Books
4 entries- Dec 8Essaynewest The Tortured Artist Is So Yesterday
41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the …
3 min - Dec 6EssayWorld Machines Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself
This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club. We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive …
8 min - Jul 31EssayWorld Machines Looking Forward to Montaigne
As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul …
2 min - Jul 27Essay On Protocols, Wagons, and Associated Acrobatics
Years ago, maybe a decade even, I fell in love with this software called Scrivener. I could never justify buying it because I didn’t actually write. But having that software would represent a little …
3 min