Process books due Thursday 8 December, unless extension has been approved. For those who are getting books printed by Lulu, pdf and receipt/acknowledgement from Lulu acceptable.
update (Monday 12, December) :
I did not specify what time today the process books are due, for those who are not doing the Lulu route.
I will be at school tomorrow (Tuesday), 7:00am. I will expect to see physical copies on the seminar room table then.
Lulu versions : pdf and forwarded notification from Lulu.
Reminder: those who will continue on in Spring, update/revise proposals for the reviews on Wednesday.
collage and documentation thereof
Thinking of Dan Eldon (1970-1993), his The Journey is the Destination (Kathy Eldon, editor; 1997), borrowable (wow!) at internet archive : link
more at wikipedia : link
Socrates: “All the great arts need to be supplemented by philosophical chatter and daring speculation about the nature of things; from this source appear to come the sublimity of thought and all-round completeness which characterize them.”
Plato, Phaedrus 270 (Hamilton translation, Penguin edn) : 89
We used to read all or parts of this dialogue in Design Stories; it is devoted to love (that might be loosely translated as caritas, or even kindness) and to rhetoric (the arts of persuasion), and as such, is fully relevant to design.
see wikipedia for a summary : link
and SEP (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy) for an extended discussion of Plato on rhetoric : link
This passage — re: philosophical chatter — is perhaps what we’re about in Design Seminar. Working on language, that is one connection of work under way, or the stammering/stumbling toward that work, with the world and our lives in it. Moreover, it is with language that we engage with clients, partners, colleagues, developers, printers, editors and everyone else who participates with us in the practice of design.
The dialogue contains a famous passage about the superiority of spoken over written language —
“The fact is, Phaedrus, that writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.”
Plato, Phaedrus 274-279 (ibid.)
JM discussed this passage in the context of design in the Design Stories course blog/website, at “alphabets, writing, externalization of memory” (18 February 2008)
https://studio.montserrat.edu/gd/stories/index.htm#alphabets
(unfortunately, that website is currently unavailable, but it is backed up; printed and distributed that post, in class).
Katherine Small Gallery
mentioned several times in class. : ksmallgallery.com/
sign up for mailing list (weekly, or so, interesting posts, mainly about design/designed books)
about : link
instagram : @ksmallgallery
visit (open Fridays, Saturdays) : 108 Beacon Street, Somerville Mass 02143 (walking distance from Harvard Square, Porter Square)
trains
Steve Reich, Different Trains (Kronos Quartet performance, 1988) : link (at his website, explanation plus preview)
at youtube : link
JM favorite is “2. Radio: All Moving 4-4-4-9” (disc 2) : link
Madiun, January 1978 : link
more and better (same yard, not my photos) : link
and more (up a step) here : link
shoes
John showed shoe interior (b&w) containing the pink Pumas amidst orange/red leaves, three versions. in one, gravestones visible in upper read. JM wondered if shoes were buried. Apparently, yes.
- shoe cemetery : link (in German, but can be auto-translated)
- search for "shoe cemetery", other things come up too.
- concealed shoes (a thorough and interesting entry — on shoes as apotropaic objects — at wikipedia) : link
- Revisited Myth # 145: It was the custom to bury old shoes in a new building for good luck. (July 30, 2018) : link
- and then there are shoe trees, e.g., link (Shoe Tree of Middlegate, in Nevada) but there are others, see —
- Shoe trees (decorated plants), long list, at wikipedia : link
paused at this —
Mostly I want to be letters — not
their sounds, but their shapes
on a page. It must be exhilarating
to be a symbol for everything at once:
the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,
the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.
— Kaveh Akbar, from “Rimrock”, Calling a Wolf a Wolf
source
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