Little Christmas Blogging

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My logs show that starting the 22nd of December you all stopped reading this blog. Good for you! Of course, now Christmas is over, so reading is picking up. Does this mean everyone is turning back on the computers and surfing now that presents have been bought, wrapped and opened?

Two Books for Tolerance

Each of us should be encouraged to accept his own diversity, to see his identity as the sum of all his various affliations, instead of as only one of them raised to the status of the most important, made into an instrument of exclusion and sometimes into a weapon of war. (p. 159)

In the same way, societies themselves need to accept the many affiliations that have forged each of their collective identities in the course of history, and that are shaping them still. (p. 160)

In the Name of Identity by Amin Maalouf is one of those reasonable books that seems obvious once read. A short book that makes a simple point about how identity is complex and we should beware how it is manipulated. Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon and now lives (and writes) in France, is particularly good on what it is like to be born elsewhere. “You can’t divide it (identity) into halves or thirds or any other separate segments.” (p. 2).
The other book is Persepolis 2, a graphic (comic) book about a young Irani woman who returns to Iran after studying in Austria (a story told in Persepolis 1). The work gently mocks both European and Irani culture. The book is partly autobiographical as the author, Marjane Satrapi, is Irani born, living in France.
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Used Mechanical Bride

I bought a used paperback copy of McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride. It is a non-linear book; a collection of ads and other clippings from magazines and newspapers, each with questions and commentary by McLuhan. McLuhan encourages us to jump to any section or exhibit as each view is a way into “the circulating point of view” of the book.

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. (p. v of Preface)

The book sets out to help the reader by analysing how print media works by returning to it and analyzing it like art or literature.

It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth. And it is in the same spirit that this book is offered as an amusement. (p. v of Preface)

The detached reader is amused by the manipulation and that is a way back, but back out of the Labyrinth to what?

Most of the exhibits in this book have been selected because of their typical and familiar quality. The represent a world of social myths or forms and speak a language we both know and do not know. (p. v of Preface)

McLuhan calls these ads, cartoons, news clips and so on, “folklore of industrial man” and quotes anthropologist C. B. Lewis to the effect that folklore is not made by the folk, but for them.
The ads he turns up are even more obvious in their manipulation today (or were they always obviously?) One ad for RCA radios is titled “Freedom to LISTEN- Freedom to LOOK” and goes on with rubbish about radio and television promoting freedom. One wonders if such ads lose any power once they look dated or did McLuhan just do a great job at readjusting our reading of such media?
Now that we have all been educated to understand media (thanks to McLuhan), Why are there still ads? Why are we still fooled?
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Theremin: Science Fiction Music

CBC had a great short on the Theremin, an instrument invented in 1919 by the Russian Lev Termen (later Leo Theremin). You don’t touch the instrument, you move your hands close to antennas to produce an eerie, almost human, sound typical of early science fiction movies. According to Theremin World a revival started in the 1990s – the Theremin is back. Needless to say, I want one.

Scrolling foldout from at site on Lissitzky

I found an interesting use of HTML and Javascript while browsing this site on the Russian Futurist designer El Lissitzky (1890-1941), “Monuments of the Future”: Designs by El Lissitzky (Getty Research Institute). For the catalogue of the Soviet Pavilion’s installation at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928, Lissitzky designed an accordion foldout of photomontages. The Getty Research Institute page for this foldout lets you scroll right across the panels of the foldout.
I’m not sure about the rest of the design for the site with its use of frames, but the information and images make this a first rate research site.
An interesting feature of the site is that you can compare HTML (“Common Format”) and Flash (“Enhanced”) versions. To my mind the HTML is better; I’m not sure what is enhanced about the Flash version.