We love Starbucks. Their branding, packaging, store, merchandise, and hell, we even love their commercials. We. Love. Starbucks. We also love the holiday cups that come out every year. But this year… this year we are especially excited about the holiday cup because, look! LOOK! It’s AARON! Our very own writer is on the Starbucks holiday cup of 2016 and man, oh man, we couldn’t be more proud. Congrats, pal.
Just another autumn afternoon at Lincoln Park, a little oasis in the midst of South Hill suburbia. Of its 50-odd acres, fewer than five are developed—leaving quite a bit of space for frolicsome fun. You know, for your dog. Or whatever.
yugen (noun; Japanese) A sense of indescribable depth and profundity.
After reading Aaron’s latest blog post, Courtney was suddenly overcome by a sensation too deep and mysterious for words; an awareness that all form is void, and that the universe itself is an ephemeral object. Later that evening, she recounted her experience to her aikido sensei, who nodded sagely and said, “You, Courtney-san, are lucky indeed—for you have experienced yugen.”
Grammar got you down? There’s a solution.
“We know that grammar lessons alone do not improve writing much, if at all,” writes Gregory L. Roper in The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing (ISI Books, 2007).
But why?
“The readers don’t need it,” he explains, “because they hear the good sentences and mimic them, and the non-readers never get good sentences in their heads through mere grammar study.”
The current “pedagogy of exhortation,” as Roper calls it, is meaningless; “long and deep reading is the only sure way to improve writing.”
I suppose my own experience bears this out. As a child, I spent most Saturdays in the basement of John Steinbeck Library. What I hadn’t read by dinnertime I’d check out—along with another half-dozen or so books to get me through the week. During junior high and throughout most of high school, my family didn’t have a TV set, so my time was pretty much equally divided between books and Dungeons & Dragons—and reading books about Dungeons & Dragons. (Girls clearly weren’t an option.) And I had a couple of amazing English teachers in high school, when, during summers as a truck driver, I managed to down a novel a day while waiting for the next load of wheat or barley.
Roper’s theory explains how writing has always come naturally to me, I guess. And why it is there are so many people with communications degrees who can’t, well…communicate. So go ahead. Pick up a book. You might actually learn something.
With Tri-Cities area daytime temperatures still in the 50s and 60s, now’s a great time to explore the Hanford Reach National Monument—which is basically the old security buffer across the Columbia River north of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. (In fact, if you squint just so, you can make out the F Reactor in the top center of the above photo. One of the site’s three original plutonium-producing reactors, it operated from 1945 to 1965, and was cocooned in 2003.)
Yesterday morning, the missus and I tackled a six-mile section of the White Bluffs-South Slope Trail, which follows the long-abandoned Ringold Road down to the river. Sweeping vistas abound—including views of the old Hanford town site—while plenty of side trails should keep you busy for the better part of the day.
Best feature, though? You probably won’t see another soul.
I recently wrote about visiting the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at NYC’s Cooper Union. But what I didn’t discuss in that post was the show in Cooper’s main gallery—Swiss Style Now—which, as it turns out, included not only contemporary Swiss designers, but also a few retrospective pieces related to our favorite typestyle, Helvetica.
We got to see the first pamphlet, designed in 1958, promoting Neue Haas Grotesk (as Helvetica was called prior to 1960), as well as an oversized business card for Alfred Hoffman, son of Helvetica father Eduard Hoffman. The younger Hoffman began working for the Haas Type Foundry in 1951, retiring in 1989.
Before we left, the curator pulled off the shelf a very rare piece: a Neue Haas Grotesk specimen book designed in 1960 by famed Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann. Back in the day, when designers actually used math when working on page layouts, specimen books consisted of pages of dummy text organized according to different point sizes and leadings.
From the diary of Samuel Pepys, October 13, 1660:
“I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there were great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the King at Charing Cross. Setting up shelves in my study.”
It’s Elmore Leonard’s birthday today. He would have been 91.
Fifteen years ago Leonard published “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle” in the New York Times—part of the newspaper’s “Writers on Writing” series. Here’s how he begins:
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
The rules that follow that short introduction have been shared thousands of time over the years, and for good reason: They’re no less applicable to marketing communications or business writing than they are to a novel or a short story.
For more on the man Stephen King called “the great American writer,” here’s an Atlantic article from a couple of years ago.
