Textism

    —I can’t handle watching improvisational comedy, it’s too taxing, I said.
    —How so? she asked.
    —Well, it’s not unlike driving past a horrible accident, except the accident is comprised of unemployed actors desperate for attention. You want to laugh and be entertained, but also you want the accident to be more horrible. You want to see grisly death onstage.
    —Actors always loathe being upstaged.
    —Especially from the audience.
    —I did that once, at an improv show, caused a total mutiny. The troupe was looking for suggestions of clichés that parents tell children, like ‘clean up your room’ or something. People called out things, nothing took. Then there was a huge silent pause before I shouted my suggestion.
    —What was it?
    —‘Everything will work out fine.’

New :: POSTED 23 HOURS AGO

Over at head office: The New Pharmacy.

End of the Century :: POSTED 1 DAY AGO

The only Sonic Youth show I ever enjoyed was one in which they played nothing but Ramones songs. And while Thurston Moore soldiers on, while Fred Durst whacks off before mirrors, while funereal narcissists recycle marginal junk, while Rod Stewart remains stubbornly glued to the planet, Joey Ramone is gone forever, in search of the fourth chord.

Long Weekend II :: POSTED 2 DAYS AGO

Zounds!

Jonesing :: POSTED 6 DAYS AGO

Presented for your amusement, on the eve of the colossal non-event that is the release of Bridget Jones’s Diary. From Cardigan Industries 1.0: the rejected jacket design.

And why not, while we’re at it: another reject.

Long Weekend :: POSTED 7 DAYS AGO

The arrival?
Her plane lands at 6.

So you’ll be at the airport.
I’m teaching – last class, tests and all. Her hotel is a few blocks from the university; I’m walking over afterward, at 9.

So she traverses an ocean and a continent, takes a cab, checks in to the hotel, has an hour or so to freshen up, then...
Yes.

What’re you bringing?
Flowers and a book.

Are you nervous or excited?
I can’t see straight.

Should be an interesting class.
Fuck off.

Mother of God :: POSTED 7 DAYS AGO

The unmitigated, clattering, slack-jawed, autofellating gall.

Leaves II :: POSTED 7 DAYS AGO

A librarian writes:

“...[E]lectronic materials are most suited for information that has been dissected into nicely pulverised pieces.

“Location of morass is relevant in the print world – especially primary material. I’ve found that special collections ... percolate a soul, [this] becomes entirely lost when digitized.”

The value of special collections is unquestionable, but I’d rather visit (or have loan access to) a library with fully catalogued, exceptionally complete special collections representing the expertise of its librarians (alongside access to general collections and digital resources), rather than a thousand libraries, each attempting to out-collect and out-generalize the next by having one copy of everything.

Alarmists like Nicholson Baker miss the first point, which I also agree with: different materials suit different formats, some digital, some analog. One has no more inherent value than the next. If libraries were to focus all resources on caressing the spines of first editions, commercial interests will inevitably become the portal – and filter – for the nicely pulverised pieces, no?

Leaves :: POSTED 8 DAYS AGO

My position on those early web page prototypes called books is clear: I love books, books are good, books decorate a room nicely. The codex is a robust plug-and-play interface. Hell, I’ve been designing the fucking things for years. Girls who wonder ou est la bibliotheque make me go all googly.

But these rumblings from Nicholson Baker, chronicler of eye-crossing minutiae, phone sex and the spindly legs of men in brown UPS uniforms, however, about the unquestionable value of paper, and about the destruction brought about by microfilm and OCR, strike me as hooey. Dumb nostalgia. The library is changing, surely, but should every teacher know every novel, should every restaurant serve every dish, should every television play every episode of What’s Happening!! at once? Or should libraries focus on what they do well: cataloguing the whole huge morass of recorded thought. Isn’t the format and location of the morass irrelevant?

