The list, care of the Los Angeles Times.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Together, As Always
A photography project by Julianne Aguilar, Together, As Always, highlights inscriptions in used books.
Enjoy!
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The Epidemic of Niceness in Online Book Culture
Is all this kumbaya in book culture a good thing? Or, not so much?
From a piece on Slate...
But let’s say you’re part of this web of writers, fiction-lovers, literary editors, and readers in the social-media world, and you’re assigned a review of Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures. What if you don’t like it? Or what if you like it, but not unreservedly? Are you willing to say so? Would you be willing to critique Straub’s novel after watching her life scroll out on social media over the last year—indeed, after likely being the recipient or admirer of some small word or act of kindness on Straub’s part?
To the uninitiated, this might seem immaterial, or like the kind of navel-gazing tabulation of credentials that can make the New York literary world insufferable. As a relatively recent arrival to New York, I can say that both are true. But it also matters, because the situation of someone like Straub epitomizes the mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online.
Murder He Wrote
Dismissed by Aldous Huxley as 'vulgar', Edgar Allan Poe is saluted now as a virtuoso of the short story. The grisly deaths he inflicted on his characters helped make him the master of the macabre. Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Jamie Lenman investigate how he killed them off, here.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Some Practical Writing Advice from Douglas Coupland
Some thoughts, care of Lit Reactor.
From said list...
-
Writing can be a form of exhibitionism and writing in public can be a
good way of unlocking doors, even, yes, at Starbucks. Many writers with
steep deadlines go to a hotel in their own city and lock themselves away
and finish things more quickly — familiarity with an absence of
distractions.
-
Many editors are happy to meet a new face for lunch. Many are just
plain bored. Phone and ask to meet them but… you have to bring a large
pile of pitch ideas with you or the lunch will go nowhere.
-
Intern as much as possible, free if possible. The moment someone goes
on maternity leave, you’re in. This is true for most jobs, actually.
Nobody wants to go through 200 resumes when there’s a warm body right
there in front of them.
-
People who come out of the magazine track often don’t understand why
people from the lit stream see getting published as being mystical. One
writes to be read and readerships are to be expected; don’t be cosmic,
just get your stuff out there.
- Your life doesn’t change much after being published. “The calm following the calm.” Even if a book strikes big, life doesn’t change much. Calibrate expectations.
The E-Reader Generation is Falling in Love with Antiquarian Books
So says the Denver Post.
From the piece...
Collectors in their 20s, she said, "get all excited about something old that connects them to the past."
Tess Hamilton, 17, was introduced to antiquarian books about 10 years ago, when her mother often took her and her brother to The Hermitage Bookshop. She started with "Wind in the Willows" and "Winnie the Pooh" but has graduated to collecting first editions of Raymond Carver.
"Almost everyone I know has e-books," she said. "They're more convenient, lighter and easier to carry around. But there's something about the weight of a book, and smelling it. It's not the same reading it on a little screen."
Reflections of Home
Granta collects a plethora of writers' thoughts on home (including the likes of Teju Cole, Rawi Hage, Ha Jin, and A.L. Kennedy.
From the piece...
A.L. Kennedy
I come from a long line of drifters. My family is from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, England, even Mesopotamia. My parents emmigrated from England to Australia and then, fairly arbitrarily, settled back to work in Dundee just before I was born. Perhaps as a result, I have never found ‘home’ in a place. It’s people who are home for me: my grandparents waiting for me on Wolverhampton station, having coffee with friends in the Kings Road, or Great Western Road, or Nicholson Street. It’s the touch of a hand, or a kiss. Much more portable than a house.
Thursday, August 09, 2012
Vladimir Nabakov's Lost Short Story on Boxing, Found, and Published
We can thank the Times Literary Supplement for that.
From the intro...
Nabokov was a devotee of sports and games, ranging from boxing, football and tennis, through chess and cryptic crosswords, to the play of thought, language, desire, art, and the divine universe – those more abstract forms of play that he invokes at the beginning of “Breitensträter– Paolino”, sounding, for all the world, like a Presocratic philosopher, only one come to declare not that all is air, water, earth, or fire, but that all is play. Never again would he express so openly and nakedly this vision of life and art as play, which would govern his work for the next fifty years; no wonder that Nabokov, who later said an artist is lost when he seeks to define art, should have let the piece lie hidden in the archives of the emigration.
As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”.
Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its duelling antitheses.
William Burroughs' Curse on Truman Capote
Reality Studio has an interesting piece on Burroughs and his thoughts on Capote and his writing.
