Haute (altitude) Couture

"[Nicholas] De Monchaux has constructed Spacesuit [: Fashioning Apollo] (maybe slightly too cleverly) as a series of layers, each corresponding to the 21 layers that comprised the A7L space suit of the Apollo missions. The author revels in finding curious details from the material history of the world, and Spacesuit bursts with dinner-party fodder: Did you know that the U.S. government’s documentation of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests created a worldwide film shortage? Or that the Apollo mission’s computer-backup system was crafted into a binary pattern that was then physically woven into ropes? And that only seamstresses could be called upon to do this work properly? [...]

     The narrative heart of Spacesuit is the story of Playtex, the women’s undergarment manufacturer. The company, known at the time as the International Latex Corporation, triumphed over the more politically connected, engineering-driven Hamilton-Standard to win the Apollo lunar space-suit contract. It plays out like an after-school special: ILC’s team, a motley group of seamstresses and engineers, led by a car mechanic and a former television repairman, manages to convince NASA to let them enter their 'test suit' in a closed, invitation-only competitive bid at their own expense. They spend six weeks working around the clock — at times breaking into their own offices to work 24-hour shifts — to arrive at a suit solution that starkly outperforms the two invited competitors. In open, direct competition with larger, more moneyed companies, ILC manages to produce a superior space suit by drawing on the craft-culture handiwork and expertise of seamstresses, rather than on the hard-line culture of engineering.

     [...] the suits, de Monchaux says, were never actually constructed according to engineering drawings. The drawings were always descriptive, not prescriptive: produced after the fact. To fit into NASA’s engineering system, ILC had to essentially reverse-engineer construction documents of each space suit after they had already been produced. This seemingly small detail points to the vast blind spots across different cultures of making and knowing, and de Monchaux happily points out the appealing irony: The very image of NASA’s technical triumph, the most iconic image of the space race, is in fact a 'throwback' — more craftwork than Kraftwerk."
— Rosten Woo, Los Angeles Review of Books
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The Job of Writing

"[...] So set your own deadlines. 'By the end of the day I will have written 500 words. I will have written five pages. I will write the first section of chapter one.' Then set your pace by the available time you have to write and meet your goal and deadline.
     Eviatar Zerubavel, author of The Clockwork Muse, writes that when he works with a deadline, he sets his pace by determining how much he needs to write and 'divides the estimated length (in terms of number of pages) by the pace (in terms of number of pages a day)' to determine the amount of time he needs to write (p. 69). He estimates that he writes 1 to 2 pages a day; he lists each manuscript section by number of pages planned for that section; then he calculates that his book manuscript of six chapters will require 93 days of writing at one to two pages a day. He prepares a calendar by marking all the days he will have time to write (by crossing off days that his teaching or vacation or travel schedule will prevent him from writing. Then he makes himself write on those days, on that schedule, at that pace. (If he writes every day he finishes his book in 13 weeks, if he writes six days a week, he finishes in 15 weeks; if he writes only two days a week, then he needs to write for 46 weeks to complete his manuscript.)
   Can you stick to this kind of schedule? Would writing with a goal and deadline each day work for you? It’s another strategy for you to consider."
— Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Columbia University)
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Treasure Triage