Kudos, Babs :: POSTED 8 DAYS AGO

A Democratic reply to political firebrand Barbra Streisand:

P.S. Joe Lieberman asked me to tell you that last Saturday he walked – it being the Sabbath – to Tower Records to buy A Love Like Ours, your tribute in song to James Brolin. Joe says that after the third track, he got into his car, drove to Tower and demanded his money back. On his way home, he stopped at Burger King for a bacon cheeseburger, then mailed the refunded cash to Suha Arafat.

Listen to This :: POSTED 9 DAYS AGO

Should you be looking to augment a particularly melancholy surge of emotion – be it hearbreak or loss, or even ennui – or should you merely be drunk, lost in that terrible, terrible trick of memory that comes from remembering an old flame, not for anything good or bad about the relationship, nor the other’s faults, or even for the reasons you broke up, but for the sex you had after the split:

[via Napster] Neko Case, South Tacoma Way

Precision :: POSTED 9 DAYS AGO

It’s nice to find the dividing line, the point at which something vague suddenly becomes definite. An adult male living alone, for example, stops being a vaguely tragicomic bachelor once he is found in the circumstance of simultaneously taking a whiz and eating a sandwich. This is a definite state of tragicomic bachelorhood.

Squished :: POSTED 10 DAYS AGO

More in the way of text design: Distortion and Feedback

Back a Winner :: POSTED 10 DAYS AGO

When I was a kid I used to imagine what it was going to be like. Fantasies of being a grownup, or at least some cartoon approximation thereof, were constant: always some grand distant place where everyone took you seriously and you could go to bed whenever you felt like it. Part of this daydreaming, of course, included an amazing place to live (equipped with huge machines and the ability to stop time), and a rich, dense neighbourhood – the people that you meet, as you’re walking down the street; butcher, baker, candlestick maker.

So here I am. In my neighbourhood (densely populated, near the beach and park, generally high quality of life) the rents are high. The landowners gouge. Here, in my neighbourhood, a curious and inevitable thing happens to anyone who tries to open their own business.

I suppose it’s fair to say that the onetime universal fantasy of running one’s own business, of selling quality things or serving quality food to a loyal, local clientele, was rendered unviable long ago. Anyone who wants to open a boutique or diner or specialty shop will soon have a five hundred pound gorilla of multinational franchise either opening up next door or strangling supply chains. Add that to obscene rents from gouging landlords, and your mom and pop operation isn’t going to be around for long.

In my neighbourhood there’s a pattern. New shop opens, full of stuff. Owner is optimistic, feeling independent and in charge. Owner sees the hundred thousand people living nearby walking past every day, dressed nicely, well fed, and soon wonders why they aren’t coming in. The owner advertises, to no effect. The people keep walking by, carrying packages from The Gap and bags of burgers from McDonald’s and still continuing not to come in. And then the blowout sales start. The dramatically reduced prices. The everything marked down. The For Lease.

On the downward slide (there’s always a slide, nothing without a head office and team leaders will survive, it seems) I see them, the owners, standing out front, window shopping their own establishments, smoking. Wondering what the hell is going on, what they did wrong. I walk by, involuntarily avoiding eye contact, amazed there’s nothing to be done.

The people that you meet.

Improvements :: POSTED 11 DAYS AGO

[Update: The last set of files were corrupted due to the stupidity of the author. All is well now.]

Vast improvements to the ongoing project: a suite of scripts for writers, to aid in the production of well-formed copy for the web. The best improvement, I think, is a new script called URL Grabber that silently turns selected text into a hyperlink to whatever is currently loaded in IE, with the title of the loaded page as a Title attribute.

The script to preflight for the web has had a buttload of errors removed (doubtless there are more to find), and a new (terribly optional) script has been added to quickly format the working environment to a decent type size and face. Also there’s now a previewer which loads the current state of your text in IE.

The next update should be able to pick up dry cleaning, wash your car and return phone calls.

THIS HAS BEEN TEXTISM

A division of Cardigan Industries

ISSN 1496-7596