Monday, April 24, 2017

Dispatch from Palo Alto: A Joy in this Intensely Multivariate World: Edward Tufte's "Presenting Data and Information"

C'est moi in Palo Alto,
After the ET Presenting Data and Information workshop
Yonder back, about a decade ago, on the rave recommendation of a graphic designer friend, I took Edward Tufte's one day workshop, Presenting Data and Information, and it was such a joy of an inspiration that ever since I had wanted to take the class a second time. Finally, in Palo Alto this Monday, it was possible. Herewith a few notes and links:

Beautiful Evidence, one of several books by ET
Website: www.tufte.com
Includes more than 200 essays

Books by Edward Tufte

Twitter: @EdwardTufte

Links from the handout:


From Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte:

"clutter and confusion are failure of design, not attributes of information" (p. 51)

"What we seek... is a rich texture of data, a comparative context, an understanding of complexity" (p.51)


Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte
Practical advice for presentations on p. 68.


From this workshop, random E.T. quotes of note:
"the world is intensely multivariate"
"respect your audience, endlessly"
"I'm not going to dumb things down, I'm going to make everyone smarter"
"How do I know that? How do they know that?"
"Start with a document, not a deck"
"Keep architecture simple, content rich" 
"A visualization should provide reasons to believe"
"If you have any reason to bring in a three dimensional object, do so"
"Find successful things in the wild. Where is the ceiling of excellence?"
"Keep an open mind, not an empty head"
"The point of an information presentation is to explain something with credibility and to help viewers understand the content, help them reason. Show causality."
"Separate the sheep from the goats"
"Sculpture is a work of art that casts shadows"
"When things are spacially adjacent this lets the audience be in charge"

I eagerly await ET's forthcoming book, Meaning and Space. 

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.




Monday, April 17, 2017

Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River by Patrick Dearen

When I closed the cover of Patrick Dearen's Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River it was with both gratitude and the unsettling sense of having arrived into new territory— raw, rich, appalling—in my understanding of Far West Texas. This is no minor thing to acknowledge; for some years now I have been at work on a book about that very region.

But first, for those who don't have a jones for, shall we say, Wild Westerie, why bring Far West Texas into the cross hairs? And why give a hoededo about its skinny river so salty, to quote one of Dearen's informants, that "a snake wouldn't drink it"?

Texas is one of the most powerful economic and political entities in not only the United States but the Americas. At the same time, "Texas" is so hammered out into tinfoil-thin clichés of popular culture (and many of those informed by warmed-over 19th century war propaganda and Madison Avenue-concocted boosterism), that we have the illusion we know Texas, when in fact it enfolds concatenations of undeservedly obscure histories, stupendenous beauty, and the lumpiest of paradoxes. If Texas—and I mean the real one, not the confection of Marion Morrison aka John Wayne, et al—is still in many ways terra incognita, its "iconic" far west, profoundly moreso. What delineates Far West Texas from the rest of Texas is precisely that skinny, salty river. And a most peculiar body of water it is. CONTINUE READING

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.





Monday, April 03, 2017

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América in Mexico City

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM


This is an excerpt from my long essay, of creative nonfiction, "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," which  is forthcoming now available in Kindle.


