Naoki Hayashi, Blue Diamonds
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Mark Yoshizumi "MYNA" and “MYNA II”

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Utagawa Hiroshige, Horse Mackerel, Freshwater Prawns, and Seaweed, 1832-1833
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Reading Proust Again

I was reading this chapter from The Guermantes Way again today. It is about the death of narrator's grandmother after a protracted struggle with a disease. It is long, brutal and brilliant. It was soon after this chapter that I left reading Proust completely exhausted. I am now planning to pick it up again. 

From the older version the final paragraph. It was also here that I learned a new word "Hyperaesthesia" something that describes the novel very well too. (...)

***

They made me dry my eyes before I went up to kiss my grandmother.

“But I thought she couldn’t see anything now?” said my father.

“One can never be sure,” replied the doctor.

When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered, a long shudder ran through her whole body, reflex perhaps, perhaps because certain affections have their hyperaesthesia which recognises through the veil of unconsciousness what they barely need senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother half rose, made a violent effort, as though struggling to resist an attempt on her life. Françoise could not endure this sight and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor had just said I tried to make her leave the room. At that moment my grandmother opened her eyes. I thrust myself hurriedly in front of Françoise to hide her tears, while my parents were speaking to the sufferer. The sound of the oxygen had ceased; the doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead.

An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses which had only begun to turn grey and hitherto had seemed not so old as my grandmother herself. But now on the contrary it was they alone that set the crown of age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the long course of years had been carved on it by suffering. As at the far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even which the years had gradually destroyed. Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the middle ages, had laid her in the form of a young maiden.

~ Dispatches From Zembla

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[ed. I myself have only gotten as far as The Guermantes Way in Proust's À La Recherche du Temps Perdu - In Search of Lost Time (Rememberance of Things Past). A small example of its prose beauty.]

Utagawa Hiroshige: Mariko Mabutsu Chaya (tea house)

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Kay Nielsen, “In Powder and Crinoline: Old Fairy Tales Retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch” (1913).

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Logan Maxwell Hagege (b. 1980), Days Like This.
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Matthew Reed, just checkin'
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Why So Many Book Covers Look the Same

At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashy prints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule.

If books have design eras, we’re in an age of statement wallpaper and fatty text. We have the internet to thank — and not just the interface but the economy that’s evolved around it. From the leather-bound volumes of old to lurid mass-market paperbacks, book covers were never designed in a vacuum. Their presentation had everything to do with the way books were made, where and how and to whom they were sold. And when you look at book covers right now, what you’ll see blaring back at you, bold and dazzling, is a highly competitive marketing landscape dominated by online retail, social media, and their curiously symbiotic rival, the resurgent independent bookstore...

Left with blunt tools and fuzzy math, book marketing and design departments resort to instinct and look for ways to produce the most visible proof of concept: publicity. And where do we go for publicity in this age of tech disruption? Social media.

Books that are designed to render well on digital screens also look great on social.

by Margot Boyer-Dry, Vulture | Read more:
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[ed. Followup to the post below (Decline of Deviance). I have a strong aversion to any book that looks like this, which to me translates as 'unserious', 'hyped', and, (unfortunately) 'chick lit'.]

The Decline of Deviance

Where has all the weirdness gone?

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before

b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and

c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History |  Read more:

Images: Author and Alex Murrell

[ed. Interesting thesis. For example, architecture:]

***

The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:

Every new apartment building looks like this:

Kiyoshi Saitō, ‘Winter in Aizu’, 1907-1997.
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Joni Mitchell - Joni's Jazz

[ed. What a welcome surprise. A new archival release focusing on Joni's jazz evolution, dedicated to Wayne Shorter who died in 2023. So much good stuff here - 61 tracks (full album). See also: Joni’s Jazz Reviewed: Short on rarities but steeped in a love of the genre (Mojo).]

Fiiiiiiish
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Wim Schuhmacher (1894–1986), Still life. 
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Anthony Brault, Pots and Pans
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Alfred Fernandes
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Naeemeh Naeemaei, The Moon Falls a Thousand Times (b. 1984)

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Jack Penny, Midnight Dining Rooms
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