This essay contends that reading is nothing less than a validation of our shared humanity. However, the author’s joyful reading is increasingly disturbed by the dearth of reading in society at large. Missing is the focused attention on a single passage, unadorned by images, uninterrupted by alerts, unlit by a screen—simply text on paper. But in a world where celebrities appear shinier and happier than anyone in real life, black letters on a white background look like a failure, even aesthetically: too plain, too severe, too boring. For the author, that simplicity is part of the point: letters that do not call attention to themselves but rather to the ideas they signal. Digital media fractures our attention, while reading requires us to maintain focus on something other than ourselves. Reading thus resists two dominant cultural trends: the solipsism of life online and the impulse to move on to whatever is newer, hotter, or simply more outrageous.
The paper focuses on the political serialized writings of one of the greatest Armenian humorists, Ler Gamsar. These series reflect the dire life of the Armenian nation in the first two decades of the 20th century.
They can be considered as chapters of Armenian history written by Ler Gamsar. The author notes that these...
Metapictures are pictures that reflect on the messages of other pictures. For example, the 1971 anti-war poster I Want Out is based on, and disagrees with, the 1917 recruitment poster I Want You by James Montgomery Flagg. Metapictures deserve special attention in illustration because they reveal public intellectual eng...
H. Haddad, Stuart Medley· The International Journal of...· 0 citations
What does it mean for an anthropologist to be wrong? This essay takes the question seriously in two registers at once: the everyday mistakes of fieldwork, from mistranslating a greeting to misreading a shaved head as a sign of mourning, and the deeper entitlement through which our discipline claimed authority over ot...
Mark Turin· Anthropology and Humanism· 0 citations
Geri Allen once told an interviewer that music is like water, meaning that it was as essential as a life-giving force. Thus, what can we make of the life-giving character of music? It is something that is not easily discernible from a chart, a transcription, or even a recording. Tammy Kernodle's question of “Where do...
This volume is a bold and original meditation on how we interpret art, music, and culture—and what it means to listen, see, and feel differently from others. Drawing on Czech history and aesthetics, the book moves from filmmaker Hugo Haas’s coded tributes to his murdered brother, to the haunting ex libris designs of Jo...
M. Beckerman· 0 citations
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