Skip to content

Tag: serendipity

Published January 27, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Typographica’s favourite typefaces of 2011 (pictured above: A2 Beckett designed by Henrik Kubel for A2-TYPE).

The Coroner`s Report — John Banville reviews The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin for The Guardian:

A “Complete Poems” is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet’s official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner’s report.

A two–part interview with William Gibson, author of Distrust That Particular Flavor, in the Wall Street Journal.

And finally…

Go Outside — Ian Leslie responds to criticism of his essay on serendipity:

The inherent limits of older formats like newspapers or bookstores are a feature as well as a bug. They make things a bit difficult for us, and because of that they often push us towards unsought-for discoveries.The modern internet makes each of us like a rich man in his mansion who has the finest food flown in from every corner of the world and whose favourite singers and artists come and perform for him in his bedroom at a moment’s notice. He has a nagging feeling that he ought to go outside and experience the city and its manifold surprises first-hand. Nothing is stopping him from doing so. But it feels like such an effort.

 

Comments closed
Published January 18, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Psycho-Drama — Pat Kirkham reassesses the collaboration between Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock for Design Observer:

The entire Bass/Hitchcock collaboration deserves to be better known, partly because of the sheer quality of the work, partly because it offers an interesting case study of the complex interchange between film and design, and partly because of the controversy surrounding Bass’s contribution to what is arguably the most famous scene in U.S. cinema — the shower scene in Psycho. Serious discussion of Bass’s contribution to the shower scene — a fascinating collaboration, from novel and script to musical score — remains problematic, not least because issues of authorship are far from dead in many academic disciplines, design history and film studies included.

Portmanteau — William Gibson’s new collection of non-fiction, Distrust That Particular Flavor, reviewed in The New York Times:

Everything he notices seems to be a this grafted onto a that. In these essays, we see a man fascinated by objects and places containing their own contradictions. It makes sense, then, that Gibson’s novels have helped promote several portmanteau words and neologisms, like “cyberspace,” into widespread English use. This is the essence of Gibson-think — anything can be a kind of portmanteau, a glued-­together paradox.

See also: Gibson interviewed in The National Post (who get bonus points for their “Neuromantic” headline) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

What You Want, But Not What You Need — An interesting article by Ian Leslie, author of Born Liars, on serendipity:

[T]here is a reason why Amazon is successful and bookshops are closing: in a world of infinite choice, efficiency is hard to resist. The pleasures of the bookshop or the library are easily outgunned by the knowledge that we can order or download a book instantly, or find the information we’re looking for within seconds. Serendipity, on the other hand, is, as Zuckerman says,  “necessarily inefficient”. It is a fragile quality, vulnerable to our desire for convenience and speed. It also requires a kind of planned vagueness. Digital systems don’t do vagueness very well, and our patience with it seems to be fading.

Comments closed
Published October 11, 2011

Ted Striphas on Algorithmic Culture

In this interview for CBC Radio show Spark, Ted Striphas, associate professor in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University and author of The Late Age of Print, talks to Nora Young about algorithmic culture and the social implications of leaving discovery and serendipity to complex math:

CBC RADIO SPARK: Ted Striphas on Algorithmic Culture

Striphas has written a series of posts about algorithmic culture on his blog (also called The Late Age of Print funnily enough).

Comments closed
Published February 16, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Risky Business — Cartoonist Adrian Tomine talks about his new book Scenes From An Impending Marriage, which originally started life as a mini-comic for his wedding guests, with More Intelligent Life:

I probably first started thinking about publishing it when a copy appeared on eBay. I assumed that since it was only given to close friends and family, that would never happen, but I was wrong. And like I said, since I was slowly adding pages to the book, I eventually found myself with 50 or 60 pages worth of material, and I just proposed the idea to my publisher. If he had declined, I would’ve happily filed it away…

AND Adrian and his wife Sarah Brennan talk about the new book with NPR’s All Things Considered.

(For the record, Scenes From An Impending Marriage is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

Sunny-Side — Jonathan Lethem talks to Carolyn Kellogg at The LA Times about decamping from Brooklyn to Southern California. There is more of their conversation at Times’ Jacket Copy blog:

I’ve only probably reviewed seven or eight novels. It’s really problematic. I’m gregarious with writers; I like novelists. I don’t want my sympathies to cause me to write a review that’s in any kind of bad faith, nor do I want to destroy some pleasant, even if it’s slight, collegial feeling. I try to review the dead guy — Bolaño — or the biography of the dead guy, because I like being in the conversation. Sometimes I look at what Updike did at the New Yorker. I don’t know if many people have the temperament, let alone the incredible set of skills he brought to that, the versatility, the endless curiosity, to identify with so many different kinds of novelists who were not doing what he does.

The Price of Zero — David Carr on media companies and unpaid contributors for The New York Times:

For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there is that, and more about the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero… For the media, this is a Tom Sawyer moment. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” he says to his friends, and sure enough, they are soon lined up for the privilege of doing his chores. That’s a bit like how social networks get built. (Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”)

And finally…

In the Age of Screens — A serialized essay about contemporary book discovery and reading by Chad W. Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, editor of  the Three Percent blog:

[W]e’ve stripped away all the institutions that supported the ways in which most outsiders found their literature, leaving texts to float untethered in the ether, there to be found… There is no serendipity… And yet, for the long-term benefit of society, we need people to have—and be exposed to— ideas from the out-of-­nowhere.

The complete essay is available as a PDF.

we’ve
stripped
away
all
the
institutions
that
supported
the
ways
in
which
most
outsiders
found
their
literature,
leaving
texts
to
float
untethered
in
the
ether,
there
to
be
found
.
.
.
Comments closed