In the shadow of the National Palace:
La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América,
the House of the First Printing Press in the Americas,
Mexico City.
Photo by C.M. Mayo, 2017.
...There is one more a pearl of a place that cannot go unmentioned in any discussion of our sister republic’s literary landscape. 
From the Claustro de Sor Juana, in less than twenty minutes’ walk north and slightly east—weaving your way through the shoppers, touts, tourists, beggars, businessmen—honking cars and buses and motorbikes—and a skate-boarder or two—blaring music, freighters with their trolleys piled to toppling with boxes—don’t get run over by the pedicabs—and once at the Zócalo, wending around the Aztec dancers in feathers and ankle-rattles, the toothless shouter pumping his orange sign about SODOM Y GOMORRA MARIGUANA BODAS GAY, and an organ grinder, and to-ers and fro-ers of every age and size, you arrive, out of breath, at a squat, terracotta-colored three-story high building. This is where the first book was printed in—no, not just in Mexico—then New Spain—but in the Americas. 
La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América.
To step into the foyer of its museum and bookstore is to relax into an oasis of peace. 
The uniformed guard hands me a pen to sign the guest book. It’s late afternoon; I am the third visitor for the day. 
I take a gander at the exhibition of contemporary textile art—a few pieces reference one of Frida Kahlo’s drawings in the Casa Azul of a tentacled monster of paranoia, each limb tipped with a staring eye. 
In the second gallery I find the replica of our continent’s first printing press soaking in sun from the window. The wooden contraption is taller than I am, but so spare, it occurs to me that it might serve to juice apples.
How my Mexican amigos scoffed at the auction of the Bay Psalm Book in 2013. Not about the record sum—14.2 million US dollars—for which that little book, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, went to a private collector, but about the report in the international media that the Bay Psalm Book was “the first book printed in America.”
To Mexicans, America is the continent, not their sister republic. Mexico is part of the same continent, of course, and so the first book printed in America—or, as we estadounidenses prefer to say, the Americas—was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana (Brief and Most Comprehensive Christian Doctrine in Nahuátl and Spanish), printed right here, in Mexico City, in this building, in 1539.
Mexico beats out Massachusetts by 101 years! But this sinks to silliness. That printer in Cambridge, Massachussetts, was English, and the one in colonial Mexico City, a native of Lombardy named Giovanni Paoli, Hispanicized to “Juan Pablos.” The technology that found its way to the Americas with these printing pioneers—to the north, Protestants, to the south, Catholics, separated by religious schism and the whirlwinds of European politics, and that century, and moreover, by the staggering distance of desert, swamplands, oceanic buffalo-filled prairies, and sunless and unmapped forests—had one and the same root: the fifteenth-century workshop of a German goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg. 
Gutenberg was inking his little pieces of movable type more than half a century before Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” and the indigenous on this continent chanced to hear the first stirrings of vaguest rumors and weird omens.
Still, 1539 is an early date indeed for that first book printed in the Americas: only eighteen years after the fall of Tenochitlán. Three years after Cabeza de Vaca’s miraculous arrival in Mexico City. Fray Sahagún was still a year away from launching the research that would result in the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, or the Florentine Codex. The lodes that would turn Mexico into an industrial-scale silver exporter had not yet been discovered. The Manila Galleons, treasure ships bringing porcelain, spices, and silks from China to Acapulco, would not begin their annual crossings for another twenty-six years.
In England, Henry the VIII was between wives three and four. It would be sixty-eight more years until the first, disastrous English settlement at Jamestown. The Pilgrims who would land at Plymouth Rock? As a religious community they did not yet exist.
Tucked in the shade of the National Palace and a block east from Mexico’s cathedral, the Casa de la Primera Imprenta was built, it turns out, over the ruin of the Aztec Temple of Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, trickster god of the night sky, of time, and of ancestral memory.
Aztec snake head on display, 2017.

Who knows what still lies beneath in the rubble? Dug up in the eighteenth century during a renovation, a gigantic Aztec stone snake head was, no doubt with a shudder of horror, reburied. But we live in a different time with a very different sensibility. In 1989 when renovations unearthed that same Aztec stone snake head—elegant with fangs, nostrils, scales, eyes the size of melons—it was carefully excavated and cleaned by archaeologists. This monumental sculpture, heritage of the nation, is now displayed atop a roped platform in the Casa de la Primera Imprenta’s Juan Pablos bookstore, surrounded by a shelf of fiction, a table of poetry, and a sign informing us that the Aztec snake head is carved from grey basalt and weighs approximately one and a half tons.
The Juan Pablos bookstore, named for that original printer Giovanni Paoli, retails books from the press of Mexico City’s Universidad Autónomo Metropolitana (UAM). Such are my interests du jour: I came away with a copy of the first Spanish translation of an eighteenth-century Italian’s journey to Mexico and the 2015 El territorio y sus representaciones. 


A splendid and very important book:
El territorio y sus representaciones
by Luis Ignacio Sainz Chávez and
Jorge Gonzlález Aragón Castellanos
winner of the 2016 Premio de Investigación
Published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana,
Mexico.
END OF EXCERPT

From "Disptach from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla" by C.M. Mayo
Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.
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When the Kindle is available I will be sure to announce it here. If you'd like to get my very occasional newsletter, I welcome you to sign up for that here.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

> Another excerpt from this same long essay, on Cabeza de Vaca's Relación, is forthcoming in Scoundrel Time; another, on Mexico's great baroque poet, Sor Juana, appeared in this blog Monday before last; and yet another, on Lord Kingsborough's colossal Antiquities of Mexico, was posted back in February.



UPDATE: "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," my long essay pon the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book, is now available in Kindle.

amazon.com