Typography is both fun and challenging for designers. Selecting the appropriate typeface to communicate the message is not as easy as it seems. I see bad use of types everywhere from bathroom posters to Vietnamese album covers. Most often, designers just slap on new and fancy fonts just to make their works look cool. If you are one of those designers (you know who you are), Imin Pao and Joshua Berger’s 30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime is an invaluable investment. The book featured fifteen san serifs (including Avenir, Futura, and Myriad) and fifteen serifs (including Bembo, Minion, and Times New Roman) that you might want to use for your projects. With a brief history, purposes’ suggestion, and well-chosen, real-world examples of each typeface, the book should not leave the designers’ desk. I know it won’t leave mine. And just to show a quick inspiration from the book, I played around with my banner’s assignment for Vassar’s October Break. The experimentation is nothing fancy but gets me to think about communicating with types.

As blogging gains its popularity (even people with Yahoo mail can blog), fun and worth-reading contents are hard to find. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog aims at providing you tips on how to make your entries more enticing than your mundane life. From “Fifteen Minutes to Fame” to “Think Like A Writer,” Margaret Mason who is the owner of MightyGirl.com (used to be one of my frequent stops) presents her ideas in a short, concise, witty with the blog-formatted approach to help people write down their own experiences. Although my main interest for Visualgui.com is “unprofessional criticism” on music, design, or whatever interests me, I could use some of Margaret Mason’s advices to juice up my posts. So flip through the book, find something provokes your head, and set your blog on fire.

“Why is abbreviation is such a long word?” Why do we use redundant words such as honest truth? And if we rearrange the letters in funeral, we get real fun, which the opposite meaning. These are some of the absurdities in the English language that graphic designer and typographer Teresa Monachino points out in her Words Fail Me—a book inspired by her Italian mother who had trouble understanding the idiosyncrasy of English. With clean and simple design, witty wordplay, and clever use of typography, Monachino illustrates how those words fail her.

Read Midnight Lightning not because I am interested in Jimi Hendrix’s life, but because I dig Greg Tate’s writing. He sure is one fine critic I have mad respect for. Tate describes Hendrix as “[T]he electric guitar’s Einstein if not its Edison.” And he isn’t ashamed to admit that he felt in love with Hendrix the “dreamfucker” as he analyzes Hendrix’s lyrics, “I make love to you in your sleep and yet you feel no pain because I’m a million miles away and at the same time right here in your picture frame.” Speaking of Hendrix’s sex life, Tates invited Michaela Angela Davis, a fashion and beauty editor for a major African American women’s magazine, to compliment on Hendrix’s pimp juice and for “how liquid and languid he was, and how drippy that made him always seem. Like he was surrounded by a lot of water and could still set shit on fire—literally! He was also drippy without seeming soft or gay and that was because he was not afraid to embrace his inner pimp… I’ve never wished I could have fucked him, but I have wanted to fuck that feeling he was having when he played… watching Hendrix fuck those amps was some of the best sex I’ve ever seen.” Tate also featured a portion of the book to a number of people who were close to Hendrix to speak about him. While these chapters are informative, they could not carry the engaging level Tate could.

In “The Presence Is Always the Point,” which included in Considering Genius, a collection of Stanley Crouch’s writings on jazz, he argues “[t]hat jazz is a music built on adult emotion while rock is focused on adolescent passion created another problem for jazz musicians who tried fusion.” I share his view on rock (not as sophisticated as jazz), but I disagree with his position against Miles Davis’s fusion direction. Davis never lost the complex emotion in jazz when he combined the two styles. Listens to Bitches Brew, one can still hear Davis’s deep expression that came out of his trumpet. Although we both have different views on jazz-rock and hip-hop, I still have respect for Crouch as a jazz critic who speaks his mind with an intellectual voice.

What makes Crouch’s essays intriguing to read is that he does not use heavy technical terms (something I avoid to do myself), yet he could let us hear the sound of jazz through his eloquent pen. If one would like to learn about several important jazz figures—such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Duke Ellington—“The Makers” section is perfect for that, especially the piece on Bird. Crouch started out castigating Clint Eastwood’s Bird (film) and Chan Parker’s To Bird With Love (a book filled with photos), and then told the story of legendary Parker through his own research.

Even though the “Battle Royal” section, which featured eight short pieces Crouch wrote for JazzTimes, is brief, the writings are filled with controversial topics. One comes to mind is the dismissal of John Coltrane. McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s pianist, left the band because he was “unable to deal with many squeakers, howlers, shriekers, and honkers his boss was invited onto the bandstand.” Yet, one important detail that fascinated me the most in this book is when Crouch’s father made a comment about Billie Holiday: “You should have heard her singing one to a woman. That was when she was really singing. I saw her romancing a girl with her voice just a couple of blocks from here at an after-hours joint up near Adams Boulevard on Central Avenue. She was fine and mellow all right but she was in her element when she was trying to pull a girl up next to her.” Holy shit!

Criticism plays a significant role in jazz. The critics not only helped spread the aesthetic qualities of the music, but also pushed the color line and challenged the racial equality in America. As someone who has been obsessed with jazz over a year ago, I spend innumerable amount of time catching up with jazz recordings, read the history of jazz, and digest doses of jazz-related essays. Yet, my knowledge is nothing compares to the level of details and researches John Gennari, an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont, pour into his stellar Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics.