From the story...
Burroughs’ texts of the early 1950s offer his own mordant mockery of Capote’s success. A letter to Ginsberg from April 1952 finds Burroughs shifting into an effeminate register to mock the gossipy tone of litterateurs: “My dear I simply must read the short story about your affair with a Mongolian hair-lipped idiot in Dakar. It sounds too too Truman Capoty. A hunch back blowing you at the same time?” Most witheringly, Burroughs invokes Capote in the pay-off to the Billy Bradshinkel routine of The Yage Letters (written 1953, published 1963), a tale of an adolescent love affair whose narrative tone treads an uncertain balance between abject sentimentality and self-conscious satire. The latter wins the day as the teenage Billy rejects the advances of Burroughs’ narrator and later dies in a car crash, leading Burroughs to conclude “And I got a silo full of queer corn where that came from,” ending in the bathetic and dismissive address to the reader, “Ah what the hell! Give it to Truman Capote” (a sentiment-puncturing punchline performed to terrific effect in Ed Buhr’s 2008 film of the routine, The Japanese Sandman). Burroughs’ notes on the original Yage manuscript imply that the Bradshinkel vignette was specifically intended as a parody of contemporary American fiction, as a “lapse into typical young U.S. novelist style” (suggesting Burroughs may also have had in mind Vidal’s 1948 novel of gay adolescent infatuation, The City and the Pillar).
Burroughs’ arrival in Tangiers in 1954 offered new reasons to resent Capote, given that Burroughs promptly felt slighted by the city’s expatriate literary community centered around Paul Bowles (who Burroughs would only befriend some years later). In August 1954 Burroughs writes to Kerouac complaining that “[Bowles] invites the dreariest queens in Tangiers to tea, but has never invited me [...] Since Tennessee Williams and Capote etc. are friends of Bowles I, of course, don’t meet them when they come here.” Despite Burroughs’ bruised tone, it is worth noting that at this point Bowles, Williams, and Capote were all successful writers while Burroughs had only one pulp novel to his (pseudonymous) name. Furthermore, Burroughs may have been misinformed as to the likelihood of encountering Capote in Tangiers, given that Capote’s sojourn in the city had occurred much earlier, in the summer of 1949. Yet the following month, Burroughs again bemoans his social exclusion to Kerouac, revealing the extent to which his sense of being ostracised in Tangiers had reopened old wounds.
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Not Just Spice on His Shelves
Celebrity Jose Andres collects cookbooks. They're awesome.
From a piece in the New York Times...
“Books, for me, this is a way of learning,” Mr. Andrés, 43, said as he
circled the table. “This is my college education. The history of cooking
is my passion, and cooking is my passion.”
Add those books residing in his office in Washington — 300 to 400 more —
and in “boxes and boxes” still packed away, and the total is roughly
1,500. Mr. Andrés, who was born in Catalonia, Spain, has no time to
catalog his remarkable collection, because in addition to operating 12
restaurants, he has embarked on a crusade to elevate Americans’ eating
habits.
His eclectic library includes an 1825 first edition of Jean Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin’s “Physiology of Taste”; a rents and receipts notepad
from 1795 that belonged to Honoré Julien, Thomas Jefferson’s chef; and
Japanese comic books that relate the history of Japanese cooking. Add to
these a 1931 first edition of Irma Rombauer’s “Joy of Cooking”; an 1851
edition of “The Virginia Housewife,” written by Mary Randolph in 1824;
and the first cookbook Mr. Andrés ever bought, “The Cuisine of Frédy
Girardet,” from one of the celebrated masters of nouvelle cuisine.
The Life of a Full-Time Freelance Writer
How do you do it, Natasha Vargas Cooper? That's the question asked recently on The Billfold.
From the piece...
Do you live paycheck to paycheck?
There are entire months when I don’t get paid. Realistically I probably only get paid five times a year. I’ll get a large sum of money and I’ve been lucky enough live on that before it gets down to zero I’ll get paid again. The goal is to get big ticket pieces so I can spend my time on those, and don’t have to cobble together smaller pieces and listicles and slideshows, which I’m not very good at anyway. I am not a blogger, I can’t hack it as one, I’m slow. I had two weeks at Gawker that made me want to put a gun in my mouth.
I’m pitching five editors from five publications constantly. I have relationships with them. I’m not sending blind queries. There are two ways the magazines pay. One is a negotiated fee-per-word, and one is a lump sum payment per piece. And I have a good rate. Very early when I started writing I got a book deal and my first longform piece was for The Atlantic, and through those I was able to establish myself early on.
