Wednesday, August 31, 2011
What Killed American Lit
Today's collegians don't want to study it—who can blame them?
From an article in the Wall Street Journal...
Yet, through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to "The Cambridge History of the American Novel" have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite. A novelist, we are told, "tasks himself" with this or that; things tend to get "problematized"; the adjectives "global" and "post"-this-or-that receive a good workout; "alterity" and "intertexuality" pop up their homely heads; the "poetics of ineffability" come into play; and "agency" is used in ways one hadn't hitherto noticed, so that "readers in groups demonstrate agency." About the term "non-heteronormativity" let us not speak.
These dopey words and others like them are inserted into stiffly mechanical sentences of dubious meaning. "Attention to the performativity of straight sex characterizes . . . 'The Great Gatsby' (1925), where Nick Carraway's homoerotic obsession with the theatrical Gatsby offers a more authentic passion precisely through flamboyant display." Betcha didn't know that Nick Carraway was hot for Jay Gatsby? We sleep tonight; contemporary literary scholarship stands guard.
"The Cambridge History of the American Novel" is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender. "How would [this volume] be organized," one of its contributors asks, "if race, gender, disability, and sexuality were not available?"
Hurricane Lit
Collectible Diaries
AbeBooks celebrates them, here.
From the piece...
Writing a diary is a very personal experience and yet they are a staple of the publishing world. Reading somebody else’s diary is supposed to be a heinous crime but bookshops are full of them. Despite this apparent conundrum, diaries from notable figures and ordinary people become highly collectible.
Of course, the most famous diary from an ordinary person was written by a mere schoolgirl - Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. But how can you ignore a diary penned by a doctor describing the bombing of Hiroshima and the subsequent seven weeks?
This selection of rare diaries contains many notable names, including adventurer Lawrence of Arabia, revolutionary Che Guevara, avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau, silent movie star Rudolph Valentino, and the green-fingered author who created Biggles.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Forlorn Temple Awaits! Now In Pathfinder Flavor
My first Pathfinder-labeled product is now out, hot off the virtual press. It's a short module, a dungeon delve in "Warlords of Lingusia" flavor that is my test bed product for a new series of PDFs I have been working on over the last several months. The idea is to release alternating scenarios and setting books, preferably one or two a month (although actual rates of release will vary wildly, knowing my own limits), with each book providing a slice of content on the Warlords of Lingusia setting. This was the first book; the second book will be the first "setting book" on schedule, and will focus on the region of Golmadras, a land once occupied by elves and now dominated by a cruel empire dedicated to a self-proclaimed god king.
Warlords of Lingusia will be an interesting treat to showcase. It's a direct successor to the Keepers of Lingusia campaign setting, but with the timeline spun forward more than a thousand years. In that thousand years a variety of dramatic events have shaped the very nature and geography of the world, the mystery of the ancient, cthonian Skaeddrath has at last come to light, and the divine politics of the gods have changed--for the worse. I see the Warlords Era of Lingusia as my "modern baby," a sort of reimagining of my original setting through my current sensibilities, while still remaining "canon" to my original campaigns from many years ago. Of course, the continuity of my own campaign is of little concern to anyone other than myself....so the idea is to make these new books both internally sound for my own sensibilities while writing them to be as accessible as possible to gamers who have no concern about such esoterica.
As a free bonus, I am going to add another 4E monster to the roster here. Specifically, it's a 4E adaptation of the Big Bad and its artifact at the end of the module. Enjoy!
Gotta Have It
Definitely in my top 3 songs off of the album "watch The Throne" By Jay-z and Kanye West called "Gotta Have It". It has an awesome sample and a dope beat. Color edit by the awesome Benjamin Anders everything was a lot more saturated before lol.I might switch up a couple of things but here it is for now.Enjoy.
-GG
Otis
Track #4 on 'Watch The Throne'. I was going to re-interpret a shot from the video but I felt like it would be redundant. So i decided to create the performance that would have been -Jay, Ye, and Otis himself ...Also i felt like the song deserved the timeless Grey scale photo treatment ,added a bit of noise to the image.Ps: congrats to Jay and Bey on the baby the song "new day" makes a lot of sense now... Enjoy.