"Papyrus Harvest" from: Wikimedia Commons

"Then comes a morning, usually in late March or early April, when the strengthening sun streams through my windows, throwing a clear light on the tangle of volumes that amble like ivy across coffee tables, nightstands and countertops. I take a deep breath, stiffen my back and prepare to weed. [...]     Some of the choices are relatively painless; it’s almost a relief to discover that part of the bibliophilic undergrowth I’m cutting through is the result of duplicate copies.  My wife and I had some books in common when we tied the knot and merged our libraries, and in narrowing two sets of Jane Austen’s novels to one, we’re voting with confidence on the future of our marriage. [...]
     But any book weeder, no matter how lenient, inevitably wonders if he’s weeding too much. Like many readers, I’ve often confronted the basic dilemma of culling one’s shelves, which is that the book one gives away today is the very title that will be needed — or fervently desired — tomorrow.
     [...] Why weed bookshelves at all? Why not simply build more shelves to accommodate the overload — or, if necessary, move to a bigger place? What’s more, with the rise of electronic books, which can store thousands of titles within a laptop, book weeding just might become a happily forgotten art."
— Danny Heitman, Salon
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"What's the point of keeping most books once they've been read? They huddle together on the shelves and then, when shelf space runs out, they stand around in precarious columns on the floor, making fossil impressions on the carpet, doing nothing really more serious than bearing witness to what you've read in the past few decades. Do they speak to your visitors of your capacious literary appetite? Or do they just count as old friends, the rows of Nabokovs and Thomas Manns, standing protectively around you on permanent guard?"
— Stuart Walton, The Guardian
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"Two years ago, I re-organized my library, and gave away 20 cartons of books, culled according to the following general principles:
♦ Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the Pharaohs.
♦ If a country, like Czechoslovakia, no longer exists, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to take the travel guide along with you when you go.
♦ If the reproductions in an art book are so fuzzy and blurred that you can’t tell the work of the Impressionists from that of the Pointillists, or even from the Surrealists, get rid of it.
♦ Ask yourself the following hard question and answer honestly: If I live to be 100, will I read this book again?"
— Francine Prose, The New York Times
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From: I Love Reading and Writing!

"Because anxiety is energy, the key to transforming it into creativity is to learn to harness it. Yet, how do we rein in our anxiety so we might write or create art?
     Here are some suggestions that help me transform anxious energy into creativity:

♦ Take care of your basic needs. First, it’s important to simply take care of your basic physical and emotional needs. This suggestion may seem obvious, but when in the throes of anxiety, I often forget that I haven’t eaten for the day or that I’m actually running on very little sleep. And it’s important to focus on doing simple activities, like taking a shower, taking a walk, or relaxing.
♦ Engage in creative procrastination. If you’ve taken care of your basic needs and you still don’t feel ready to engage your artistic work, then I suggest creative procrastination. In my opinion, procrastination has a bad rap. But I believe that it’s really a significant way to ease the pressure we may feel and to prime the creative pump. Everyone has their favorite ways to procrastinate, but what I suggest is to do something that is likely to stimulate your creative brain, like going to the library and reading some great literature or going to the museum and looking at great art. Often, once I’ve engaged in some creative procrastination, then my anxiety is more manageable and I feel ready and inspired to write.
♦ Free write. Free writing lets you transfer all your anxious thoughts from your brain to the page. When done in a specific manner, it becomes a way to dump your worries and park them elsewhere. The best way to free write is to set a timer for 5-10 minutes. Start writing and keep writing without lifting your pen or hand from the page."
— Ami Mattison, poetryNprogress
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Authors Be Gone

From: CoverBrowser

"It's easy to see the positive in the Department of Justice's decision to file a lawsuit against publishers and Apple over ebook pricing: it means cheaper ebooks, right? And an end to the shadowy publisher/Apple conspiracy to, according to the DoJ, 'end ebook retailers' freedom to compete on price, take control of pricing from ebook retailers and substantially increase the prices that consumers pay for ebooks.'
     Amazon was certainly quick to rejoice, releasing a statement calling the settlement 'a big win for Kindle owners,' and saying that it looks forward 'to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books.' [...]
     The DoJ lawsuit plays, it seems to me, right into the hands of Amazon. Yes, we'll have cheaper books, but at what cost? Is it worth paying a little bit less for a title if it threatens the future existence of the publishers who are bringing us the books? Or will we be happy getting everything we read from a vastly reduced pool of presses?
     Authors Guild president – and fantastic writer – Scott Turow says the US 'government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition. This would be tragic for all of us who value books and the culture they support.' "
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"[...] But now, with e-books, the chickens are coming home to roost. In February, veteran author Jim C. Hines discovered that Amazon had discounted his $2.99 e-books to 99 cents, cutting his royalties in the process. Jim tried in vain to discover why Amazon had done this. One Amazon rep told him that the company reserved the right to re-price their e-books ('...sole and complete discretion to set the retail price at which your Digital Books are sold through the Program'). Jim made a stink, and another rep got in touch with him to say that in his case, they’d lowered the price because they had out-of-date information about how he priced his books in the Kobo store.
     This is what DRM enables. Imagine Amazon and other platforms all reserving the right to lower your e-book prices to match a competitor’s lowest advertised price. Imagine if Amazon decided to cut your $3.99 book to 99 cents for a promotion (while paying you royalties on $3.99 for the duration of the promotion). Its competitors would soon notice that Amazon is advertising your book at 99 cents and invoke their right to price match. The upshot: your book is never going back to $3.99, ever. Such baked-in price matching would have the effect of making all price drops permanent."
— Corey Doctorow, Publishers Weekly
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"[...] an attitude of mind."

