Celebrating the unconscious mind
At Slow Wave, Jesse Reklaw transforms strangers’ dreams into comics.
The panel at left is taken from “will you sign for this?”
Submit your own dreams here, and be sure to “provide a brief physical description of yourself (e.g.: hair color & length, age, sex, and interesting features like: glasses, false teeth, monkey tail, etc.).”
Return of the “twinkling buttocks” champion
Steve of Splinters points to an enthusiastic TLS review of “one of the most vile books to be published anywhere: Theodore Dalrymple’s collection of hate-filled essays about modern Britain written for Far Right US publications. Just reading the review is an upsetting experience.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Dalrymple — and according to Steve that’s not his [...]
More perspectives on Google Print
Lawrence Lessig contends that “Google Print could be the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries. It is an astonishing opportunity to revive our cultural past, and make it accessible.”
Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, a member of the Association of American Publishers, posts his thoughtful dissent from the [...]
A sidekick for Tulkinghorn
Dickens fans are considering a protest, possibly in costume, of the BBC’s new Bleak House miniseries, which contains a sidekick character that doesn’t appear in the novel.
Talking points
What if Fox News had been around throughout history? (Via #1.)
Behind an Abu Ghraib “ghost detainee” homicide
No doubt the Washington Post sent the inquiring minds at Little Green Footballs into a tizzy when it alleged earlier this week that Dick Cheney “will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.”* But the administration wants to exempt CIA employees from a proposed legislative measure “that would bar cruel and degrading [...]
The word from Toronto
George Murray of Bookninja offers an amusing wrap-up of his role in Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, where he introduced readers like Rick Moody, Jonathan Coe, Anita Diamant, Francine Prose and Jonathan Safran Foer, and was convinced to pick up Jenny Erpenbeck’s strange and haunting The Old Child.
I started reading the collection a few [...]
Online book sales: penalizing lower-income readers?
I’ve been planning to write about the way the rise of online book sales negatively affects lower income readers who don’t have computers or credit cards — an issue I raised briefly in yesterday’s short interview with Dave Weich of Powell’s — but today The Literary Saloon does some of the work for me.
The most [...]
Miscellaneous remarks, new and old
Kurt Vonnegut: “[I]nk on paper is no way to tell a story anymore. Film and movies are the best way to tell a story today.”
Dorothy Allison: “I had been worrying about the movie [version of Bastard Out of Carolina] the way a novelist worries, which is about which parts of the story were [...]
The new Moody
James Hynes, one of our best contemporary satirists, admires Rick Moody’s The Diviners. (Another trusted critic keeps telling me to dig the galley back out and skip the first chapter.)
Twenty years of Calvin & Hobbes
As The Complete Calvin and Hobbes appears, a reporter tries unsuccessfully to track down the comic strip’s creator, Bill Watterson.
Meanwhile, someone has drafted a smartass Calvin homage, Classics for Illiterates, which liberally employs the universal sign of contempt of the 1990s. (Via TMN.)
I’ve always suspected it was the maniacal pissing Calvin that sent [...]
Your own rare books library
Participants in the Open Content Alliance are scanning in hundreds of thousands of public-domain books, and Microsoft has just signed on.
A preview of a few titles, including Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet, is available at The Open Library. Cory Doctorow says the “gorgeous in-browser book-viewer … combines the best elements of a physical book [...]
Postcards from South Florida
While she lived in Miami, my Texan-born mother never tired of decrying the city’s wickedness and prophesying its doom at the Hands of God. So she’d feel scarily vindicated by the note I just received from writer Geoffrey Philp, who says it “looks like a series of small bombs have been detonated all over [...]
Digested Read anthology
John Crace has written the Guardian’s scathing and hilarious “Digested Reads” for the past five years, and he’s collected his favorites in a new book.
“The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist,” he explains, “and it remains [...]
Powells: selling to traditional and online book markets
As part of MaudNewton.com’s ongoing quest to assess the future prospects of independent bookstores, I asked Dave Weich, the director of marketing and development for Oregon’s Powell’s Books, to participate in a brief interview.
Powell’s has been around for more than thirty years. And, unlike many independent booksellers, it successfully straddles the brick-and-mortar [...]