Alan Jacobs

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.

Whenever you hear someone explain that a concept is so foreign to this or that culture that people cannot even use their language to describe it, it is safe to assume your passport has just been stamped for entry into the Land of Bullshit. There are multiple dictionary entries for “nerd” in Chinese, including terms for a dull and tasteless person (乏味的人, fáwèi de rén) and for someone excessively enthusiastic about computers (电脑迷, diànnǎomí).

The word for “nerd” in the sense Brooks means—"pedant" or “bookworm"—is "书呆子” (shūdāizi). If you’re too shiftlessly American to have an English-Chinese dictionary handy, you can literally type “nerd” into Google Translate and find it.

The popular interest in the brain means that we increasingly have a “folk neuroscience” that is strongly linked to personal identity and subjective experience. Like folk psychology it is not necessarily very precise, and sometimes wildly inaccurate, but it allows us to use neuroscience in everyday language in a way that wasn’t previously credible for non-specialists.

Folk neuroscience comes with the additional benefit that it relies on concepts that are not easily challenged with subjective experience. When someone says “James is depressed because he can’t find a job”, this may be dismissed by personal experience, perhaps by mentioning a friend who was unemployed but didn’t get depressed. When someone says that “James is depressed because of a chemical imbalance in his brain”, personal experience is no longer relevant and the claim feels as if it is backed up by the authority of science. Neither usefully accounts for the complex ways in which our social world and neurobiology affect our mood but in non-specialist debate that rarely matters. As politicians have discovered it’s the force of your argument that matters and in rhetorical terms, neuroscience is a force-multiplier, even when it’s misfiring.

In any political conflict between extremists and non-extremists, the non-extremists start with one serious disadvantage. They tend to be conflict-averse. Moderate-minded people tend naturally to be people of moderate temperament. When they encounter rage, hate, and paranoia, they flinch. Extremists, on the other hand, delight in conflict. Simply by being louder and nastier, they bully the non-extremists into silence, acquiescence, or exit. Which happens to be the recent history of the Republican party.

What America needs now, and what the Republican party most especially needs, are moderate-minded people who are also tough-minded — who won’t be shrieked down and who won’t be intimidated. “Civility” cannot mean: you yell, I yield. Conservatives deplore those old-line 1960s liberals who shriveled up when challenged by student radicals and Black Power militants. Well, now it’s happening in our house, and it is we who are being tested: Do we dare confront our own radicals? It’s not enough to have greater wisdom, greater tolerance, and greater patriotism if you don’t also muster courage, endurance, and will to win. Otherwise, you’re playing by Weimar rules.

Modern economics bases much of its analysis on the idea that people “maximise their utility”. The idea is that everything we do makes sense in some material way or other: the economic view of commuting would be that although people don’t necessarily enjoy it, they do it to earn money, which makes up for the effort in other ways. So you commute, which is a drag, in order to have the house and holiday and lifestyle that makes you happy – yes? Well, no, according to happiness studies. Cutting down on the commute is one of the few things people can do which genuinely makes them happier. According to one academic paper, “people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective wellbeing”. In other words, a difficult commute makes people miserable in ways for which money doesn’t make amends.

This is an academic finding that hasn’t crossed over into the wider world. I’ve never seen a film or television programme about the importance of commuting in Londoners’ lives; if it comes to that, I’ve never read a novel that captures it either. The centrality of London’s underground to Londoners – the fact that it made the city historically, and makes it what it is today, and is woven in a detailed way into the lives of most of its citizens on a daily basis – is strangely underrepresented in fiction about the city, and especially in drama. More than 1bn underground journeys take place every year – 1.1bn in 2011, and 2012 will certainly post a larger number still. That’s an average of nearly 3m journeys every day. At its busiest, there are about 600,000 people on the network simultaneously, which means that, if the network at rush hour were a city in itself, rather than an entity inside London, it would have the same population as Glasgow, the fourth biggest city in the UK.

60ansdevadrouille:

                           Temple  de  Banteay  Srei ( groupe  d’Angkor,  967).

 1.Tour- sanctuaire  centrale  avec  ses  gardiens  de  porte.  Chef  d’oeuvre  en  grès  rose,  longtemps  perdu  dans  la  jungle. 

2. Tour-sanctuaire sud, garé par des Déités féminines. Octobre 1993.

That’s what I do now: I lace up my boots and head into the hills, then do the same again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Where do I live at the moment? On the move. It’s a routine, a rhythm, the norm. I walk therefore I am. And now that I’ve got used to it, I feel too lazy to stop.