Anne Shirley Forever

Robin says,

Whoah, Anne of Green Gables is a hundred years old!

The Guardian celebrates with an essay by Margaret Atwood which includes gems like:

The book was an instant success when it first appeared -- Anne "is the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal Alice", growled crusty, cynical Mark Twain [...]

(I was going to quote more, but it won't make any sense if you're not an Anne-fan. And if you are, you'll just want to read the whole thing.)

NMA Winners '07

Matt says,

HuffPo stole my candy: National Mag Awards winners for '07. (Fimoculicious.)

What's a Library For?

Robin says,

This Slate piece was apparently precision-engineered to appeal to me: Witold Rybczynski on public libraries in the age of Google, set to pictures of some new-ish American Alexandrias.

Some of the spaces are very appealing -- the new Denver Public Library and, of course, the Seattle Public Library -- but I wonder if anyone has tried a more distributed approach? I think of all the branches of the San Francisco Public Library scattered throughout the city -- most are pretty lame and outdated at this point. But they could become an archipelago of coolness with the right kind of design and attention.

I almost think the public library of the future has more in common with Starbucks than the stately fortresses of old: comfortable, accessible, intimate, omnipresent.

And of course, there is coffee and free wifi.

(Via the excellent Design Observer.)

P.S. As an aside -- and I might have mentioned this before -- librarians were the single group most fervently interested in sharing EPIC with their colleagues and talking about its implications. This is a group of people that's actually thinking hard about their -- and our -- future.

Developer and Diarist

Robin says,

Wow, this is super-random, but great: a snippet of wonderful, atmospheric prose by... Blake Ross, cofounder of Firefox!

The Forbidden Fantasy of Utter Upeaval

Robin says,

This WaPo story by Hank Stuever is terrific, and weird, and a good example of that ripped-from-its-context thing the web does so well: I started reading it and had no idea what was going on. You'll see what I mean.

Even when do you figure out what you're reading, it never quite becomes normal. The story is totally fractured, almost impressionist -- but to good effect. Steuver is a terrific writer, and his subject matter is sublime: American culture as it's experienced in places other than New York and San Francisco. His book Off Ramp is terrific, and its subtitle says it all: "Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere."

Natural Magic

Robin says,

Reading "The Revolution in Science 1500-1750" by A. Rupert Hall and absolutely loved this line:

Quite how the authentic philosophy of Plato [...] became the father of natural magic -- magical operations without the aid of demons -- seems to be somewhat obscure.

"Magical operations without the aid of demons"! So awesome! "Hey, uh, listen, so if you want to do some magic... but you don't have any demons... try science!"

I'm enjoying the tone of the book. Hall isn't afraid to make positive value-judgments about the scientific worldview (because, he says, that view actually does provide more useful, more complete theories about the world) but at the same time, he doesn't fail to detail all the weird, religious, dogmatic, and/or occult motivations of many early scientists: Vesalius! Mondino! Paracelsus!

The Ideas! The Ideas!

Robin says,

Clive Thompson remains the single journalist most perfectly calibrated to my interests, and his latest essay for Wired is no exception. It's about science fiction:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best -- and perhaps only -- place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting -- well -- bored.

I had a friend in college who, upon hearing a science-fiction book recommendation that cited plot, characters, setting, etc., would reply: "Yes, yes, but what about the ideas? The ideas?"

(P.S. So yes, it's probably me who is actually calibrated to Clive Thompson's interests, given the nature of media. That's fine, too.)

The Atlantic Rides Again

Robin says,

The Atlantic, favorite magazine of my middle youth, was kinda lame for a while there, but it's been getting good again -- a fact that had been bumming me out because, of course, I couldn't link to the subscriber-only stories.

Until today.

So let us celebrate the magazine's resurgence and web-savvy with a couple of pointers:

• The new James Fallows piece on China is exactly what got me into the Atlantic in the first place: Themes of politics and economics, hugely abstract ideas, giant global actors and their dilemmas, etc. I love it that there's none of the usual attempt to concrete-ize and personalize here: No narrative intro with a factory worker in China, for instance. The only narrative in the piece involves the voyage of a U.S. dollar to China and back. I could not love it more.
• Caitlin Flanagan's piece about Katie Couric was the last one I read in this issue, and I almost didn't read it at all. Thank goodness my train was slow, because it was a revelation, in large part because it's as much about Caitlin Flanagan as it is about Katie Couric. Beautifully written, too: Flanagan is a great storyteller and has perfect "tone control," if you know what I mean.
Comments (4) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:44 PM

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Robin says,

Ah, remember how large the Newbery Award used to loom? It seemed like every other book in the elementary school library bore one of those golden foil badges. Was just reminded of this by a lovely Ypulse post about the latest winner, a book called "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" by Laura Amy Schlitz:

Originally written in the form of monologues to be performed by her students, the Baltimore librarian wanted to make sure every one could get a part in the production of this piece. And no one wanted a small part.

There are 17 roles, a substantial piece for every single person in her fifth grade classes. She said in an interview that she wrote it with all of her students in mind. She remembered being so disappointed and sad when she would get a token tiny part in the school plays of her own childhood. If for only three minutes, she wanted everyone to be big, to be a star.

I am so going to read this book.

