A favorite from the Archigram archive: The Enviro Pill, for inducing architecture in the mind. “Enviro Pill, it’s my choice!”

Just heard from an Austin friend that Grupo Fantasma is playing with Prince these days! Bravo! I love that story.

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What Khoi Vinh says about Apple’s indifference to typography is true, but horrifying typography is just one of the problems with ebooks. First we pay for a limited experience instead of a shareable object. Second, the experience almost universally sucks, but we suffer though it becuase what’s really important is that Amazon gets to collect marketing data for themselves. I guess we’ll see whether Apple can improve on the Amazon experience enough to make me want to spend money again. Contrary to what I keep hearing about how people buy more ebooks than they ever did paper books, I spend far less on books now than I used to in the days of pretty paperbacks. (Has anyone else noticed that no one’s putting much effort into cover design any more?) The convenience of an elibrary, especially for insomnia reading, is undeniable. But paying for something so halfass gives me hives.

By the way, Amazon (and I know you’re listening), the act of reading is solitary and I like it that way. Don’t try to weasel all sorts of social nonsense into my solitude. The “popular highlights” feature sends me into a frothing rage. I don’t want to be part of a global book club, check in with my “friends”⁰¹ to make sure everything I like is popular enough. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about the pointless notes feature. I can write notes all through my rented book, but I can’t take them anywhere else? Does Amazon think I exist only inside this particular book? It’s as if the designers made a deliberate determination that I have no reason to take my reading related thoughts outside of it and into the rest of my world. It displays an impressive lack of understanding of the way books fit into people’s lives. Amazon conflates the delightful solitude of immersion within a book with the delightful but utterly separate conversations that take place outside of and around books. These two separate things exist because they are separate. Mash them to together to cripple each of them pretty badly.

I am less and less convinced this nonsense is worth paying for. On the bright side, I am reading a lot of classics lately. Thanks Project Gutenberg. You guys are champs.

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However, I am intermittently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost and finding it absolutely lovely. Tangled and delicate and slyly and intentionally bewildering. Just perfect. So I was ready for a small thing Julian Assange said in that fascinating New Yorker article⁰² about living alone in the eucalyptus forest long enough to quiet his internal voice.

“Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

And last, the scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro sees her body begin to fade in the darkness.