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Tag: evgeny morozov

Published February 24, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Blown Covers — The New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly has a Tumblr (pictured above:  “Eustace at a Stoplight—Right?,” by David Urban)

Spanking — Charles McGrath remembers the late Barney Rosset in the New York Times:

Mr. Rosset was far from a highbrow. Sometimes he signed up books without having read them. He determined to publish “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” for example, while riding in a cab and hearing on the radio that other publishers had turned it down. And he was proud of publishing a profitable line of Victorian spanking pornography. To a considerable extent the dirty books made the arty ones possible, and Mr. Rosset wasn’t the least abashed about it.

See also: WNYC has reposted two archive interviews with Rosset from 1995 and 2008, and John Gall has posted a collection of links to reminiscences about Rosset on his blog Spine Out.

Form and Fortune — A fascinating  review  of  Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs by Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, in The New Republic which discusses Apple’s relation to the Bauhaus and Braun:

The design philosophy of Dieter Rams, Braun’s legendary designer, has shaped the feel and the look of Apple’s latest products more than any other body of ideas. Since joining Braun in 1955, Rams—who likes to describe his approach to design as “less, but better”—began collaborating with the faculty at the Ulm School of Design, which tried to revive the creative spirit of Bauhaus with a modicum of cybernetics and systems theory. Eventually Rams produced his own manifesto for what good design should accomplish. His “ten principles of good design” encouraged budding designers to embrace innovation and make products that were useful but environmentally friendly, thorough but simple, easy to understand but long-lasting, honest but unobtrusive. Rams wanted his products to be like English butlers: always available, but invisible and discreet.

See also:  Maureen Tkacik’s on Steve Jobs and Isaacson’s biography at Reuters.

And lastly…

James Wood reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels for The New Yorker:

Patrick Melrose, the protagonist of what is now a quintet of novels devoted to the Melrose family, is the scion of a wealthy dynasty almost as monstrous as the dodgier Roman emperors; he has spent much of his adult life trying to kill himself with drugs and booze. St. Aubyn’s novels have an aristocratic atmosphere of tart horror, the hideousness of the material contained by a powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose style. In good and bad ways, his fiction offers a kind of deadly gossip, and feeds the reader’s curiosity like one of the mortal morsels offered up by Tacitus or Plutarch in their chatty histories.

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Published October 19, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis.  A must-read:

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:

“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”

The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:

I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.

See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:

Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.

 

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