Bookpornography

One photo + text blog that I love is the "Bookporn" section of A Historian's Craft. There's stunning photos of books and libraries that make any book lover shiver with longing.

Well, over at Curious Expeditions, there's a motherlode of white-hot photos of the world's libraries. It's one bibliophiliac money shot after another.



That's the Peabody, in Baltimore. Baltimore, kids!

Analog God With Artificial Limbs

Anthony Lane, in his superb essay on the Leica 35mm camera, hits on a definition of something I've always found difficult to express. After calling Leica cameras "the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world," he writes:

Many people would disagree. Bugatti fans, for instance, would direct your attention to the Type 57 Atlantic, the only car I know that appears to have been designed by masseuses. Personally, I would consider it a privilege to die at the wheel of a Lamborghini Miura—not difficult, when you’re nudging a hundred and seventy m.p.h. and waving at passersby. But automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a Leica.

The money line, for me, is the one about mechanical gadgets that I've bolded here. I would add that the perfect device has mechanisms that are all (in principle) visible, so that their workings themselves can acquire their own beauty. The beginning of the twentieth century was a great moment for such devices -- besides the handheld camera, there's the typewriter, the bicycle, and hordes of small, handheld, nonelectric gadgets, like Duchamp's chocolate grinder (above).

Our moment is the digital one, but the one that I and most people alive today were born into is the intervening one dominated by predigital electrical and fuel-powered appliances -- the refrigerator, the automobile, the blender, the electric typewriter, the blow dryer, the lawnmower, etc. But I love anything mechanical that endures from that pre-electrical epoch (or which doesn't partake of it) -- the water handle and the flush toilet, can openers, hand-cranked mixers, etc. There's a fantastic scene in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D that centers around a girl, a cat, a match, and a coffee grinder -- it has to be seen to be believed. Track it down.

The Three Pixels

Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic Software, talks about developing Panic's Coda web editor. They couldn't get the toolbar to do what they wanted it to do, so they designed it from scratch... and circuitously, managed to get their toolbar mod picked up for Mac's Leopard. (Via Daring Fireball.)

Get Off Of My Cloud

"Cloud" or web-based apps are all the rage, in part because your data can be retrieved anywhere, anytime, and can't be lost as easily as on a fallible local hard drive. But what if all of those things -- retrievability, access, durability -- are liabilities rather than assets?

QuickBooks, the popular accounting software, has apparently bumped into this problem. Making the app available online would be great, say, at tax time. But business customers see it differently.

Rather, Cook says, his customers want to know where their data is at all times, since in many cases, they're keeping somewhat fictional accounts for their tax reports. Should the IRS come knocking, Cook says, "Format C:..."

Oh, dang.

Fun With GarageBand

Like all converts, I'm a zealot for Apple products. But I have to confess, until recently, besides iTunes and iPhoto, I hadn't had much use for iLife. iDVD and iMovie aren't as useful as Toast, and iWeb doesn't hold a candle to a genuine web creation app like Dreamweaver or even a simple but powerful text editor like Taco.

Lately, though, I've been having fun with GarageBand. Despite the glaring omissions in its instrument library (um, solo violin? solo horns? banjo? glockenspiel?), the loop collection isn't bad, and it's a fun program to make music on.

I've made a couple of songs so far, and this is the one I'm happiest with -- a pastiche of Magnetic Fields/Mark Mothersbaugh electro-chamber pop. It's called "Orkney Street," after a friend who used to live there. Alas, it's in m4a, not mp3, but it'll play in iTunes just fine (ha ha). I hope you like it.

The Sentient Harpsichord

Denis Diderot, 1769:

The philosopher instrument is sentient; he’s at the same time the musician and the instrument. Sentient, he has a momentary consciousness of the sound he is rendering; animal, he remembers it; memory, the organic faculty, by connecting the sounds inside itself, at the same time produces and retains the melody. Imagine that the harpsichord possesses both sentience and memory, and tell me if it won’t know and replay by itself the tunes you have played on its keys. We are instruments endowed with sentience and memory. Our senses are like keys plucked by the environment which surrounds us, and that often pluck themselves; and there, in my judgment, you have everything that takes place in a harpsichord constructed like you and me.

Pop Life

I do not know anything about Tim Lane so I will not write an essay about Tim Lane. Yet there are several things (besides his first name) that make me highly sympathetic to his new book of poetry, Pure Pop, just out from Revelator.

1) Tim Lane really, really likes Frank O'Hara. (Tim, if you haven't picked up a copy of the Collected Poems yet, let Gavin know and I will send you one.)
2) Tim Lane really likes Coca-Cola.
3) Tim Lane's poems, while bouncy and fast and biographical and fun, are also deliciously and lyrically just a little pervy.

I think my favorite line comes early, in "We Have Yet to Ride on a Roller Coaster Together":

I like to watch you stepping into a sandal, the agreeable way the insole and it meet

which is really the best way to build intimacy in poetry, to acquaint the reader with your small strangenesses and make it seem odd and familiar and yours and theirs at once.

I'm also sympathetic when Lane (who is always slightly meta- in his poetic voice) wonders whether he's sad "because [his] poems lack the sophistication of an Ivy League education," not least because he rhymes "Ivy League education" with "English League soccer." It's half a joke, but it's always worth remembering that in poetry,

You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

Which, coming from a Harvard grad and Navy man, has always been among the most reassuring inspirations.

Ride The Dairy Train

Global expansion of the middle class has created an explosion in demand for cow's milk:

It turns out that, along with zippy cars and flat-panel TVs, milk is the mark of new money, a significant source of protein that factors into much of any affluent person’s diet. Milk goes into infant formulas, chocolate, ice cream and cheese. Most baked goods contain butter, and coffee chains like Starbucks sell more milk than coffee.

That's a surprise, but the best part of this NYT article is the timing of its more pedestrian observations. After noting that the expansion in demand "will require the addition each year of the equivalent of New Zealand’s entire annual milk output," Wayne Arnold deadpans, "That is a lot of milk." Also: "This is not good if you are in the market for milk." Both of those sentences begin paragraphs. Genius.

Elektrische Schreibmaschine

"Goodbye, cruel word: A personal history of electronic writing." Like myself, Guardian journalist/author Steven Poole is a fan of Scrivener on the Mac. He also uses WriteRoom; I also use NeoOffice. But Scrivener is particularly good for organizing notes and multiple documents under a single project, which makes it good for research-heavy writing, books, and (as in my case) dissertations.

I recently came across the Firefox extension Zotero, which has a similar interface to Scrivener and may be even better for online research, both because of its browser integration and instant-screen capture capacity. Now all it needs is the ability to export and import from Scrivener, and my writing/research workflow will be a snap.

Data Under Your Mattress

Ben Vershbow takes this Economist article and perfects the Google-as-bank conceit:

In these first few generations of personal computing, we've operated with the "money in the mattress" model of data storage. Information assets are managed personally and locally—on your machine, disks or external drives. If the computer crashes, the drive breaks, it's as though the mattress has burned. You're pretty much up the creek. Today, though, we're transitioning to a more abstracted system of remote data banking, and Google and its competitors are the new banks.