Must Be Art Weblog

“Modernism and its ongoing follow-ups have convinced some of us that anything can be important if it can be propped up with an explication.”
—Richard Gess, 1997

Finished with Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. He makes excellent sense when he’s describing how people react to things. Which makes it all the more surprising how naive and silly are his predictions for the future of home automation and robots.

In the reading room today, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman.

Recently I found Skylark 3 by E. E. ”Doc” Smith in the bookstore. It’s the second book of a series of four space-opera novels. 1948. The other three have been in my library since I stole them from my brother’s library, but I had never seen this one before.

I had forgotten just how awful the writing was. It’s like an episode of The Flintstones, without the humor. The women are all Wilma (even the warrior princess). The “Good” and “Evil” are really “Us” and “Them” — the “Evil” guys are seen threatening to conquer the Universe, but the “Good” guys actually do blow up an entire heavily-populated planet, and feel only a little bit squeamish about it.

I was surprised to find how much of the action I already knew about. Much of it was recapped in the later books. Some of it was even shown again from another perspective. The bad guy you saw blown to smithereens in one book turns out to have been a dummy rigged up by the bad guy to fool the good guys.

We won’t even talk about the exceedingly-pseudo science, or the tacit racism.