Still Tight With People In Tights, But Floppy Print Isn't A Fit: New Column by Andy Solages

I’m enjoying a refreshed appreciation for printed books as a whole. After a few years of reading electronic books almost exclusively, the luxury of quiet paper bound for a single purpose feels very real. I relish still moments with hardcovers in particular.
That said, I’ve mostly phased out the long-loved type of book that led to my long term relationships with sex criminals, new gods, mutants, and superheroes: new single issue printed comic books.
Yes, this is what my desk looked like as I was writing my column

Yes, this is what my desk looked like as I was writing my column

A Wanderer's Tale

I had just finished reading Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey when I wrote the first version of the bio that appears on this site. While I don't claim to be skilled in all ways of contending, I thought to begin my professional epic poem with a reference to the first lines of Homer's work (as Fitzgerald translated):

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.

Several years later, to this day, I've kept this old school shout-out to a goddess on my site and on some of my social media profiles (e.g. @andysolages). Odysseus isn't a deeply resonant ur-hero for me, but the reference felt right. Maybe I had a vague sense of having tarried too long, in the past, with the business equivalents of Kalypso, Kirke, Polyphemos, etc.

And "Ithaca" still feels far.

On Smarter Than You Think

Writing for companies under my own name is not something I've historically done. That changed with some blogs I wrote for the eLynxx Solutions website. While it ultimately promoted the eLynxx software, the first blog was built around a discussion of Smarter Than You Think, a book I count among my recent favorites. The blog was titled "When Cyborgs Buy Print."

There is a Printerverse: New Column by Andy Solages

Before working with eLynxx Solutions, I was wholly unfamiliar with the complexities and milieu of print. In my first column as a monthly contributor to Print Media Centr’s News From The Printerverse, I describe the novel world I perceived as I came to work and play within the culture of print buyers, production professionals, and printers served by eLynxx. Perhaps a Printerverse native wouldn’t notice it like an attentive newcomer, but there is definitely a culture.

“There is a Printerverse.

That is not news to regular Print Media Centr visitors, but until recently my multiverse guidebook didn’t include ink-sniffers and substrate sensitives.

Print was all around, but the Printerverse was hidden.”

Let me know what you think after you read the rest at http://www.printmediacentr.com/2016/05/17/there-is-a-printerverse/

The Pragmatic method in such cases…

“Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost every one has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows. They don’t just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial, or what not. At any rate he and we know off-hand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of "whack,” and have no business to speak up in the universe’s name.“

**pg 20**

"The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.”

**pg 23**

from Pragmatism by William James