The second half of the video (about 14 minutes in) focuses specifically on the connections between creativity and workspaces.

[ via NPR by way of Songs You Taught Me]

[click for larger version at flickr]

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author ‘in his place,’ making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

[via Brain Pickings]

Nice PBS short on the Art of TV and Movie Title Design.

[via Laughing Squid]

Marjorie Foley unpacks The Decemberists’ tribute to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in their video to Calamity Song (above) (duh). The video (loosely) tells the story of the Eschaton, a multi-court tennis match that combines elements of adolescence and global war.

The subject of the video is Eschaton, a fictional tennis game played by Hal Incandenza, one of the main characters in Infinite Jest, and his peers at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The game is played in a futuristic world in which years are no longer numbered but rather sponsored (the Eschaton bit happens in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and much of the Northeastern United States is destroyed due to a nuclear “accident”–the area is now known as the Great Concavity (into which catapults launch hazardous waste and where babies are born without skulls).

Eschaton, a word which means something akin to “end times,” is played across multiple tennis courts, with various areas of the courts corresponding to parts of the globe. The highlighted areas represent the teams, and the combinations of countries, with nuclear capabilities– North America (AMNAT); the former USSR (SOVWAR); China (REDCHI); India & Pakistan (INDPAK); “the wacko but always pesky” Libya & Syria (LIBSYR) or Iraq, Iran, Libya & Syria (IRLIBSYR), and the somewhat weak South Africa (SOUTHAF). Sometimes, depending on the number of players, one may have other teams “like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas.” Players fire 5-megaton nuclear tennis balls at enemy areas, creating playful worldwide chaos, massive civilian casualties, and juvenile tennis rivalries.

Above, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Very cool sociological documentary of how people move within and occupy city spaces.

I found the video at Swiss Miss, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Her source was a wide-ranging Atlantic article by Kio Stark, an NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program prof, describes her course, Stranger Studies 101: Cities as Interaction Machines:

There are three broad themes during the semester.

• Why stranger interactions in cities are meaningful
• The spaces and the significance of the spaces in which strangers interact, and
• How strangers ‘read’ each other, how they initiate interactions, how they avoid interactions, how they trust each other and how they fool each other, how they watch, listen and follow each other.

Then there is the secret theme. I want students to fall in love with talking to strangers, to do it more, and to make technology that creates more plentiful and meaningful interactions among strangers.

[via swissmiss]

And don’t you forget it.

Backing band includes Joe Ely, Arcade Fire, Alejandro Escovedo, Tom Morello, The Low Anthem, and Garland Jeffreys. (From SXSW 2012.)

Damn. BBC removed the video last night.

How To Be a Retronaut features a 1940s-era manual on telephone etiquette produced by Bell Telephone. Reminds me of those “Using Social Media to Market Your Business” guides I keep seeing.

(larger at flickr)

Christopher Warren created a program for visualizing Amazon recommendation networks (Windows/Mac/Linux). Jill Walker Rettberg points out that it’s an excellent guide for deciding what to read next in an area.

[via jill/txt]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204542404577157290201608630.html

It’s not just an article issue, though. Here’s how WSJ handles sections, in this case US Business News:

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-business-us.html?mod=WSJ_topnav_business_main

For comparison, here’s the URL to a post from my weblog, a picture of a creek near Fort Jackson, NY titled, unsurprisingly, “creek, fort jackson“:

http://www.johndan.com/workspace/2011/10/creek-fort-jackson/

And here’s a link to articles tagged “design“:

http://www.johndan.com/workspace/category/design/

I guess it’s arguable whether URLs need to make sense to users. I think there’s not a good argument for not making them cleaner and simpler given that the process of creating them can be automated. Maybe that’s just me.

Increasingly, DeLillo has turned his attention in his recent books to trance states that have little or no actual content but for that very reason have become central to the story. In his most recent novel, Point Omega (2010), the main character finds himself at MoMA viewing Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. Hitchcock’s film, slowed down to near immobility, startles the correct sort of amateur semiotician into a dazed disquiet:

In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

Note that the “array of ideas” isn’t paraphrased. How could it be? If the array could be paraphrased and reduced to verbal units, the trance might be broken; we would enter the fallen world of meaning. To be transfixed in that twilight condition signals the presence of postmodern awe, emptied of its traditional attachments to divinity but with some shreds of religiosity still hanging on. Having retreated into namelessness, the condition correspondingly empties out all thought, resulting in a kind of mystical opacity verging on enlightenment but never arriving there. Enlightenment remains eternally on the other side of the door.

This is akin to Jameson’s “cognitive mapping,” the futile attempt to gain critical distance or to situate the self into some larger, objective reality. That trance state as the user clicks link after link, compulsively/convulsively.

Here are some pictures of unicorns.

[via The Millions]