and here it is again, with the center frame highlighted:

Looking closer at the center panels, we can see that the backdrop is clearly lower Manhattan, with the Bank of New York at left (and the Woolworth Building in the third panel).  Then there’s the strip of text flying by, led by what might be read as a passenger jet on its side, flying past (or into) a building that looks a lot like the Twin Towers of the former WTC.

What happened?  Total accident, possible sly joke?  Who knows?  In a world globalized and overflowing with image, there is plenty of graphic collision, and it can be hard to say what means what to whom.

The flavor of this Hi-chew pack, however, is “American Cherry”, which may explain things. I imagine some beleaguered graphic designers, deep in a sub-basement of the headquarters of candy-making behemoth Morinaga Seika Kabushiki-gaisha, needing to come up with a design for the next day, and casting about for something recognizably American, that they could find usable images of easily.

I imagine this possibility because New York City is a powerful, global brand — symbol that for many people is almost one with the United States.  It is a tremendous asset for New York, except for making the city a prime terrorist target.  Many New Yorkers, of course, being rather alienated from the country, might find it strange that foreigners regard the city as synonymous with the nation.

Thus perhaps the lower-Manhattan imagery.  The plane?  Well that’s the plane with the product slogan text trailing behind it that we  put on every package design! (I imagine them saying).  Here the worlds collide.

I also recently picked up an assortment pack of Meiji-brand candies:

I buy one of these now and then, I admit, because it has great fun value:  seeing the cacaphony of boxes lined up in one package;  cracking the outer cellophane to let the different jewel-like, matchbox-sized boxes spill out, each cellophane wrapped as well, and with playing-card markings on back so you could play cards if you collected enough of them.

By the time you go through the individual-box cellophane, open the cardboard box, and have one of the tiny intense candies, it is as if you are eating pure colors or images.  Yes they are for children, but I like to think it may also help one understand the pleasure Japanese have with packaging.  Also I like the candy.  Their world and my world, we meet here.

The project I loved was “IScreen” by Li-Rong “Lisa” Liao from Taiwan, a student in the graduate Industrial Design program at Pratt Institute in New York. (portfolio, personal site).    IScreen is a system for making a modular, tradition-Chinese-style lattice screen, based purely on the abstracted characters of her English name, “LISA”.   Four or eight of these modules can be combined in a ring to form a larger module;  these larger modules can in turn be combined into a larger unit, and this can be extended arbitrarily to form a large screen or wall decoration.  For a visual explanation, see the image below; click here or below to see full-sized explanation.  There is also a good explanation on Li-Rong’s web site.

A detail I found interesting is that Li-Rong used her adopted English-language name (i.e. Latin characters), to form a screen which has a clear affinity to traditional Chinese lattice-work.  As I note in the image below, the screen is produced by a series of transformations beginning with the substitution of her given Chinese name into Latin characters and a Western name, “Lisa”, and then the subsequent geometric treatments.   What does this suggest, that the relatively abstract Latin characters have a universality?  (after all, Romanizations or phoneticizations of Chinese have been proposed for centuries, and it is claimed Mao Zedong believed latin characters would replace Chinese).

[continued after the picture]

anyway, congratulations Li-Rong (Lisa) — beautiful beautiful work!  See her portfolio and her personal site for more, and ask her about buying a set of IScreens units for your home or workplace or as great gifts, for a screen or a wall decorations or as coasters.  At the Designboom Mart, she was selling them for $6 apiece, for very nicely finished, laser-cut wood pieces.

And now back to me.

I noted on Li-Rong’s personal site that “In the future, users can go on line and order customized screens with unique graphics made from their desired characters.”   Now that was a thought I wasn’t going to let rest.  So I decided to work out a lattice system using my name “T I M”, using a core pattern abstracted from Li-Rong’s (or so I thought….see below).

So, here’s the series of transformations leading from my name to an arbitrarily extensible screen.  You can watch it as a slideshow on Flickr, or see the images below.

now add the “I” as a horizontal element connecting “T” and “M”:

now take that unit, rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise, and attach at top:

repeat that move twice more, and now we have the module below.  Let’s call it the “4 Module”.

The “M” characters form nice connectors, so we can put two of the 4 Modules together like this:

If we do this twice more, we have the new form below, made of 4 “4 modules”.  Let’s call it the “4 x 4 Module”:

now it turns out that the 4 x 4 Module can, itself, be repeated and plugged together as in the image below.  Let’s call this resulting new super-module the “4 x 4 x 4 Module”.

Now, here is the mystery. In the steps above, a “TIM” is multiplied by four to make the 4 Module.  The 4 Module is multiplied by four to make the 4 x 4 Module, which is multiplied by four to make the 4 x 4 x 4 Module.  It seems intuitive that there is a sequence in which, at each step, four modules combine into one super-module.  You’d think this would continue.  Li-Rong’s screen, upon which I based mine, works this way.

