Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
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As the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, ‘The world is all that is the case.’ We have been flung into the world whether we like it or not. But the internet creates a vast illusion that the physical, social world of interacting minds and hearts does not exist. In this new situation, the screen is all that is the case, along with the illusion that the screen projects of a world tamed, digested, abbreviated, rationalized, and ordered into a trillion connected units, called sites. This new world turns the most consequential fact of human life—other people—into seemingly manipulable half presences wholly available to our fantasies. It’s a world controlled by our wrist and finger.
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A concept rendering of a “Wall of Knowledge”
These turned out wonderfully— via Pentagram:
Faced with the task of designing 21 new covers for the works of Vladimir Nabokov, art director John Gall decided to ask 20 other designers for help. To create a series look—and to pay homage to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting—he sent each of the participating designers a collector’s specimen box to serve as the centerpiece of the cover.
The one above is my favorite. See all 18 here >
From Britannica blogger Robert McHenry:
Over my desk hangs a large print of a photograph (seen below) taken in London during World War II. It is of the library of Holland House, one of the great houses of London from the time of its construction early in the 17th century until its ruin in the Blitz of World War II…
One night in September 1940 the house was largely destroyed by German bombs. But the library – perhaps fortified by the weight of those books, perhaps (let us imagine) defiant of the book-burning Nazi regime – stood. The roof fell in, great beams hung precariously, but the shelves were mostly intact and the books remained quietly and neatly arranged in their proper order.In the photograph, three men stand quietly at those shelves, seemingly oblivious of the rubble all about them. They are hatted, of course – two homburgs and a fedora – which brings home to the viewer the ambiguity of their situation: Are they indoors or out? One of the men is looking into a book; a second is just about to pull one from its shelf; and the third is simply scanning the spines arrayed before him.
What strikes us most forcefully is the men’s sangfroid. Surrounded by the wrack of war, they stand in silent contemplation of the books.
Merely British stiff-upper-lip? Perhaps. But it seems more than that to me.
(via GOOD)
A nice review of Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport by CITY OF SOUND:
And de Botton picks apart that paradox from almost every angles one can imagine. In fact, his starting point is that the airport is essentially the emblematic human structure:
“In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation - then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”
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