Also, as long as we're talking kids' stuff: Check out Peter Sis. His picture-books Starry Messenger (about Galileo) and The Tree of Life (about Darwin) are over-the-top beautiful and good.

Writing in China

Robin says,

Very interesting (and long) write-up of literature in China over in the Guardian. There's this whole burgeoning scene of new writers with (of course) hugeaudiences, totally invisible to (ignored by?) the English-speaking world. Wish I could download Mandarin reading skills.

This bit caught my eye:

The general manager of Penguin China, Jo Lusby, is even more emphatic. "All credible interesting writing in China begins online at the moment," she says. "It's given an added boost because it exists in a relatively free space outside of the tight constraints of traditional publishers."

Super-interesting, right?

(Crossposted to Current.)

What's All This Fancy Stuff For, Anyway?

Robin says,

My favorite MacWorld analysis of all comes from Short Schrift:

At any rate, if Jobs' vision of Apple is an increasingly large number of devices on which we can watch Zoolander, I find myself much less enthusiastic about that vision or that world.

Agreed. Let's use technology to disrupt old formats and invent new ones -- not just deliver the same ol' stuff more efficiently.

Shaw's Shelter

Robin says,

Philip Pullman used to write in a shed in his backyard. Roald Dahl did, too. But here is my new favorite story of a writer and his lair, from Witold Rybczynski's heart-bendingly good book The Most Beautiful House in the World:

George Bernard Shaw was largely indifferent to his physical surroundings -- his house at Ayot Saint Lawrence, where he lived during the last forty-four years of his long life, was a nondescript Victorian rectory. But Shaw too was a builder, and the writing room that he erected in his garden was a Shavian combination of simplicity, convenience, and novelty.

He called it "the Shelter," but it was really a shed, only eight feet square. It contained the essentials of the writer's trade -- a plank desk, en electric lamp, a wicker chair, a bookcase, and a wastepaper basket. Beside the desk was a shelf for his Remington portable -- like [Mark Twain], Shaw was an early amateur of the typewriter. There was also a telephone (modified to refuse incoming calls), a thermometer, and an alarm clock (to remind him when it was time for lunch).

Inside the door was a mat where the fastidious writer wiped his shoes. The shed was austere -- a vegetarian's workplace, one might say; the pine boards and framing were painted white on the inside and left to weather on the exterior. The door, which was placed in the center of the wall, included a glass pane and had a fixed window on each side; a small window on the rear wall opened for ventilation.

The Shelter incorporated an unusual technical feature. Shaw wrote in the morning, and it was to warm the unheated interior that he had located almost all of the glazed openings on one side. To increase the effectiveness of these windows, he devised a curious solution: instead of resting on a foundation, the floor was supported on a central steel pipe, which permitted the entire room to be manually turned, like a revolving Victorian bookstand. This way, Shaw could benefit from the morning sun at different times of year. According to his secretary, however, the hut was never rotated; once it was loaded with furniture and books, it was probably too heavy to move.

I love the one-way telephone.

And seriously, this book was terrific -- not just quirky housing anecdotes (though there are plenty of those), but deep, accessible thoughts on what houses can and do mean to us.

Uncle Zip Is Leaving the Building

Robin says,

Without question, the blogroll I'm happiest Snarkmarket is on is M. John Harrison's. He's the author of Light, one of the weirdest and most wonderful books I've ever read.

Now it looks like his blog is winding down; go enjoy it while you still can, and poke around in the archives. I liked his posts on worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction. But best of all is this, which has a bit of commencement in it, you know?

While I've Been Out ...

Matt says,

My slightly edited Cool Tools submission:

Reader-diners know the pain of trying to balance a thick book and a meal without losing your page or spilling food. As a regular lunchtime reader, I went searching online for a tool that would allow for comfortable hands-free reading -- and eureka! Cleverly designed, this diminutive device is replete with intelligent features: a little pull-out stand supports the book, two sturdy clips hold the pages in place, a pair of pull-out legs holds the book upright on a table. Best of all, spring-loaded page holders on either end make for simple page-turning without the need for repositioning the text; you just grip both holders with one hand and squeeze. I've used the BookGem with a variety of types of books -- everything from thick hardcovers to slim-ish paperbacks -- and it's adapted marvelously. And because it folds down to a pocket-size rectangle, I can easily tuck it in with my book wherever I go.

City of Lost Books

Robin says,

BLDGBLOG's post on book warehousing could not possibly be more evocative and interesting. (He is a master of, among other things, slipping terrific photos into the flow of his text just so.)

But, don't miss the comments either. Autoautism writes:

I had the pleasure of working on the design for a storage library for Stanford a few years back. Three things that I still remember from that experience:

1. Books are placed in quarantine before being allowed into the storage area. Dust mites and other pests love book bindings and you have to make sure your incoming books won't infect the neighbors.

2. If there is a fire, they douse the books in water, and then freeze-dry them back to keep the paper from getting ruined.

3. Books in storage libraries are cataloged in the order that they are received-- the first book in the door is book #1, and so on. Without a very detailed and cross-indexed database, the books would be impossible to find (just like the ark?)

What a world!

