A Writer's Desk

Jon's Writing in Vintage Seattle

2009-11-16T05:45:00.001-08:00

I recently wrote about the fabulous Fox Theatre that was on 7th and Olive in Seattle for Vintage Seattle. I hope you enjoy the small piece here. And for more images of the grand building, you can visit the University of Washington's image collection here.

A Feminist Reading List

2009-11-16T05:41:00.001-08:00

Ariel Levy offers it in The New Yorker.

From the brief piece...

It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the piece I wrote, but as long as we’re talking about feminist memoirs, I highly recommend Andrea Dworkin’s, “Heartbreak.” I think it is her best book, certainly her most accessible. It is the perfect antidote to the myth that Dworkin was a simplistic thinker—and writer—who thought that all sex was rape.

Now this is really a stretch, but just by the by, I think my favorite biography of a feminist icon is Nancy Mitford’s unbelievable “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Oof, that’s a good book.

The Bible - X-Box Edition

2009-11-16T05:38:00.000-08:00

Thou shalt play games.

Quote of the Week

2009-11-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
- Chinese Proverb

Gene FOXP2

2009-11-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

It's that gene, that single solitary gene that separates chimps and us in regards to speaking abilities. We can, they can't. It's because of the gene FOXP2. UCLA scientists discuss it here.

From the piece...

"Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans," said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells.

"We showed that the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 not only look different but function differently too," said Geschwind, who is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London."

Robert Mankoff - The Big Think Interview

2009-11-14T08:35:00.001-08:00

The cartoon editor of the New Yorker is a wealth of knowledge on all things comedic:

I've Lost My Library Card!

2009-11-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

More, at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Friday's Poem

2009-11-13T06:03:00.001-08:00

Dorothy Parker's "General Review of the Sex Situation":

I Can Tell By the Pixies...

2009-11-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

Letters of Note, which day after day has some incredibly interesting posts, had a post the other day on Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was an avid spiritualist and believed in faeries, actual faeries, and the like. He wrote a letter to a girl who had taken a "photograph" of a faerie.

A Novel Crime Cure

2009-11-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

The BBC recently looked at how reading classic literature can help those in prison from reoffending.

From the piece...

Mr North says literature also helped addicts and other sick people.

He said: "Literature is an incredibly broad thing and heals all of us all the time.

"We're interested in how you deliver it in a highly charged way to get a result."

Mary Stephenson, formerly writer in residence at Channings Wood prison in Exeter, said she had seen at least two prisoners change after reading classic novels.

"It made them realise they weren't thick or stupid and they were just as much an audience for that kind of writing as anyone else.

"That gives them a great boost and a lot of them started to do education."

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and the modern adventure novel Touching the Void by Joe Simpson all resonated with offenders in different ways.

Why Writers Define the First World War

2009-11-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

There's an illuminating post in The Guardian (without question one of the best book sites on the internet) about World War I, the literature it spawned, and how those on the firing line recorded their experiences of it.

From the piece...

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant bestseller around the world. It is the one book that provided a continuing market for the others mentioned here. It spawned a new literary movement in books condemning the war, making the style suddenly fashionable in the late 20s, just as books about teenage vampires are today. It also inspired the first great war film which set the tone for what would follow. Future conflicts – the second world war, Vietnam, Iraq – would all inspire more great celluloid than pages.

The first world war was the first time war was seen and understood by writers, by a whole generation of them, who didn't see it remotely, through chivalrously tinted lenses but in the mud and the blood and the shrapnel. Before the real dawn of cinema and after the birth of literacy, the first world war is the only war that must be read to be understood.

The Smell of Books

2009-11-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

Double-Breasted Dust-Jacket has an interesting post about a new study that was done about the smell of books. Called "material degradomics" - analyzers can tell the age and condition of a book by sniffing it.

The Antiquarian Book Market in Mexico City

2009-11-12T05:48:00.000-08:00

It's a good one, notes the Los Angeles Times. Travel to Mexico City and there are treasures to be found, partly because most book collectors look to the United States or Europe for their books, secondly because oftentimes the bookstores owners in Mexico don't use the internet and price their books at lower prices because of it.

From the story...

You don't have to read Spanish to love these bookstores. There is an incredible range of old, odd books in English (as well as in French, German and Italian) scattered throughout the shelves. In Bibliofilia, a Donceles bookstore that specializes in rare, antique and out-of-print books, a 1960s Manual for Refrigeration Mechanics, a first edition of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" and the 1866 "History of the United States" in four volumes illustrated with steel engravings are for sale at about a third the price of what they could fetch north of the border.

In general, the price of antique, out-of-print and rare books in Mexico City is cheap compared with the prices in the U.S. and Europe. Collectors outside the country often don't know what's available in Mexico, and booksellers here may not use the Internet to find out what prices are elsewhere. This, of course, gives the informed, or just lucky, book buyer a real advantage.