How did you learn how to negotiate?
Whenever I’d get a piece, I’d tell my dad—who was a journalist for 30 years—and he’d say, “How much are they going to pay you?” I’d respond sheepishly that “I didn’t ask” because at the beginning it kinda felt like the editor or magazine was doing me a favor. And he’d make me get back on the phone and get a contract. Coming from a union background, I also don’t, uh, have a lot sympathy for bosses. These are giant conglomerates who can absolutely afford to pay $25,000 for a photo shoot, so they can absolutely pay me my measly fee.
I don’t have any sentimentality about this profession. I don’t romanticize it or my relationship with these magazines. And I don’t have any illusions that the business relationship I have is with the editor I’m working with, because it’s not a friendship, it’s a business deal (not living in New York helps reinforce this perspective). So I ask for a contract, I say, “Okay, this is the fee,” and sometimes they’ll push back on it, but I have a pretty good idea of what my work is worth now.
Rewriting Comics History
Paul Gravett traces the history of daily comics in a review.
From the piece...
You’d think by now that the history of a medium as global and influential as comics would be fully researched and written, but this is not the case. In contrast to the more varied and international perspectives available on film or literature, the majority of English-language reference books on comics plough through the well-worn furrows of the 20th century American newspaper strip and comic book, re-affirming old "truths" and historical "facts". Objectivity and lack of bias are practically impossible, because by putting into print your history, your version of the "facts," your inclusions and omissions determine who and what are significant. In the process, almost inevitably, supposedly "minor" or "peripheral" figures and events can be overlooked.
Writing history is a way of controlling history. As R.C. Harvey puts it in his book Children Of The Yellow Kid: The Evolution of the American Comic Strip (University of Washington Press, $29.95, ISBN 0-29597778-7), "And we begin, as most historical surveys of this medium do, with The Yellow Kid (shown above in his first appearance, not yet in yellow, bottom left in a single-panel cartoon by Richard Outcault for Truth magazine, dated May 5th, 1895). To justify this, Harvey invokes the "Columbus principle," used by many comics historians since Coulton Waugh’s 1947 book The Comics which admits that the Vikings were the first to reach the New World, but Columbus’ "discovery" inspired others to follow him. Unfortunately, applied to comics, this approach conveniently writes off all that came before, in America, Europe and elsewhere, as precursors or "proto-comics," of interest perhaps but not the genuine article. After all, they don’t fit into the notion that this ‘new’ narrative medium began in America.
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Why is Z Associated with Sleeping, Anyway?!
The question is answers on the Straight Dope.
From the piece...
Z isn’t associated with sleeping, specifically, but
rather with snoring. You may be one of the fortunate few having no
personal acquaintance with this phenomenon. I don’t have much
familiarity with it either, but mostly because I’m asleep when I do it.
Ms. Adams tells me Z doesn’t adequately convey the experience, which she
says is like hearing a drowning man being eaten by a squid. Considering
that a realistic representation would be something like
gasp-choke-grunt-chew-smack, I think we can agree a simple Z is good
enough.
Z as shorthand for snoring is a relatively recent invention. It came into common use with the advent of comics.
Figuring this out took a while. The Oxford English Dictionary
wasn’t much help. It credits the first use of Z to signify buzzing to
Henry Thoreau, who in 1852 wrote, “The dry z-ing of the locust is
heard.” However, the first use of “z-z-z” to represent snoring given in
the OED is from a 1924 publication by the American Dialect Society,
implying it was in popular use some time before.
Sure, There's Lots of Sex Scenes in Literature. But Where Are the Birth Scenes?
That's the question recently posed by the Guardian.
From the piece...
But birth is more often gracefully elided, occurring between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, or even between one paragraph and the next. We might have overcome our inhibitions about following characters into the bedroom, but we want a birth over with in a neat-and-tidy jump cut. (Many mothers might wish that life imitated art in this respect.)
When I started work on my debut novel, one of the first scenes I wrote was a meeting between a heavily pregnant woman and her slim, career-driven friend, who has never wanted children. I wanted to write about the way relationships between women can be both competitive and supportive, and what happens to a friendship when one woman has a baby. I knew birth had to be part of that; I didn't want to skirt around it.
But there were a number of difficulties to overcome: how much detail to go into, and what to leave out? How to describe pain? How to make it as dramatic and compelling as the real thing? The key would be to see what happened through my characters' eyes – but whose eyes did I choose? Pain reduces women in labour to wordlessness; others are only partially helpful bystanders. How could I do justice to both perspectives?
