Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
by Ellen Lupton.

This is a really great book for folks wanting to get into typography. It not only teaches the basic principles (what’s an x-height? what’s a descender?), it also gives a good bit of the history and theory. I really dug it, and for $14, I’m thinking about adding it to my library.

Links:

• On-line companion to Thinking With Type
• Ellen Lupton’s Website
• Ellen Lupton, “Reading Isotype“

“To reclaim…control over one’s food, to take it back from industry and science, is no small thing: indeed, in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts.”—Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

This was an fantastic book that deserves a better map. Oh well.

Earlier today my friend Tim asked, “What is your most naïve question?”

Mine was, “Why do we live like this?” Which, of course, is also a way of asking, “How should we live?”

I loved this book because Michael Pollan answers my question in terms of food: “Why do we eat like this?” and “How should we eat?”

The answer to the latter: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. In an age where food has become nothing but a commodity, something packaged and sold, it’s time to treat it like a gift. “Shake the hand of the one who feeds you,” as Pollan says.

Speaking of great writing about food, I’d like to wish Maureen McHugh a happy birthday! Check out her blog and contributions to Eat Our Brains for some exquisite culinary lit.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain is okay. As a huge Oliver Sacks fan and a musician, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. But really, it’s a pretty scattered book. There’s not much of an overarching theme or thread — just 350 pages of Oliver Sacks writing about music and the brain. Which is very cool and all, but it doesn’t make for an engaging long narrative. It might be a good bathroom book: you just pick up a chapter here and there, rather than reading it straight through.

Here’s a big roundup of links related to the book:

• Seed Magazine » The Listener » As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension
• Wired Magazine » Oliver Sacks on Earworms, Stevie Wonder and the View From Mescaline Mountain
• The New Yorker » Oliver Sacks » A Neurologist’s Notebook » Music and amnesia
• Oliver Sacks » The Bat Segundo Show

There was a good article about this book in the LA Times:

Hyde’s 1983 book “The Gift,” subtitled “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving — offered or traded — instead of being hoarded or commodified….Over the years, “The Gift” has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on “creativity” — David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it’s “a life-changer”; video artist Bill Viola calls it “the best book I have read on what it means to to be an artist in today’s economic world.”

Mr. Hyde himself gives a good summary:

The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching….This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.

In other words, “Don’t quit your day job, dude.”

I’m not really sure what to say about this book. It just kind of re-affirmed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about making art: that it’s important for me to have a day job, so I can separate work from play, and that the more generous you are with your audience (through blogging, teaching, sharing, etc.) the better off you’ll be as an artist—spiritually and financially. Good companion reading would be Cory Doctorow’s article, “Giving It Away.”

Has anybody else read it? Thoughts?

An 80-minute film all about typography that interviews lots of great designers…what’s not to like?

Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. Why did I read this book? It was all Tim and Mark’s fault. Also, the fault of the UT librarian who displayed it prominently in the new books section.

After skimming about 2/3 of the way through, I took Tim Ferriss’s own advice from page 88:

Practice the art of non-finishing…Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it…If you are reading [a book] that sucks, put it down and don’t pick it back up…

Great advice! I once wrote a post about walking out on bad concerts that suggested the same.

Like any self-help book, there are a few little fortune-cookie nuggets of wisdom. My favorite was a solution to some questions that have been puzzling me lately: What if I don’t know what I want? What if I don’t have any huge goals? Ferriss suggests, that I’m asking the wrong questions—that what I should be asking is, “What excites me?”

I like that.

The other good part of the book is the idea of a “Low Information Diet.” That is, get off the f***ing computer, don’t watch TV, try to limit your reading only to those things that truly give you pleasure and enrich your life.

Which is why I’m putting this book away and starting Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

“Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.”

After the exhausting mess of Schulz and Peanuts, I wanted a book that moved quick and didn’t bullshit. Steve Martin’s stand-up memoir, Born Standing Up, did the trick. Great writing, very subtle and smart jokes. Has anybody read his fiction?

Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.

Rose: To read your characters is to know you.

Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?

—Charles Schulz on The Charlie Rose Show

Good grief. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts. A grueling 565 pages of book that exhausted and disappointed me. So many details, so many of them not significant. I never get sick of Peanuts, but by the end of the book, I was sick of Charles Schulz.

Jeet Heer has written a really brilliant post about the strengths and flaws of the book, almost 100% of which I agree with. Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz kids have also been really outspoken about the fact that the book, in their opinion, is just downright wrong.

Whether it’s factually inaccurate or not, I didn’t find it to be a pleasant nor a particularly great read.

The major innovation of the book is the way Michaelis weaves examples of the strips into the autobiography. This works because—as Schulz said—to read the strip is to know him. It’s all there. This book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Michaelis ran with this technique, and just collaged the strips in a way that reflected the chronological order of Schulz’s life, stating the plain autobiographical facts alongside them, leaving out his psychological “insights.” Now THAT would be a cool book.

Here are some materials I recommend instead of the Michaelis book for those interested in Schulz and his work:

	Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography. Nobody seems to be interested in this book now that the Michaelis biography has come out, but I think it hits all the significant details and deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner. Plus, the writing is way better. Worth tracking down. (Great Amazon customer review.) Check out an excerpt from the book in my post, THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS.
	Peanuts: A Golden Celebration Probably the best introduction to the strip: contains, for better or worse, strips from all five decades, including commentary here and there by Schulz himself. It’s a big, coffee-table size book, and about 200 or so pages. You can get it used for dirt cheap. (Even better might be an earlier edition, Peanuts Jubilee, but I think it’s pretty hard to get a hold of…)
	Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz Chip Kidd designed this beautiful little book. It concentrates on the early part of the strip’s life and development, and contains numerous beautiful scans of actual newspaper clippings (a lot which come from the personal collections of Kidd and Chris Ware) and photographs of Schulz’s tools.
	ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW This is a good interview with Schulz from near the end of his life, and you can watch the whole thing for free.
	Charles M. Schulz: Conversations This is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal. A few more thoughts about the book.
	An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories This might seem like an odd choice, but Ivan Brunetti includes a whole slew of Peanuts tributes, including a piece penned by Schulz himself on how to be a cartoonist.
	THE COMPLETE PEANUTS Finally, if you really want to know the man, just read his strips. Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with these books — I’ve been slowly building my set. (And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping, that they will chose to release it on DVD at some point, a la The New Yorker.)

If any of you dear readers read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples.”
—Thomas Jefferson

When, at the age of fifty, I first began to study the Gospels seriously, I found in them the spirit that animates all who are truly alive. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water, I perceived much mire and slime mingled with it; and this had prevented me from seeing the true, pure water. i found that, along with the lofty teaching of Jesus, there are teachings bound up which are repugnant and contrary to it. I thus felt myself in the position of a man to whom a sack of garbage is given, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the garbage a number of infinitely previous pearls.”
—Leo Tolstoy

In The Gospel According To Jesus, Stephen Mitchell sets out on the quest of Jefferson and Tolstoy: to separate the “diamonds” of Jesus’ teachings from the “dunghill” of the gospels (Jefferson’s words).

The resulting gospel is 25 pages long.

The rest of the book is a wonderful 100 page introduction, an exhaustive 140 page commentary, and a 25 page appendix of words on Jesus by Spinoza, Jefferson, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nitezsche, Gandhi, and more.

Of course, Jefferson himself produced a collaged gospel text, commonly known as The Jefferson Bible:

“During the evening hours of one winter month late in his first term as president, after the public business had been put to rest, he began to compile a version of the Gospels that would include only what he considered the authentic accounts and sayings of Jesus. These he snipped out of his King James Bible and pasted onto the pages of a blank book, in more-or-less chronological order. he took up the project again in 1816, when he was seventy-three…pasting in the Greek text as well, along with Latin and French translations, in parellel columns. The “wee little book,” which he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” remained in his family until 1904, when it was published by order of the Fifty-seventh Congress and a copy given to each member of the House and Senate.”

Speaking of presidents, it was Bill Clinton who recommended reading this book…

More reading:

• The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell
• More on the Jefferson Bible
• Stephen Mitchell on Jesus and the Christmas Legend

This book blew my mind. I read it based on the recommendations of both George Saunders and Bill Clinton. Saunders’ recommendation pretty much sums it up:

“It deals with the way our brains process political information, and particularly with the need for people on the left to become more honest and direct in the way they talk about things – to stop trying to appease the growing right-wing movement and really say, flat-out, what they believe and why they believe it, directly and fiercely. Westen includes an incredible “here’s-what-he-should-have-said” speech that Al Gore should have made when Bush questioned his character during one of the debates. Really a mind-expanding book…”

If you want more details, these two NyTimes articles should suffice:

• Counseling Democrats to Go for the Gut
• Push Buttons; Pull Lever

Highly recommended.