'I Have Plenty to Say About Him'

Robin says,

Major upside to the impending release of The Golden Compass: lots of interviews with Philip Pullman making the rounds! This one is the best I've seen: an extended e-mail interview that goes deep, deeeep into his theology. And of course there's this bit:

[Interviewer]: Your trilogy does an amazing job of interpreting certain aspects of the Old Testament (and the legends surrounding it) quite literally (e.g. Enoch), and it touches on Church history too -- but if memory serves, there is no mention of Jesus as a character in this cosmology. To some readers, this has been a curious gap. Where does he fit into your mythos? Given that the depiction of everything that came before and after Jesus -- God, Enoch, the Church, etc. -- is pretty negative, would Jesus himself have been "bad" somehow? Or, as a "good" person, did he not fit in?

[Pullman]: His omission from HDM was deliberate; I'm going to get around to Jesus in the next book. I have plenty to say about him.

OMG!

The next book, recall, is going to be called "The Book of Dust," and Pullman has been working on it for many years now.

Footprints

Matt says,

Via Bookslut, have you ever wondered who was responsible for that ubiquitous poem-like text "Footprints"? Keep on wondering.

Snarkmarket Holiday Book Recommendation

Robin says,

Briefly: Yes, I agree: Read David Markson's "The Last Novel." It's slim; it's inventive in form but timeless in spirit; and it will shake you up.

What's your recommendation? Stipulation: You only get one! (But you can tell us the runners-up if you want.)

Kindle

Robin says,

It's sort of amazing how the blogosphere has completely inspected and chewed up the Kindle in like eight hours. Done and done.

Tim has a great round-up of links which is worth clicking through. I generally agree with the consensus ("Not shiny! So expensive. Why closed?") but I do think people ought to wait to touch one before completely writing it off. However bad the Kindle is, the Sony Reader was and is ten times as bad, and yet, when I actually held one, and flipped a page... I was intrigued. E-Ink displays are unlike anything else; it's almost unsettling to see what you know is digital information rendered absolutely matte, just like a piece of paper. I think it'd be a trip to see a web page on a display like that.

And that indicates where I part ways with Tim, who thinks Apple could make the device that beats Kindle and its kin. Here's my thing: I think the real revolution is going to be electronic paper -- or at least electronic cardboard. That is: a display that's kinda flexible, and matte, and cheap, and connected to the internet -- but without much style or content of its own. Maybe it's still five years away; but when it comes, I don't think Apple's going to make it. It's just not... shiny enough, you know?

Also: The thing that's really potentially interesting about all this stuff is that, per if:book, our very notion of the book could change: finding one gets faster, reading one gets more social, writing one gets... weird. This seems to be what got Stephen Levy excited in his Newsweek piece. But it also seems that, barring big changes, Kindle abdicates most of that, because it's a closed system. Boo.

(This is a placeholder for the awesome Kindle post I am going to write tonight. In the meantime let Tim and Umair get you started.)

This Sounds Like Something William Gibson Would Make Up

Robin says,

Regarding Google's plans to bid in the upcoming wireless spectrum auction, PaidContent notes:

Since the auction will be intense, Google has hired game-theory specialists to help plot its auction strategy, the story says.

One of those game theorists is totally a character out of a William Gibson book.

Actually, wait, no. In the Gibson book it would never be Google -- it would be some shadowy Russian holding company. Never mind.

The Title is Half the Battle

Robin says,

Poem for a Monday morning: Visiting the Library in a Strange City.

'You're Asking Me Whether the Book is True'

Robin says,

The A.V. Club interviews Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi. No great revelations -- just smart and interesting throughout. Oh, but wait, there is this:

AVC: What's the film's status? Is there actually a director attached at this point?

YM: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director who did Amélie.

That's pretty crazy! I hope it actually comes to pass.

Book of Chap

Robin says,

There's a new Revelator chapbook with nine poems by Gavin. It's called... Nine Poems. Number four is my favorite -- it seems exactly correct to me. (And it describes exactly my favorite kind of bookstore.)

And, not to be overlooked, Brandon Kelley's design continues to be absolutely terrific.

Hurrah chapbooks!

Shaun Tan

Matt says,

Blog of a Bookslut has been posting links to the work of Shaun Tan. Pure gorgeous. Check out the wordless panels (courtesy of New York Magazine) from Tan's The Arrival.

Reading Roundup

Matt says,

Today at work, I convened a tiny confab of colleagues for an inaugural, bimonthly, lunchtime essay-reading series. We kicked it off with the National Magazine Award-winning essay Russell and Mary, by Michael Donohue, a work he apparently spent five years putting together.

Kevin Drum linked this Vanity Fair piece tracing the last 50 years of the life of the two women depicted in this sad photograph, taken at the integration of a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

I've been enjoying the blog Nonfiction Readers Anonymous for its choice snippets of random tomes.

All Aunt Hagar's Children is finally out in paperback.

Where Writers Write

Robin says,

I absolutely love this sort of thing: images of the rooms where writers do their writing.

Totally approve of the attic, envious of the wall of books, and digging the pleasant insanity... but clearly this is the move. I'm there.

The Acts of King Arthur

Robin says,

Um, okay, who knew John Steinbeck wrote an adaptation of the King Arthur legend? Not me! But it sounds sorta mythically awesome in its own right, doesn't it? The lost Excalibur of YA fiction! Bring it on!