The Erotic Pop-Up Book from 1846
Booktryst reveals it, here.
From the post...
It is Variations de l'Amore, a suite of nine numbered, gilt-bordered watercolors, image size 115 x 160 mm, with overlaid slips that was clandestinely issued c. 1846 (that date appearing on one of the plates), likely in Germany, with captions in German and French.
It is not the earliest work of erotica in movable book format, innocent scenes whose overlays, when lifted, reveal graphic sexual situations. I have seen two other erotic movable books with overlays, Moeurs de Paris 2eme Livraison, with illustrations by, amongst others, Achille Deveria, published c. 1835 in London (i.e. Paris), and Les Portes et Fenêtres, paru en livraisons (Paris, 1835) with plates by Henri Monnier, Devéria, etc., its "doors and windows" providing an eyeful when opened.
Hunting for Gold at the Games
Those lucky spectators who streamed into the Olympic Park for Friday's opening ceremony were wise to keep their ticket stubs and any other ephemera related to the occasion, if only for their great-grandchildren's sake.
Monday, August 06, 2012
How to Eat Like Your Favorite Authors
Care for some recipes by Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabakov and more? Put on your apron.
From a piece on Flavorwire...
Colette’s Truffles
Turns out legendary bad girl Colette didn’t just indulge her (risqué at the time) sexual appetites, but the prolific author also had a knack for truffles — a food that, of course, happened to be a prized aphrodisiac in ancient Rome.
“Steep in good very dry white wine. Keep your champagne for banquets; the truffle (highly prized black or white mushroom sniffed out by pigs and dogs) does very well without it. Lightly seasoned with salt and pepper. Cook in a covered black concotte (black iron skillet). For 25 minutes it dances in the boiling liquid… which give substance to the cooking juices. No other spices whatsoever! To hell with the pressed napkin, tasting and smelling of chlorine, the final bed of the cooked truffle. Your truffles should come to the table in their court-bouillon (cooking liquid.) Take a generous helping: the truffle whets the appetite and assists the digestion.”
The Guardians of Nanjing Library's Old Books
They're men like Shen Xieyuan and Yang Laijing.
The minguo books were printed on paper using Western papermaking methods. Thus, the repair procedures are similar to the West.
But for ancient Chinese books,
the way to restore them is unique. They are usually worn out on the
edges. To repair the pages, a new piece of paper is stuck at the back of
the original piece. This is done as the pages are printed only on one
side.
"Our equipment and skills in
restoring ancient Chinese books surprise even visiting foreign experts,"
says Chen Xujun, director of the repair center under the library's
Historical Archives Department.
Chen says though worm holes can
be fixed by machine, the library only trusts its rare books in the
hands of experienced repairers like Yang.
"Yang is so experienced that he
only needs to touch and look at a book to be able to tell the date of
publication and edition," Chen adds.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Marilyn's Memorabilia
The Hunger Games Has Made Archery Cool
This, according to the Guardian.
From the story...
"Last year there was a survey of 12-18 year olds who were asked what Olympic sport they would like to try and archery came out top," said Peter Jones, from Archery GB. He points out membership has already risen from 16,000 people in 2004 to 36,000 in 2012. "Our have-a-go sessions are fully booked and when I went to my local club the other day there was no room for new members"
Heidi Nichol, from 2020 Archery said the Olympics were having an immediate effect. "We've already had a big spike in inquiries thanks to the records being broken."
On the Perks and Pitfalls of Signing Books
The Guardian lays it out for you.
From the piece...
It was only with my next couple of books that I began to see that a signing life is not necessarily a happy one, and that for every few pleasant experiences, there is also likely to be a humiliating one. These humiliations – I have resisted a weaker word – are of various sorts. The worst, probably, is when you perform for an audience at a literary festival, retire afterwards to the signing area, and no one comes. There is plenty of space in front of you for an orderly queue, the same as those for the other authors sprinkled about, signing away. Only no one fills it. You sit there for a time, more in hope than expectation. Check your emails on your iPhone, look at your watch, cruise the internet, look at your watch again. Drink your glass of water. Request a refill. By this time, if they have any human feeling whatsoever, the bookshop manager for the festival will have turned up with a few copies for you to sign for their stock. With pathetic gratitude you sign them with a flourish, announce limply "must get on", and slink away. The other authors, bent on signing, affect not to notice that you have left.
