"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter."
About 20 years ago Pennebaker, who’s at the University of Texas at Austin, got interested in looking more closely at the words that we use. Or rather, he got interested in looking more closely at a certain subset of the words that we use: Pennebaker was interested in function words.
For those of you like me — the grammatically challenged — function words are the smallish words that tie our sentences together.
The. This. Though. I. And. An. There. That.
“Function words are essentially the filler words,” Pennebaker says. “These are the words that we don’t pay attention to, and they’re the ones that are so interesting.”
”There’s a growing suspicion that [literature]’s worth has been over inflated that surfing the web is a suitable and even superior substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. From this larger reconfiguration of values, many others necessarily follow — speed trumps reflectiveness, information unseats analysis, the rewards of convenience win over those of difficulty. Though no one would claim to value rancor, this reordering of ideals has come at a cost to empathy and compassion, which are more sophisticated mental processes, and therefore, as neuroscientists explain it, inherently slow.”
Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a Lolita cover competition asking designers to do better.
Now the contest is being turned into a book, due out in June and coedited by Yuri Leving, with essays on historical cover treatments along with new versions by 60 well-known designers, two-thirds of them women: Barbara deWilde, Jessica Helfand, Peter Mendelsund, and Jennifer Daniel, to name a few. They don’t shy away from frank sexuality, but they add layers of darkness and complication. And like Jamie Keenan’s cover—a claustrophobic room that morphs into a girl in her underwear—they provoke without asking readers to abdicate their responsibility.
"Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions."
"She is in search of a language that is tactile, palatial, and self-immolating—a language that will correspond to her latent desire to disintegrate and expand. To become the room."
"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter."
About 20 years ago Pennebaker, who’s at the University of Texas at Austin, got interested in looking more closely at the words that we use. Or rather, he got interested in looking more closely at a certain subset of the words that we use: Pennebaker was interested in function words.
For those of you like me — the grammatically challenged — function words are the smallish words that tie our sentences together.
The. This. Though. I. And. An. There. That.
“Function words are essentially the filler words,” Pennebaker says. “These are the words that we don’t pay attention to, and they’re the ones that are so interesting.”
"Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions."
"She is in search of a language that is tactile, palatial, and self-immolating—a language that will correspond to her latent desire to disintegrate and expand. To become the room."
