Dean

Franzen, Heidegger, Leisgen

Feb 012012
 

Ana sent me a link to Jonathan Franzen’s thoughts on e-books. I agree.

I think the combination of technology and capitalism has given us a world that really feels out of control.

However, grown-up boys need their little toys. There’s nothing much we can do about it.

One thing, though, is that we should not take it too absolutely. You know, consumer technology is just here in order to confuse and distract. It’s an obstacle to clear sight, not an enhancement.

Here are two fragments from Martin Heidegger’s last interview:

Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today.

and:

It seems to me that you take technology too absolutely. I do not think the situation of human beings in the world of planetary technology is an inextricable and inescapable disastrous fate; rather I think that the task of thinking is precisely to help, within its bounds, human beings to attain an adequate relationship to the essence of technology at all.

On the light side, one can also deal with technology in this way:

There’s more, but I don’t feel like embedding it right now.

What I truly believe is embedded here:

This is from the work of Barbara and Michael Leisgen. This is what I wish to all of us. To feel like this as often as possible. Perfectly grounded, reaching for the stars. Part of the flow. One and two and all.

I know it’s a bit cold outside, but Spring is already on the way.

The Incredible Machine

Jan 232012
 

I keep thinking about this Kieslowski fragment. I admit I don’t remember much of the rest of the movie. This fragment is more or less all I carried away. The puppet master and the dying ballerina. They are joined, related, married into something altogether different. In the artistry of an artist. Speaking of which, the artistry of a bookseller was always a bit fuzzy, complicated. Are we just the guys that push coins over the front desk? Or is there still some magic in little bookshops, those few remaining ones?

My friend Natasha sent me a link to this Rube Goldberg video. I watched it once. A couple of days later I decided to take another look.

It is his face that is so beautiful. He is from another planet, no? The way I understand it is that the whole construction of the incredible machine relates to the rational side of personality. Yours, mine, doesn’t matter. Rationality makes all these incredible bridges and not always the easiest and the most logical connections. It doesn’t always get you where you want and the way you want it. But it does protect the creative inner being. That is important. As long as I can manage to protect my inner being and keep it as innocent, as curious and as alive as this guy’s beautiful face – Book Depository and Amazon can both go to hell. I’ll keep constructing my incredible machine. Whatever the twist, turn or shape it may take.

On Wednesday we went dark together with thousands of web sites all across the universe. It might look a bit funny or pretentious. Such a small and insignificant bookshop joins the protest. After all, we make our living by selling intellectual property and yet we seemingly disagree with the act that is supposed to stop piracy. Well, I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow that no level of piracy justifies the proposed measures.

I’ve read this nice piece about how independent booksellers should stop trying to compete with online retailers. A day or two later I ran into this email from a disillusioned publisher employee. Very interesting. One of the problems I see is that the complete book industry pricing system has been turned obsolete. It was originally designed to appreciate each and every single creative input in the bookselling network. Now the list price mutated into a mere concept, useful psychological tool in the hands of big players and a heavy burden around the necks of independents.

I followed links to articles pro and contra independent bookshops. I’ve learned that Ann Patchett, American novelist has recently opened a bookshop. She could not stand living in a city without a single bookshop.

On my hyper-walks I stumbled upon this lovely independent bookshop that opened in 2011 in Rockland, Maine, USA, town of less than eight thousand inhabitants.

In real life, I happened to walk past Smetumet window on Celovška and liked it a lot. And I continued to read 1Q84. Slowly.

The Year of the Dragon

Jan 032012
 

Have you seen Love Actually? There’s this little scene I like there.. I know, I know.. It’s yet another classic western corporate cliché, well packed and skillfully sold. But, you know what? It’s hoildays time, so let me get away with it, just this one time. The scene I am telling you about is, I guess, a quote or perhaps a loving appreciation for the famous Bob Dylan video with Allen Ginsberg in the background.
Well.. in the movie the guy says something like: “..because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth)”. I like this “tell the truth” part.. So.. let me pretend that you are that gorgeous blonde girl and I’ll be the guy with the tape recorder and a little confession to make. Here I go:

It was a nice Spring day when a person walked into the bookshop and asked for a book that we didn’t have. The classic situation: if we don’t have it in stock, we can order it for you. We check the price and availabilty and ask our potentional customer for order confirmation. Instead of confirmation, I was confronted with honestly innocent question: “Is this the cheapest I can get it for?” Now.. there’s so much to explain, there are so many details that should be added here in order to put all of this into the right perspective.. I’ll try to choose only the few.. it was obviously a non-bookish person, you could see there were all these other priorities in life that make reading books hardly even enter the top hundred necessities. The title of the book suggested it was an obligatory reading for school, university or work. It was far from desired reading or what I lovingly call predestined meeting of people and books. So here I was, looking into those eyes, trying to figure out what to do. Needless to say, it has been a slightly difficult year for us. Some of our customers switched to electronic books. Some decided it is cheaper and more convenient to order books online. And even the most beautiful and the most faithful customers experienced cuts in their budgets due to overall financial meltdown. The question hang in the air. I am not fond of lying. I simply stood there and contemplated the ethical values and practical consequences of an old fashioned bookseller advising an innocent, non-bookish person of the cheapest ways to obtain an undesired book.

