G as in Good H as in Happy

Rich Person, Poor Person

May 20, 2005

Fortunately, the New York Times firewall scheduled to go up in September for editorials and op-eds won't obstruct access to the occasional densely-reported piece, such as this series on social class that does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. (For once, we agree unreservedly with something the Times says...)

Yesterday, there were two stories. One described the marriage of Dan and Cate, a working-class-origin car salesman and a 54-year-old Westchester doctor's daughter. Our own opinion is that the "class" issues outlined have more to do with a spoiled and oblivious maturity-challenged way of looking at life on the part of the relatively moneyed partner, an approach not necessarily tied to class or wealth, though of course subsidized by it. No wonder some people are so hostile to "the rich," if this is typical of what they mean. Read it and decide for yourself.

The second report, a young woman who has become a lawyer and returned to the Kentucky area where she grew up, has more poignant notes. Her experiences and emotions capture the remarkably barren conceptual landscape of a deeply isolated and unimaginative culture, contrasted at rapid pace and high volume with the chatter of the upper middle class who engage in allusive conversation at a well-laid dinner table. If you, like we do, collect seemingly hopeless moments, "foster care" in Della Mae Justice' childhood is about as dreary as it gets. That, of course, is not the end of the story.

As is usually the case, if we only let it happen.

The Face of a Faith

Recent angry riots, said to have been triggered by Newsweek's irresponsible rumor-mongering about the Koran, bring to mind Shusako Endo's Silence, a Japanese classic among novels touching faith and culture.

In response to a 17th-century government edict against the growing popularity of the Christianity introduced by Jesuit missionaries, everyone must trample a holy image, a fumie:

On this day, from Edo, from Imazakara, from Funatsu and from Fukuro, the otona and the leading citizens go to receive the fumie plaque and to check each house's observance of the practice of trampling on the fumie. Every household has joined in cleaning the road, and quietly they are now all awaiting the arrival of the otona and the leading citizens. At last, from afar the announcement rings out in a voice that is like a song: "They have arrived..."; and in each house, in a room adjoining the entrance, everyone in the family is lined up, attentively awaiting the ceremony that is to come. The fumie is between seven and eight inches in length and between four and six inches in breadth; and on it is fixed an image of the Virgin and the Child. The first to trample is the master of the house, then his wife and the children. The mother, clasping her baby in her arms, must trample too. If there are any sick in the house, they also, in the presence of officials, are made to touch the fumie with their feet from their position in bed.

Ostracism, torture, and execution were in store for those who refused.

What would be correct for the priest to do, on behalf of his Japanese congregation? What is he to doubt, what to believe? What does that Face require, especially in light of the iconic washing of feet? And how is a living faith to apprehend these challenges?

Maeda's Ninth Law of Simplicity

May 19, 2005

#9 -- Simplification most commonly occurs through conscious reduction; the more uncommon form involves subconscious compression.

That is, it is done on purpose. Bloggers and other writers (one hopes) look at a draft, cut extra words, move phrases around, eliminate ideas that go nowhere (and develop ones that do). Sometimes it's teamwork, triangulation of vision or the introduction of a less-biased or more distant point of view. A fortunate woman with a candid observer in the house can ask, "Are these earrings too much?"

It's usually purposeful, and intentional. Sometimes however a more streamlined statement or strategy simply rises from the unconscious.

How do you do it? Time may be a factor. Recapitulate, with attention, as Maeda's mentor did. Do it over, and better, and simpler. Think about it differently. How little can I do so that nothing essential is lost? That's the question not only of simplicity, but of scientific and artistic elegance.

Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery, [author of] The Little Prince, [and] also an aircraft designer, [describing] engineering elegance --

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Art. An occasion for the human designer of something large or small to involve himself in evolving an end product. No wonder Maeda finds the subject so compelling. Achieving simplicity, as the shape of this post may illustrate, is elusive. Pursuing it is always worthwhile, as one aspect of doing my best.

M'aussi de temps en temps

May 18, 2005

Chauvinists. Stubborn nannied humourless pretentious offhand frivolous agitated talkative shallow cold distant vain impolite preaching arrogant flesh-loving righteous self-obsessed not-very-with-it disobedient immoral disorganised neo-colonialist dirty egocentric bons vivants snobs.

...mais nous ne sommes pas gros!

Reported epithets from the (London) Telegraph courtesy the Anchoress

No More a Stranger Nor a Guest

A few weeks ago, Chez Dilys sent a little delegation down to San Antonio to study screenwriting-storytelling with representatives from Barbara Nicolosi's Act One enterprise. The deal-sealing feature of the mini-course was Barbara's idea of "haunting moments" in films -- eloquent unlabored images of beauty, shock, and wonder that still the mind, touch the heart, and feed the soul with a mysterious nostalgia. How to identify, and, if the muse is willing, how to tell stories as settings for those moments.

Examples offered by Act One instructors include the assembling Shawshank Redemption prisoners in a desolate exercise yard beneath soaring-soprano Mozart; an end to disorder when in Fargo the pregnant police chief rests next to her husband as the ominous theme music becomes a baby's music box; and the last scene of Places in the Heart, where communion in a country church lifts earth to heaven, chronos blooming into kairos, long-lost faces smiling at last beside us again.

