In his 1976 essay “Lumbar Thought,” Italian writer-philosopher Umberto Eco recalled wearing tight jeans for the first time and finding that the constant feeling of clothing pressing on his body made him aware at all times of his exterior form, limiting his capacity for internal thought and stunting his ability to manspread. “As a rule I am boisterous, I sprawl in a chair, I slump wherever I please, with no claim to elegance: My blue jeans checked these actions, made me more polite and mature,” he wrote. “I lived in the knowledge that I had jeans on, whereas normally we live forgetting that we’re wearing undershorts or trousers.” Eco concluded that tight or uncomfortable items of clothing-bras, girdles, hosiery, heels, Wedgie Fit jeans-are significant contributors to women’s oppression. Body-squishing womenswear does more than inhibit free movement, he surmised. It occupies brainspace and consciousness that could be better used scheming, creating, or just daydreaming.
Some things I read this month
- Kerry Gold, “The Highest Bidder” (The Walrus)
- Jeffrey Meyers, “Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction No. 117” (The Paris Review)
- Maria Popova, “How to Save Your Soul: Willa Cather on Productivity vs. Creativity, Selling Out, and the Life-Changing Advice That Made Her a Writer” (Brainpickings)
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Rena Silverman, “Photographing Ikea, Some Assembly Required” (The New York Times)
Some things I read this month
- Bear Bellinger, “I’m a black actor. Here’s how inequality works when you’re not famous.” (Vox)
- Alexandra Eyle, “W. D. Snodgrass, The Art of Poetry No. 68” (The Paris Review)
- Shannon Keating, “The Year We Imagined The End Of The Closet” (Buzzfeed)
- Soraya Roberts, “Winona, Forever” (Hazlitt)
it’s my responsibility to seek out women writers
There’s a reason I’m translating a woman next. I think about that; I think about the question of women writers in translation. I’ve translated on commission a lot, so I tend to just choose the best of what I’m offered, and that’s happened to be male writers. But I do think that it’s my responsibility to seek out women writers and to translate them.
Some things I read this month
- Peter Cooper, ““It’s no longer just a ‘little-boy thing,’”: There’s a huge increase in ADHD diagnosis in young women”” (Salon)
- Alex Espinoza, “Beautiful Lies” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
- Melissa A. Fabello, “5 Ways to Bring Feminism to Your Education” (Everyday Feminism)
- Meagan Francis, “The Art of Natural Self-Promotion” (Quiet Revolution)
- Danny Funt, “Alana Massey’s journey to being taken seriously” (Columbia Journalism Review)
- Megan Garber, “In Defense of Instagramming Your Food” (The Atlantic)
- Michael Godsey, “Why Introverted Teachers are Burning Out” (The Atlantic)
- Andrew Pilsch, “When the Coffee Machine Is Just a Human” (The Atlantic)
- Molly Reiniger, “The Re-Read: A Wrinkle in Time” (Feed Your Need to Read)
- Anna Reisman, “The Last Rotation” (Slate)
- Virginia Sole-Smith, “Escape From the Internet!” (New York)
Some things I read this month
- Jodi Ettenberg, “Travel and the Present Tense” (Daily 800)
- Annie Hartnett, “We’re more than confirmation numbers: What I learned selling books to strangers” (Salon)
- Alexandra Kimball, “Unpregnant: The silent, secret grief of miscarriage” (The Globe and Mail)
- Jacob Lambert, “Thirty Minutes at a Used-Book Sale” (The Millions)
Some things I read this month
- Stephen Burt, “Jem and Gender Theory” (The New Yorker)
- Elaine Filadelfo, “Leveling both sides of the playing field” (Medium)
- Melissa Jeltson, “The Remarkable Journey From Identical Twins To Brother And Sister” (The Huffington Post)
- Anne Helen Petersen, “The Keys to Enya’s Kingdom” (Buzzfeed)
- Nick Ripatrazone, “Why Writers Run” (The Atlantic)
- Amber Scorah, “A Baby Dies at Day Care, and a Mother Asks Why She Had to Leave Him So Soon” (The New York Times)
Some things I read this month
- Colleen Bennett, “Why It’s Not Sexist To Call Women ‘Girls’” (Refinery 29)
- Monica Bielanko, “Why I Can Never Order from Chipotle Again” (Quiet Revolution)
- Jane Gottlieb, “At New York Apple Orchards, an Autumn Tradition Strays From Its Core” (NY Times)
- Gary Gutting and Nancy Fraser, “A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning On Others” (The Stone / NY Times Opinionator)
- Aisha Harris, “TV Is More Diverse than Ever—on Screen. Why Not in the Writers’ Room?” (Slate)
- Rebecca Rosenblum, “What Happens When a Literary Submission Gets Published in a Journal/Magazine” (Rose Coloured)
- Herbert Yager, “Saul Bass On His Approach To Designing Movie Title Sequences” (Medium)
Some things I read this month
- Josef Adalian, “Network TV’s Ultimate Survivor” (Vulture)
- Michelle Dean, “‘I cannot be that person’: why the ‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers’ had to quit” (The Guardian)
- Katie Hyslop, “‘Sessional’ Instructors: Return of the Penniless Scholar?” (The Tyee)
- Brian Moylan, “The Many Stages of Life After Reality TV” (Vulture)
- James Victore, “Dangerous Ideas on Design Education” (Print)
weird is good
Students are attracted to design in the first place because they see the world in a different way, slightly askew. They are weird. Most of them have heard this many times in their lives-and it was not intended as a compliment. But Weird is good; it’s an anomaly and it’s unique. I teach on the simple premise that the things that made you weird as a kid make you great as an adult-but only if you pay attention to them. If you look at any “successful” person, they are probably being paid to play out the goofiness or athleticism or nerdiness or curiosity they already possessed as a child. Unfortunately for most people, somewhere along the road their weirdness was taught out of them or, worse, shamed out of them. Crushed by the need to “fit in,” they left their quirks and special powers behind. But it is our flaws that make us interesting. We need to not only hang on to them, but hone them. I don’t try to make my students “Designers.” I want to make them “free-er.” It’s my job to teach them to look inside, to covet their weirdness, to help them direct it and take the rough edges off-or even add a few new ones. It’s my job to help students understand and cultivate their individuality and innate weirdness and turn them into a powerful tool. Weird is good, but only if we put it in your work.
The Remainder Table 