Nicholas Negroponte argues in favor of e-books and the demise of print:

While the ideas behind any piece of fiction or non-fiction are intangible, rendered as ink on paper, they are immutable. Kept in the native form of bits, by contrast, the expression of an idea is not only fungible, but the reader can become a writer — what I am calling a “wreader”. A previously solitary experience becomes a social experience.

I don’t know about you, dear internet user, but the last thing I need in 2010 is another solitary experience turned social.

From a recent Talk piece about Max’s Kansas City, by John Seabrook:

There was no doorman, and security, such as it was, was handled by a diminutive socialite named Dorothy Dean, who worked briefly as a fact checker for this magazine, and who would shame people who didn’t belong into leaving.

From “Preface to Sesame and Lilies”, by Marcel Proust, 1903:

I leave it to people of taste to decorate their homes with the reproductions of masterpieces they admire and to relieve their memories from the care of preserving for them a precious image by entrusting it to a sculptured wooden frame.

I leave it to people of taste to make their rooms the very image of their taste and to fill them only with things of which they approve.

As for me, I feel myself living and thinking only in a room where everything is creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a taste opposite to mine, where I find nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is excited to feel itself plunged into the womb of the non-ego.

From Trunk Records:

Tristram Cary conducting a rehearsal, with the Olivetti orchestra and the Ambrosian Singers.

The “Orchestra”

• A 730 electronic invoicing/ accounting machine. 
• P603 micro-computer for commercial, scientific and technical applications. 
• Logos desk-top electronic printing calculator. 
• DES23 key to cassette data entry system and remote batch terminal. 
• Editor S14 automatic typing system. 
• Editor 5 proportional spacing electric typewriter. 
• Linea 98 standard manual typewriter. 
• Summa Prima 20 manual add /listing machine. 
• Copia 305 roll and sheet fed electrostatic copier.
• TC380 programmable realtime computer terminal.

fielderschoice:

theshipthatflew:

Hashimoto Kunisuke (Japanese, 1884–1953), People Listening to Music, postcard, Late Meiji era (MFA)

From The Economist:

The picture above is a visual representation of the “nationality” of traffic on the internet, created by the University of California’s Co-operative Association for Internet Data Analysis: America is in pink, Britain in dark blue, Italy in pale blue, Sweden in green and unknown countries in white.

ENO WINS!

“Show me a man who worries about edges and I’ll show you a natural-born winner.” — Narrator in Donald Barthelme’s “See the Moon?”, 1966.

“The edges around nothing.” — Cryptic note Brian Eno scribbled in his journal, 1968. Courtesy of David Sheppard’s 2008 Eno bio.

The stages of grief (according to The Kids in the Hall):

• Alcoholism
• Sleeping with cowards
• Buying things and shooting them
• Public nudity

Chemehuevi Woman, 1938. Photograph by Barry Goldwater.

Yes, that Barry Goldwater. 

(Via.)

Maria, a hand-tinted photograph by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein of his wife, c. 1945.

From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, by John Locke, 1690. 

(Quoted by Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book, 1999.)

“This is the picture you send to the draft board, obviously.” — Dick Cavett, marveling at the cover of Diamond Dogs during his 1974 interview with David Bowie.

MORE EMPATHY …

George Eliot, in 1856, quoted by Ben Winyard and Holly Furneaux in “Dickens, Science and the Victorian Literary Imagination”:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment