The Telegraph
So I think my first “a-ha” from the Media & Technology book is that it’s getting harder for me to read “real” books, especially those with dense content, without my trusty computer as a sidekick. First thing I wanted to do was Google Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Funny, I envisioned the painting as very gothic, even though I was pretty sure he was involved in Bauhaus and therefore his style would hardly be gothic. The image itself did not impress me in the least—my imagination, and Benjamin’s words, painted a much more vivid, tragic, picture of a determined angel fighting against the blowback of events. Klee’s image looked like a childish cartoon. So what does that say about “the rise of the image, the fall of the word” (to crib from Mitchell Stephens, whom I’ll return to in my research)?
I found the reading slow going. I wanted to define apposite, so tantalizingly close to opposite, but clearly separate in meaning. So that required a trip to dictionary.com, where I learned that it means relevant. Quickly followed by a sidetrip into jeremiad, meaning bitter lament. Mmm, good words. Hadn’t consciously thought much about vocabulary till taking the GRE this summer. At 46, how many words should you expect to add to your vocabulary per week?
Well, I digress. The telegraph chapter was illuminating. We see the suppression of radical potential today, do we not, in the media companies’ fight to keep free creative content off the web (recently Napster, now YouTube)? I’ve been dimly aware that history attributes many scientific breakthroughs to the wrong player, but this case study was interesting.
Finally, a typographic rant about this book: it’s set in a font called Perpetua, which has a very small x-height (height of lower case letters that don’t have ascenders). At the very least it needs to be set larger. Perpetua also lacks a property we look for in choosing body copy fonts: that of invisibility. Its personality gets in the way of delivering the message.
posted by digitaldish @ 7:48 AM
3 Comments:
I find myself accessing the online dictionary as well frequently, but then I appear to be a few months older than you and having been in the construction field (literally) for a number of years-DESPERATELY require an infusion of new vocabulary. I offer HBO's Deadwood series as a great transition. Shakespearing langua and storytelling in the Old West. Novel. Found it on DVD, which is superior to watching TV for me.
To topic, I too have found Winston heavy going. I also found my attention zooming in more with the advent of the telegraph scenario and for the same reasons. Shall we take a research sampling of the class and see if this is a generational or gender phenomena? (Oops! Class 529 creeping in). I do not have the paper version of Winston, I chose to do the download and given what you say about the font, this may have been a good choice. I can therefore increase the font (in some of the books even change it) so my aging eyes can view it.
I had not considered looking up Klee's painting because in my hubris I thought I recalled the artist better than I did. Upon your note, I did and I too am baffled. However, I did read a critique of the painting and perhaps Winston was referring to that, rather than the actual image.
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
Now, how Benjamin arrived at all that eludes me, but then I only took a couple of quarters of Art History...
One effect of the computer technology on me is that I too find myself exploring tangents. Makes it hard to finish a chapter in one sitting. I wonder if the impulse to satisfy the urge to communicate increased as messaging over distance increased in accessibility and decreased in cost to self? Oh, another research topic is forcing it's way to the top of my brain. Studying that topic over the history of distance communication from telegraph to cell phone. Arghh!
I also notice my punctuation failing and paragraphs created more to improve readability rather than generated according to the rules. Which leads me to wonder about the evolution of our language during this online period in our lives....
speaking of ur reference 2 failing punctuation & evolution of language, i don't think i understood where my younger students were coming from w/their lack of caps & bad sentence structure & abbr. til i had to learn to i-m my own college age kids (who otherwise ignored their mother). they kept correcting me!
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But I'm still allergic to the bad grammar and spelling in instant messaging.
Oddly, my first instinct was also to google Klee's Angelus Novus (and then to google Walter Benjamin), with much the same reaction. The angel looks adolescent, but Benjamin's layer of interpretation makes it beautiful. Willa Cather said, "Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all--no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological."
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