Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

This book is actually not that good looking. And it is a classic ‘high-concept’ book and the concept is obviously freedom, our hunt for it and the attempts to maintain it.

“Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day to figure out some decent and satisfyingwayto live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.” (Franzen, 2010, p.181).

“People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedom all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, evenif our kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing noboday can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.” (Franzen, 2010, p.361).

The book shows how this leads to avoiding and doubting any commitment and the constant urge to try out more options in life. Thereby we are never happy with the life we are leading. This simply concept is then blown up with stories from theBerglund family over 500 pages.

Towards the end, the book presents a solution as simple as the problem posed: commitment.

“There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness. Gene no longer had to fear a big disappointment in the future in the future, because he’d already accomplished it; he’d cleared that hurdle.” (Franzen, 2010, p.447).

This solution then leads to a simple, rather dull Hollywood happy ending. If we all commit ourselves to something, anything, preferably private, everyone’s home will be a great place.

George Lois - The Art of Advertising

A book full of good, raw and in-your-face US advertising.

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

Very interesting book, cumulating in the great sentence:

“He that does not eat need not work” (Thoreau, 1854, p.144).

“When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced” (Thoreau, 1854, p.9).

“In accumulating property for ourselves or for posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident” (Thoreau, 1854, p.64).

“He that does not eat need not work” (Thoreau, 1854, p.144).

James Webb Young - How to become an Advertising Man

A couple of very clear definitions and thoughts that seem much more elegant than much of the literature written afterwards:

“The “PROPOSITION” which any advertisement makes to its reader or viewer the quid pro quo – the benefit he will receive for what you ask him to do. It consists of the promise of that benefit plus the reason why you can fulfill it.” (Young, 1963, p.19).

“What you must say here (with the message) is something carefully clculated to touch an exposed nerve of your prospect’s self interest” (Young, 1963, p.30).

“You must make (…)clear the relationshop between what you have to offer and the prospect’s wants, needs, or existing desires” (Young, 1963, p.30).

“So you will work like a beaver to talk his language (…) to ring true with his life as it is or as he hopes it will be” (Young, 1963, p.31).

Moreover Young is not afraid of explaining why advertising is a good thing – not that you have to agree with him, but it is a very interesting thought:

“To use advertising to overcome inertia is to use it as an external force to overcome some state of rest in man (…) By overcoming inertia there is produced a greater release of the energies of men – the true source of wealth of nations” (Young, 1963, p.65).

Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov

Long time no book. The reason is not, though, that I have been lazy, but only because the last book was a rather long one. That is also the reason why it looks so battered, which I like a lot. It has been with me for a while and it shows it. Didn’t understand much of it, though it seems there is lots of Rene Girard’s theory of sacrificing and the sacred in here.

I simply copied the passages I found the most striking.

“And since man is not strong enough to get by without the miracle, he creates new miracles for himself, his own now, and bows down before the miracle, of the quack and the witchcraft of the peasant woman” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.333).

“each person being guilty for all creatures and for all things, as well as his own sins” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.392). This is what the scapegoat does, and this is what Dimitry will do, being punished for a crime, he did not commit, but accepting the punishment. And by this process the scapegoat can become sacred.

“Bear in mind particularly that you can be no man’s judge. For a criminal can have no judge upon the erth until that judge himself has perceived that he is every bit as much a criminal as the man who stands before him, and that for the crime of the man who stands before him he himself may well be more guilty than anyone else. Only when he grasps this may he become a judge.” (Dostoyevsky, 1880, p.415).

“The human race fails to accepts its prophets and does them to death, but men love their martyrs and honour those whom they have martyred. (…)

Modern Art – 1880 to present – the museum of modern art. (John Elderfield, ed.)

I got this one ages ago when I actually visited MoMa in New York. The MoMa itself is a horrible experience, ways too crowded and somehow very sterile and less fun than the Tate Modern in London for example. Thus I left quickly, bought this book, so I have a chance to catch up on all.

And it turned out to be very interesting: “Basically, art is making meaning. In a sense, it’s philosophy made concrete.” (Duchamp). And as theorists artists seem to be very good at writing aphorisms: fun little theory sniplets. Here you go:

For Picasso “Cubism was a kind of deliverance. It obliged him consistently to forgo the refuge of virtuosity.“

“Leger argued that art must acknowledge its time not through the naturalistic representation of contemporary subject matter (“visual realism”) but by transforming that subject matter through explicitly pictorial devices – “a realism of conception”.

For Duchamp “there is a brief to be made as an artist against certain forms, because those forms constitute fixed meanings. Ready-mades that are naturalized as the language of art are not seen, in fact, as ready-made”

“The style he (Malevich) called Suprematism, which eliminated all references to the world of visible reality, leaving only the purely pictorial elements” (Elderfield, 2004, p.200).

Mondrian “felt that naturalistic forms in painting were limited forms by the very definition of their specific references (…) He wanted to destroy the particular form”” (Elderfield, 2004, p.206).

Surrealism is a “pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation”.

Magritte said “My painting have no reducible meaning; they are a meaning” (Elderfield, 2004, p.221).

On Rothko: “We no longer look at a painting as we did in the nineteenth century, we are meant to enter it, to sink into its atmosphere of mist light or to draw it around us like a coat – or a skin.” (Elderfield, 2004, p.311).

Advertising Works 15 - Laurence Green

Another one. Very interesting fort wo case studies: Felix, because it shows that it sometimes pays off to sticking to an old camapign and not trying to disrupt the marketand for the foreword by Laurence Green, where he shows that creativity doesn’t have to be in the advertising but often is in the product innovation, or in general more upstream on the client side.