-GG
Is the Personal Library Doomed?
So asks Publishers Weekly.
From the small opinion piece...
Looking over someone’s Kindle contents tells me something, but not much. Was this title even read? Has it been re-read, loved, slept with? Read in the bath and therefore slightly waterlogged? Where are the dog-eared pages, the satisfying kinesthetic memory inherent in heft, shape, size? And don’t forget about bookmarks: those tell their own stories. In my own books, I re-discover bookmarks from long-defunct bookshops I loved, receipts and restaurant napkins I used to mark my place that now serve as travel diary entries, photos and other random flat paper items I grabbed to use as placeholders and then left there, giving me sudden bright glimpses of my own forgotten past. And there are items in the pages of books that were left there by other readers, little messages in bottles from across mysterious seas. My sister gave me a beautiful old King James Bible, an ornate leather-bound version from the 1800s, with illustration plates protected by onion skin. Pressed into the heart of the book, between onion skin and paper, was a four-leaf clover. I love this so much I can hardly stand it. A person of faith, perhaps, who owned this book before me, hedged his or her bets with a little piece of pagan luck! Show me an e-reader that can provide that kind of wacky archaeology.
The convenience of e-readers is handy, but libraries are treasure troves. I have so many friends and acquaintances who have shifted the bulk of their book buying to e-readers that I am starting to think about more than the usual anxiety about the future of publishing and bookselling. Book fanatics will always be here, and our libraries will survive. But I am starting to wonder whether the casual personal library is in danger.
What We Do to Books
The great Geoff Dyer, for the New York Times, discusses the book and how we leave our mark(s) on them as physical objects.
From the piece...
Other than that mark the book should be in near-mint condition when I start reading it, but I am not obsessive about keeping it that way. On the contrary, I like the way it gradually and subtly shows signs of wear and tear, of having been lived in (by me), like a pair of favorite jeans.
It’s time to get specific. I bought a remaindered copy of the British edition of Richard Overy’s “Why the Allies Won” (Pimlico) for £4.95 at Judd Books in London on Dec. 11, 2010 — I always write the date and place of purchase on the flyleaf, in pencil. A large-format paperback, it has a color-manipulated photo of a bloated German corpse on the cover, thereby suggesting that the Allies won because the Axis powers lost. It’s a dense work of analysis, lacking the propulsion we associate with the narrative histories of Antony Beevor or John Keegan, so even when immersed in the book — after a purchase-to-start-it lag of several months — I was unable to concentrate on it for more than an hour at a time. As a result it was lugged around to many places, in various bags, on planes and trains. In the process the corners became curled and the spine wrinkled. Spreading in direct proportion to the amount of the book’s contents that were being loaded into my brain, those creases became the external embodiment of the furrow-browed effort that reading it required. After a while, as these grooves deepened, the book refused to close completely when I laid it down. I love this. In the biblio equivalent of the corner of a bed being turned down, inviting you to get in, it’s as if the book were encouraging you not to abandon it, to keep at it. Which I did. I made notes, put pencil marks by passages that strikingly revised my understanding of the war: “For most of the Second World War Britain and the United States fought a predominantly naval conflict. . . . ” Hmmm. In addition to these annotations a couple of pages are marked by blotches of brown dried blood. George Steiner wrote somewhere that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in his or her hand. My version of this compulsion is that I can’t seem to read without picking my nose — hence the blood stains.
Eventually, I finished this impressive volume. It went from being a new and unread book to one that was very evidently used and read. I left it lying around for a few days, enjoyed looking at the transformation it had undergone, struck by the mysterious transfusion of knowledge in which this object had played such an important — and historically tried-and-tested — role. The changes wrought upon the book were fairly discreet but, at the risk of projecting my own feelings of satisfaction at having made it to the end, I am tempted to say that it looked fulfilled. Like the youth in “The Red Badge of Courage” (bought Dec. 28, 1987, Cheltenham), it had, after an ignominious beginning (cowardice/remaindering), accomplished its purpose. Together, it and I earned a Read Badge of Shared Achievement.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Ni**as In Paris
3rd Watch the Throne piece.Awesome song but blogger is messing with my colors |:C oh well .sidenote: The art on the wall is from the Watch The Throne booklet by Riccardo Tisci :). Enjoy.
-GG
The Ecstacy of Influence - a Plagiarism
Jonathan Lethem, in Harper's, discusses artistic appropriation and plagiarism.
From said piece...
“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?
Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.
The same might be said of all art.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Street Style
Preview of a larger post I'm working on. Walking to and from cafes to sketch people every so often I come across stylish or just interesting people who are (for the most part) extremely friendly . I've always loved blogs like 'the sartorialist' ,'GQ's Tommy Ton photos and 'the aveder outfit' thought it'd be more interesting to see a quick illustration alongside the images. They're all holding my new business cards by the way ;) stay tuned to this post for updates .Enjoy.
-GG
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Lift Off
This is the second piece I did based on the Joint Kanye & Jay-Z album "Watch The throne" . The song is called "Lift Off" feat. Beyonce her vocals are nothing short of amazing. Enjoy.-GG
Pic of the Day 192
Elegy, by iGear (it's a knock off Masterpiece Dirge, because Hasbro hasn't made one yet).
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
No Church In The Wild
Started to draw more BG's for my characters to exist in.I've been drawing inspiration from Watch The Throne(joint album from Jay-z and Kanye West) and Matias' work. Here's a piece I did based on the first song off of the album called "No Church" -Frank Ocean is the priest :) expect more.Enjoy.-GG
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Kamen Rider model kit and Twitter
Shortly after I started watching toy review videos by Internet Personality Vangelus I was introduced to the Kamen Rider property. Apparently it's a series of Japanese TV shows. It looks fun, someday I'll look into watching it. The point is though, the character designs look neat, and the toys are well made, if rather expensive. But I've wanted to get into the toys since seeing his reviews. A couple of days ago I watched his V-Build video of assembling a model kit of Kamen Rider Skull, and I knew I had to have it. My wife said she'd buy it for my birthday in two months. But that was too far away, so when I found out there are several kits available, and I happened to have some Amazon Reward points available, I bought one.
Master Grade Figure-rise Kamen Rider W Accel. It arrived yesterday and I started assembling it last night. I'm going to do a proper post about it when I'm all done, but I'm also using Twitter to post small updates (with pics!) as I go along, so I thought I'd throw a Twitter widget here in case anybody wants to follow along. See the widget over there ->
Friday, August 19, 2011
Conan the Barbarian: A Review
I'll preface this by establishing my "credentials" before moving forward: reading Conan in the original 12 book series featuring Howard's edited tales in conjunction with new stories by de Camp and Carter was what got me into both fantasy and reading in one fell swoop as a kid. The seventies were, for me, a time when I could manage to get the novels with ease, but trying to get the non-CC Authority approved "Savage Sword of Conan" comics was out of my reach. As a result, I felt strongly that Conan was a literary character, and that the comics were fun but pale imitations.
I got to see the original Conan the Barbarian movie when it was released in 1982, and I had cool enough parents and uncles that they were all there watching and enjoying it as well. It was a profound movie to see as a kid, and I have always considered it the kind of film that was unique to that period in film history....the idea of a movie laden with nudity, violence, sorcery and lots and lots of hippie extras was a singular convergence of films in the late seventies and trailing into the early eighties. It was a good film, and Arnold did a pretty good job, this despite the fact that the movie was not a true adaptation of Conan's tales but rather a sort of spiritual re-imagining of the character. For one thing, it managed to take Conan's key defining trait in the tales --his natural development into a warrior through years of fighting and adventure-- and changed it into this sort of angsty "my family is dead" theme that made him more a victim of circumstance and a hapless pawn for years before he is unexpectedly given an unwanted freedom. It's not bad as stories go, just not Conan. Not the real one, anyway. The sequel is barely worth mentioning, as far as I'm concerned; it's tragic misdirection of tale and intent derailed by focusing on something more PG-friendly and taking too many qeues from the comics (or so I've felt, at least until recently).
