So today has been the day of the web’s big SOPA/PIPA blackout protest. I do not black out erasing.org. The extent of my participation is a lunch-break impulse to post the above picture of Ellsworth Kelly’s 2010 relief “Black Curve Diagonal” on erasing.tumblr.com. An egregious co-opting and misuse of art on my part, but to me somehow it looks correct for the occasion. And now I am cross-posting it here. Forgive me, Ellsworth Kelly, wherever you are.

Sweet mother of Cupertino. Above is the new Mac mini. Looks pretty much the same as the exquisitely redesigned Mac mini that Apple released in the summer of 2010, but this new-new mini 1) has jettisoned that hilarious moldering antiquity that was the CD/DVD drive, 2) runs the newly-minted leonine OS X 10.7, and 3) unholy gobsmacking miracle of transdenominational miracles, is finally the same price here in Canada as it is in the States.

My circa-2008 Mac mini — at which I am typing right now, a computer that to my ongoing astonishment is still working fine, spookily reliable, a pleasant example of the Last Year’s Model (plus two) ethic — cannot wait to be replaced by this object. This disappearing thing.

So the new-new mini is slimmer, sleeker, quieter, cooler, whiter, greener, blanker, and bleaker. More minimalist, more miniature, less there. A vanishing ice cap. An eroded stone. Something or other melting, thawing, resolving into a dew, etc., etc. Like all of Apple’s hardware, each newer model fills less space, is less solid, approaching insubstantiality, fading from view — like clouds, like air, like poor Steve Jobs’s body, like us poor users’ minds. I appreciate that when Jobs was explaining iCloud, he said they’re demoting the Mac to just be a device … I know the feeling.

Cross-posted from erasing.tumblr.com for Xmas Eve: Agnes Martin, Happy Holiday.

Above: A new favorite book cover: Writings From the Zen Masters, from Penguin’s Great Ideas series. Cover design by Alistair Hall. You know you’re a designer with clout when you can convince a major publishing house to go with a book cover so minimalist that it has neither title nor author on it, or in fact any text at all. (And reduces that publisher’s iconic logo to an almost indistinguishable purple stamp.)

Today in the mail from Amazon.de: The exquisitely-designed 1547-page German-language hardcover edition of DFW’s Infinite Jest, just released, translated over the course of six years by Ulrich Blumenbach (translator of Stephen Fry’s books!) and published as Unendlicher Spaß. I can’t read German, of course, but I had to have this. (Was inspired by Matt Bucher.) The minimalist cover design has a somewhat sepulchral quality, drained of color, black type on otherwise blank matte white boards, black endpapers, the back cover a mirror image of the front. With a thoughtful touch: Sewn into the binding are two bookmark ribbons. (One for the main text, one for the 134 pages of endnotes.) Seems a shame to not be able to read it, but I shall just pretend it’s in English and consider it a special edition that stays on the shelf. Our four actual English-language copies of IJ should be able to take up the slack.

Above: Google’s finest design yet. Screencapped for posterity, as it appears in Safari. Wish it was permanent, and not just for the seventh. (7 October 1952 being the barcode’s patent issue date.) Today we are all machine-readable…