Edward Tufte – Design is choice.

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

Design is choice. The theory of the visual display of quantative information consists of principles that generate design options and that guide choices among options. The principles should not be applied rigidly or in a peevish spirit; they are not logically or mathematically certain; and it is better to violate any principle than to place graceless or inelegant marks on paper. Most principles of design should be greeted with some skepticism, for word authority can dominate our vision, and we may come to see only with our own eyes.

What is to be sought in designs for the visual display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult – that is, the revelation of the complex.

Notes on Catharism

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

12th century dualist heresy where it is believed that Good and Evil are two gods and that the material world is Evil. But the twist is that to become a Cathar priest you had to become a perfect through a rite called the consolamentum (consolation). But since most Cathars were not perfect but only credentes (believers) they decided to postpone the consolamentum until they were dying. And before this, they lived rather liberal lives for the times. They ate lots of meat and had lots of sex among other things. A laudable approach to dealing with the duality of attending to the spirit while living in the evil world.

Books to note:

Stephen O’Shea. The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars.

Jonathan Sumption. The Albigensian Crusade.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Montaillou. Translation by Barbara Bray.

Witold Gombrowicz – from Cosmos (1965)

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definitions. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in any form. Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe this imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.

That entire philosophical and ethical dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immensity, which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

William Butler Yeats – A Last Confession

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.

I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes.
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,

And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.

John Ashbery – My Erotic Double

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.
Thank you. You are too.