Although good deals can be found on blankets spread out along the avenues around the city, in the well-stocked bookstalls on the traffic islands in the Roma, Condesa and Coyoacán neighborhoods or at the weekly flea markets, the dozens of used-book stores lining Calle Donceles, with upward of 1 million books on sale and prices often as cheap as on the street, are still the place to go for one-stop used-book shopping.

Jonathan Ames - The Big Think Interview

2009-11-11T09:27:00.000-08:00

Photography and the Private Library

2009-11-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

The Private Library has an extensive series of posts in regards to collecting books on photography.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX

Happy reading and go out and start taking some pics.

The Donkey Library

2009-11-11T05:54:00.000-08:00

The Great Comic Book Heroes

2009-11-11T05:51:00.000-08:00

Not only do they fight crime, they're good for your kids. In the Telegraph, there's a story about how comic books are good for children, about as good as any other type of literature the tot may read.

From the story...

"Any book can be good and any book can be bad, to some extent. It's up to the reader's personality and intellect. As a whole, comics are just another medium, another genre.

"If reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or comprehension, readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic and cultural conventions."

William Carlos Williams and His Burnt Book

2009-11-10T06:03:00.001-08:00

Bookride has a groovy post about poet William Carlos Williams's first book, Poems. Most all of them burnt up, save nine. Obviously, due to their rarity, they're a little expensive. The post continues with discussions of other famed books and libraries going up in flames.

Do Women Write "Female" Poetry?

2009-11-10T05:59:00.001-08:00

This is a question asked recently by The Guardian.

From the story...

Many of the poems in my next book are influenced by the artist Helen Chadwick, whose early work made much use of images of her own body – until a change in the late 1980s. She wrote: "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body ... It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft." I think I am in love with the word "deft", which seems to me to describe exactly how a poet should be – but apart from that I was intrigued by the idea of art that might not declare gender. When I applied the idea to poetry I saw how prescriptive we can be – particularly as readers – in our assumptions about the influence of gender on writing.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent – and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

Pictured above: Poet Carol Ann Duffy.

The Carbon Footprint of Reading

2009-11-10T05:54:00.000-08:00

Are e-books greener than regular books? Bookseller.com has a discussion about it.

From the piece...

Eco-conscious consumers face these sorts of dilemmas every day, the sort of electric handdryer versus paper towel debates (on that one, Al Gore recommends neither but waving your hands around in the air). But with the Amazon Kindle now available in the UK and the e-book market certain to rise, a vexing question UK consumers will certainly be asking themselves is this: are e-books greener than print?

As often with these green debates, the answer is less than certain. A few recent reports from the US fall heavily on the "e is greener" side. In August, a study by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year.

Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would "result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year"—the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books.

ASL Shakespeare

2009-11-10T05:48:00.000-08:00

ASL Shakespeare. How cool is that? The ASL Shakespeare Project began in 1999 at Yale University. A team of four people, two deaf, and two hearing, came together to translate Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into ASL. This core team was later joined by other Deaf performers. It took over a year to translate and videotape the full play. Then the translation was produced by the Amaryllis Theater in Philadelphia.

The Gutenberg Bible at Yale University

2009-11-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

Dr. William Whobrey, Assistant Dean of Yale College and Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literatures discusses Johannes Gutenberg, Yale's copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and the significance of the invention of moveable type. Enjoy the illuminating podcast!

How to Kick Writer's Block Musically

2009-11-09T05:51:00.001-08:00

The ever entertaining Chuck Klosterman presents twelve albums that kick writer's block, via Flavorwire. Oddly absent from the list - Peter, Bjorn and John's album Writer's Block.

Jane's Predecessor

2009-11-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

You've heard of Jane Austen. But have you heard of Maria Edgeworth? The Second Pass illuminates you.

From the piece...

Maria Edgeworth might be the most important nineteenth-century novelist to have gotten lost in the twentieth. Like Fanny Burney before her and Mary Shelley after her, Maria was raised in the home of a famous father. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was an amateur scientist, a man of letters, and an “improving” landlord who returned from England to Ireland in 1782 with his thirteen-year-old prodigy of a daughter. Under his tutelage, at a tender age she was already conversant with the works of Adam Smith, but her literary education was also remarkable. She read widely and went on to write in many genres, sometimes in partnership with her father. In particular, she developed the new form of “national tale” in a series of novels about Ireland that inspired Walter Scott to try something similar for Scotland. The result was the Waverley novels. She was an innovator in domestic fiction as well, and her influence on Jane Austen is palpable.

Jane Austen remains pretty damn popular these days. The Morgan Library & Museum actually just started a new exhibition, "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy."

Quote of the Week

2009-11-08T09:30:00.001-08:00

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
- Rudyard Kipling