A profile of calligrapher DeAnn Singh at The LA Times:
When the producers of “Mad Men” needed a note in cursive and a signature from Don Draper, they turned to Singh. “Something masculine and from the 1950s” was the request, though they eventually decided that the missive be typed…
Ask her about computers, and she’ll tell the story of Steve Jobs.
Before the founding of Apple and the development of the Macintosh, Jobs dropped out of Reed College and studied calligraphy with artist Lloyd Reynolds. If he hadn’t taken that class, he has said, personal computers might not have come with a variety of fonts.
Fantasy Modernism — Lev Grossman talks to the A.V. Club about The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians:
I have this theory about modernism and fantasy, which I’ll do in 30 seconds.
They came into being at the same time, which is very interesting. They were both reactions to the disasters of World War I and the electrification of cities, and urbanization, and the rise of the automobile, the end of that twilight world of the Victorians. They both are reactions to that in different ways. Modernism went very inside and delved into the interior lives of people. Fantasy externalized all that in these fantastical, magical, metaphorical landscapes. I thought, “Well, what if you did both the inside and the outside at once?” I tried to combine those foci of fantasy and modernism into one kind of writing. It sounds like I’m writing a dissertation on my own work, but, you know, you end up thinking about what you’re doing. That’s the kind of thing I thought.
See also: Alexander Chee reviews the book for NPR.
Prussian Pedantry — Susie Harries’ new biography of scholar Nikolaus Pevsner, best known for his 46-volume series The Buildings of England, reviewed by George Walden for The Observer:
For us at least the conflict of national intellectual styles he represented was hugely beneficial. The irony of a “Prussian pedant” lecturing the English on Englishness, for which he was mocked, resolves itself in the fact that, together with Gombrich in art history and Weidenfeld in publishing, Pevsner was one of a golden generation of German/Austrian Jewish refugees who did much to give their adopted country the bottom it prided itself on already possessing.
And for those of you not interested in a county-by-county guide to the wonders of English architecture (what’s wrong with you?), Pevsner also wrote the seminal Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. First published in 1936, a revised and expanded edition will be available (in the UK at least) in September.
And finally…
Everyone is an Auteur — Guardian correspondent Fiachra Gibbons meets Jean-Luc Godard:
“I am not an auteur, well, not now anyway,” he says as casually, as if it was like giving up smoking. “We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.”
Oh Jean-Luc…