Joshua Glenn in the Boston Globe says:

Still, like everything Steinbeck wrote, the book teaches us about regional economic development, gender roles, class structure, and man's inhumanity to man... while remaining a gripping read.

Ha ha -- Steinbeck, the poet laureate of regional economic development. Awesome.

Book Club Challenge

Matt says,

All right, Snarketeers, the gauntlet is thrown: Help me come up with a theme and some nominations for readings for my book club.

Every month, one of my fellow book-clubbers is assigned to nominate three or four books. When we meet to discuss the past month's reading, we choose one of the nominees for the next month. Being something of an oddball, I like to organize my nominations around themes. The last time, for example, my theme was "Masters of Humankind." The books I proposed were No god but God (God), The Year of Magical Thinking (Death), The Time-Traveler's Wife (Time), and Moneyball (Money). (The club picked The Time-Traveler's Wife. The actual selection doesn't make much of a difference to me, because I plan to read all the books I propose, and I did.)

The theme can be oblique, clever, or straightforward. (In the straightforward camp, for example, I've been considering the four elements -- Cloud Atlas (Air), Snow (Water), American Prometheus or Dante (Fire), Coal: A Human History or Salt: A World History (Earth).) They can be either a prominent theme of the book or just a play on its title. We prefer books that have been out in paperback, and a nomination almost always goes unpicked if one of us has already read it. I aim for variety in the selection -- memoir, biography, journalistic non-fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, social history.

So, whaddya say? Help me out?

Bookinist

Matt says,

It doesn't exactly look comfortable, and it's not exactly pretty. But it's a chair-barrow with a lamp attached to it. It's even apparently got little shelves hidden beneath the armrests. I want one! Alas, all the text is in German, and I don't see anything that resembles an "add-to-cart" button.

(Via my bookstore. See also: Bibliochaise.)

Prepare for Massive Amazon Wishlist Expansion

Robin says,

What single book is the best introduction to your field? AskMeFi-ers respond. So awesome.

The Opening Lines

Robin says,

I have not read any Nabokov. However, based on these amazing opening lines, I think I am going to have to.

William Gibson and the New Baroque

Robin says,

Terrific interview with William Gibson over at The Onion A.V. Club -- it includes this bit:

I don't know what constitutes "noir" in 2007. I mean, would The Wire be noir? I don't think so. Actually, noir -- I was taught in college -- is a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism. Anyway, that's the way some critics have looked at it. I think that a show like The Wire is the closest we come these days to naturalism. It's a genuine, authentic attempt at naturalism. I've never really attempted naturalism before, but I value it a lot, so all of its more baroque forms have been very valuable to me. One of them, I think, is noir.

I haven't thought about stuff like that since I was an undergraduate. [Laughs.] I'm amazed I can still do it.

Not to get too undergraduate myself here, but I am finding "baroque" a more and more useful concept these days. What is The Postal Service if not baroque? What is The Arcade Fire if not chamber pop?

Any more nominations for modern baroque in any medium? Or, jeez, good definitions? I feel like I know what it means but can't necessarily articulate it with any great precision.

The Poe Toaster Revealed?

Matt says,

Edgar Allen Poe's masked fanatic has allegedly unmasked himself. A 92-year-old Poe-head named Sam Porpora claims to be the originator of the annual tradition of celebrating Poe's birthday with roses and cognac. But he says he's not sure who's continued the toast each year since 1976. The mystery remains ...

The Bridge and the River

Robin says,

If Gavin had asked me to link to the newest Revelator Press chapbook -- "The Bridge and the River," a collection of Tim Carmody's poems -- I would have happily done so. As it happens he did not, which gives me the opportunity to link naturally and of my own bloggy volition, for three reasons:

1. Allegiance to Tim Carmody, who besides being a terrific blogger and poet (as you'll see), is a prolific & erudite Snarkmarket commenter. This domain is without exaggeration about 25 percent more interesting simply because he stops in as often as he does.
   
   
2. The poems are really good! In particular, I like "Island," which is short but weighty; "February 13, 2002," which -- well, if movies should start with a murder, then poems should start with a moment you truly recognize, and this one does; and "Horn," which is just sort of titanic.
   
   
3. The chapbook's design is pitch-perfect. Brandon Kelley knows what's up.

Do check it out.

(Note: I love the word "chapbook." I suspect you do as well.)

The Power of Potter

Robin says,

I love this: Young legal scholar and blogger James Grimmelman (who I ran into at that Regulating Search conference back in the day) loved Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows so much that he is starting a short-term blog of Potter ruminations. (Be careful with that link! We are talking about a blog specifically predicated on spoilers!) It's terrific and I am totally going to hang out there.

There Are Alexandrias Everywhere

Robin says,

David Weinberger points to Open Library, a new project to collect all the world's information about all the world's books. (Rex mentions it too.) Lots of database nerdery involved, and a lovely design.

Related: I used Google's book search to actually read a book for the first time recently. I started online, then just went ahead and downloaded the PDF. It was fun!

The Story of Squonk

Matt says,

I just finished reading the McSweeney's story "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter," about a circus elephant hanged for murder in a small Tennessee town in the early 20th Century. Brilliant. Affecting, gripping, wonderfully written, and a little bit heartbreaking. It's one of those stories that you Google when you finish reading it, and then come to find out many wondrous things. For example, the story's not entirely fictional. In fact, an entire book has been written about it, attempting to get at the truth behind what happened that day in Tennessee.

