I can’t explore any more of his work without sharing.
They’re so simple, but if you like nature, typography and motivational quotes, visit julianbialowas‘ photostream and more specifically, his 365q set. But wait, pause. Go get a copy of Born to Run and flip between the two. It’ll be amazing and you’ll feel like you can conquer the world. I promise.
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. —George Orwell
That said, you can also view my untrustworthy autobiography at millietran.com — a domain named after yourself is basically a 21st century autobiography, right? My series of defeats will be recorded here though.
PS. James Fallows is following me on Twitter. Amazing! Why?
PPS. Hi, Jen :^)
To celebrate being back at my apartment before 3 p.m. (it feels deliciously indulgent to be able to relax on a Monday afternoon), here are some excerpts from around my world wide web for you to be equally indulgent for the rest of the week, or in one sitting:
Washington Post: ‘The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda [link]
Life is tolerable when doing mundane tasks, it is unbearable when left to think / Admiration for genius can withstand martial misery: Tolstoy had just let his sheltered, 18-year-old bride read his own youthful diaries, in which he described his gambling, drunkenness and debaucheries. … Whenever Sofia shows a little spirit or playfulness, Tolstoy finds her “stupid and irritating.” She starts to copy his manuscripts for him — she would go on to transcribe the manuscript of “War and Peace” over and over, parts of it seven times — and there she does find a kind of peace: “As I copy I experience a whole new world of emotions, thoughts and impressions. Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius.”
Intelligent Life: An Urban Laboratory [link]
BMW and the Guggenheim Foundation have come together for something called the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a six-year initiative to “engage a new generation of leaders in architecture, art, science, design, technology, and education, who will address the challenges of the cities of tomorrow by examining the realities of the cities of today.” The Lab is ultimately an attractive mobile unit for sharing ideas and solutions about urban environments, which will start in North America in late summer 2011 before moving on to cities in Europe and Asia. The plan is to promote a multidisciplinary forum for exploring new approaches that balance our desire for “urban comfort” with our need to be more environmentally responsible.
New Yorker: What does procrastination tell us about ourselves? [link]
I definitely stepped away a few times while reading this. On procrastination and why we do it — it is not just ignorance of the consequences of prolonging tasks at hand, but an ongoing battle between our two selves: Procrastination, in this reading, is the result of a bargaining process gone wrong.
The Guardian: Being Wrong – Adventures in the Margin of Error [link]
Why the experience of being wrong helps to make us better people, with richer lives: To be wrong, after all, is to depart from the facts into creativity, to become artists in our own lives. Error may feel like despair, but it is more akin to hope: “We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right next time.” That may be no consolation to the patient who loses a healthy limb or the pilot whose mistake chucks a 747 into the Atlantic, but for those of us whose errors are less disastrous it’s a cheering perspective.
National Post: Westerners vs. the World – We are the WEIRD ones [link]
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) people are, in fact, weird: After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity. … Moreover, WEIRD people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, they perceive it differently to begin with. … ”This is a serious problem because psychology varies across cultures and chemistry doesn’t,” says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.
The National Interest: Punditry at the Drive-Thru [link]
Punditry is the intellectual food equivalent of a meal at Burger King or Taco bell: At first bite, tasty, appealing and seemingly complete; in the end, bloating, cloying and empty of genuine intellectual fortification. More specifically, David Rieff on Peter Beinart’s propensity to conflate issues and provide narrow arguments about US hubris. While Beinart writes as a historian, and makes no claims to being a psychologist, the almost-total focus in his book on ideas and their effects on personalities, and the lack of suitable attention paid to the question of whether economic motives and pressures were the principle drivers in the hubristic policy decisions he chronicles, make it hard to take Beinart’s conclusions seriously. … Beinart has no obligation to accept the darker view of U.S. motives; he does, however, have an obligation to treat it seriously in a book (a column is something else), just as someone whose prejudice is to see America’s motives as fundamentally imperial must entertain seriously the question of the role of American idealism.
