November 2011
15 posts
Design China: Design 360° Magazine →
design-china.tumblr.com
Based in south China, Design 360° - Concept and Design Magazine is “an all-round [bilingual] design magazine dedicated to international advanced design concepts, original works, outstanding designers and prestigious design institutes”. Covering architecture, animation, graphics, interiors,…
China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles →
pekingreview.com
China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues – Open CRS. A Congressional Research Service report looks at China’s role in WMD proliferation around the world…
Puns, Games, and Mathemagic
CHELSEY PHILPOT
on the enduring magic of The Phantom Tollbooth.
Norton Juster (Author), Jules Feiffer (Illustrator)
The Phantom Tollbooth 50th Anniversary Edition
Knopf Books for Young Readers, October 2011. 288 pp.
In her August 2004 article for the New York Times, “Why Teachers Love Depressing Books,” writer and critic Laura Miller wrote, “I decided that there were two types of children’s books: call it Little Women versus Phantom Tollbooth. The first type was usually foisted on you by nostalgic grown-ups. These were books populated by snivelers and goody-two-shoes … The people in the other kind of book, however, were entirely different. They had adventures.”
This October marked the 50th anniversary of Norton Juster’s story about a little boy named Milo, who is rescued from disenchantment by a magic tollbooth that transports him in his little car to the kingdom of Wisdom. There he meets Azaz the Unabridged, king of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, ruler of Digitopolis, who charge him with the daunting task of rescuing the exiled Princesses Rhyme and Reason. Milo, a child who “didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always,” rises to the challenge, aided by his friends, the Watchdog Tock (who literally has a clock in his side) and the foolish, beetle-like Humbug. With buoyant, humorous drawings from artist Jules Feiffer, The Phantom Tollbooth is the kind of book you want to start over as soon as you finish.
Tollbooth didn’t win the big one (the John Newbery Medal), but it is a “classic” nonetheless. Critics have compared it to works as varied as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories. In November 1962, the Times Literary Supplement said: “The Phantom Tollbooth is something every adult seems sure will turn into a modern Alice.”
We just reread the Tollbooth here in the Hutong. Or I did, anyway. Aaron read it for the first time. It never gets old.
“It’s just that you’re about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”
—
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (via bookmania)
Bleak. Harsh. And another reason for me to buy and read this book.
Why Culture Matters for Strategists →
pekingreview.com
The words “pithy” and “easy to read” do not always attach themselves to writing coming out of government institutions, but Jiyul Kim’s Cultural Dimensions of Strategy and Policy is the exception…
“More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside.”
—
Mary Pols, Adam Sandler’s ‘Jack and Jill’ Is Easily One of the Year’s Worst Movies | TIME.com
Owch. Well, that’s one we can scratch off the December movie list…
“In 1924, the first issue of The New Yorker appeared on newsstands with the now famous proviso that it was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” Wondering how the new offering would play in the heartland, Time magazine sent a copy to one of its midwestern readers, who retorted, “The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of a metropolitan who lacks urbanity.”
—From The American Midwest, an Interpretive Encyclopedia by Richard Sisson, Christian K. Zacher, Andrew Robert, and Lee Cayton
You aren't a true Goth until you've sacked Rome
Amen. Take that, you profusely-pierced pretenders!
