article called “The Japanese Preschool’s Pedagogy of Peripheral Participation,”, Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin describe a twofold strategy commonly deployed in Japan to deal with preschoolers’ conflicts: machi no hoiku and mimamoru. The former means “caring by waiting”; the second means “standing guard.” When children come into conflict, the teacher makes sure the students know that she is present, that she is watching — she may even add, kamisama datte miterun, daiyo (the gods too are watching) — but she does not intervene unless absolutely necessary. Even if the children start to fight she may not intervene; that will depend on whether a child is genuinely attempting to hurt another or the two are halfheartedly “play-fighting.”

The idea is to give children every possible opportunity to resolve their own conflicts — even past the point at which it might, to an American observer, seem that a conflict is irresolvable. This requires patient waiting; and of course one can wait too long — just as one can intervene too quickly. The mimamoru strategy is meant to reassure children that their authorities will not allow anything really bad to happen to them, though perhaps some unpleasant moments may arise. But those unpleasant moments must be tolerated, else how will the children learn to respond constructively and effectively to conflict — conflict which is, after all, inevitable in any social environment? And if children don’t begin to learn such responses in preschool when will they learn it? Imagine if at university, or even in the workplace, they had developed no such abilities and were constantly dependent on authorities to ease every instance of social friction. What a mess that would be.

Books don’t change your life. At most, if they are good, they can hurt and bring confusion.

[gallery] deckerlibrary:

Believe it or not, these vibrant images are not silkscreened, instead they are examples of pochoir, a refined stencil-based printmaking technique popular in the late 19th century through the 1930’s originating in Paris.

From Kaleidoscope: Ornements Abstraits by Ad Verneuil (NK1535 .V47 Cage).

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