Up at MIT Nick Montfort--embodying the perfect mixture of engineering and literary backgrounds--has his students do some serious web work in (I'm almost tempted to say) the old-fashioned put-it-up-on-the-web mode. One student project has been to make Des Imagistes of 1912, Ezra Pound's gathering of imagists, available for the first time ever on the web. They've done a beautiful job of it. And even the URL - www.desimagistes.com - is elegant. There it is. Gotta love that typeface, 1912's version of mod. "This website uses a font stack of 'Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif.' Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry."
Monday, December 08, 2008
imagists on the web
Up at MIT Nick Montfort--embodying the perfect mixture of engineering and literary backgrounds--has his students do some serious web work in (I'm almost tempted to say) the old-fashioned put-it-up-on-the-web mode. One student project has been to make Des Imagistes of 1912, Ezra Pound's gathering of imagists, available for the first time ever on the web. They've done a beautiful job of it. And even the URL - www.desimagistes.com - is elegant. There it is. Gotta love that typeface, 1912's version of mod. "This website uses a font stack of 'Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif.' Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
