This is an old edition of Meanwhile from an inferior, more simian newsletter platform that has unhelpfully severed all the hyperlinks. It’s included here in the archive simply for sake of completion.
Cathedrals, libraries, labyrinths and lunatics – Geoff Manaugh remembers Umberto Eco.
“Eco excelled at allegorical details: rooms that served to mask the presence of other rooms, a town built atop a subterranean twin of itself, a library that conceals a parallel, clandestine collection of books, another library somehow tucked inside its very walls, even an island lost on the precise border between today and yesterday. … Eco’s books are perfect for people who are too willing to believe that truth can be found in reading—even if the stories they return to again and again are published not with words at all, but on the façade of a cathedral, in a theological sci-fi of intertwined saints, symbols, and landscapes.”
Through design, images and words – six decades of art directing The Paris Review.
“It’s very rare that an acclaimed literary magazine goes through as many style revolutions as The Paris Review has. The masthead has shape-shifted from serif to sans and back again; its size has gone from pamphlet, to book, to magazine, to somewhere in-between. And alongside timeless contributions from writers like Joan Didion, William Faulkner, and Truman Capote, design and artwork from the likes of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Leanne Sharpton, and Chip Kidd have been just as crucial to establishing the magazine’s revered place in the canon. Great content matched by great style makes a great magazine.”
Boys could enjoy stories about girls, and vice versa – if only we'd let them.
“Ever since my first book was published, adults have been asking me whether my books can be read by boys, or whether they are exclusively for girls. On the face of it, this question is simply bewildering. Why should the gender of my detectives affect who can read them? It’s like suggesting that men shouldn’t read Miss Marple or women shouldn’t read Sherlock Holmes. About isn’t the same as for – we should never limit readers to books featuring characters identical to themselves. Part of the greatest joy of reading is in stepping into the mind of someone entirely other, and experiencing the world through their eyes. As a child, I was Dennis the Menace or Just William as often as I was Matilda or Sophie, and I think I’m a more compassionate, more imaginative adult because of it.”
Dads and Design review Chip Kidd's GO.
Historically, design (art & design) has been an education underdog, it is accustomed to having to justify its status and worth. But in 2016 it has an array of talented professionals who do champion its worth, and with good reason, as design is everywhere. A good place to start on the home school education of design is Chip Kidd’s brilliant book GO: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. Pitched at children aged 10 and upwards, with a simple message that everything is designed! GO invites them to take a look around and in Kidd’s words ‘behold the design they take for granted every day. Deconstructing it and encouraging them to embark on projects using typography and perhaps some nifty word play’. Bringing design to curious minds. The book takes you on a journey of what Graphic design is and its origins, then breaking into detailed chapters on form, typography, content and concept, addressing the use of techniques and combinations in design.
Do teens read seriously anymore?
“It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past. But they often read scraps, excerpts, articles, parts of articles, messages, pieces of information from everywhere and from nowhere. It’s likely that they are reading fewer books. Yes, millions of kids have read Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and other fantasy and dystopian fictions; also vampire romance, graphic novels (some very good), young-adult novels (ditto), and convulsively exciting street lit. Yet what happens as they move toward adolescence? When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another. The terror of eye contact!”
That is all.