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charlotte strick

Midweek Miscellany

by Dan on May 18, 2011

Juggling — The multi-tasking Charlotte Strick, art editor of The Paris Review, art director at Faber & Faber and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and book designer, interviewed at From The Desk Of…

Genre — China Miéville, on his new book Embassytown and genre fiction in The Guardian:

“I love genres; I think they are fascinating. My issue with litfic is not that it is a genre but that (a) it doesn’t think it is and (b) it thinks it’s ipso facto better than all the ones that are genres. Literary fiction of that ilk – insular, socially and psychologically hermetic, neurotically backslapping and self-congratulatory about a certain milieu, disaggregated from any estrangement or rubbing of aesthetics against the grain – is in poor shape.”

Invasion by the Virtual — Iain Sinclair discusses London and five novels that capture the spirit and history of city:

When the railways were first put in, there was devastation, because there were so many competing companies who just ripped up houses right, left, and centre. In the name of catching the spirit of the age and indulging in this technological process (and the idea of progress through science), London was savagely remade. It took a long time to absorb, recover and discover itself through that. At the moment, we’re in this sort of management age — an age of the virtual — in which you can change reality by looking at digitised, computer-generated images and projecting a fantastic city of the future, like a science fiction. People have come to believe that this is reality, even though they are contradicted by observation, which shows you devastated fields, radioactive materials buried in the ground that have been ripped up fast, and absolute destruction… So it is a devastating moment for the city, which I don’t think has ever been under such a prolonged form of invasion by the virtual.

Franzen’s Ugly Americans — Tim Parks on reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in Europe (and, incidentally, the work Swiss novelist Peter Stamm, author of Seven Years, which sounds great) (via Bookslut):

Freedom’s failings are interesting in so far as they deepen the mystery of the book’s international success. It’s one thing for the Americans to hype and canonize one of their favorite authors, but why do the Europeans buy into it? Ever anxious that they need to understand America, fascinated by its glamor and power, Europeans are perhaps attracted to those American novels that explain everything: Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld. More than a novel by an American they want The Great American Novel. But of course Europeans also resent American world hegemony and feel (still and no doubt wrongly) superior culturally.

And finally…

20 Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read and an interview with Rick Poynor, founding editor of Eye and a co-founder of Design Observer, who compiled the list, at Designers and Books:

Books always point to other books. A bookshop, like a library, is a fantastic, spatially organized, easily navigable source of vast quantities of interconnected information about what exists for you to discover and know. If someone devised an online virtual space that allowed you to do this kind of rapid, effortless, multifocal, visual, and spatial browsing—perhaps someone has, though it certainly isn’t Amazon or the iPad App Store—we’d applaud them for a brilliant new concept. But these marvelous spaces already exist, at least for the time being, right there in your local shopping street.

art editor of The Paris Review and an award-winning designer known for creating the jackets for books by Roberto Bolaño, Lydia Davis, and Jonathan Franzen, among many others. She is also art director of Faber & Faber, Inc. and of the paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.art editor of The Paris Review, art director of Faber & Faber and at Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

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Midweek Miscellany

by Dan on March 16, 2011

The Analytical Eye — Rick Poyner’s second essay for Design Observer on the visual interpretation of J.G. Ballard examines the work of French artist Peter Klasen:

What both Ballard and Klasen share… is a cold, appraising, analytical eye. It’s impossible to tell how they feel about what they show, or to know what they want us to feel, if anything at all. Their findings are disturbing and perhaps even repellent from a humanist perspective, yet the new aesthetic forms they use to embody them are, even today, exciting, provocative and tantalizingly difficult to resolve.

Any Colour — So Long As It Is Black — The WSJ profiles Massimo Vignelli:

“The greatest design has to provide a little pleasure,” he explained, producing the straightforward black bag he carries; Mr. Vignelli wears nothing but black. Proudly reporting that he’d bought the bag from a local street vendor, he pulled out a black Leica camera…, a pair of black Ray Bans and a tape measure—alas, bright yellow, not black.

“This is my dictionary,” Mr. Vignelli said of the tape measure. He explained that even as a child he had such fascination with the dimensions of things that he would challenge his friends to guess their size. He believes that subtleties of shape conjure emotion. “Is that three centimeters or four centimeters?”

All Forest, No Trees — David L. Ulin reviews The Information by James Gleick for The LA Times:

Over the course of human culture, there have been a number of significant transformations, beginning with the alphabet, which Gleick calls “a founding technology of information. The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge.” It is his idea that all these technologies exist as part of a continuum, with each developing from the last.

The key to such an argument is perspective, which is often in short supply when it comes to the information culture, with its tendency to inspire either paeans or jeremiads. Gleick, however, is too smart for that; he’s all about the forest, not the trees.

And finally…

Breaking Machines — Richard Conniff, author of The Species Seekers, on what the Luddites really fought against:

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

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