William F. Buckley, Jr., April 14, 1973:
I guess I was seven when I first heard the maxim that only people with a small vocabulary use “dirty” words. I am forty-seven and have just received a communication from a reader delivering that maxim as though he had invented it. The trouble with the cliché as (a) it isn’t true; (b) it doesn’t take into account the need to use the resources of the language; and (c) the kind of people who use it are almost always engaged in irredentist ventures calculated to make “dirty” words and expressions that no longer are, and even some that never were.
from Buckley: The Right Word (Random House, 1996)
So this article calls Midcentury Modern design “the pumpkin spice latte of the design world.”
There’s a lot wrong with that comparison. After all, Midcentury Modernism is characterized by clean lines, elegant forms, and an honest approach to materials and intent, while pumpkin spice lattes are an abomination in the eyes of our creator.
But if the author is merely trying to express (however clumsily) the ubiquity of both, well…she’s probably right.
Which raises an interesting question: Is abundance inherently bad? Hipsters will say yes, but I’m not so sure. Plus, nobody cares what hipsters say. So let’s ask the question another way: Are Eames chairs more beautiful when fewer people have them? Of course not.
The irony, of course, is that Midcentury Modernists set out to create beautiful design for the common person. And now that the common person has access to it, the cultural gatekeepers aren’t very happy about it.
“Grammar is credibility,” says Amanda Sturgill, PhD, associate professor of communications at Elon University. “If you’re not taking care of the small things, people assume you’re not taking care of the big things.”
“Grammar is racism,” says Mona Chalabi, data editor at Guardian US.
OK—so maybe that’s not a direct quote. But she did say this, which makes about as much sense: “It doesn’t take much to see the power imbalance when it comes to grammar snobbery. The people pointing out the mistakes are more likely to be older, wealthier, whiter, or just plain academic than the people they’re treating with condescension.”
Rather than triumphantly point out Ms. Chalabi’s own sneering condescension, let’s give Paul Brians, PhD, emeritus professor of English at Washington State University, the final word on this one. “It may be deplorable,” he writes in the introduction to his indispensable Common Errors in English Usage, “but the fact is our language is judged all the time by employers, friends, and potential dates. When some teachers evade the issue by declaring all dialects equal, they set their students up for bitter disappointment in the world outside school. By all means celebrate the variety of Englishes abounding in the world today—but everyone deserves to know what sort of usage variations may cause them trouble.”
Is a robot gunning for your job? If you’re a telemarketer, it’s already happening. And if you’re a bank teller, there’s a 98.3 percent chance you’ll be automated in the next 20 years. That’s according to a pair of Oxford researchers via NPR’s handy automation calculator.
It turns out that if your job requires you to come up with clever solutions or be able to negotiate, it’s less likely to be automated any time soon. Which explains why graphic designers (8.2 percent) and writers (3.8) are relatively safe.
Delanna Studi moderates a panel discussion following a screening of the 1998 film Smoke Signals at the inaugural One Heart Native Arts and Film Festival. Left to right: Studi, Larry Estes, Scott Rosenfelt, Monique Mojica, Evan Adams, and Sherman Alexie.
In an interview with the Spokesman-Review last week, writer and co-producer Alexie was asked whether anything had changed concerning Native American representation in film since Smoke Signals was released. “I thought it would usher in an era of mainstream Native films,” he answered, “but it didn’t.…One of the issues is simply economic. There’s not enough Native people to guarantee a box office.”
Shot on an estimated $2 million budget, Smoke Signals grossed over $6.7 million—around a 240 percent return. Yet it apparently remains the only film written, directed, acted, and produced by Native Americans to have a major distribution deal.
A few weeks ago we changed out our office display case content to feature one of the best graphic designers ever to walk this planet: Herb Lubalin (1918–81). A typographical wizard and a master of conceptual typography, Lubalin created some of the most iconic logos ever conceived, as well as some of the most progressive magazine layouts ever produced—like U&lc and Avant Garde, to name just two.
So it was a real treat to discover the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography on a recent trip to the Big Apple. Housed at the Cooper Union in Manhattan’s East Village, the collection proves Lubalin’s place in the annals of design history. Flat files within the center are full of his original tracing paper sketches, along with print samples and advertisements. (Lubalin also surrounded himself with some very talented folks, most notably Tom Carnase and Alan Peckolick, both fantastic designers in their own right.)
But if a visit to New York seems a little over the top to look at a collection of great graphic design, you’re welcome to stop by the office for some Lubalin inspiration.
In an interview published in the Spring-Summer 1957 issue of the Paris Review, Truman Capote, referring to the short stories he began writing as a child, said that “whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.”
“What do you mean exactly by ‘control’?” asked the interviewer.
“I mean maintaining a stylistic and emotional upper hand over your material,” Capote answered. “Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence—especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.”
The entire interview can be found here.