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Suit wears the man

On clothing, costume, and inhibition.

Jul 3, 2026 02:47 PM

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  1. Bookmarked Vladimir Nabokov’s pale fire: the lost ‘father of all hypertext demos’? by Simon Rowberry.

    In the mid-sixties, Ted Nelson worked at Brown University on an early hypertext system. In 1969, IBM wanted to show the system at a conference, and Nelson gained permission to use Vladimir Nabokov’s highly unconventional and hypertextual novel, Pale Fire (1962) as a technical demonstration of hypertext’s potential. Unfortunately, the idea was dismissed in favor of a more technical-looking presentation, and thus was never demonstrated publicly. This paper re-considers Pale Fire’s position in hypertext history, and posits that if it was used in this early hypertext demonstration, it would have been the ‘father of all hypertext demonstrations’ to complement Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ in 1968. In order to demonstrate the significance of Pale Fire’s hypertextuality and Nelson’s ambitions to use it, this paper will explore its hypertextual structure, the implication thereof for the novel and evaluate its success as a hypertext compared to electronic systems.

    Jul 25, 2026 07:05 PM

  2. Raphael Magarik, on the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibit:

    [Walter] Benjamin would have understood all too well his text’s appropriation as a nationalist trophy. He writes terrifyingly of present victors’ power over the past: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Here again, Benjamin rejects the illusion of a fixed, monumental past; historical legacies are battlegrounds, to be won or lost in today’s struggles. One sees an intimation of this idea in the Jewish Museum’s laudable choice to devote a full exhibit to Klee. For Paul Klee was notably not a Jew, though he was accused of being one by the Nazis, who attacked his art as “degenerate.” He responded by gamely incorporating Stars of David and legendary “Red Jews” into his sketches and paintings. In honoring Klee (including his earlier, pre-Nazi work), the Jewish Museum acknowledges an anti-essentialist account of its own organizing identity category: art, and even artists, can be made Jewish, even retrospectively, by the assault of history. Because the fight against fascism furnishes the rationale for the exhibition, the museum might have easily gone further, connecting the ultra-nationalism and genocide of Klee’s moment to our own.

    Jul 22, 2026 06:21 PM
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