An attractive tight-back bound book with edge-stained pages, Make it Bigger is at its heart a survey of Scher’s work from the 70s through the 90s. Yet it feels more like a memoir or a study of process than just a portfolio of her work. I loved her discussion of discovering how to “sell down” designs at CBS Records (get the highest decision maker on your side and everyone else will fall in line). The various hierarchies of her different positions and the diagram of a meeting are some of my favorite parts of the book.

I felt she was a little more humble than some in talking about her career — Chip Kidd often sounds a tad self-congratulatory in his, not to mention that he called it Book One, implying that the world will obviously need further volumes!

Women are still pretty absent from the rockstar level of the graphic design world; Scher is one of the few women interviewed in the recent Helvetica documentary (a film that also features not one person of color, unless I somehow forgot the token non-white person), which maybe indicates she is the most famous female designer in the world. She doesn’t touch much on her experiences being a woman in design aside from a reprint of her essay “The Boat,” originally published in Print magazine in 1993, in which she expressed “conflicting feelings.” The essay centers around a photo of the Pentagram partners on a boat, where the diminutive Scher appears out of scale. It doesn’t offer any definitive declaration on women’s place in design, which is probably why I appreciated it so much.

A profession that has long been dominated by men is changing. There are simply more women. There are more women who are terrific designers, more women running their own businesses, more women corporate executives, more women changing the scale of things and appearing out of scale in the process.

There are also more underpaid women, more women juggling careers and motherhood, more women who feel squeezed out in a bad economy, more women going to art school and going nowhere afterwards, and more women who are resentful of their lack of success “because they are women.” There are more women in design groups, more women’s panels, more women mentoring women, more women who want women to mentor them, more women looking for women role models, and more women who don’t like other women’s success.”

Though Scher wrote this at least 15 years ago now, I think much of this change is still crawling along towards an obvious equality. (Even in the web world, the lack of gender diversity at conferences has been heatedly discussed as recently as last year. And what about racial diversity in the design world? That’s also something to talk about too.)

What’s so interesting about her discussion of scale in reference to gender in design is how it ties into her work. The title Make it Bigger refers partially to a specific incident where a client made that request, but bold, large designs are also a recurring feature within Scher’s oeuvre. The book itself, despite being pretty small for an art book, features huge type that can’t even be contained within the pages.

Reading this book on the subway was probably not the best approach, but I managed to struggle through it. Auster’s earlier poems have some overwrought tendencies, but in a way all of his poems fit together as a larger work, making this collected volume very useful. He’s attached to images of stones and whiteness and snow among other things, and many common images are threaded across his work. He has a tendency towards oxymoronic lines and a knack for good poetic punchlines, endings that could almost sit on their own:

We dream
that we do not dream. We wake
in the hours of sleep
and sleep through the silence
that stands over us. Summer
keeps its promise
by breaking it.

(from “Dictum: After Great Distances” from Wall Writing 1971-1975)

This is a book that I really should get a copy of to keep around, as reading it all at once is kind of too much to take on and I often succumbed to distractions. Then without fail, every time I opened the book I couldn’t remember for the life of me where I was and would end up rereading several poems before finding my place again. There’s something inherently disorienting and vaguely labyrinthian about Auster’s writing.

White Nights

No one here,
and the body says: whatever is said
is not to be said. But no one
is a body as well, and what the body says
is heard by no one
but you.

Snowfall and night. The repetition
of a murder
among the trees. The pen
moves across the earth: it no longer knows
what will happen, and the hand that holds it
has disappeared.

Nevertheless, it writes.
It writes: in the beginning,
among the trees, a body came walking
from the night. It writes:
the body’s whiteness
is the color of the earth. It is earth,
and the earth writes: everything
is the color of silence.

I am no longer here. I have never said
what you say
I have said. And yet, the body is a place
where nothing dies. And each night,
from the silence of the trees, you know
that my voice
comes walking toward you.

(also from Wall Writing)

I’ve somehow managed to never read an entire collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories, despite being somewhat of an enthusiast of the form and having read a few of his stories in passing. This one caught my eye at the library, as I’d guess Murakami played off this title with his recent memoir. It turns out the title story is the one The New Yorker published a draft called “Beginners” last year — the version in this collection was heavily edited by Gordon Lish (the story behind the changes). This collection also includes “So Much Water So Close to Home,” which the film Jindabyne was adapted from, so it was kind of the ideal collection to pick up randomly.

I love how some of Carver’s stories are spare sketches yet manage to impart depth and nuance. His characters tend to have a similar qualities of weathered strength blended with a subtle pathos. In some ways the common threads make Carver’s reach feel limited, but it’s hard not to be drawn into the precise honesty of his work.

Maybe I’m just a hater this week but I couldn’t find much to latch onto in Didion’s exploration of her history with California, including her pioneering ancestors’ treks to get there. Though it’s kind of a personal history placed within a larger context, even the parts about her family read strangely impersonal. It seems like each chapter starts out interesting and then gets laden down with too many facts without any real narrative structure. One begins looking at the painter Thomas Kincade — and I love her description of his paintings:

A Kincade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was list, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

— but then it shifts crisply several times and I lost the thread. I skipped ahead over and over until finally landing in Part Four. Here she leaves the facts and figures behind and delves into her mother’s death. She encapsulates so much in just a few sections, and her sometimes hazy memories give an appropriately fragile texture. I’m glad I didn’t miss that part.