Books, Design and Culture
Author Tom McCarthy talks to Bookworm about his latest novel Satin Island:
KCRW Bookworm: Tom McCarthy on Satin Island mp3
The rather splendid cover for the US paperback edition published earlier this year by Vintage (pictured above) was designed by John Gall.
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Following on from my post yesterday, Joe Sacco talks about his new book The Great War with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm:
KCRW Bookworm: Joe Sacco The Great War mp3
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Cartoonist Chris Ware discusses Building Stories with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm:
KCRW BOOKWORM: Chris Ware Building Stories mp3
Ware will be at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival tomorrow (November 10) and the Librairie D+Q fifth anniversary party with Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine in Montreal on Sunday (November 11).
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Music journalist Simon Reyolds talks to Michael Silverblatt about his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past on KCRW’s Bookworm:
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Sweet Nuttin’ — A primer on George Herriman’s classic and wonderfully idiosyncratic comic strip Krazy Kat at Robot 6:
Krazy Kat is far from a chore… Indeed, it is rarely anything less than a delight to read, although it can be a bit challenging for newcomers. The early strips are dense with wordplay, while the later strips take on the quality of near-abstract paintings at times. Then there’s Krazy’s off-kilter dialogue (“If only I could be star or a moom or a komi or ivin a solo eeklip. But me, I’m nuttin”). Thus, whichever book you decide to dive into first, I’d recommend taking your time. Read (and reread) the strips slowly and don’t feel the need to rush through.
Unhappy Endings — Jason Zinoman, author of Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, talks to Terry Gross for NPR’s Fresh Air:
I think that as you look at this period from ’68 to the end of the ’70s, generally, first of all, you see a lot more unhappy endings. There isn’t this kind of catharsis at the end that you see in a lot of movies before that.
The central kind of monsters are no longer werewolves and vampires and the supernatural. The central monsters are – or I guess I would say the central monsters become serial killers and zombies… And I think the other thing that marks it is there’s a certain kind of moral ambiguity about these movies and just generally a sort sense of confusion and disorientation that marks most of these films.
Meanwhile, over on KCRW filmmaker and author John Sayles talks about his hefty new book A Moment in the Sun with Michael Silverblatt for Bookworm.
And finally…
Rick Poynor on the dictionary as art concept for Designer Observer:
Comments closedWith book design, we should value appropriateness to subject, vivid animation of content, and the dexterity and panache with which the designers interpret every purposeful, cherishable convention of the book. The notion of continual reinvention as a worthwhile or attainable goal is particularly misplaced here…
The stunning cover of Graffiti Asia by The SRK‘s Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan. The image doesn’t entirely do it justice as the ‘brown’ is actually spot metallic gold (I think it’s ink, but correct me if I am wrong):
(FULL DISCLOSURE: Graffiti Asia is published by Laurence King, who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).
The Best Film Books chosen by 51 critics for Sight & Sound magazine. The somewhat esoteric Top 5 is here.
The Death and Life of the Book Review — Despite being a well-ploughed furrow (and the predictable nostalgia for print reviews/skepticism about the web) this essay by John Paletta in The Nation is an interesting read, not least because he recognises that the culture of newspapers has downgraded book review sections:
The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves… In a news context, “anti-intellectual” does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can be that too. I use the word “anti-intellectual” to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.
The Host — KCRW’s Bookworm Michael Silverblatt interviewed in The Believer:
I’ve read all of the work, or in some cases as much of the work as is humanly possible. We all have time and deadlines, accidents, emergencies, but I read as much of it as I can. I’m very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don’t have time to do the preparation. And that is almost everyone who has a daily interview program. How could you read, or see, or watch, or hear as much as you need to? So, you wing it. And it’s not going to stop. Winging it is going to be the American way.
And speaking of Bookworm, Michael talks to David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto) and Anders Monson (Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir) about the “New Prose” on this week’s show (NB: I am posting this mostly because Anders Monson references my favourite scene from the TV show Futurama in the first five minutes of the interview):
John Squire‘s 1980’s covers for the Penguin Decades Series at The Creative Review. The art direction was by Penguin’s Jim Stoddart, but yes, it is THAT John Squire (i.e. awesome).
Fine Independent Publishing — An interesting interview with Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief at literary publisher New Directions, at KCRW’s Bookworm (although I could do without the decline of literature being blamed squarely on sales and marketing people. Again):
Permanent Crisis — A post by Rebecca Smart, Managing Director of military history publisher Osprey Publishing, at Digital Book World:
If you perceive that your only environment is that encompassed by your current supply chain then you’re only going to adapt to changes in that environment – so the response to the digital challenge viewed in this way would be to create and sell e-books. If you put the consumer at the heart of your thinking you can consider instead each group of customers you serve and what they might want on top of what you already provide, how they might want you to serve them differently in the future. More to the point, you can ASK them, listen and respond.
Proletarian Erotica — Lorin Stein, former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and new editor of the Paris Review, interviewed at The Economist‘s ‘More Intelligent Life’ blog. The National Post also ran a nice interview with Stern last month.
Going Deutsch — Tom McCarthy, whose new book “C” I’m reading right now, interviewed at the New York Times ‘Paper Cuts’ blog:
One critic described “Remainder” as a French novel written in English; well, by that token, “C” is my German novel. What the next one will be is anyone’s guess. Swedish, maybe…
More from Tom on The Casual Optimist soon (if I can twist his arm)…
Print Junkies — An interview at The Second Pass with the publisher and editor of Stop Smiling magazine J. C. Gabel on the launch if the Stop Smiling book imprint:
We’re still operating with the same mentality… but have adopted a Less Is More mindset — and a production schedule to match. It does feel nice to know that what we spend months or years working on is now being released in a permanent format. We’re really trying to reinvent the DIY aesthetic of the magazine to apply it to editing, publishing, and promoting books. The book-making process itself, of course, is much slower and drawn out, which is refreshing as we all get older.
And finally, I give you Oliver Jeffers’ moustache (via Tragic Right Hip)…
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Big Shit-Eating Grin — George Lois chooses 12 of his favourite Esquire covers at New York magazine. There are more iconic Esquire covers at George Lois’ website and there is, of course, a new book, George Lois: The Esquire Covers @ MOMA, published by Assouline. (NB the image above is not one of Lois’ 12, but it is great).
Objects of Desire — An interesting University College London podcast about the history of books and publishing featuring Professor Henry Woudhuysen, co-editor of the The Oxford Companion to the Book, and Professor Iain Stevenson, author of Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century (available in the US from University of Chicago Press) (via Ernesto Priego on Twitter).
The Dark Side — The Economist on Scandinavian crime fiction:
The cold, dark climate, where doors are bolted and curtains drawn, provides a perfect setting for crime writing. The nights are long, the liquor hard, the people… “brought up to hide their feelings” and hold on to their secrets.
Somebody’s Sins, But Not Mine — A two part interview with Patti Smith about her new memoir Just Kids at KCRW’s Bookworm. Part two is here.
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[A quick note about the poll: thanks to everyone who voted, left a comment or sent me note this week — I really appreciate it. The feedback has been great. I’m going to shut the poll down at midnight tonight, but please let me know if you have any further thoughts about the direction of The Casual Optimist.]
Lauren Kaiser’s Little Red Riding Hood seen at Type Theory (pictured above).
The Oscars of Type — Ellen Lupton’s list of the year’s top typefaces at Print magazine. “Best Actress” was awarded to Underware’s Liza Pro (pictured above). My interview with Ellen Lupton is here.
Happiness as By-product — Jessa Crispin founder of Bookslut interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer, author of Booklife (which Crispin was critical of interestingly):
I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you… Not that we should all sing songs around the campfire and braid each other’s hair, but there has to be a combination of the two, forward motion and goal planning, but while taking a look at the people around you.
Comics Studies Reader — Jeet Heer on comics and comic scholarship at Books@Torontoist:
I think there’s a wide variety of things that can be done with comics, and I think we’ve only scratched the surface… One of the interesting things about manga is that kids are reading translated manga that reads right to left. Part of the reason that’s possible is because comics are both words and pictures – half of the translation work is already done. So you can look at a comic book in a language you don’t know and you won’t get everything but you can still get a fair bit of what it’s about. And so they have this sort of function as cultural ambassadors. You can actually learn a lot about a culture just by looking at the comics.
The New Yorker 85th anniversary covers by Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes, and Ivan Brunetti seen at the Creative Review blog (Adaptation by Tomine pictured below).
Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly (art editor at the aforementioned New Yorker) discuss The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics with (a particularly gushy) Michael Silverblatt for KCRW’s BookWorm :
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