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Nate
: ?I actually had a photo of this famous D.C. eatery, located on the U Street corridor then known as "Black Broadway," all queued up for eventual posting, but this charming painting/sketch showed up and trumped it.?
Nate
: ?A blog reader sent me this link: "A collection of artworks inspired by the animated film My Neighbour Totoro, celebrating reverence for nature. The artworks were auctioned off to help preserve the ancient Japanese forest that, in turn, inspired the movie." Most of the art from the site wears its Anime inspirations quite prominently, but I found this paper cut out illustration, by a young illustrator who works at Pixar, to be particularly evocative. I think it gets at the delicate tension between nature and culture—the city and the garden, both with their own needs for creative cultivation.?
Nate
: ?I'm always fascinated by discussions (or really just acknowledgements) of the thing-ness of books, that, apart from being texts, they're objects with a feel and smell and a personal, cultural, individual history to them.?Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript—the first historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system—before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn’s sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose—not an experience anyone was likely to forget.
Members of that first generation of readers remember who gave the book to them, who else knew about it, and to whom they passed it on. They remember the stories that affected them most—the tales of small children in the camps, or of informers, or of camp guards. They remember what the book felt like—the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night—and with whom they later discussed it.
Nate
: ?That great lover of paper ephemera Nicholson Baker would likely note all the extraneous, but scrutinizable data left on the edges of these cards in their handling and sorting—an unrecorded search history in the sections of card-edge gone dark and felty with repeated sorts.?
Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once.