sssh! this is a working library.

Regarding the “new” typography:

First, and so obvious that one sometimes neglects to mention it: the materials of printing played a part. Red has been the traditional second colour of printing since Gutenberg.…In the context of socialist revolution, it could take on new meanings. Similarly, ‘bars’ had been familiar to printers since at least the early nineteenth century. Now they were seen freshly, through constructivist spectacles, as elemental forms. Much of the energy of Bauhaus and modernist typography comes from this process of old or already available materials being seen in a new light. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (250)

Which is, of course, what creativity is all about: an adjustment to one’s perception, a new context for an existing observation. If creativity demanded that we bring into existence that which is completely foreign, the end result would be so unfathomable it would spill over the limits of our perception. An original design (or text) must have enough of the old and familiar within it for us to recognize its originality.

For designing is not creation out of nothing (as in the idea of the genius-artist, conjuring unexplainable beauties from a void). Rather it is a matter of working, usually with given materials, constrained by many interconnected and often pressing factors. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (314)

On fundamentalism and texts:

Jehovah’s Witnesses are fundamentalists because they believe that every word of the Bible is literally true; and this, surely, is the only definition of fundamentalism that will really stick. Fundamentalism is a textual affair. Eagleton, After Theory (202)

I’ve always suspected that fundamentalism afflicts those unfamiliar with reading; spend enough time with a book in your hand (and more than one of them), and you’ll develop a healthy cynicism about the meanings of words:

Writing just means meaning which can be handled by anyone, anywhere. Meaning which has been written down is unhygienic. It is also promiscuous, ready to lend itself to whoever happens along. Ibid. (202)

The concept of promiscuity is particularly interesting: meaning as a whore – downtrodden, easily manipulated, too simple to care what people say about her. (The word promiscuous is almost never applied to men, because men are expected to couple loosely; there’s no need to describe that which is normal. It’s when a woman behaves like a man that terms like promiscuous are thrown about.) Why would you rest the foundations of your faith - or your law - on her?

As for law, nothing illustrates its slipperiness more than Portia’s legalistic sophistry in The Merchant of Venice.…Portia gets the doomed Antonio off by pointing out to the court that Shylock’s bond for securing a pound of his flesh makes no mention of taking any of his blood along with it.…Portia’s reading of the bond is false because too faithful; it is a fundamentalist reading, sticking pedantically to the letter of the text and thus flagrantly falsifying its meaning. To be exact, interpretation must be creative.¹ Ibid. (206)

Underneath this statement is a useful corrective to the way we often think of the word “creative.” Creativity does not require invention. At it’s best, creativity is an effort to reveal the truth, no matter how elusive or complex it may seem. It’s 12 Angry Men, not Athena emerging from Zeus’ head.

1. Emphasis mine. ↩