Liz: December 2008 Archives

Every winter, I reread a few of the poems of notorious curmudgeon, conscientious librarian, and revered poet Philip Larkin , who died on December 2, 1985.

Home Is So Sad, Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Depressing, no? It's typical Larkin: beautifully written, confrontational, elliptic. It's the antithesis of holiday cheer.

Anyway, to honor the 23rd anniversary of Larkin's death, I'm offering something that would probably make Larkin's stomach turn: a good recipe for latkes! It's well known that it's hard to hate life when your stomach is full of fried potatoes.

I like to think that Larkin would actually have enjoyed eating the potato pancakes, but enjoyed them even more as the excuse to write a poem about the familial disillusionment and sordid despair that lies behind the homely smells of salt, oil, and onions. What follows, then, are Larkin Latkes. Delicious, but a little complicated.

Design Futures: New Craft - A Marriage of High and Low Tech - Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)

Wednesday December 3, 2008 from 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Berkeley Center for New Media Commons
340 Moffitt Library, next to the Free Speech Movement Cafe
Berkeley, California 94720

People knit scarves, build furniture, sew clothing, and solder radios together in their homes and garages. Diverse groups of people--girls and boys, grandparents and college students--lovingly engage in these hands-on low-tech hobbies. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes, using teams of people and sophisticated machinery to build devices like cell phones, computers, pharmaceutical drugs, and cars. But this clear division between high-tech and low-tech is beginning to blur. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.

This talk will discuss this "new craft", envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about "high-low tech" devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones. The presentation will discuss burgeoning high-low tech communities, focusing on ways that professional designers and engineers can support and encourage this new creative movement. It will present examples of high-low tech artifacts--including embroidered circuits and paper computers--and examples of tools that empower others to construct high-low tech devices--including the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers.