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Edmund de Waal on Bookworm

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On last week’s Bookworm, host Michael Silverblatt talked to artist and writer Edmund de Waal about porcelain and his new book The White Road: Journey into an Obsession:

KCRW Bookworm with Edmund de Waal: The White Road mp3

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Something for the Weekend

It Will All Be Over Before You Know It… — A six-page, six-chapter comic by the brilliant Richard Sala (a must for fans of Edward Gorey, I’d say).

Something Lost — Edmund de Waal, ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, on inspiration for writing and art at The Browser:

[T]here is still something extraordinary about art which comes out of an encounter between a person and a material. The further you get away from that, the more you get into something which is commodified and reduced to a series of other people’s interactions with it. There is something extraordinary which is lost.

Talking Covers — A new blog, edited by writer Sean Manning, where authors, designers, and artists discuss book covers. The cover to Sean’s own book, The Things That Need Doing is discussed here.

The Solitary World — Ellen Handler Spitz, author of Illuminating Childhood, on the late Maurice Sendak:

Sendak knew from within the profound sense in which every child, from time to time, perceives himself or herself to be alone—an outsider—and feels the need to retreat into some private space, some nook or secret hiding place. Sendak’s books are themselves such places; they can so function even when being read aloud by an adult. Sendak’s supreme gift, as visual artist as well as author, was to discover pictorial as well as verbal and narrative means to portray the existential separateness of childhood.

And finally…

Championship Hoarding — Steven Heller on “stuff”:

It is one thing to have stuff and another to collect it. It is one thing to accumulate stuff and another to exhibit it. What’s the point in just keeping stuff in drawers, out of view? Stuff is/are trophies, evidence of championship hoarding — finding the perfect rarity that no one else has found. Collecting stuff can be competitive, even if only in the mind. Therefore, showing one’s bounty is essential to having stuff. So the vehicle for display is just as essential as the objects themselves.

Have a great weekend.

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Something for the Weekend

James Victore shares his workspace with From The Desk Of.

Burn Unit — At the New York Times ‘Bits’ blog, David Streitfeld writes on Amazon’s recent image problems:

[Take] the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek two weeks ago. It shows a book in flames with the headline, “Amazon wants to burn the book business.” What was remarkable was not just the overt Nazi iconography but the fact that it did not cause any particular uproar. In the struggle over the future of intellectual commerce in the United States, apparently even evocations of Joseph Goebbels and the Brown Shirts are considered fair game.

Witheringly Obscure — Wired Magazine talks to William Gibson about Distrust That Particular Flavor and collecting antique watches:

[It] was really about pursuing a totally unnecessary and gratuitous body of really, really esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t about accumulating a bunch of objects. It was about getting into something utterly, witheringly obscure, but getting into it at the level of, like, an extreme sport. I met some extraordinarily weird people. I met guys who could say, “Well, I’ve got this really rare watch, and it’s missing this little piece. Where might I find one?” Then the guy would kind of stare into space for a while, and then he’d say this address in Cairo, and he’d say, “It’s in the back room. The guy’s name is Alif, and he won’t sell, but he would trade it to you if you had this or this.” And it wasn’t bullshit. It was kind of like a magical universe. It was very interesting. But once I’d gotten that far … I got to a certain point, and there was just nowhere else to go with it. The journey was complete.

Magic Journalism — Writer Geoff Dyer chooses five unusual histories for The Browser:

[T]ypically, I guess, you read history books for the content – that sounds an unbelievably stupid comment – and you’re drawn to certain works of history rather than others because you’re interested in the period. You read Stalingrad by Antony Beevor because you’re interested in the Second World War, or Russia or whatever. Whereas it seemed to me that the thing about these books was that you might be interested in the subject, but it’s the way that the subject is dealt with that is the distinguishing feature of each one.

And finally…

A long article for Intelligent Life  on ceramicist Edmund de Waal and the double-edged success of his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes:

In the 18 months since the book came out, de Waal has completed six overseas book tours, given dozens of talks, answered hundreds if not thousands of questions. He has also kept his porcelain-making studio busy and has plans for a subsequent book, about the history of porcelain around the world, which will take him from 18th-century Plymouth to the hillsides outside Jingdezhen where porcelain was first made in China, via Dresden, Marco Polo’s Venice, Istanbul and Yemen. “Porcelain”, he says, “is light when most things are heavy. It rings clear when you tap it. You can see the sunlight shine through. It is in the category of materials that turn objects into something else. It is alchemy. Porcelain starts elsewhere, takes you elsewhere. Who could not be obsessed?”

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Midweek Miscellany

Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books by Paul Sloman, a 220-page overview of contemporary art, installation, and design created with and from books , published Gestalten.

La Mémoire Retrouvée — Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes, on his family’s connection to Proust, for The Daily Telegraph:

Proust played with the interpenetration of the real and the invented; his novels have a panoply of historical figures who appear as themselves mingling with characters reimagined from recognisable people. Elstir, the great painter who leaves his infatuation with Japonisme to become an Impressionist, has elements of both Whistler and Renoir, but has another dynamic force. And Proust’s characters stand in front of actual pictures. The visual texture of the novels is suffused not just with references to Giotto and Botticelli, Dürer and Vermeer, Moreau, Monet and Renoir, but by the act of looking at paintings, by the act of collecting them, remembering what it was to see something, the memory of the moment of apprehension.

Doomed — Jonathan Coe, author most recently of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, on film adaptations of books for The Guardian:

In the course of their famous book-length interview, François Truffaut once asked Alfred Hitchcock about his approach to literary adaptation, and Hitch’s response was as magisterial, worldly and mischievous as one would expect: “What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that.”

 

Circumventing the Male Gaze The New Yorker‘s Hilton Als on photographer Judy Linn and a new book collecting her photographs of Patti Smith:

I wonder what Patti and Judy saw in one another—I mean, beyond the description Judy provides in her little essay at the back of the book. What is the energy that one being picks up on, and how does it complement the other’s? Judy and Patti went to Detroit one summer and worked for a local paper and Crawdaddy, respectively; Patti wrote rock criticism and Judy took pictures. Lester Bangs was their friend. The world got bigger. Collaboration can be vexing, but there’s not a note of complaint in their work together. The pictures are documents of girls doing things together, sometimes in their summer dresses. And when there’s a third person present—Mapplethorpe, some other boy—they make a little room for him, but he’s rarely center frame; the pictures are rare in that they circumvent the male gaze and thus approval; instead, they document how each woman’s vision is equal to the other’s.

And finally…

Designer Data — The New York Times on data visualization:

Visual analytics play off the idea that the brain is more attracted to and able to process dynamic images than long lists of numbers. But the goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

And on a related note: The Infographic Inforgraphic by Ivan Cash.

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Something for the Weekend

A Swiss Typeface + 2 Italian Designers = New York City — Michael Bierut reviews Helvetica and the New York City Subway System by Paul Shaw for the WSJ:

Mr. Shaw is irritated with the widespread belief that the modern New York subway system has always been associated with the Swiss typeface Helvetica. This misperception was fueled by the attention the typeface received in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of its introduction, especially in Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica,” a documentary survey of the astonishing ubiquity of a lettering style that appears over the entrances of American Apparel and Staples, on Lufthansa airplanes and New York City garbage trucks, on Comme des Garçons bags, and, yes, on New York subway signs. But the last, as Mr. Shaw shows, was not always so.

The Habit of Reading — Harvard professor Marjorie Garber talks about her new book, The Use and Abuse of Literature, with The Atlantic:

I don’t believe there’s a necessary divide between highbrow and lowbrow or whatever. I think that the habit of reading is intensely pleasurable and it’s also hard. The pleasure of it is partly the pleasure of detection, the pleasure of recognition, the pleasure of response… I’m very optimistic actually about the future of literature and literary reading—I’m far from despairing and I don’t actually feel that there’s a crisis. What we need is to continue to show the power of reading, the pleasure of reading—and, again, more people experience that than we are sometimes aware of.

Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief of Bookslut,  reviews the book for NPR:

In fact, it’s proof of literature’s strength and lasting value that a 19th century writer like Jane Austen can still speak to the contemporary love lives of her readers, and that a book like the Diary of Anne Frank can still cause a ruckus among protective parents. That fight over comic books? The same arguments were made about Shakespeare, because, it was suggested, Elizabethan drama wasn’t real literature. (Early debates also routinely happened over novels, ballads and books written by women.) People have been trying to ban books for ages, from the 18th century’s Fanny Hill and the court cases against Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, all the way to Harry Potter. “[Literature’s] greatness… is enhanced rather than undercut” by these challenges, Garber argues. There will always be stubborn, scandalized readers trying to define what literature is, but the greats will endure.

From Head to Hand — A lovely essay by ceramic artist Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes, on Primo Levi’s The Wrench and being a maker, in Slate:

Here, at last, was a book structured round structure. It was a conversation about how you took one part of learning and took it to another job. This made sense of how deeply connected the hand and the head really are. It articulated for me the way that I would throw a dozen porcelain pots and look at them, affectionately perhaps but also with a dispassionate eye, and plan the next dozen. It understood how I knew when dipping a pot into a bucket of glaze or listening to the sound of the flames when firing my kiln that there is something out of balance.

And, above all, there was a feeling that Levi was not speaking for people who make things. He doesn’t explicate or translate technical terms. In The Wrench, Faussone’s voice is clear and unhurried, paced in response to the real complexities and real pleasures that he encounters. Alongside him is Levi with his “specific challenge: I have a double experience—a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling, on the contrary a writer’s blood in my veins.”

People Like Us — A profile of Coudal Partners on Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals blog:

Despite the varied efforts, one consistent theme for the firm is a sense of curiosity and playfulness… That attitude attracts kindred spirits. “In our experimental films, in our contests, in our blog postings, and the products we make, we are trying to satiate our own curiosity and interest,” he says. “And we just take it on faith that there are a lot of people who share those curiosities and those interests with us. And if so, they will buy our products and they’ll watch our movies. Maybe you don’t have to sell to everybody. Maybe there’s enough people like us.”

And finally…

Bass is Best — Steven Heller on the movie posters of Saul Bass, for The Atlantic:

Bass’s work is appealing for its nuance, and his keen ability for making subtle, abstract symbols speak louder than literal photographs. What makes the new Hollywood versions so unappealing is the inability to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. When Bass worked for Hollywood studios he created a consistent identity for films, from main and credit titles to posters and ads.

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Edmund de Waal | Writers and Company

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Edmund de Waal’s memoir about his extraordinary Jewish family and an inherited collection of ornamental Japanese carvings called netsuke, was on many of last year’s “best-of” lists and is high on my current ‘to-read’ list. The author talks about the book with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company:

CBC Radio Writer’s & Co: Edmund de Waal Mp3

Edmund de Waal, who is also a successful ceramicist, is also profiled in The Guardian:

De Waal and his netsuke have been much discussed over the past seven or eight months, but even now he is “completely taken aback” by the success of a book which is an “odd matrix of personal obsessions”. (We talk in the upstairs room of his south London studio – downstairs are three kilns, his wheel and a bag of clay, ready for him to get to work in the afternoon.) Yet that it is so personal and springs from these obsessions (Japan, objects, memory), drawing on his expertise as a potter, is surely a clue to its enormous appeal. How things are made and handled, he writes, and what happens to them “has been central to my life for more than 30 years”.

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