New Arts Journal: Create

Arts Council England has launched a new journal aimed at fostering "discussion about the true value of art and culture to our society." The entire issue is available for download.

In his foreward, Peter Bazalgette chair of ACE, begins with a defense of public funding of the arts, noting:

"The arts define our culture, our identity and our national conversation. And now there is a growing understanding that the arts and culture sector fuels tourism, urban regeneration and our rapidly growing creative economy."

If for no other reason, check out the beautiful building behind Alan Davey. He's the departing Arts Council Chief Executive. Page 40 -- it's hypnotic.

There's a great conversation between English writer Toby Litt and author Neil Gaiman about the power of libraries. Gaiman says he's been in 600 to 700 libraries over the years. Amazing.

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/

Create [the magazine]

New Favorite Website: The Library As Incubator Project

Our new favorite website is The Library As Incubator Project, which sums up its mission as:

" ... to promote and facilitate creative collaboration between libraries and artists of all types, and to advocate for libraries as incubators of the arts."

So, we were sold right off. 

They do a great job featuring different artists and writers, but there's some awesomely quirky stuff as well. Where else will you find a photograph of, say,  Beatrix Potter with her pet mouse Xarifa?

http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/

Find them on twitter also: @IArtLibraries

Can Typography Help Dyslexic Readers?

Typography is pretty amazing stuff. It can do so much more than inspire hate,  as is the case with Comic Sans.

A couple of years ago, for instance, MIT AgeLab looked at how changing typefaces used in cars could help reduce accidents. The study found that certain typeface styles can shorten glance time for in-vehicle displays, and "results suggest that changes to font characteristics in in-vehicle interface design may be helpful in moving towards a goal of reducing demand and improving roadway safety."

It doesn't seem so long ago that word processors came with one font.

Christian Boer has developed the Dyslexie typeface designed to help people with dyslexia read faster and with fewer mistakes. The font, developed at the Utrecht Art Academy, won first prize at the Smart Urban Stage in 2011 in Amsterdam.

The basic idea seems to be that each letter has more of its own shape. The website says the font utilizes a "heavy base line, alternating stick/tail lengths, larger-than-normal openings, and a semi-cursive slant." 

"Traditional fonts are designed solely from an aesthetic point of view, which means they often have characteristics that make characters difficult to recognise for people with dyslexia," says the site.

Check out the website: Designed in the Dyslexie font, there is something distinctly different about the way it looks. A heavy open-ness, as if it was written on a very widely-spaced typewriter.

https://www.dyslexiefont.com

In The Margins: Project seeks to preserve book-margin notations

Ebooks are kind of a tricky subject. They are, of course, completely awesome. You can carry your entire library on vacation, they're easier to move than a cardboard box, can be read on devices from a phone to a television screen, can be replaced if lost, won't fall apart in the shower and are cheaper than their paper counterparts.

But actual paper books are awesome. Sure, you can still buy paper versions of most every major book title released now, but there's an aesthetic that's been lost, a communal feeling, in the tidal shift towards electronic readers. Somehow the weight of a physical book seems less these days.

Alas. Call it nostalgia — it's hard to deny an electronic reader isn't better in most every practical way.

Which makes this project all the more amazing. Among the things swept aside by electronic books were margin notes, those comments and underlinings and thoughts penciled in beside the passages which made us think. 

Erik Schmitt, who worked on the design team for the 1st generation Kindle, has put together a beautiful project which preserves marginalia and notations as a kind of visual art and demonstration of how knowledge and insight is preserved and passed on.

The Pages Project is based on books he inherited from his grandfather, and invites people to submit photographs of notated book pages. He describes beautifully what he is attempting:

"The goal of the project is to demonstrate the layered expansion of meaning and insight that occurs through the marginalia left by ordinary people within books."

http://thepagesproject.com/

Isabel Allende to Receive Presidential Medal of Freedom

The White House this week named 19 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, including Isabel Allende, author of The House of the Spirits and 20 other titles.

"I look forward to presenting these nineteen bold, inspiring Americans with our Nation’s highest civilian honor," said President Barack Obama. "From activists who fought for change to artists who explored the furthest reaches of our imagination; from scientists who kept America on the cutting edge to public servants who help write new chapters in our American story, these citizens have made extraordinary contributions to our country and the world."

Allende's works have been translated into 35 languages and her books have sold some 65 million copies. She received the National Literary Award in Chile, where she was born, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Allende is known for her work in the magical realism genre. Other books by her include: The Porcelain Fat Lady, Of Love and Shadows, Daughter of Fortune and Island Beneath the Sea.

http://www.isabelallende.com/

Amazon: Ng's "Everything I Never Told You" is 2014's best book

Amazon.com has selected Celeste Ng's "Everything I Never Told You" as the best book of 2014 in print format. The online retailer describes the book as an exquisite debut novel ...

" ... about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party."

Ng is a winner of the Pushcart Prize and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

http://celesteng.com | @pronounced_ing 

Constellative Narration

One morning after a hazy night the words were there, sitting in the typewriter: Write the Stars.

Hokey sounding shit, to be sure, but the basic idea feels true enough. Mythologic constellations represent characters and stories. They are outlines, with stars as pivot points of development. "Writing the stars" is simply a reductive focus of narrative.

Seven stars to Orion, but it's not a literal concept. Just how far down can you distill the story of a giant hunter blinded by Oenopion, only to recover his sight and later be killed at the bow of Artemis?

That's not the point. How many of the words can you eliminate? Can we tell a lush story with sparse details? To do that, the story must resonate. It must be eternal, something that already existed in all of us.

Perhaps constellations don't tell stories so much as illuminate the ones we already know.

Idea: A Mass of energy comes into being. Its presence is immense, significance overwhelming and existence universally known. It is the essentialness of life. It belongs to everyone, and yet it comes into existence in a small forest, just beyond a farmer's field.

There are calls for study. The government intervenes, sets up barriers, tries to keep people back. The Mass expands - it grows, it glows, it reaches past fences towards everyone. It cannot be controlled as it exists in a state of universal dispersion.

How do you tell that story?