Midweek Miscellany

Ian Thompson reviews Mod: A Very British Style by Richard Weight for The Observer:

Mod’s first choice of music was jazz, Richard Weight reminds us. Miles Davis in particular became a fashion icon for blue-eyed soul brothers everywhere in Britain. The photograph of Davis on the cover of his celebrated 1958 Milestones album – Sta-Prest trousers, button-down Ivy League shirt – became a sort of mod pin-up. Mods (“modernists”) were among the first white Britons to embrace west-coast jazz, which had been galvanized by the Birth of the Cool sessions led by Davis in New York from 1949-50.

See also: Gavin James Bower’s review for The Independent.

It is What it is  — Five designers, Craig Mod, Rodrigo Corral, Michael Fusco, John Gall, and Jon Gray, on the books that inspire them, at the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Here’s Mr. Gall:

The clearest explanation of a good cover that I have ever heard came from Michael Beirut. I was a guest invited to critique a book-cover project he had given to his Yale students. As I was struggling to express some notion about why a particular concept may or may not be working, he got right to the point: “It has to look like what it is.” Indeed.

 

 

The Darkness — Sarah Weinman profiles Canadian author and illustrator Jon Klassen (I Want My Hat Back, This is Not My Hat, and The Dark) for Maclean’s:

Klassen’s style shies away from sentimentality. Instead it shows young children the consequences of bad behaviour through the prism of humour, a technique that hearkens back to books for children by the likes of Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl.

And finally…

On the Exaggerated Reports of a Decline in British Fiction at the White Review:

Our peculiar creed is mortally suspicious of untrammelled aestheticism, endlessly asserting the primacy of content over form. In accounts of British writing, even now – long after such a thing could be anything other than a rather quaint anachronism of an old culture war – the avant-garde features as a kind of bogeyman. One whose dandified aestheticism belies a questionable politics, a moral compass gone awry; who must be beaten back by decency and common sense. Literary experiment still tends to be perceived as a pernicious form of French ‘flu: of course we should still be bloody grateful for the English Channel, separating, as it does, steady, dependable old Blighty from that kind of thing.