So anyway, I've been with Conan as a source of interest and inspiration for a long time. I wrote some of the supplements for the role playing game in recent years (Tales of the Black Kingdom and books 2 and 3 of the Messantia boxed set) as well, which was a real pleasure, and also in interesting insight into the nature of professional freelancing in the RPG business. These days I've been enjoying the resurgence of interest in Conan and Howard especially, with purist-driven anthologies of his works, with all editing and politically incorrect adjustments restored to the original texts. I've also at long last been able to catch up on the surprisingly good Savage Sword of Conan collections Dark Horse has been releasing. In short, I've read a lot of Conan, and a lot of Howard.
So now I've seen the new movie, which I honestly had only nominal expectations for. I was fully expecting it to be a spin-off of the original films, with maybe a modest nod to the current MMO and possibly, just possibly, a bit of recognition of the original stories. Instead, I was treated to one of the goriest films I've ever seen this side of the zombie subgenre, a movie which portrays a Conan who is a naturla born killer both in youth and adulthood, setting the opening act of the tale with Conan as a youngster who has Ron Perlman for a dad and later cutting to the chase with Conan in his mid twenties, set sometime after he has likely done his time as a thief and a wanderer, met Belit, and gone through a number of adventures (and a few references, such as to the Tower of the Elephant, are provided as indication of his exploits).
The movie establishes right off that it's not related to the previous films, starting with the more accurate depiction of Conan's birth on the battlefield and converging only briefly with what now must be the traditional "massacre of the home town" event that is apparently necessary in the minds of screenwriters to motivate the hero to go forth. It then cuts forward several years to a Conan in the middle of his adventuring career, as he stumbles on a clue that leads him to vengeance against his village's destroyer. This time it's a cruel warlord and his sorcerous daughter, seeking to use an ancient Acheronian artifact to resurrect his mad and quite dead wife, using the blood of the last pure Acheronian woman in the world. Good stuff, nice to see a new villain and not wonder why Conan is fighting Kull's nemesis, for one thing! They also didn't decide to recycle Thoth Amon or another villain from Conan's tales, who might not have been specifically appropriate for a new tale as this one weaves.
So I'll avoid any more spoilers, but state the film's strengths:
1. It pulls no punches, and this movie shows off gore, violence, depravity and naked slave girls as often as it can. The violence was seriously over the top. This is all a good thing. This film earned its R.
2. The story is original, but it studiously avoids violating the canon of the original tales as much as possible. Where it gets muddy (such as the periods of time that are not specifically addressed in traveling across the length and breadth of the continent) it glosses over, and one must be reminded of Howard's own interpretation of his Conan tales: as the stories of a man you are sharing an ale with in a tavern, told out of sequence and sometimes not quite accurate, as they are recalled from memory of the old warrior telling you about the highlights of his long career. This movie manages that just fine.
3. The new actor for Conan works out better than I expected. He's got the lithe, panther-like quick movements and speed that Conan was always described as having, but which the slow and lumbering Arnold couldn't manage. He looks more "Frazetta-like," to me. He's good eye candy for the ladies as well, my wife has informed me.
4. The set pieces, scenery and costuming for this film was impeccable. I loved it, and need to watch it again just to pay closer attention to all the little details. It was scenery porn all over the place, and really looked and felt like Hyboria. Great stuff.
Now for the bad bits:
1. The 3D was unnecessary and of mixed value. Sometimes it stood out, and other times is was obviously flat or missing. It was actually kind of distracting at times. If you can see it without 3D, I would suggest that option instead.