It can be just as bad when people, however few, do turn up. At first I had the usual problems: do you inscribe "To" or "For" the recipient? What do you actually say? "Best wishes" stinks. I often use, instead, "Here at the [for instance] Hay festival," with a date. That will satisfy most of the requests.
What is hideously embarrassing, though, is when you recognise the person who has asked for a signature, but cannot remember their name.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
How to Write Great
Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts in the New York Times.
From the piece...
Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of
surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual,
whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what
is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to
rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are
startled, that’s all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise
as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day
too, well, well! At the beginning of “Hamlet” there can be no doubt that
by the play’s end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish,
then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made
more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one
juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird
or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon.
There have been times in literary history when writers steered clear of
the great moral issues, but not completely, and never for long. The 18th
century (Johnson, Gray, Cowper) had no problem telling people how to
think and behave. The Romantics made the egotistical sublime, though
Wordsworth’s self was large enough for everyone. The Victorians opened
things up again, as did T. S. Eliot a little later, with big
pronouncements about the state of the world. Literature took to the
confessional in the 1960s, when personal demons took over for universal
evils. Yet while Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath shrank subject matter to
the size of Czar Lepke and Daddy, we still could see the Us in Them.
One might say that the shadow of the Big Bad Bomb made honor, heroism
and the rest beside the point. But “Invisible Man” and “Doctor Zhivago”
appeared while we were ducking and covering, suggesting that dealing
with big themes in literature depends less on eras than on individual
inclination.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Women in Comics and the Tricky Art of Equality
The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex looks at women in the comic book workforce.
From the piece...
But a broader look at the world of comics and the women who work there reveals the industry is far more gender-balanced than the superhero fare suggests. Though women still make up a minority of creative talent at Marvel and DC, their influence is growing. And in comics at large, women are on even footing and gaining ground.
“Outside the world of Marvel and DC, women are just doing it, and it’s awesome,” said Heidi MacDonald, a comics journalist and former editor for Disney and DC Comics. “They’re succeeding or failing on the content of their work.”
Women dominate the pages of manga (comics created in Japan), their graphic novels fill the catalogs of small independent publishers, and their Web comics draw millions of eyeballs.
Thursday, August 02, 2012
How to Write
The novelist Colson Whitehead has some thoughts.
From a piece in the New York Times...
Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do. “And what do you have for us today, Marcy?” “A penetrating psychological study of a young med student who receives disturbing news from a former lover.” “How marvelous! Timmy, what are you holding there?” “It’s a Calvinoesque romp through an unnamed metropolis much like New York, narrated by an armadillo.” “Such imagination!” Show and Tell, followed by a good nap.
Superhero Typographic Classifications
The most distinguishing factor of any font is its characters. Hidden beneath these characters, each typeface also has character—its own unique characteristics. However classified this information may seem, when used correctly, typefaces often speak to us more powerfully than the words that are written with them.
A gallery of classifications, care of Behance.
10 Things You Didn't Know about Batman
The list, care of io9.
From said list...
6) A lot of key elements of the Bat-mythos weren't introduced until the 1940s.
Batman's home was first named as "Gotham City" in Detective Comics #48 in 1940, and before that Batman lived in "Metropolis" or just New York. The Bat-signal didn't appear until Detective Comics #60 in 1942. The Batcave didn't appear until 1948, and prior to that Batman just had a secret hangar for the Batplane and a deserted barn connected to Wayne Manor by a secret passageway. Prior to the appearance of the Bat-signal, Batman covers frequently depicted a giant moon (which was frequently bright yellow) behind Batman.
7) The crappiest Batman costume ever sold was part of the carton of Batman (TM) chocolate milk. You cut the side of the milk carton out and you end up with a soggy piece of cardboard shaped sort of like a Bat eye-mask. Lord knows what that would smell like after a few hours.
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Batman...and Architecture
It's discussed on Arch Daily.
From the post...
New York, Dubai, Tokyo, Moscow, Gotham. Every city in every atlas—real and fictional— has a unique character shaped by history and geography. More than a mere sense of place derived from architecture and planning, cities have a feeling that pervades the consciousness of those who live there until themselves become a a piece of the urban fabric, a fractional embodiment of the city itself. Perhaps more than any other person—real or fictional—Batman is integrally linked to his city, the city he has sworn to protect. In every sense of the word, he is a true avatar of Gotham. And Gotham City itself is an avatar, not only of the dreams of its fictional architects, but of our collective urban paranoia.
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