And then there's the squonk, a legendary creature from the Pennsylvanian wilds said to dissolve into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered.

There's a throwaway reference to a ballet, "La Chauve-Souris Dorée," by a choreographer named Plastikoff -- "a rare work," the story says, "in that it celebrated not courtship, but daily love, the often-pale and unnoticed emotions that pass between a man and wife." Google yields no English references to Plastikoff, but "La Chauve-Souris Dorée," or "The Gilded Bat," is the name of a promising story written and illustrated by Edward Gorey.

I love texts that make you want to Google every word. And I love that you can.

Prediction and Prose

Robin says,

Man, William Gibson is seriously one of the very very best writers working today. I feel like he gets most of his props for his prescient ideas and images, but his prose is near-perfect, too. The only writer I can think of who's sharper and leaner (if you like that sort of thing -- I do) is Ha Jin. That's important: There are sooo many guys in sci-fi who are full of great ideas but whose words on the page are liked flopping, gasping fish.

Anyway, great interview with Gibson here. Fimocu-links here.

This Working Library

Robin says,

Jack Stauffacher, designer and printer, on his books:

"Without this working library," notes Stauffacher, "I would have no compass, no map, to guide me through the density of our human condition."

Hmm. Maybe that's what an alethiometer really looks like?

The Eurekronomicon

Robin says,

Tell me this has never happened to you waiting for a red light:

Like me, you probably don't associate the traffic lights on Southampton Row with the end of the world. But it was while waiting there in 1933 that the Hungarian polymath Leo Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb.

In the Telegraph, Tibor Fischer continues:

The car contains Szilard and his de facto chauffeur, Wigner (only Szilard would use a future Nobel Laureate as his taxi service). They are trying to find Albert Einstein to convince him of the need to urge the US government to start building an atomic bomb before the Nazis do.

When they finally locate Einstein and outline how chain reactions can be achieved, Einstein comments: "Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht" (I hadn�t thought of that). The resulting letter from Einstein to Roosevelt triggers the Manhattan Project. It�s an eerie example of how profoundly one man can influence history.

Someone write this book immediately: a compendium of eureka moments. It should include not just the canonical -- Archimedes in the bath, etc. -- but also the less-famous and, best of all, hitherto-unknown moments. Quantity would be the goal: an epiphany per page, hundreds of them in total, some big, some small.

The goal wouldn't be so much to infer patterns or derive some big Law of Lightbulbs (although you might end up doing both along the way) as it would be to simply create a storehouse of stories about insight... a book that, when browsed, might even generate some new ones as well.

Jenny 8. Lee Blogs

Robin says,

Jenny 8. Lee has a blog! It's keyed to her new book, and it's good. You know, blogs really are the great leveler, in that even New York Times reporters must at some point admit this:

Okay. I just registered for hosting at Dreamhost and installed Wordpress.

And indeed, as my friend promised, it was one-click installation + typing in some fields. I had a little stumble with trying to figure out a good nomenclature for the mysql database, as �wordpress� and �blog� (recommended) were being used elsewhere in the Dreamhost world.

Her publisher Twelve has a fun setup:

But instead, Karp launched a small imprint at Warner Books called Twelve -- the idea being that he would publish only twelve books a year and personally edit each one [...]

Seriously though, back to that MySQL thing: I love it that a generation of writers must all now learn a bit of database syntax to be successful.

'Steal from The Simpsons, Not Henry James'

Robin says,

Totally agree with the Globe Ideas section that this essay on how sorta lame modern novels are is really great and definitely worth reading. I'll blockquote the same passage they did:

Novelists can take from these new art forms [e.g., sitcoms and HBO-quality TV dramas] new structures and techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary than The Waste Land -- which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle's Poetics and hitches a ride on the energy of the novel ... Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand.

So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.

The line "Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google translation of everything ever" is gold.

Seriously, though: I want a sharp, funny, forward-looking novel that reads like a cross between Samurai Champloo, Joss Whedon's run on "Amazing X-Men," and a Facebook wall. Not another tome about, like, "the nature of memory and loss"* set in 1965 Buenos Aires.

*Not actually a quote from anything but it might as well be.

David Brin's Respect

Robin says,

Discover Magazine has a short interview up with science fiction author David Brin. They ask him how he's chalked up such a good record as a prognosticator, and this is what he says:

Peering ahead is mostly art. We all have tricks. One of mine is to look for "honey-pot ideas" drawing lots of fad attention. Whatever's fashionable, try to poke at it. Maybe 1 percent of the time you'll find a trend or possibility that's been missed. Another method is even simpler: Respect the masses. Nearly all futuristic movies and novels -- even sober business forecasts -- seem to wallow in the same smug assumption that most people are fools. This stereotype led content owners to envision the Internet as a delivery conduit to sell movies to passive couch potatoes. Even today, many of the social-net and virtual-world companies treat their users like giggling 13-year-olds incapable of expressing more than a sentence at a time of actual discourse.

Good, prescient stuff throughout.