Here are the rest that I am too lazy, at the moment, to summarize/quote —
I mentioned Penguin’s Great Ideas (3) & Great Love series in an earlier entry, but thought of them again because they’re so typographically beautiful and well-designed. Anyway, I woke up this morning but stayed in bed, read through some blogs & RSS feeds on my iPhone until I had this urge to look up workspaces. Somewhere in between searching for YSL’s desk, which I had the opportunity to see IRL at the Petit Palais (!!), and reading an old NYTimes article about ampersands (Well, kind of: “The cases [of B & H and H & H] are unrelated; their announcement on the same day a coincidence. But they provided bagel lovers and techies — worse yet, techies who love bagels — with a shared reason for concern.”), I happily stumbled upon the designer of the Penguin series and his portfolio: David Pearson. I do love that horizontal scroll.
While on the subject of publishing, one of my favorite publishers, Phaidon, just launched its new site.
Galignani, or “the first English bookstore established on the continent,” is my bookstore of choice in Paris. I know everyone swears by Shakespeare & Co. and I can’t really comment since I haven’t been though I’m sure it’s a lovely place. Regardless, Galignani is my favorite more so for the editions of the titles they choose, than simply the selection. Think beautiful typography, matte, embossing… not to mention the almost complete Great Ideas & Great Love series by Penguin, both of which I’m determined to acquire sooner than later. They carry both English and French titles and in addition to having a nice literature section (pictured above), they also have a pretty solid current events/politics section and an impressive arts wall with large, gorgeous hardbacks.
Anyway, there was a string of days where I’d go to Galignani everyday and pick up a new book, even if books are probably one of the worse traveling items. Galignani is on Rue Rivoli, right across from the Tuileries, so I’d usually grab my book and head over to the gardens and read by the fountain. There’s a lot of clamor around the area because of the little carnival and the fountain could be be crowded sometimes, but it’s easy to shut everything out and get lost in your book, especially if you manage to snag one of the reclined chairs. As with any anticipating ending, we are prone to reflections and such. I’ve really enjoyed my time in Paris this month* because I was able to do things I’d normally enjoy, but in a different setting. I’ve told a few people this already but instead of reading at Peet’s on Wilshire or Urth in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, I could read in a café overlooking the Seine or with La Tour Eiffel peeking overhead. Instead of running the loop around Westwood, I could run to Parc Montsouris near my apartment or take a longer run to Jardin du Luxembourg.
Those are the books I couldn’t resist buying. To be fair, I bought Monocle at WH Smith, another bookstore down the street. WH Smith only carries English titles and is a lot bigger, which is good if you’re looking for something more obscure, but I prefer Galignani. So, I have this habit of snapping iPhone photos of books I really want but know I shouldn’t buy. I was going to ramble about the underlying psychological or philosophical reasons for this, but realize it may be completely nonsensical, so I’ll refrain. Just know that this is a persistent habit. Also, I’ve read about half the books and am now on Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and cannot bring myself to read it in public spaces because I may or may not burst into tears spontaneously. Anyway, this last photo is of some things I bought from the concept store, Merci. Much has been said about it and it’s mostly all true.
*Not be to presumptuous about anyone reading older posts, but just know that I had my opportunity to dance to California Girls at Le Montana last night, though that’s another story. Merci for making it this far.
I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire and wanted to share some excerpts on the section about beauty and tulips—especially the Queen of Night tulip.
“Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flowers, but presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and future—complicated human thoughts that may once have been anything but idle. Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time” (p. 68-9).
[Photos by Screen Deb and gwiwer]
“Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact is is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. … For Dumas the black tulip was a synecdoche for tulipomania itself, an indifferent and arbitrary mirror in which a perverse consensus of meaning and value came briefly and disastrously into focus” (p. 92-93).
“The canonical flowers seem to me almost all female—except, that is, for the tulip, perhaps the most masculine of flowers. If you doubt this, watch next April how a tulip forces its head up out of the ground, how the head gradually colors as it rises. Dig down along the shaft, and you’ll find its bulb, smooth, rounded, hard as a nut, a form for which the botanists offer a most graphic term: ‘testiculate’” (p. 98-99).
This is easily one of my favorite books. Pollan’s writing is clear and simple, yet beautiful and his ideas and conclusions—especially while intoxicated in the name of “research”—are fascinating. I appreciated the nuanced botany information but really fell in love with his ideas of order and disorder à la Apollo and Dionysus. It’s difficult to say what my favorite chapter was, but needless to say, there’s something for everyone: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.