Contemplating my technologically enhanced near-suicide has been pretty much what I’ve been doing in those seldom free moments of a dedicated parent and a small business owner during the past year. Once confronted with a proximate possibility of loosing it, I tried to think the true nature of my book-selling.

Financial meltdown set aside, my principal enemies are technologically driven online retailers. Technology in itself is neither good nor bad. It takes the same knowledge to create a nuclear weapon and a nuclear reactor. Technology is closely linked to a certain type of knowledge that is created by beautiful minds of scientists and fucked up by evil moguls of corporate capital. It is false to think that Book Depository and Amazon are involved in an activity even remotely similar to what we are engaged in. As far as I am concerned, the true nature of what they do is making money and the true nature of what we do is lighthouse keeping.

One of the questions that repeatedly came to our mailbox this year was a variation of “Why is this cheaper on Book Depository?” Here is a bit of copy-paste from my recent email trying to answer one such question:

Zanimivo je, da gostincu nihče ne ugovarja, da je kava pri njem deset ali dvajset krat dražja kot doma. Pivo je tudi dva do trikrat dražje kot v trgovini, pa vseeno radi naročimo še eno in še eno in na koncu celo razneženo in dobrovoljno pustimo še kaj natakarici. Gostincem zavidam, da ljudje preprosto in po občutku, skozi podzavestno, enostavno jasno sprejmejo in vedo (brez da racionalizirajo), kaj je dodana vrednost, kaj je gostinec naredil, vložil in kako si je zaslužil to razliko v ceni.

Pri knjigarnah je to bistveno težje, med drugim tudi zato, ker konec koncev sploh nismo vajeni teh knjigarn. Ni tako, kot z gostilnami, da je na vsakem vogalu vsaj ena. Knjigarne so tukaj redke in ni vse, kar se imenuje knjigarna, tukaj zares knjigarna..

A ja, pa še to: 11. julija 2011 je Amazon kupil Book Depository.. A ste Orwella že brali? Danes je to zelo aktualno.. Orwella je spet potrebno brati..

It is hard to see all that is at stake when someone is waving with a five euro banknote in front of your eyes with a flashy neon-lit “You Save:” inscription on it. The truth behind is ethically very questionable. It is killing healthy bio-diversity of thousands of small and not so small independent bookshops, each and every single one with a unique story to tell, books to curate, readers to hide from a winter chill. In words of John Updike: “Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk.”

It is difficult for me to define, explain and defend the lighthouse aspect of our book-selling. It is hidden somewhere in the nature of a real space. If all is well maintained and properly orchestrated – this real space may occasionally transform into a magical place. The true meaning of independent is interdependent. We depend on you. Not only in the sense of “your money is your vote”. Your personalities are embedded into our shelves. We dance, spilling light onto the sidewalk. It is difficult to define and explain. I just know the magic is there. And I am thankful that you know it.
Happy New Year!

How could one possibly resist that?

Dec 232011
 

This is from one of Skazka’s recent posts. I love it! Happy holidays!

You may be acquainted with individuals who read ebooks. You may even have befriended one or two such ereaders. Chances are that you yourself are such an ereader. We, however, still indulge in books in a trashy way.

We frequent libraries and bookstores, and we carefully plan our interiors to accomodate the beloved books. Over the years, we moved from one to another jurisdiction, house, job, lover. Old LPs, casettes, magazines, letters, dear gifts were more often than not lost along our way. Usually, it is only the books that make it. Each a story in its own right, they link us to our past.

And so it can hardly come as a surprise that our bookshelves are something between a shrine and a peep-show. Our books may seem accidental to an innocent bystander, but we who selected them know better. We indulge in scanning the libraries of people we know to get to know these people better.

We may have entered the sexy boudoirs of those who persuaded us to come up for a nightcap, but we hastily departed when we found their poor books or, even, no books at all. I know a man who fell under a spell of his (now) girlfriend, when he saw her bookshelves: she pins little green curtains on each individual shelf to keep books safe. How could one possibly resist that?

via A Gem A Day.

Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn

Dec 162011
 

Evelyn Evelyn is a cirque-cum-cabaret band of two twin sisters, who were conjoined at birth. They make original compositions on piano, ukulele, guitar and accordion. Prior to forming Evelyn Evelyn, they traveled with the Dillard & Fullerton’s Illusive Traveling Show.

It goes well into this strange and warm and rainy December’s night.

via the one and only, totally adorable A Gem A Day.