2. I don't know why Conan's fellow villagers keep dying in movies. I guess it would explain why Conan in his long career never meets another Cimmerian with whom he grew up, but this is clearly some sort of perceived plot necessity by Hollywood screenwriters....still, it was done well, and Conan the younger kicks a lot of ass for a kid.
3. The movie is a quality B film, a lot of fun, but anyone watching it will notice moments where the story is sacrificed for the effects, or occasional spots where maybe some additional dialogue or a slower and more purposeful effort at focusing on the slow moments may have better served the mood of the film.
4. The special effects are by and large amazing, and I loved the sand demons, but there are a couple moments where the film really fell flat due to the effects. The most outstanding moment of this problem was (for me) with the kraken/hydra tentacled thing toward the end. I wish they'd taken the time spent rendering that and put it into a more impressive finale....speaking of which....
5. The finale was fun, but missing something: specifically, something demonstrating the decidedly Mythosesque Acheronian Mask's powers, such as....oh, I don't know...some actual sorcery? It was a perfectly decent ending, but still, if the sorceress can summon sand demons, why on earth does she decide to tackle the monk woman herself at the end? Still, a minor quibble.
So in the end, this is a fun movie, and closer to the Real Conan than the 1982 Arnold Conan. It's getting brutalized by the film critics who are clearly taking the film to task for being a continutation/reboot of the 1982 movie, and demonstrating a lack of awareness of its broader literary context. Is it a perfect adaptation of the books? Not hardly, but its a pretty damned good pastiche, and I don't think Howard is spinning in his grave. In fact, I think he'd rather enjoy it.
Exactly Your Type
The Daily gives a history of the Times New Roman Font.
From the piece...
It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.
The original story of Times New Roman’s genesis goes like this: Morison wrote a blistering article in 1929 arguing that Times Old Roman, the font of The Times of London, was dated, clunky, badly printed and in need of help — his help. The paper listened and charged Morison with directing the creation of a new suite of letters. He did, and on Oct. 3, 1943, Times New Roman debuted on the bright white broadsheets of the London daily.
Here’s the problem with this tidy account: Evidence found in 1987 — drawings for letters and corresponding brass plates — suggests that the real father of the font wasn’t a typographer at all, but a wooden boat designer from Boston named William Starling Burgess.
History's Ill-Fated Literary Couples
The list, care of Flavorwire.
From said list...
Sylvia and Ted met at the issue launch party for St. Botolph’s Review; she was studying on a Fulbright at Cambridge and he was writing poems for the short-lived publication. The pair were married on Bloomsday in 1956, at an Anglican church in Camden. Seven years later, the very unstable Sylvia killed herself, after discovering that Ted was having an affair with Assia Wevill (who also killed herself via oven fumes, in a copycat suicide a few years later). In a poem about Sylvia that was published in the late 1990s, Ted writes, “I did not know/I had made and fitted a door/ Opening downwards into your Daddy’s grave.”
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Zee-END
I've done a bunch of development work for this project that I'm going to post soon. getting kind of bored with this design right now. It just keeps changing! I'll be posting props,environments and other character model sheets including somewhat of an update of Zee's design .Stay Tuned.Enjoy.
-GG
Butch Cassidy's Autobiography?...Or Horse Pucky?
A rare book dealer says he's found a thinly veiled autobiography of Butch Cassidy. Some don't think much of said discovery.
From an article in the Washington Post...
A rare books collector says he has obtained a manuscript with new evidence that Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia but returned to the U.S. and lived peaceably in Washington state for almost three decades.
The manuscript, “Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy,” dates to 1934. At 200 pages, it’s twice as long as a previously known but unpublished novella of the same title by William T. Phillips, a machinist who died in Spokane in 1937.
Utah book collector Brent Ashworth and Montana author Larry Pointer say the text contains the best evidence yet — with details only Cassidy could have known — that “Bandit Invincible” was not biography but autobiography, and that Phillips himself was the legendary outlaw.
Others aren’t convinced.
“Total horse pucky,” said Cassidy historian Dan Buck. “It doesn’t bear a great deal of relationship to Butch Cassidy’s real life, or Butch Cassidy’s life as we know it.”
