Alan Jacobs

beingblog:

laughingsquid:

Fahrenheit 451 Book Cover With a Match and Striking Paper

This is just plain brilliant. Love the type too.

~Trent Gilliss, senior editor

The history of literature is replete with folly but the news that Sebastian Faulks is writing a novel featuring Reginald Jeeves and Bertram Wooster knocks all other blunders into a cocked-hat. We are not gruntled.

Madness, not to put too fine a point on it, seems the only explanation for such a project. Perhaps, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Mr Faulks is a glutton for punishment. Like the newt-fancier, one supposes he must spend a good deal of time staring at himself in the mirror.

As for the rest of us, well, like the BBC’s present lamentable adaptation of Blandings this news has us groaning and wincing “like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch”.

typeworship:

Funky Flyer

Reminiscent of a woodblock print, this intricately composed flyer is for an event at the Baby Jupiter club, Leeds, UK. I like the feeling of looking through a secret (if slightly psychedelic) door way. Designed by Danny PiG

SIR: I am grateful for the review which my book Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England received from the Provost of Kings (Mr Bernard Williams) in the London Review of Books (LRB, 2 April), and in particular for his perceptiveness in knowing how pleased I would be at having it described as ‘clotted and ill-natured’, as bearing an equivocal relationship to its chief argument, as using Christianity as a vehicle of Sarcasm, and as having ‘dark associations’ with the ‘scepticism and distrust of all merely secular improvements which can be found’ amongst ‘the more unreconstructed sort of cardinal’ in the ‘unliberated heartland of the Church of Rome’. I hope I shall not seem ungrateful if I make two critical comments.

At various points in his review the Provost states that I am incapable of arguing my opinions. Given that I have a certain articulateness, it is, it seems to me, quite likely that I can argue them. Argument, however, is not what it seems to me suitable to do with opinions. What one does with opinions – all one needs to do with them, having found that one has them – is to enjoy them, display them, use them, develop them, in order to cajole, press, bully, soothe and sneer other people into sharing (or being affronted by) them. To argue them is, it seems to me, a very vulgar, debating-society sort of activity.

— Maurice Cowling, responding to Bernard Williams’s review of his book (1981). This, I think, offers a master class in how to respond to a negative review.

So, so, SO wrong

Ms. Kenney described the blog’s strengths. “When there was an overriding issue or event, the blog was a locus and a magnet, attracting tens of thousands of readers” to a particular post, she said, “with the Deepwater Horizon spill as a great example.”

She added, “I’d be the first to admit that the blog was uneven because of a shortage of resources.” It needed a dedicated editor, she said; as deputy environment editor, she was able to give it only a few hours a day, given her other duties.

Here’s my take: I’m not convinced that The Times’s environmental coverage will be as strong without the team and the blog. Something real has been lost on a topic of huge and growing importance. Especially given The Times’s declared interest in attracting international readers and younger readers, I hope that Times editors — very soon — will look for new ways to show readers that environmental news hasn’t been abandoned, but in fact is of utmost importance. So far, in 2013, they are not sending that message.

typeworship:

A Special Specimen

This wonderful and colourful type specimen once belonged to Paul Rand. It was given to JP Williams, who had become friends with Rand while studying under the professor at Yale School of Art. They both shared a passion for collecting all things written and designed by Jan Tschichold. Rand invited JP to his home and gave him this ‘tattered old book’ from his library. 

It was well used – not to mention mutilated by Rand – and JP describes how Rand used to cut letters and sometimes whole sections out for use in his work: ‘The spine was broken and it was in a horrible state. Of course I loved it’.

“Mr Rand turned page after page to reveal the most wonderful type specimens. However, since we usually spoke about Tschichold, I did not understand what this book had to do with him. Then Mr. Rand closed the book and opened it from the beginning, revealing the inside front cover and the ex libris. It had belonged to none other than Jan Tschichold. my mouth fell open and Mr. Rand smiled. Enjoy, as I have.”

Celibacy is not only an ancient tradition of asceticism, but more important, it is an ancient tradition of love. Celibacy is, in short, about loving others. Those who opt for celibacy (or to use religious terminology, those who feel “called” to embrace it) choose it as a manner of loving many people deeply, in a way that they would be unable to if they were in a single relationship. It is certainly not for everyone. And it is not a better or a worse way of loving than being a married person, or being in an exclusive relationship with one person.

The criminal acts of a few do not negate the value of celibacy, any more than spousal abuse or incest can negate the value of marriage or marital love. And even if women or married men were admitted into the Catholic priesthood, celibacy would inevitably remain a choice for many. Because for many – myself included – it is not a disciplinary restriction, it is the best way they have found for living a meaningful and committed life.

Not so long ago, I was on the usual type of panel discussion at a literary festival, far from home and the people whose hands I prefer to be holding. The format was the fairly standard: four authors and a chairperson chat about something vaguely to do with the event title. Over the years, I have slid from being one of the token new writers to being one of the token scraggly old ones. The young novelist sitting beside me began a description of how he had efficiently and effectively planned his first book to be commercially successful, adaptable for movie purposes and generally a money-making machine. The plan worked. He made money. (I quietly began to dislike him.) And then he talked about writing his second novel and the way he’d written that one for his friends. He’d cared about it. At which point he cried. Right out on stage, he wept big authorial tears of sheer bloody happiness. He had accidentally done something which had made him deeply happy – he had written for love. The only thing better than sitting next to that level of joy is having it yourself. Every day. Onwards.

Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.

— W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967). Thanks to my friend and colleague Richard Gibson for reminding me of this great passage which I should never have forgotten in the first place.