"Dora Saint, a prolific and gentle chronicler of English village life who wrote under the pen name Miss Read, has died at age 98.
     Saint died April 7 at her home in Great Shefford, 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of London, the Newbury Weekly News reported.
     In 28 novels between 1955 and 1996, Saint wrote of the small conflicts and quiet excitements of life in the fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. She also wrote 16 other books including two volumes of autobiography.
     The first book, Village School, drew on her experiences of village life and teaching. The pen name Read was her mother's maiden name.
     A review in The Times said events in that book were small 'but observed with an exactitude, animation, and sense of comedy that recall a Brueghel painting of village folk.'
     Saint believed that 'happiness is the result of an attitude of mind.'
     'I believe you can build it out of small things, out of hearing someone calling across a garden, a robin in a hedge, a cat in the woodshed," she once said. 'When I hear depressing news on the radio, I can switch off and drift into what is, I suppose, a dream world. I think all people like to look back, not because everything was better in the past, but because often they were happy then.'"
— Associated Press
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Church of Saint Mary, Great Shefford (from: YourLocalWeb)

"The parish [Great Shefford] is in the district of West Berkshire, on the River Lambourn. The modern civil parish includes the historical parish of Little or East Shefford, a small hamlet and lost settlement downstream.[1] The tiny Church of St Thomas there contains important monuments to the widespread Fettiplace family. The parish also includes the village of Shefford Woodlands, about 1 mile (1.6 km) to the south of Great Shefford and close to M4 junction 14.
     The toponym of both Sheffords is derived from the Old English for 'sheep ford.' Great Shefford village has a public house, school, shop and petrol station, and 896 inhabitants (880 listed on the Millennium Stone opposite the petrol station).
     The Church of England parish church of Saint Mary is one of two existing round-tower churches in Berkshire. The other one is at St Gregory's parish church at nearby Welford."
— Wikipedia
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"I will brook no refusal, Miss Dashwood."

"Historians of Canadian literature often call Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague of 1769 the first Canadian novel. Though it was published in England and written by an Englishwoman, Frances Brooke spent the years 1763 to 1768 in Quebec, and drew extensively on her experience there for her novel, the first and best half of which is vividly set in Lower Canada.
     Emily Montague is no mean literary achievement. It has a lively heroine, Arabella Fermor (there is  further play on the allusion to the original of Pope's Belinda, although this Arabella is firmly Protestant) and a sentimental heroine, Emily Montague—a kind of contrast that recalls Richardson's vivacious Anna Howe and serious Clarissa Harlowe, as well as looking forward to Austen's Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax; it has a well-developed sense of location; and it incorporates strong female characters and a vigorous feminist stand. It is an epistolary novel, and pays marked attention to the necessary hiatuses in communication between Lower Canada and England,
allowing time not only for transatlantic sailing, but also for the winter freeze-up of the St Lawrence River.  That is, while Brooke takes on the epistolary convention with its frequent strains on credibility, she is businesslike and convincing in following through on the consequences of her choice.
     Even today it is a good read, thanks to the vivacity of one heroine, the social and topographical interest of the story, and the rapid pace of the narrative.
     Nevertheless, by the time Jane Austen took the pen into her hands in the late 1780s, a sentimental epistolary novel of 1769 inevitably seemed dated, and to 'a mind lively and at ease' it must have called for parody.
     Young Austen, as I believe, answered the call; and Emily Montague seems to me a strong candidate as the novel most aptly parodied in her wild little fiction 'Amelia Webster' from Volume the First, as well as a prominent target, among others, for her exuberant take-off of the sentimental novel, 'Love and Freindship,' from Volume the Second."
— Juliet McMaster, Young Jane Austen and the First Canadian Novel: From Emily Montague to 'Amelia Webster' and 'Love and Freindship'
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