“… but you cant get all hung up on details when you are trying to survive…”
Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen nameSapphire, is an American author and performance poet.
“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
from wikipedia:
Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, and an existentialist humanist concerned with thepsychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
“Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth—even if they decide to help the less fortunate—while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.”
from wikipedia:
Michael Eric Dyson (born October 23, 1958) is an American academic, author, and radio host. He is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton PhD and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two". Dyson has authored and edited 18 books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X;Martin Luther King, Jr.; Marvin Gaye; Nas's debut albumIllmatic; Bill Cosby; Tupac Shakur; and Hurricane Katrina.
“We love because it’s the only true adventure.”
from wikipedia:
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. (born June 7, 1943) is an American writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and has been nominated for a Grammy Award,for her Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has recently been named as one of Oprah Winfrey’s twenty- five “Living Legends.”
“Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”
from wikipedia:
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist.
“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
from wikipedia:
Edwidge Danticat (Haitian Creole pronunciation: [ɛdwidʒ dãtika]; born January 19, 1969) is a Haitian-American author.
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
From wikipedia:
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
In addition to new editions of her work being published after a revival of interest in her in 1975, her manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives.
“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
From wikipedia:
William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois (pronounced /duːˈbɔɪz/ doo-boyz; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After graduating from Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”
“Failure is a greater teacher than success”
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
I asked on facebook this last week "What's a book you wish more people had read?" and first among the answers was Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run with Wolves.
“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.”
“To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.”
It's one of those books that plants a seed, J.M. Coatzee's Waiting for the Barbarians certainly affected me when I read it in a literature class, but it was the disquiet that it planted deep in me that had me reaching for it again when I began to need to address more directly the distortions caused by my own privilege.
I recommend Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences as a important book to read.
It very much pushes on the way both the imagined end result and the tools at hand play a huge part in the success or failure of a design. It has totally changed my mindset.
Tufte has become an icon for me in the space that often gets reduced to infographics, but really has to do with the meaning available through comparisons.
One of the concepts that came to me from him is roughly "information is all the differences that make a difference." And this title of his, Envisioning Information, explores the way changes and similarities, represented visually makes information accessible in ways numerical abstractions sometimes hide.
A further extension on this thought, is the way images and the information contained in them can be the heartbeat of a power, convincing and compelling narrative. His Visual Explanations challenges a lot of the notions I had about important and help me refine a key idea for all of my interaction and information designs: salience.
For the actual work of designing interfaces, Kim Goodwin's Designing for the Digital Age and Robert Hoekman, Jr.'s Designing the Moment have formed the basis for my process, moving from strategies and concepts through user insights to frameworks structures and finally interfaces.
Sharing books you love with people you like/love/admire/appreciate is one of the most delicious things. You walk around with a shared interior room. You establish an invisible tribe of the heart and head. So, I like/love/admire/appreciate you. Here are the books about ideas, art, aesthetics I want to share with you.
If you want to share with me yours I would be so grateful.
by Nelson Goodman
I got this book referred to me by a professor of ancient Chinese calligraphy ( a bit about that experience). It is cerebral and lovely and trusts the reader immensely with discussions of the invisible, the dynamic, the hidden flows that make art move the way it does.
by Umberto Eco
With a playful approach Eco gets me to a thoughtful reckoning of the heavy cognitive burden that language bears.
I have actually bought copies of this book and sent them to friends because I wanted to talk with them about it.
by Robert Hass
With a wide range of subjects (from the image/thought of haiku, to contemplations of Tranströmer and Checkov) poet Robert Hass writes clearly and generously about the poetry he has found resources in.
by Steven Pinker
Very much interested in the way we learn and develop language and the way that language overruns the rules we think define it, Pinker puts forth the notion that language isn't a cultural artefact, isn't an invention that set our societies off from their pre-linguistic past through its instrumentality, but instead that language is an inbuilt biological activity that has shaped our evolution as it evolved beside us.
by Junichiro Tanizaki
The way we approach beauty, the things we allow it to say about us, the way it contributes to the moment-to-moment experience of living, this is what Japanese novelist Tanizaki discusses in this brief little discussion on everything from tableware to architecture to space and light.
There are a handful of books that have been a part of my personal education, ones that I feel like I found on my own, and refer to time and again. This is one of them. There are a number of poems ( Notes Toward Identifying a Father, for example) there were, as Lucie Brock-Broido says, troubled into mind by ideas in this book.