At home among spring birds' nests and his several little boys with their make-believe transparent paint, Tony Woodlief in a recent post marries the daily world of mopping up -- eeuw! -- the baby to the brightness and joy of a glimpsed eternity. As we all do, he has a stake in both realms. The difference is, he knows it. A top-notch writer with sophisticated narrative moves, president of a real-deal university research institute for interdisciplinary research and application in the humane sciences, he willingly and urgently acknowledges that from some perspectives we are all only children. Blessed and beloved children.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) paraphrased the 23d Psalm and others set it to music:

The sure provision of my God
Attend me all my days.
O may thy house be mine abode
and all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest
while others go and come;
no more a stranger or a guest,
but like a child at home. 

G-o-o-d n-e-w-s

May 17, 2005

There appears to be no good reason why almost every child should not  learn to read and write. At least when parents unambiguously want them to.

Via mirabilis.

As is this news: Beer. It's Not Just a Vapor-Borne Pesticide Any More. Benjamin Franklin: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

So's just about everything, says the local Pollyanna, over a stein of generically blessed Malteser Weißbier.

A Book on Wittgenstein

Reviewing a new discovery, the thickly theological blog of Peter J. Leithart, we found his summary of a review of The Literary Wittgenstein (edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) in the (London) Times Literary Supplement.

The radiance of the commonplace: "It is [his] nose for the density and irregularity of things, their distinctive, untotalizable tones and textures, that links Wittgenstein's thought to the great European tradition of realist fiction."

Philosophy as homecoming: "Wittgenstein saw strangeness [& alienation] as the problem from which philosophy was designed to deliver us."

We don't read much Wittgenstein, nor subscribe to the TLS. But we enjoyed thinking about these things.

Via the Pontificator.

Roads and Other Tests

May 16, 2005

The Eighth Law of Simplicity (or of perception + communication + sometimes persuasion) is:

#8 -- Recognize not only the absolute laws of the physical universe as important constraints, but also the artificial laws as of equal importance when striving for simplicity.

This appears in other contexts as the difference between theory (absolute physical laws), and the gestalt in practice ("artificial" laws). Even the Law of Unintended Consequences. In neurolinguistics it is addressed by a practice known as "future-pacing." That is, a mental rehearsal of the proposal or product usage through a series of decision points which may be predicted to arise in the future after the matter is beyond the designer's control.

Too much "planning," however flexible and innovative, seems unconsciously to expect the environment, especially the human environment with its rainbow of agendas and motivations, to "freeze," to go on hiatus and hold its shape while the product or program introduces itself and puts down roots.

It doesn't work that way.

Maeda draws as an example a point of beautiful visual simplicity in the design of the new Audi A4. And the collapse of that simplicity, that design, into the practical concept of "legally licensed automobile" by the attachment of a license plate just in the beautifully simple field he was admiring.

So the plan or design of something rides or falls on the actual experience in execution, often over and over in diverse environments in the company of people unlike "me." Most of these are predictable.The Audi designers know that cars have license plates. Though the placement of those plates may vary among their major markets. Query, did they consider that variation of a front license plate in some US states?

Most management training underscores the desirability of setting up a pilot project or mockup before an important or large investment. For instance, setting up cardboard cubicles before decorating a new headquarters not only places the walls around an actual human being for dimension and location, it is likely that the process of physical assembly and inspection in a different environment activates other parts of the brain than have been called upon. New perspectives help complete evaluation.

Feel free to catalogue your own examples of "it seemed like a good idea at the time" that are undone in actual use. This mismatch is slightly different from the designers' "doesn't everyone?" which designs only for themselves and their perceptual biases. The matter here is the artificial divorce of the studio from the hurly-burly, material and non-material, of ordinary life, day after day. Dismissing thought, and imagination, several steps too early.

The Seventh Law, inspired by the delectable subject of ice cream bonbons, is discussed here.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers...

May 14, 2005

avid Gelernter describes a Bible-shaped hole in American education.

During the 19th century, many American homes possessed only two books, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible. A third, moralizing in a similar vein, might be McGuffey's Reader. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the late 60's, there were still rural students in freshman composition classes whose vocabulary and sentence structure directly and recognizably echoed the King James Bible.

Surely we as a nation are not doomed hereafter to tinny, superficial clanging discourse, robbed of any shared transcendent and philosophical subtext save Reality TV.

Gelernter has some ideas about all this, and is always provocative. The Unabomber's awful acts brought Gelernter to prominence, and have for national public discussion proved a felix culpa.

Via Powerline, a blog which just received its 25 millionth cyberhit recently. When the time is right, unexpected things come to the fore. Thank you, inter alia, Dan Rather. Moving in mysterious ways, etc.

In What May Be a Series of the Unserious:

May 13, 2005

Victorian-style paper toys. Print and make them yourself. If you have a graphics program, you can even make them bigger.

Ornamental boxes.

Otter paper dolls.

A handsome automobile {from the artist's blog):

If it's to your taste, the designer has a charming book. Her designs are elaborate enough to be rather elegant. Hours of fun for children et al. Imaginative gifts. Add value to life.

Via BoingBoing