With thorough documentation (57 pages of notes), gripping narration, and open-minded observation, Gennari captured one of the fascinating and engaging aspects of jazz: it’s writing. Blowin’ Hot and Cool sets off in 1935 with John Hammond and Leonard Feather—two white critics who started the jazz criticism movement—then progresses all the way up to Gary Giddins, Stanley Crouch, and my main man Greg Tate who is a brilliant, contemporary writer. What intrigues me the most about this book is that whatever the controversial issues were—critics vs. critics, white vs. black, musicians vs. writers, traditional vs. modern, politic vs. racism, underground vs. commercial—Gennari provides readers both side of the story and backs up his analysis with quotes and excerpts.

Again, as a jazz enthusiast as well as my interest in music criticism, Blowin’ Hot and Cool is an invaluable gem. It is more enriching than the nineteen-hour documentary of Ken Burns’s Jazz and much better represented than The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. And I strongly agree with Gennari that: “Somehow this jazz writing seemed more important, more necessary than the writing about rock and pop music. Many rock musicians were well-known celebrities; we saw them on television. We love their music because it was accessible. Those of us who were musical dabblers played rock and funk because they felt like native languages. If we ventured into jazz, it was as a second language, and it came with no guarantee of an audience.”

Who Do You Love is a compilation of Jean Thompson’s marvelous short stories that appeared on major publications including The New Yorker, Mid-American Review, and Ontario Review. The book featured fifteen skillfully-crafted fictions ranging from shocking to reminiscing to disturbing to shattering to enlightening experiences. Thompson’s ingenious pen created engaging characters, amusing moments as well as heart-touching narrations. Each of her pieces—“The Widower” in particular—strikes like lightening: sharp, powerful, and unpredictable. A second reading is required for further appreciation of the splendid details.

Working at Vassar is hard not to learn new skills or not to be inspired when we’re always indulged with design-related resources. Lawrence Zeegen’s Digital Illustration: A Master Class in Creative Image-making is the latest book being passed around the Vassar’s Web-design crew. Although the heart and soul of the book is the jaw-dropping illustrations, the history of image-making is no less interesting, especially with the influences of pop culture such as punk rock, hip-hop, and pornography. With digital tools—Mac computer, digital camera, scanner—being affordable and easy to access, the process of integrating media and techniques is much smoother and faster. An artist can move freely from paper-sketching to digital-crafting or vice versa. Digital Illustration is a wonderful source of inspiration.

With a collection of essays written by music scholars, Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno is both refreshing and informing to read. The book delves into various genres—country, pop, world music, smooth jazz, folk, and punk rock—that are often ignored by the academic’s gatekeepers. Discussions such as “Camp vs. Cheese,” “Why Smooth Jazz is Not Part of Historical Narratives,” and “Badness as ‘Aesthetically Unbearable Style'” help readers understand the “musical badness” without being disdainful. As someone whose interests include music writing, I find Bad Music to be helpful and insightful.

I have tremendous respect for Thinh Nhat Hanh and his work as a peace activist. I’ve learned to calm myself and connect with my interbeing (Tiep Hien) through his Being Peace. The book is an eye-opening reading for me, especially when we’re in the world full of temptations, because it taught me to appreciate my presence and to live life one day at a time. I was so impressed with his teaching that I have wanted to learn more. I began to read his other books, but disappointed by the same concepts, only different stories. His simple writing style becomes a drag to read, and his idea gets unreasonable to the point where I begin to doubt his credibility.

On the subject “We Are What We Eat” in his Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames, he talks about the food that we eat contains anger. For instance, cows raised in small barns are filled with anger because they are trapped; therefore, when we eat them, we inherit their angriness. His point is interesting, but I am not sure how realistic it is. As someone who loves his pho (Vietnamese noodle) with a side dish of uncooked beef, I guess I consume kilos of madness on top of mad cow disease. But I doubt that my anger will subside if I stop eating like a cannibal. Let’s assume that he is right on “we are what we eat,” how would he explain the angriness from people who don’t even touch meat? I know quite a few women who eat only the greenest vegetables and the freshest tofu, yet I can’t even believe the words that came out of their mouth or their evil intention. I am sure we all know someone with those two qualities.

Another disappointment with Anger is when Thich Nhat Hanh switches to fictional writing. In the tale of “David and Angelina,” he writes, “[David] was a lonely person. He did not have friends. Often he did not go to the campus cafeteria. Instead, he stayed home and ate instant noodles. You may have already guessed that David is Asian.” Besides the stereotype that only Asian people eat instant noodles, his setting is problematic. David is a college student in America, which is more or less closer to a modern society, yet Thich Nhat Hanh tied it into a fantasy world. I just could not read on when the beautiful Angelina comes to life from a painting that David has been obsessed with ever since he bought it from the market. This is not Weird Science, and I didn’t know Thich Nhat Hanh could write cai luong (Vietnamese opera).

I am in no way attempting to disrespect someone who works hard all his life to bring the world some peace. I guess it’s the evil in me, from eating too much angry food, drinking too much inflamed liquid, and listening to too much evil music like jazz and hip-hop, that fuels the flames instead of cooling them down when reading Anger. I know I am going straight to hell when I die, and it’s not so hard to tell. In fact, the mental life I am living in isn’t better than hell; therefore, I admire Thich Nhat Hanh, and wish I could be as spiritually free as he is.