BookLamp - "The Pandora of Books"
It's gone live.
From a piece in Paste...
Booklamp.org went live earlier today, offering a free service similar to the wildly popular Pandora Internet radio service, but for books.
The story of BookLamp, the brainchild of 29-year-old Aaron Stanton, began back in 2003 when he and other students at the University of Idaho put together what they called the Book Genome Project. Similar to the Pandora-originating Music Genome Project, the Book Genome Project breaks down a literary work to analyze the style of writing, which they refer to as Language DNA, and assign numerical values to what they refer to as Story DNA: a breakdown of the settings and actors in any given scene.
Fantasy Women
Fantasy writer Juliet McKenna discusses gender in fantasy fiction.
From the piece...
Kings and princes, wizards and heroes – isn’t that what fantasy’s all about? Look at the great epics of yore and see Gilgamesh, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, Arthur, Lancelot, Roland, Siegfried. Look at the development of the fantasy genre and see Conan, Aragorn, Elric, Druss, Belgarion. Such lists are endless – and all male.
But why should this concern us? There are women in these stories; Helen, Hecuba, Penelope, Dido, Lavinia, Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Isolde, Galadriel, Arwen, Polgara, Ce’Nedra. Their presence offers the necessary balance, and if the characters who drive the plot are predominately male, that’s just a traditional aspect of this genre which does reflect so much history. Before the last few decades, women were subject to male authority for centuries. No one’s saying that women shouldn’t be equal in the real world nowaday, but this is fiction after all. Right?
No, wrong, and for a whole lot of reasons.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Sherlock Holmes Banned in Virginia
Arthur Conan Doyle's tale "A Study in Scarlet" has been removed from library shelves in Albemarle County.
Why?
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
If I were there today, the sixth-graders I passed in the halls would be banned from reading the Sherlock Holmes mystery "A Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle.
A parents at one of the other middle schools in the district objected to "A Study In Scarlet," first published in 1887, on the grounds that it portrays Mormons in a negative light. According to the Daily Progress, Brette Stevenson said, "This is our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion."
The Henry David Thoreau Crater
Publisher's Weekly takes note of six strange things named after writers.
From said list...
A look at the list of Mercury’s craters will reveal that the following writers have big holes named after them on the planet: Honoré de Balzac, Giovanni Boccaccio, The Brontë family, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Italo Calvino, Miguel de Cervantes, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, John Donne, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Homer, Horace, Victor Hugo, Henrik Ibsen, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Mikhail Lermontov, Li Bai, Herman Melville, Pablo Neruda, Ovid, Petrarch, Edgar Allen Poe, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sophocles, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and Emile Zola.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Bringing Books to the Homeless By Bike
Let us know praise, Laura Moulton.
From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...
Ms. Moulton is Portland’s mobile librarian. Since early June Moulton has been bringing books to the public with her library-on-wheels Street Books, an outdoor library for people who live outside.
“The power of the book,” she says, “offer[s] a way to transport oneself out of a current reality.” Books are also “a tool to help pass time, which a lot of people living outside have a lot of.”
Moulton, a novelist and mother of two young children, bikes her library to Skidmore Fountain and Park Blocks – near Portland State University – on Wednesdays and Saturdays respectively. She brings about 40 or 50 books with her for each shift. But she says her basement is full of paperbacks that have been donated to her since the project began.
Each book holds an “old school” pocket on the inside cover with a loan card inside. Street Books patrons receive a library card that they can use to check out as many books they desire at a time.
“Being able to give them a card and tell them, ‘I hope to see you again’ – that’s a powerful thing because these are people who cannot get a library card [at the local library] because they have no address,” Moulton says. Her patrons show a high-level of accountability in returning books, which contradicts some assumptions about homeless people.
Frida Kahlo and Edgar Allan Poe
A book of Poe's work, annotated by none other than painter Frida Kahlo sold at auction recently.
From a piece on the Paul Fraser Collectibles site...
