katherinemaslyn - Tumblr blog

[katherinemaslyn]

“L.A. has long sold itself as a territory of individual dreams, individual freedom, as a place where, if you have the resources, you can do what you want as you want in a home or office built to the specifications of your fantasies.

That we live in a city where restaurants come in the shape of derby hats or giant hot dogs, where people build themselves chateaus and fairy tale cottages or even, like the Hayden Tract and Frank Gehry’s private dwellings, places that seem devoid of tradition except, perhaps, that of the imagination, is the whole idea.

—David L. Ulin, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (2015)

Photo: The Brown Derby restaurant, established 1926, 3427 Wilshire Blvd.

[katherinemaslyn]

“On the surface, agile seems antithetical to design.

The agile manifesto explicitly values ‘responding to change over following a plan.’ Design is planning. However, any work with complex ideas and dependencies requires holding some ideas outside the development process. You can’t cave in completely to the seductive solipsism that agile offers, or you’ll be tunneling efficiently and collaboratively toward the center of the earth...

From a user experience perspective, the primary problem with agile is that it’s focused on the process, no the outcomes. It doesn’t offer guidance on what to build, only how. Perhaps your team is more efficient and happier making a lot of stuff together, but how do you know that stuff is the best it could be, meeting real user needs and fit to compete in the marketplace?

Research is not antithetical to moving fast and shipping constantly.”

—Erika Hall, Just Enough Research (2013)

[katherinemaslyn]

“Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine.

You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! ...

A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! ...

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”

—Beatrice Warde, “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible” (1932, 1955)

[katherinemaslyn]

“I remember the moment I realized Manhattan was outdoors, in the sense of being underlain with dirt and stone.

I was fifteen or sixteen, walking down Fifth Avenue in midtown, surrounded by those enormous temples of consumption: Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Saks Fifth Avenue. On all sides, buses, taxis, pedestrians ... I could barely see my feet. Talk about a constructed environment: even the trees come dressed in concrete overshoes. At some point, I came across a building site, or a break in the pavement—I no longer recall the details—a tear in the veneer of the city through which nature (suddenly, stunningly) revealed itself.”

—David L. Ulin, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (2015)

[katherinemaslyn]

“It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail.

Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)

[katherinemaslyn]

“Not being a historian, one might go even further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time —

Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes — the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women ‘lacking in personality and character.’ Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction...

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards — a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)

[katherinemaslyn]

“One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and ..... the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment.

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? ... Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex — woman, that is to say — also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)

[katherinemaslyn]

“Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream.

It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until — you know the little tug — the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind — put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in the protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)

[katherinemaslyn]

“I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer —

to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion on one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928)

[katherinemaslyn]

“Have you ever noticed that hearing your favorite song on the radio seems so much more enjoyable than when you play it yourself?

Surprise amplifies our emotional response. When we anticipate a moment, the emotional response is diluted across time. A moment of surprise compresses emotion into a split second, making our reaction more intense, and creating a strong imprint on our memory... A moment of surprise frames our attention, which blurs peripheral elements, and brings the extraordinary into focus.”

—Aaron Walter, Designing for Emotion (2011)

[katherinemaslyn]

“‘The equipment is all new, installed last year,’ Mr. Wilkin told me.

‘It cost thousands and thousands of pounds, obviously. It is electronically controlled and more modern in other ways. But the pans and process are the same. We tried pans without copper linings, we tried pressure cookers, we tried vacuum cookers. But we couldn’t get the taste we were used to.’

The label is terse: ‘Ingredients: sugar, oranges. Prepared with 47 grams of fruit per 100 grams. Sugar content 67 grams per 100 grams.’

Walter Scott, the company’s production manager, was rather more lyrical. ‘The elixir of life,’ he said as he watched marmalade flowing into hot jars on the speeding bottling line.”

– R.W. Apple, Jr. “This Blessed Plot, This Realm of Tea, This Marmalade”, The New York Times (2002)

[katherinemaslyn]

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.”

– Jenny Joseph, “Warning” (1961)

[katherinemaslyn]

“There is the old story of Somerset Maugham reading Proust while crossing the desert by camel,

and to lighten his load he tore out each page after reading both sides and let it fall behind him — one wants to say the wind was involved, but on most days there was no wind. With or without wind, who had a more memorable reading experience, Somerset Maugham or the one who came after him, the one who found and read a page here, a page there, in some strange new order with stellar gaps?”

— Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012)

[katherinemaslyn]

“At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure.

The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.”

– Joan Didion, “California Notes” (2016)

[katherinemaslyn]

“The first time I was ever on an airplane was in 1955 and flights had names.

This one was ‘The Golden Gate,’ American Airlines. Serving Transcontinental Travelers between San Francisco and New York. A week before, twenty-one years old, I had been moping around Berkeley in my sneakers and green raincoat and now I was a Transcontinental Traveler, Lunching Aloft on Beltsville Roast Turkey with Dressing and Giblet Sauce. I believed in Dark Cottons. I believed in Small Hats and White Gloves. I believed that transcontinental travelers did not wear white shoes in the City. The next summer I went back on ‘The New Yorker,’ United Airlines, and had a Martini-on-the-Rocks and Stuffed Celery au Roquefort over the Rockies.”

– Joan Didion, “California Notes” (2016)

[katherinemaslyn]

“In her application letter to Mademoiselle, Sylvia addressed her vocational skills:

She was ‘skilled’ waitress, an ‘excellent’ spinach-picker, a governess, a villanelle writer, and a ‘reasonably’ good typist. Her first assignment was to interview the poet Elizabeth Bowen (and for Sylvia to have her photograph taken while interviewing her). She was concerned about her appearance as she knew it was a powerful and creative force. For months before she left, she had collected ‘blouses of sheer nylon, straight gray skirts, tight black jerseys, and black heeled pumps.’ She wore her very best outfit to interview Bowen, with pearls, gloves, and a hat.

One of the most confounding and exhausting parts of the experience was that the girls were both charged with creating a product — writing and editing an issue of Mademoiselle — and simultaneously living that product, showing up neatly pressed to cocktail parties, attending lingerie shows. That June was hot during the week, and it rained every weekend, but the pressure remained to appear dewy and fresh each morning. The month was a mania of seeing and being seen, where every girl expected to be both the model and the mind. The ‘Millie’ guest editor was a member of the most glamorous finishing school of the day, in which the final product was shipped to young women all over the country. June, 1953 may have been one of the most well-documented months in Sylvia Plath’s life, but she barely wrote about it in her diary. On the night of Friday, June 26, the girls celebrated their last night on the rooftop of the Barbizon, and Sylvia hauled up her suitcase and threw every last nylon, slip, skirt, and blouse off the roof. The next day, she borrowed a skirt and peasant top and, without a single item she brought with her to New York, took the train back home.”

– Michelle Legro, “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953” (2013)

[katherinemaslyn]

“When you’re young, you think there’ll be plenty of time for everything in your life:

Counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world, becoming greater than Jesus and Lenin and Lomonosov and Pushkin and Einstein all rolled into one, reuniting at some point with everyone you’ve met once in your life, befriending every man, falling in love with every woman… Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness. Never—well, so be it. Quoth the raven: oh well, them’s the breaks. Get used to it. Get over it. Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere; but that didn’t happen—and well, so be it. There won’t be, in the end of your life, a joyous, transcendentally meaningful regathering of everyone you’ve ever met on your path, with stories shared and wine flowing and laughter lilting and happiness abounding and life never-ending—well, so be it.”

— Mikahil Iossel for the New Yorker, “Life: How Was It?” (2013) (via ky-lights)