But look what happens next:  when you try to join four of the above 4 x 4-up modules into one super-module.  It take five modules to form this final module.  So we have the 5 x 4 x 4 x 4 Module.  Why?

Highly counter-intuitive.  Can anyone out there suggest why this happens?  Huge cash prize for the first successful answer submitted. There’s probably a simple explanation, but it escapes me.  I like the look of the screen though..

For more information on Chinese lattice designs (i.e. screens), I suggest  the “bible of Chinese lattice design”, Daniel Sheets Dye’s Chinese Lattice Designs (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 5-6.).  $13.10 on Amazon.  Better yet, buy me the book so I can study more of the fundamental forms of Chinese lattices — and maybe design a lattice for you.

Now it’s just another moldering dead project, and I even lost the domain name by not renewing in time, losing it to someone sharper who… has done nothing with it.

But I digress. I’ve resurrected the pages and put them at tjm.org/literarycritic. I might even update and add on to it.  So, enjoy, and may I recommend Harold Bloom’s magisterial summation of the Western canon as he sees it.  Also, send me any lists you’ve come across, no matter how obscure.  In fact, obscure is good, because when Google crawls my site and finds the names of obscure authors and books, I get good Google rank on these items (because hardly anyone else on the Web mentions them).  Thus I probably make more Amazon commission money on these obscurantists, searching for, say, 19th-century Hungarian authors.

Send me those lists..

For a measure of your canonical literacy, or perhaps your academic orientation, see how many of these authors you’ve read something by.  I’ve been so bold.

From Times Higher Education (UK).

1    Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism”
2    Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology
3    Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy
4    Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology
5    Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology
6    Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology
7    Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology”
8    Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology
9    Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy
10    Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology”
11    Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis
12    Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy
13    Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy
14    Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy
15    Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy”
16    Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology
17    Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy
18    David Harvey (1935- ) Geography
19    John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy
20    Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies
21    Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism
22    Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology
23    Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy”
24    Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology
25    Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory
26    Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy”
27    Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology
28    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy
29    Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology
30    George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics
31    John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education”
32    Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies
33    Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy
34    Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism”
35    Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science
36    Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology”
37    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy

Ok, not that I’m an acclaimed professional photographer now, remembering where I started out; but it was the first time I used the camera as a way to very deliberately examine places, and record them as for a visual record (as opposed to, as an artistic interpretation).  This is almost entirely what I’ve done  with photography ever since, probably at the expense of its artistry.

Below are a few samples.  Click on photos to go to corresponding album page.

“After earning his living as a Cartegena street vendor selling water, Martin decided to not only to teach himself, but to also teach others – especially street children – to read.

“He swapped the water for books that people can borrow from his wooden library cart for free.

“During the week he goes round schools where he talks to the children about the importance of reading and of the books he likes most.”

One of the telling details about Murrillo is that his home is so book-crammed he has to sleep on top of books… like, umm, me.

The October 19 cover of The New Yorker features a painting by Eric Drooker, titled “In the World of Books”.   It’s very similar to the image used on the below sticker for Powells Books, in Portland, OR.   Actually, Powells has been producing posters and other goods with this theme for some years, in keeping with its slogan, “City of Books”.

So, did a)  Eric Drooker lift the graphic idea from Powells?  Or, perhaps b) the idea is obvious enough to be independently arrived at, or c) there is some common source.  Or, perhaps d) Drooker did the posters/stickers for Powells.   I can at least say for b) that I haven’t seen it anywhere else, in years of looking at book and bookstore materials.  For d) I note that Drucker’s and the sticker’s painting styles are very different.  c) common source:  can anyone suggest?

In any case, I think the difference in emphasis, between “City of Books” and “World of Books” is interesting.  The “world” of books, in Drooker’s view, contains nothing but books;  in Powells’ view, by contrast, books are a large presence, equivalent to the skyscrapers of a city, but they are set amid a real environment: trees, streetlamps, a Portland streetcar going by (like the one that goes past Powells’ main store), and a mountain backdrop (Mt. Hood, Oregon).

The Powells view, to me, seems wiser and more humane.  It says, we come together in “cities” to print and sell books. and for cultural conversation.  But it isn’t all of life:  there are other parts to the city, and there is nature beyond the city.  Books are part of this world, are located; they’re not just a fantasy zone, “through the looking glass.”

What I wonder is, did the makers or the buyers of this radio expect it would deceive anyone?  After all, you don’t have to see it very closely to realize it’s a radio.  Unless, perhaps, you had never seen a portable radio set.  I think the concept was that some portion of buyers would want a radio that would blend in to their parlor, with its books.  Or perhaps a book-less parlor would be dignified by these false books.