And! If you haven't read the thrilling tale of the Streaker and her neo-dolphin crew, then by all means, do so immediately!

Short Stack Stories

Robin says,

Nina Katchadourian tells little tales via titles on book spines, e.g.

Click through and look for the one called "Shark Journal."

Incidentally, I've been moving books today and thinking about arranging them by color.

Real Writers Use Courier 12

Robin says,

Slate asks a bunch of writers to describe the fonts they use to compose new drafts. An astonishing number love Courier! Ack!

Here's one of my favorite rationales, though:

I like Courier because it seems provisional -- I can still change my mind -- whereas Times New Roman and its analogues look like book faces, meaning that they feel nailed down and immovable. I also like the fact that in Courier each letter is accorded the exact same amount of space, which I think is only fair to the i and the l.

I have no special font preference but I do tend to draft things in 14-point instead of 12-. That way I can lean back a bit further... judge a bit deeper... also, it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing more.

How about you, Snarkmatrix?

Complicated Characters

Robin says,

I totally agree with Ross Douthat that this:

... the cast of characters in what is arguably the worst administration since Nixon's strikes me as devoid of literary interest.

...is totally wrong. This cast of characters -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Bushes -- is full of literary interest! Reading Barry Werth's 31 Days, it struck me how long and strange their story has been. And the cauldron of spite, idealism, conniving, and hubris that is Iraq: It's tragedy in the deepest sense.

But this is not a confessional crowd, and that's unlikely to change even after they're out of office, so it is precisely the job of the modern novelist (as opposed to the journalist, or even the historian) to give us some insight into their psyches.

A good, honest, complicated psychological novel about George W. Bush? I would read that in a second.

2007 National Magazine Award Finalists

Matt says,

Neglected to post about this: This year, ASME posted all the links for the NMA finalists all on its own. I'd like to take some credit for this.

Fantomas

Robin says,

Paul Pope traces the history of the masked super-villain to France:

Decades before Lex Luthor, The Joker, Diabolik, Satanik, Catwoman, Fu Manchu, Doctor Mabuse and all the rest, there was Fantomas, arguably the first costumed super-criminal ever, who terrorized Paris in his monthly magazine appearances.

I've mentioned it before, but Pope's blog is a gem -- full of fun insights and sketches.

Frothing at the Brain

Robin says,

William Gibson's new book "Spook Country" comes out this summer. I cannot wait. Here is a sneak peek from TIME's nerdblog written by Lev Grossman:

Your heroine is Hollis Henry, a freelance journalist assigned by a Wired-like startup magazine called Node to write about (mysterious, reclusive) artist who creates hologram-installations of historic events on the sites where they actually happened. Gibson's books are usually about his pet topics of the moment, as much as they're about his characters, so here's a brief list of Spook Country's idees fixes: art, forgery, drugs, Manhattan, Los Angeles, large quantities of data, pirates (here I'm quoting the press release), the CIA, tramp freighters, weapons of mass destruction, war profiteers, and "vast amounts of cash leaving the country."

Actually, it kinda sounds like a parody of a William Gibson book, doesn't it? I don't care. I'm in.

Warren Ellis Rides Again

Robin says,

Warren Ellis is coming out with a new Transmetropolitan-scale series called Doktor Sleepless. Good short interview over at All The Rage:

Transmet was a work of optimism. It was about Truth, and Authenticity. Doktor Sleepless, frankly, isn't. It's about liars, secrets, fraud and death. We're in a period where we distrust authenticity, because we've just been lied to too much. The minute someone stops being a cartoon and starts being real, we beat the shit out of them.

Ellis's Bad Signal email list consistently reads like the sort of thing one of his future-guerrilla-media characters would write.

A Bit of Foolscap, Talking to the Ether

Robin says,

Despite how dorky it looks, I am a little bit excited about this new Amazon.com e-book reader. It's almost entirely because it has high-speed wireless internet access. That's the whole point of an e-reader, I think: If I just want to tote around Harry Potter, books work fine. But if I want to tote around Bloglines... hmm!

Somewhere, There's an Aphorism Just for Me

Matt says,

After seeing Life of Pi yesterday on the shelf, picking it up for the nth time, and perusing the dust jacket, like always, I thought to myself, "I should get this book. It has been recommended to me by many readers I trust. It won the Booker Prize. It sounds like a rollicking good read. It meets the page 69 test." And then I put it back on the shelf. I'm still not sure exactly why, but I think I'm getting closer to an answer: I hate the cover. The illustration makes me unhappy, the fonts make me retch, the color offends me. It is an aesthetic aversion for which I can offer no defense whatsoever. None. I just gotta confess. It's irrational, I know. I'm depriving myself of cultural delights, I understand. But I think something about that cover makes me really not want to read that book. Anyone care to make a similar confession, or am I the only insane one here?

48 in 48

Robin says,

Pat Walters at Poynter (yo) is going to the National Writers' Workshop in Hartford this weekend. He's going to drum up 48 writing tips in 48 hours and post them here. I think this is a feat of public education Herculean enough to merit close attention.

(Plus, I've been to the NWWs, and they are seriously always full of good stuff.)

'Souvenirs of the Way We Felt'

Robin says,

Good piece in The Economist about the future of books:

Books are not primarily artefacts, nor necessarily vehicles for ideas. Rather, as Mr Godin puts it, they are "souvenirs of the way we felt"� when we read something. That is something that people are likely to go on buying.