In a different sphere, celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is also highly coveted by collectors, and her works have attracted six and seven figure bids.
Obviously the two are not usually related. But at Leslie Hindman's auction earlier this week one lot will have interested collectors of both kinds:
The beaten-up copy of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe was covered the book with doodles, inscriptions, paint and collaged leaves by Kahlo.
Fiction Changes Personalities
There's scientific proof.
From a story in Quill & Quire...
To test this hypothesis, Oatley and his colleagues developed experiments to measure empathy, and examine what Oatley calls the “big five personality traits” – extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. In one such experiment, the researchers randomly assigned readers one of two versions of Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Lady With the Little Dog”– a translation of the original and another comprising only basic plot points. Beforehand, researchers measured the readers’ personality traits and their emotions at the time of the experiment.
“We found the people who read the [whole] story changed a bit in their personality,” Oatley says. “What we found interesting was that they all changed in somewhat different ways.”
The observations of the researchers are significant because they differ from the psychology of persuasion, which assumes that media affects everyone in the same way. “In literary art, what you’re asking people is, ‘Alright, how does this affect you? How do you feel about this? How do you think about it?’”
Monday, August 15, 2011
Is This the End for Books?
That's the question posed, recently, by the Guardian.
From the piece...
Are books, like defunct internet pages, heading towards the point where they will be archived as an academic curiosity? Some think so. You won't find any shortage of people willing to pronounce the printed book doomed, arguing that the convenience and searchability of digital text and the emergence of a Kindle-first generation will render them obsolete.
Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin's business. But there are reasons to reject the idea that the extinction of the printed book is just around the corner, just as there were reasons to reject the notion that e-books would never catch on because you couldn't read them in the bath and, y'know, books are such lovely objects.
Here's What I Hate about Writers' Houses
April Bernard says why in a piece in the New York Review of Books.
From the essay...
There I was, after many years of living in Bennington, Vermont, finally visiting the “Robert Frost Stone House Museum”—which happens to be in the next town north, South Shaftsbury. Frost is buried in the churchyard of the Old First Church in Bennington, and he lived in the Stone House and another Shaftsbury farmhouse for almost 20 years. Over his long life, he also lived in about a dozen other houses all over New Hampshire and Vermont, and many of these, in the strange world of competitive writer shrine-making, similarly have been designated “Frost houses.”
Here’s what I hate about Writers’ Houses: the basic mistakes. That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.
Dragons Ascend - The Rise of Fantasy
The success of George R.R. Martin's books shows that fantasy books aren't just kids stuff.
From a piece in the New York Times...
It’s a high time for high fantasy. Novels about wizards outsell (and often outshine) the most glittering literary fiction titles; the contemporary romantic hero generally sports a pair of fangs; and even now the five remaining earthlings who haven’t read “The Lord of the Rings” are being hunted down and put to the sword. Yet for all of fantasy’s successes, there remains a chip on the spaulder of the genre. As Michael Agger put it in 2009, reviewing Lev Grossman’s Harry Potter-influenced novel “The Magicians”: “Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. . . . Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?” And with that, hundreds of years of fantastical writing are reduced to 20-sided dice, pencil nubs, half-filled Coke cans and the crushing realization that no, your elven rogue’s dagger is not going to be effective against green slime.
There are reasons to think this view of fantasy is needlessly limited, and one of the most obvious is the titanic success of George R. R. Martin, the present and future king of The New York Times best-seller list. Martin’s immensely popular new book, “A Dance With Dragons,” follows “A Feast for Crows,” which in turn followed “A Storm of Swords,” “A Clash of Kings” and “A Game of Thrones” (even if you admire these books, as I do, it’s hard to argue that Martin has A Knack for Titles). Thus far, the series has included a boy being thrown off a balcony, a woman having her face bitten off, a man having his nose cut off, a girl having her ear sliced off, multiple rapes, multiple massacres, multiple snarfings of people by animals, multiple beheadings and multiple discussions of revenue streams in medieval economies. If kids are reading this stuff, God help their parents.
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