Mina Loy

Dec 162011
 

By the time her watercolours were exhibited in the Salon d’Automne in 1904, she had recast herself as “Loy”. This is one of many personas readers encounter: she was at her most elusory, perhaps, in the early 1920s when her poem “Lion’s Jaws”, about the rivalry between the Italian writers Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, appeared in the Little Review signed by “Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias Imna Oly”. This is not to mention the labels, often contradictory, chosen by others for her: “obscene” (as Amy Lowell described Loy’s thirty-four-poem sequence Songs to Joannes, about her troubled love affair with the Futurist Giovanni Papini); feminist; Dadaist (Tristan Tzara lists “Mina Lloyd” alongside Francis Picabia and André Breton); and “recluse”, creating poems and collages among New York’s Bowery Bums in the 1930s.

Here is a review of Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011.

via The Times Literary Supplement

The Cult of Lego

Dec 162011
 

lego

Here’s a review of a tempting book. We have it in the book shop. Well, we kind of have it.. it’s reserved right now.

Nowadays, of course, decades after my own youth, LEGO has broadened and deepened its offerings to include an infinity of models and expansion kits, elaborate parts and figures and robotic components, as well as narrative-based packages (Bionicles) and online games and design tools. But at the heart of the experience remains the Holy Brick, with its satisfying capacity to mate ingeniously and heterogeneously with its own kind, according to the builder’s creativity.

I was eight or ten. I guess. The box was size 8. I still remember how far it was on the top of the shelf of the local department store. I remember the two plastic containers and most of those great magical things inside.

John Baichtal (contributor to Make magazine) and Joe Meno (founder of the LEGO zine BrickJournal) understand this numinous aspect completely. When, in their exhaustive and rapturous survey of the multicolored building blocks, The Cult of LEGO, they present the original patent application drawing for what was then, in 1958, called a “toy plastic brick” (or, earlier, “automatic binding brick”), the effect is that of viewing the tablets that held the Ten Commandments, or perhaps the Sistine Chapel artwork. The receptive reader is in the presence of the divine genesis.

One thing common for Lego and Apple: they never insult your intelligence.

via Boing Boing.

Pas de Deux

Dec 102011
 

Since it is Animateka these days, let me remind you of one of my all time favorites, Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux.

Do you ever regret regretting regret?

Dec 072011
 

Monday morning was a bit slow. I clicked on the TED talks link on our right sidebar and listened to several talks. It is hard to answer emails and listen to TED Talks at the same time, so I walked around the bookshop straightening books and listening. I wasn’t so impressed by the iPad guy. It was great to find out about prenatal learning. And in the end I learned a bit about perils and dangers of getting a tattoo in your twenties (or after meeting Winona Ryder).

As the day moved into night and as Monday moved into Tuesday, fragments of this tattoo talk kept coming back into my mind. She used this little tattoo thing as a metaphor to encourage us to appreciate regret and embrace our failures.

Yes, it has a common touch with Brené Brown’s talk that I linked few months ago.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” that is available in paperback via Behemot and Granta books. All the best!

Flying robot builders in action

Dec 062011
 

I wonder how heavy are these bricks. Quite amazing to see relaxed people whilst machines fly over their head with heavy bricks. Everything works, everything functions. Btw, Heidegger said “unheimlich” which translates better into “uncanny” and not into “awesome”.

via Boing Boing.

One Percenters vs. the OWS Library

Dec 032011
 

holy bible

The wonderful Michael Lieberman at Book Patrol talks about the birth, death and hopeful rebirth of the OWS Library. In this moment one of the most interesting and promising libraries.
It seems that 1% is getting afraid. To me, only fear explains such brutality.

Satyagraha

Dec 022011
 

batman

In the case you might be wondering what brought Philip Glass, Alex Ross, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and many more beautiful, inspired, hardworking people together last night, check the video below (gets very beautiful after mark 3:00).

When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.

(via Kottke)

Who drew these?

Nov 242011
 

smiling mac

The name of the woman is Susan Kare. Looking at her sketchbooks brings tears to my eyes (as it should to every Mac aficionado that started with rainbow-filled apples).

pointing hand

It looks like doodles you would make at the back of high school math notebook, no?

(Of course, via Kottke)

PS
This is wonderfully complemented with a little video of Larry Tesler speaking about how they worked on developing Mac’s graphical user interface.

Montag, silently.

Nov 202011
 

damaged library

I would hand copies of Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm to NYPD. I would like to hear Obama says something.

OWS Library
Boing Boing

At least they didn’t throw them away

Nov 152011
 

Update, 20th November: Unfortunately, they do destroy books. And they do hurt people.

library

This short Boing Boing post got me madly furious in less than a second.

Luckily, here is Huffington Post update on what really happened.

And here is a picture of books stored in dry and safe place.

Let’s hope tents for people will be allowed. It’s getting cold out there.

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