That's a good line, and at least a little true, I think.

Books are also expensive wallpaper -- not a bad thing -- and, I swear, little souls, too. It's all just patterns, right? So books are just crude, durable patterns. And probably still the best passage to 1,000 years from now that we've got. Write a book!

P.S. I've mentioned it before but Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books is really good.

P.P.S. Another good entry on the future of print over at if:books. Also, good comments on this post.

'Livable Utopian Subsets of the World'

Robin says,

Short interview with Jonathan Lethem in the Boston Globe's great Ideas section this week:

IDEAS: You allude to autism often in your work. In the new novel, you just about declare Carl to be a high-functioning autistic. Why so much interest in autism and Asperger's syndrome?

LETHEM: It's evocative for me. I'm enticed by it.

IDEAS: Not that I'm diagnosing you.

LETHEM: But don't be afraid of diagnosing me. I see Asperger's as a defining property in a lot of areas where it is denied by the participants. So I don't want to be denying it in myself.

And when I think about Asperger's syndrome I think about communities and subcultures, for example, the science fiction subculture, and science fiction conventions. What kind of people go there, to feel they have a people? When I go, it feels to me that they are bound by a thinly coded, super high-functioning Asperger's affiliation. And there's the Internet, which is a kind of autistic Greenwich Village, a place where people wander around trying to figure out whether they fit.

There are subcultures in a lot of my work. I see them as places where people try to make livable utopian subsets of the world.

That is awesome.

Recommended: Lethem's early (and not-that-well-known) book "Gun, With Occasional Music" is weird and terrific.

A Voice from Bangladesh

Robin says,

Solid op-ed in the NYT about Bangladesh's dire susceptibility to global warming. The piece also serves as a heads-up on Tahmima Anam, its author, who has a novel set in Bangladesh coming out soon. Cool!

More: David Ignatius writes up a big report from GBN here in San Francisco. Succinctly:

But in Bangladesh, where millions of people live at or near sea level, even a small increase could produce a catastrophe. In a severe monsoon, 60 million to 100 million people could be forced to flee inundated areas, Schwartz warns, producing "the single greatest humanitarian crisis we have ever seen."

Lots more in that GBN report, too -- worth a look.

Usemonopolies

Matt says,

Jonathan Lethem has plagiarized together an entrancing paean to intellectual theft:

Artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.

The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

Cf. this beautiful Slate photo-essay on visual plagiarism.

There's More Than One Kind of Comics in Asia

Robin says,

Everybody knows about manga -- but what about manhua and manhwa? (Subtext: Rumors of U.S. cultural hegemony greatly exaggerated. Have you seen the manga aisle in Borders lately?)

My Father's Suitcase

Matt says,

Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture, reprinted in The New Yorker, rocks:

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words.

...and the Deathly Hallows

Robin says,

Now I know the name of my desire.

Man, it's going to be a good summer.

'Common Sense' Was, I Believe, Kind of a Big Deal

Robin says,

Adam Bellow wants to bring back the pamphlet! Think: 4-by-6, $4. Here's the pitch:

The pamphlet culture that is trying to emerge, which has been called into being by the ideological struggle of our time, is being hampered by the old paradigm, by the market constraints on publishers who cannot sell a small book unless they put it in hardcover and give it a price that makes it worth the cost of distribution. That's the publisher's dilemma. The blogger's dilemma is how do I get my voice heard. Not just in the blogosphere but outside it.

In particular I love the idea that pamphlets could lead you back to blogs, so the argument isn't static but rather dynamic, evolving, and two-way.

To make a dent, though, I think Bellow's got to take a broader view. The pamphlets can't all be about Lebanon... there are a lot of other important things to talk about in the first decade of the 21st century.

And, of course, the pamphlets have to be available in bookstores -- in little stacks next to the cash registers -- not just online.

Finally, Bellow could take some design advice from these guys.

P.S. Check it out if only to find this line: "He was very close with the leading polemicists of the day..."

You Can Actually Get College Credit for This

Robin says,

Check out the comments brewing under the last post. Makers of possibilities! Seekers of solitude! Author-functions! Good stuff.

What's An Author?

Robin says,

What's an author? Why, just the sum of her readers, of course!

Try this on for size:

This is not to say that all networked writing will take place in vast wiki collectives. The individual author will be needed more than ever as a guide through the info-glutted landscape. But writers' relationship with their readers will change as writing moves from the solitary desk to the collaborative network. No longer just an audience, readers will become assets, and eventually writers will be judged not for the number of books they sell but for the quality and breadth of their networks.

And then imagine that perhaps it is not actually a new phenomenon. What's Plato but the collection of people who have read, discussed, and saved Plato? What's Rachel Carson without the same?

I am newly in love with the idea of authorship as the creation of a community -- by whatever means necessary or possible -- around your ideas.

English majors, have at it.

(Link from Forbes.com's great and completely-out-of-left-field report on books.)

The Original Miss Manners

Matt says,

One of the tons of literary references in The Year of Magical Thinking is to the section of Emily Post's Etiquette that deals with funerals. Didion mentions she ran across Etiquette on the Internet, and sure enough, here it is, with its ultra-authoritative tone, sage wisdom on matters particular, and wry wit:

A man whose social position is self-made is apt to be detected by his continual cataloguing of prominent names. Mr. Parvenu invariably interlards his conversation with, "When I was dining at the Bobo Gildings'"; or even "at Lucy Gilding's," and quite often accentuates, in his ignorance, those of rather second-rate, though conspicuous position. "I was spending last week-end with the Richan Vulgars," or "My great friends, the Gotta Crusts." When a so-called gentleman insists on imparting information, interesting only to the Social Register, shun him!

I move that we resurrect the verb to interlard.

The 69 Test

Robin says,

Want a quick-and-dirty measure of a book's quality? Open it to page 69 and see what you find. (Another variation is the page 99 rule but, come on.)

I like how John Freeman at the National Book Critics' Circle blog puts it:

So that's what I began doing from time to time when the first page of a galley sunk into that logey, comfortable, throat-clearing prologue rhythm -- I'd flip to page 99 and see what I found.

Note to self: Never write anything "logey."

Somewhere in Oxford

Robin says,

Recently, two of my favorites -- Scott McCloud and Philip Pullman -- had dinner together. If they did not agree during this time to collaborate on a graphic novel, then there is little hope for this world of ours.

Magazine of the Future?

Matt says,

Atlantic contributor Marshall Poe asks MeFi, "If The Atlantic Monthly (or Harper's, or The New Yorker) were founded today, would it be Metafilter?"

28 Pages Later

Robin says,

I haven't read any of Cormac McCarthy's books, but his new one "The Road" looks good. It's post-apocalyptic literary fiction!

And -- this is a good sign, I think? -- it has generated a lot of well-written book reviews. The NYT review by William Kennedy was a good read in its own right, and this CSM review by Yvonne Zipp sparkles. For instance, it describes the book as taking place in a "cauterized horrorscape." Nice.

Chip Kidd's Got Competition

Robin says,

Hot new book covers by comic book artists, including Frank Miller and Yoshihiro Tatsumi. But can you really improve on these?

Best American Comics

Robin says,

Hey! I'm so glad they're making this! (Via.)

Brick-a-Brack

Matt says,

Two gems from MeFi this morning:

• The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths (from here)
• Shooting script and original novella behind the movie Brick (from here).

That's a Hell of an Endorsement

Robin says,

Gotta say, I would not have expected this: After Hugo Chavez held up Noam Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival" during his UN speech... it jumped to number one on Amazon. WTF? Who knew the General Assembly was so good for product placement? Now I have this sort've awesome image of the president of Lithuania striding to the podium with a Zune peeking conspicuously out of his pocket.

Via MIT Advertising Lab.

An RSS Feed You Need to Be Subscribed To

Robin says,

The New York Review of Books.

I have previously avowed an interest in multi-book reviews that synthesize and illuminate (in general) and the New York Review of Book (in particular). And that publication's RSS feed just keeps bringing me good stuff!

Two worth printing out: Kristof on foreign aid. Didion on Dick Cheney. (P.S. I love the fact that Didion's piece 'draws on' like twenty books and approximately none of them are brand new. Who cares? It's a good read!)

Happy Birthday, Roald Dahl

Robin says,

He'd be 90 today. If you want to pick up a smart, inventive, dark, endlessly fun book, you can do no better than the Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl.

You Know What I'd Completely Forgotten About?

Robin says,

Harry Potter. Awesome discussion and speculation at The American Scene. (Seriously though, Snape is totally a good guy, and totally going to die to save Harry in the end.)

Buy This Book

Robin says,

Buy this book!

Okay I'm biased. I used to work at the Poynter Institute, where Roy Peter Clark hangs his hat, and I learned lots from him. Much of it was stuff that's now encoded in this book, actually. But even so, I am so glad to have it all in one place. Even better, the volume is a wonder to behold: simple, slim, elegant.

And, you know, I can tell just from the feel of it that this is the kind of book that will age like good leather shoes: One day it will be totally worn out and beaten up from overuse, but somehow handsomer for it.

Dude, I have a question though -- even when you're Roy Peter Clark, how do you score blurbs from Mark Bowden, Sister Helen Prejean, Eugene Patterson, Howell Raines, Tom French, and David Von Drehle?

Indeed, Von Drehle writes: "Roy is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of writing teachers..." Just for the record, if one of his Snarkmarket students is Anakin Skywalker (i.e. initially promising but ultimately a force for total evil) it is definitely Matt.

Commencement Speeches

Matt says,

The e-mail forwards I've been receiving remind me commencement season is upon us. And that means one thing: great speeches. Here's a list of some great ones from the past 70 years.

'If you go for the ninja, turn to page 108.'

Robin says,

Choose Your Own Adventure books are coming back! And whoah, where'd they score the hip tag-ish site design? And WHOAH, how ridiculous(ly awesome) is it that the company is called... Chooseco LLC??

I predict that the entire stock of these books is going to be purchased by ironic and/or nostalgic twentysomethings. Actual kids will remain glued to the floor of the manga aisle. (Seriously, you've noticed that, right? Every big chain bookstore now comes with a sullen teenager pre-installed there. I think they might work in shifts.)

(Via Wordwright.)